In one life, terror suspect was just doughnut guy

— For years, he was a fixture in Lower Manhattan, as regular as the sunrise. Every morning, Najibullah Zazi would be there on Stone Street with his pastries and his coffee, his vending cart anchored to the New York City sidewalk.

For many on Wall Street, his was the first hello of the day. Affable and rooted, he lived for 10 years in the same apartment with his family in Flushing, Queens. His father drove a cab for more than 15 years.

He was the smiling man who remembered a customer liked his coffee large, light and sweet. He had a "God Bless America" sign on his cart. He was the doughnut man.

photo

AP

Najibullah Zazi

But prosecutors say Zazi, 24, who worked blocks from ground zero, was just as furtive an operative as the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers when he stole off to Pakistan last year for terrorism training and returned to the United States with a plan to build bombs using beauty supplies and backpacks.

In fact, law enforcement officials say they find in Zazi a particularly harrowing challenge: a homegrown operative who travels freely, who is skilled with people, who passed an airport employee background check, who understands the patterns of American life so well that he gave multiple interviews to journalists.

"This is one of the best countries in the world," he told a reporter on Sept. 14 after the FBI had identified him as a terrorism suspect. "It gives you every single right."

For nearly two weeks, the story of Zazi, now one of national interest, has lacked almost any details. A tour of where Zazi worked and lived, in New York and in Colorado, and interviews with investigators, the Zazi family and friends, provides something of a fuller picture.

Zazi is both an Afghan immigrant steeped in the traditions of Islam and a youth from the streets of Queens, where his family moved in the early 1990s.

As a teenager, Zazi often carried two things, his basketball and his prayer mat, his friends say. He grew a dark, wiry beard and began wearing tunics several years ago, just as he was applying for his first of two Macy's credit cards.

He was a janitor and a worshipper at a mosque that split several years ago over the question of its members' loyalty to the Taliban after the 9/11 attacks. He was a devoted fan of gadgets who married, by arrangement, his 19-year-old cousin, who lives with their two children in Pakistan.

Last summer, the authorities say, Zazi shopped in Denver for hair supplies to build bombs with. If he did so, he was also engaged in something much more mundane: credit counseling to survive a bankruptcy he had declared in New York.

EARLY LIFE

Zazi was born on Aug. 10, 1985, in a village in the Paktia region of eastern Afghanistan. He is a middle child with two sisters and two brothers, and his family name is shared by a tribe, one of some 500 in the region.

The family moved to Peshawar, Pakistan, in 1991 or 1992, when Zazi was about 7, he has said. The broader area has since been identified as "ground zero in the U.S. jihadist war," according to a federal complaint against Zazi, and home to many al-Qaida operatives.

Zazi's father, Mohammed Wali Zazi, came to the U.S. around 1991, relatives said, andbegan driving a yellow taxi, working 12-hour shifts so he could afford to bring his family over several years later. The family rented a two-bedroom apartment on Parsons Boulevard, near the home of the younger Zazi's aunt and uncle.

In many ways, Flushing must have seemed like another planet to a teenager raised in tribal villages. But several of the family's neighbors were from the same region, and many prayed together at the Masjid Hazrat Abu Bakr, a large Afghan mosque, which was near their house.

Najib Zazi entered Flushing High School. He played billiards with friends and basketball with other Afghan boys in the yard at Public School 214. He loved video games and all things technological.

Zazi was not a strong student, and he dropped out before graduating, friends said.

The younger Zazi also spent a lot of time at the mosque, even volunteering his time as a janitor there. He turned 16 a month and a day before Sept. 11, 2001. One acquaintance who gave only his first name, Rahul, recalled discussing the attacks three years later and Zazi saying: "I don't know how people could do things like this. I'd never do anything like that."

Life at the mosque was disrupted after the attacks. When the imam, Mohammed Sherzad, spoke out against the Taliban and Osama bin Laden, pro-Taliban members of the mosque revolted, praying in the basement or the parking lot, and eventually ousted the imam, who opened a smaller mosque nearby.

