January 16, 2024 • 46 mins
Mosi comes upon a disturbing secret about violence swirling around Imam Jamil’s masjid revealing just how far law enforcement was willing to go in their efforts to take him down.
Follow Radical on Instagram @radicalpod
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely
those of the podcast author or individuals participating in the podcast,
and do not represent those of iHeartRadio or their employees.
This podcast also contains subject matter which may not be
suitable for everyone listening to.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
Discretion is advised. Radical is released every Tuesday and brought
to you absolutely free. But if you want to add
free listening and early access to next week's episode, subscribe
to tenderfoot Plus. For more information, check out tenderfootplus dot com.
Enjoy the episode Campsite Media.
Speaker 3 (00:49):
So you now it is really why I should started
real here Casscase dot claim right.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
Up the hill. It took months of reporting on this
store before I had a good reason to return to
Atlanta's West End, to the leafy neighborhood of bungalows and
Victorian homes surrounding the mass hit the corner store and
the park the side of the shootout on March sixteenth,
two thousand. The community, the village, even founded and led
(01:15):
by Imam Jamille A Lamine, with its own school, its
own security force, even something like its own laws.
Speaker 3 (01:22):
Make a right right and we'll come back in the back,
come out for what I did.
Speaker 2 (01:28):
It was this man, Rodney Brown who brought me back here.
Rodney grew up in the West End and he was
a teenager when crack cocaine hit in the eighties. So
many people on his side of town got sucked into
a zombie like existence, traded their spirit for the little
white rocks, and Rodney he got sucked into the fast
cash started dealing. He said he can make three or
(01:51):
four thousand dollars a day when he started out, as
long as he was willing to risk standing out on
the corner. I remember those days. I was just a kid,
but I saw how older relatives got caught up in
and out of jail, on and off the streets. Drugs,
guns and violence were cornerstones of the life. My parents
(02:12):
steered me and my siblings clear of it. We even
kept a distance from some relatives. And Mam Jimial was
in the thick of it, though, and as a leader,
he had little choice but to confront the problem head on.
In time, he developed a reputation for a quote cleaning
up the West End, making it a safe place to
raise families, not just for Muslims in his community, but
(02:34):
also others who lived nearby. Rodney witnessed some of that
from his particular perspective.
Speaker 3 (02:43):
Did rad Hill was a maid to Trout this happen?
This is what tim of got key you.
Speaker 2 (02:48):
Rodney was still a teenager when he bought his first
eight K forty seven, so he saw some things more
than his share of violence in his younger days. He
might have had more acquaintances who were killed than I
had friends in all of high school. Driving through the
neighborhood with him, the specter of violence gave me a headache.
We were surrounded by places where people who Rodney knew
(03:09):
had been struck down. Back in the book, I told
you I wasn't selling drug until.
Speaker 3 (03:14):
The girl got killed on the bridge, Tanya Natalia mine.
He got killed on the bread. I just got got
myself caught up in sound. I don't think they chopped
him up back though, but I know they are. This
is what they dunk about it at. This was black giants.
This was black giant trap house. This way he sold
(03:35):
his weight. He was right here, but he ain't get killed.
He got killed back up though. I should have showed
down that when I was up there.
Speaker 2 (03:43):
These killings happened in and around the part of the
West End controlled by a man Jamil, the area he
had supposedly cleaned up. It's the roughly six or seven
mostly residential blocks, apartments and houses that surround the park.
Just to the south of the park was the mas
Jed and the man Jamil's corner store. That was Jamel's store.
(04:09):
Exactly we turned and drove over the place where Deputy
Kinchin and Deputy English were shot. The part of the
street that was littered with shellcasings that.
Speaker 3 (04:21):
Night in two thousand. It's the mobs, this green and
white one. That's the mobs. Jamil Alami stayed all these
his house, each one of these houses. See all these
this community mobs. I's see up in here. Ain't nobody
(04:45):
never sold no drugs here.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
And Man Jamil hated drugs and drug dealing. So Rodney
and the seasoned dealers in the West End they knew
better than posting up on the corners next to the
mass Jed, the park and the corner store, the spot
where a mam gmial could be found most days, shooting hoops,
tending to the store, or chilling outside at the picnic table.
It was considered holy land. Instead, Rodney and the other dealers.
(05:12):
They did their business on the edges of a mam
Jamil's community. Still, somehow many of them ended up shot
and dead. Rodney was one of the few who survived.
In the nineties, before the shootout in March two thousand,
dozens of people were allegedly murdered in the West End,
dozens with little accountability. And it wasn't just the typical
(05:36):
violence you might expect drug dealers to encounter. In my
reporting of this story, so many people described for me
the breezy way a mam gmial moved through the West End,
how he seemed to carelessly float past his though catching
the wind. But my question after hearing these stories was this.