It is unclear where, in this heated time, the Zazis fell, though. The imam said in an interview that he saw several members of the Zazi family, including Najib, praying in the parking lot with those who opposed him.

Prayer was important to Zazi, said Sunwoo Sik, who owned a Flushing food market where Zazi worked for a year or so.

In 2005, Zazi quit. His father now ran a coffee cart, which his sister and brother-in-law had been operating in Lower Manhattan. Now it was Zazi's turn. He took a 15-hour course in food handling to get a city license.

Sik said Zazi told him he was leaving "because the coffee cart paid more money."

During this period, around 2006, Zazi flew to Pakistan and took a wife, whom he hoped to later move to New York. He returned in 2007 for another visit, said his lawyer, Arthur Folsom.

Each time, he went back to work with his coffee cart. Over time, Zazi's appearance shifted, customers noted. He grew his beard long, started carrying prayer beads and occasionally wore tunics instead of his Western-style outfits, friends and customers said.

A Metropolitan Transportation Authority worker, John Rodes, 53, who bought coffee from Zazi, said a co-worker told him that Zazi had tried to sell her a Koran. "He did it more than once," Rodes said.

In April 2008, according to bankruptcy records, he began using a Discover card. May 2008: a Shell card. June 2008: five new credit cards. July 2008: three more, including ones from Sony and Radio Shack. August 2008: two more.

OFF TO PAKISTAN

In 2008, Zazi said he was going to see his wife, as he did every year. On Aug. 28, 2008, Zazi and some others boarded a plane in Newark, N.J., and flew through Switzerland and Qatar to Peshawar, according to court records.

The day he left, Zazi had signed his cart over to another vendor to operate. It was a lease, and the Zazi family would receive payments of some kind.

Little is known about Zazi's time in Pakistan, except what the authorities say he has admitted: that he was trained in weapons and explosives.

On Jan. 15, after five months away, Zazi flew back to New York, arriving at Kennedy International Airport.

Five days after his return, he took part in a telephone counseling session with a representative of GreenPath Debt Solutions. He would file for bankruptcy two months later.

Then Zazi abruptly moved to Colorado, where his aunt and uncle lived, in Aurora, asuburb on Denver's prairie-fringed flank.

Zazi hit town hungry for work, again drifting toward a job generally filled by immigrants: driving a shuttle van at Denver International Airport.

Zazi applied for a limousine license, underwent an airport background check and began driving a van for a company called Big Sky, then for a company called ABC Transportation.

In March, Zazi filed for bankruptcy. He said on the application that he was unmarried and listed $51,000 in debts.

Several months later, Zazi's uncle said he kicked him out of their house, on East Ontario Drive, for not paying rent. Zazi moved to an apartment complex two miles away, where his parents would join him at the end of July.

Federal agents, who tracked Zazi for weeks, perhaps longer, provided their version of how he spent some of that time in court filings. Work with bomb materials did not take place at Zazi's home, according to federal investigators, but in a hotel suite he rented in Aurora. They say chemical residue found in the kitchen there indicates he tried to heat up the beauty supplies to help convert them into a bomb.

Zazi would return to the hotel on Sept. 6, apparently frantic for advice on how to complete the bomb-building, investigators contend. Then he rented a car from Hertz on Sept. 8.

He drove through the night, arriving in New York on Sept 10. Investigators say he may have hoped to set off bombs in the city. But he flew home on Sept. 12.

Zazi explained his trip to New York differently, telling reporters he had come back to clear up issues regarding his coffee cart.

He was certainly there, at the cart, on the morning of Sept. 11, eight blocks from the hole that had once been the World Trade Center. Old customers saw him. "He was standing behind his friend," said Imran Khan, a transportation authority worker.

Zazi was joking and laughing, they said, the doughnut man once more.

Information for this article was contributed by Simon Akam, Alison Leigh Cowan, Karen Zraick, Majeed Babar, Al Baker, Dan Frosch, Kirk Johnson, William K. Rashbaum and Nate Schweber of The New York Times.

Front Section, Pages 7 on 09/27/2009

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