(05:59):
Did a mam Jamil rest control from the dope dealers
with that kind of grace alone, or was there something else?
When I looked into the killings all those folks who
Rodney knew who died, what I learned was disturbing, far
worse than I ever imagined. From Campside Media, Tenderfoot TV,
(06:21):
and iHeart podcasts, this is radical. I'm Mosey's Secret Episode
seven Sacrifices. We learned about the murders and the thousands
(06:51):
of pages of documents were received from the Fulton County
DA's office. The stuff we got in response to our
open records request. Reading those reports, what started out as
a quest to get to the bottom of the shootout
with the deputies and to figure out whether a Mam
Jamil was really capable of that kind of violence, suddenly
got this whole other layer because the documents described a
(07:15):
man who allegedly was way more than capable, who was
involved in a rash of killings in the West End
way before the shootout, who used a mafioso like ruthlessness
to get what he wanted. Figuring out whether the accusations
had any merit had every bearing on understanding who a
Maam Jamil was and just as importantly, who law enforcement
(07:37):
thought he was in the period leading up to the shootout.
The key document we got is called Synopsis of West
End Homicides. It's just eleven pages long, a list mostly
with quick summaries, dates and the names of victims, and
the section at the top law enforcement connects a Mamjmil
(07:59):
to see sixteen killings over about a decade nineteen eighty
six to nineteen ninety seven. Most of the victims were
drug dealers. Rodney knew many, if not all, the people
who were killed, and we looked over the list with him.
He's not in the streets anymore. He spent time in
prison and started fresh. So part of what he felt
(08:20):
was shocked at seeing the world he was so close
to with more perspective. He struggled to make sense of
the amount of killing.
Speaker 3 (08:30):
I guess when they started happening, it was normal to man.
Think about you walk out the door and they have
shot his dude face off. When they shot Tome and
face off, and it was you know, it was always
violand in the West then but they shot his face
off a month not even a month later, shot n
them times in the face. Then everybody on your neighborhood.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
You go to the globe, y'all killing there. Everybody.
Speaker 3 (08:53):
They thought we was killing the motherfucker.
Speaker 2 (08:55):
You know, we thought about it, so it was attached
to us.
Speaker 3 (08:59):
Really they went or one for it because we won't over.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
The synopsis of the Weston Homicides portrays a man Jamil
as some kind of kingpin heading up a group of
brothers from the mass jed An inner circle who ran
guns and extorted drug dealers, secretly killing the competition and
anyone else who knew too much about what they were doing.
Very strong allegations. In the earliest days of the West
(09:25):
End mass Jed, a mam Jamil set up a security team.
This I know it to be true. Nothing unusual there.
Most mass Jeds have them. Brothers would walk people home
from the mass Jed after prayer make sure nobody out
on the street caused any trouble. But the West End
seems to have taken their security further than most. A
member of the mass Jed told me how once some
(09:47):
guys started fighting during a basketball game at the park.
It was the West End versus a different neighborhood. The
outsiders left, but they were so pissed they came back
with guns before they could do any home though the
Muslim brothers fired. Even a mammaed Meal came out of
his little shop and let loose. As the outsiders fled,
(10:08):
they nearly flipped their car over, and when the cops
came by afterwards asking if everything was all right, the
Westend brothers said yeah, they had it under control. It
was frontier justice and guns were critical. On any given
day in the park, a good number of men had
rifles hanging on straps under their thobes. At night, they
(10:29):
rode around in cars or stood out on corners, also strapped,
they could hold their own behind the trigger too. The
brothers sometimes went to the shooting range together for target practice,
and the Mamas Meal would often join, just like he
used to in his earliest days in the movement. There
were many many guns flowing through the West End in
(10:52):
the late eighties and early nineties. Rodney he wasn't only
dealing in cracking weed. He sold guns too.
Speaker 3 (11:00):
Yody who wanted guns in a lon did like they
want weed in Lona. They came to the West End.
They want a pistol. I said, okay, what kind won't.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
Rodney's gun supplier was right around the corner. He was
buying from the Muslims.
Speaker 3 (11:17):
I had Muslim knock on my door in the middle
of the night with boxes. Man, No, lie, I can't
count them. I'm talking about guns, rifles. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (11:29):
In the early nineties, two brothers from the mass Jed
were charged with running guns out of the storefront right
next to a man Jimill's corner store. They bought the
guns legally, but they were accused of selling them like
they might have done to Rodney without keeping the right
paperwork to track where they went. A federal agent testified
that a handful of guns went to the mass Jed's
security patrol, but more than two hundred were recovered in Philadelphia, Detroit,
(11:53):
New Haven, and New York City over three years. The
two accused men allegedly bought at least seventy three thousand
dollars worth of firearms, and they probably weren't just being
used for target practice. Many were Davis three eighties, a
handgun with a reputation as a Saturday Night special because
it's cheap and often used in crimes. At the gun
(12:15):
running trial, a member of the Masjid and the security
patrol testified for the prosecution. His name was Shahid ab
duur Rahman. He was in prison at the time for
shooting and killing a man. On the stand, he said
he bought guns from the accused men and then sent
them to New York, but he stopped short of saying
(12:35):
that the defendants knowingly sold gun to criminals planning to
commit crimes. Maybe that was because on the day he testified,
AmAm Jamil showed up the picture of menace he was
wearing an all black thobe and a black turban and
black charcoal around his eyes. If the FBI thought this
dude Shahid might implicate the AmAm, they better think again.
(13:00):
Not long after the gun running case wrapped up, Ma'am
Jamil got caught up in a case himself.
Speaker 4 (13:07):
He was once the leader of the Student Non Violent
Coordinating Committee and part of the Black Power movement. Today,
h Rap Brown is known as Jamil Abdullah a La
Main and he appeared in court. He is charged with
aggravated assault and weapons violations after allegedly shooting a man
July twenty sixth.
Speaker 2 (13:25):
In nineteen ninety five, Atlanta police responded to a shooting
at West End Park of a man named William Miles.
One bullet entered and exited his leg without doing any
permanent damage. The responding officer said, Myles I d'ed to
Maam Jamil as the shooter. Then the next morning, AmAm
Jamil and another brother from the mass Jed went to
visit Miles at home. When an Atlanta police detective later
(13:49):
interviewed Myles, he did not identify a man Jamil as
the shooter, but a few days later that detective and
some federal agents pulled a Mam Jamil over in his
black Mercedes. They arrested him for aggravated assault and for
carrying a forty five caliber pistol without a license. We
found the recording of an interview a local television reporter
did with a Man Jamil a few days later after
(14:10):
he got out of jail on bond. He was in
his early fifties at the time. During the interview, he's
standing on the sidewalk outside his store wearing a black
thoat and a black knitted coofee. He has a thin
beard and oval glasses.
Speaker 5 (14:23):
Do you know William Miles only from reading the paper
and seeing his name? You know this is my familiar
being familiar with him through that you never met with him?
Speaker 2 (14:34):
And I went to his house. If he's the same
person who was shot?
Speaker 5 (14:38):
I asked him, was it true that he was saying
that a Muslim shot him? He said that he saw
a tall person and the person had black on and
the person who shut him, you know, was tall and.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
Had black on.
Speaker 6 (14:52):
Was it you to do?
Speaker 2 (14:53):
Do?
Speaker 5 (14:54):
What to go see him, to talk to shot him?
Speaker 2 (14:56):
To shoot him?
Speaker 5 (14:58):
That's the allegation of police of made Well again. That's
the thing that has to be determined in court.
Speaker 2 (15:03):
Man Then the reporter asked to Ma'am Jamil if he
still thinks violence is as an American as cherry pie.
Speaker 5 (15:09):
I think it's evident, and I think that more people
realize what was being said. And I've always advocated self defense.
A loss is in the Qur'an tyranny and oppression is
worse than slaw. To fight them wherever you may find him.
So again, that whole sense of the right to self
defense as a human is a platform we've always stood on.
Speaker 6 (15:28):
I guess then the obvious question is did you have
a forty five automatic pistol on you as a means
of self defense.
Speaker 5 (15:35):
That's a part of the case again that has to
be litigated in court.
Speaker 2 (15:40):
Imam Jamil didn't seem to be denying he was involved,
but William Miles, the victim of the shooting, he later
suggested that he was actually pressured by the police to
name a Maam Jamil as the shooter. Four national Islamic
groups urge the Department of Justice to investigate the arrest.
The charges were eventually dropped and the case went away.
(16:00):
So not counting the incident with the sheriff's deputies. That's
two shootings at the park that a Maam Jamil may
have been involved in, the one after the basketball game
and the shooting of William Miles. Nobody that we know
of was seriously hurt, and the shootings could be described
as part of protecting the community self defense in a way.
(16:23):
Like a Maam Jimil told the reporter in that interview,
it's a platform he's always stood on. But the a
Maam killing all those drug dealers, or even ordering them killed,
like the allegations we saw in the synopsis of Western homicides,
that would be on a whole other level. I don't
(16:43):
think a Mam Jmil was pulling the trigger in those murders,
but he didn't know the man who did much of
the killing, if not all of it, because he was
a well respected member of the Master JD and the
security patrol. Law enforcement knew this killer too, and not
just because they were trying to catch him. No, they
had a secret relationship with him, one that reveals just
(17:04):
how far they'd go to take down a man Jamil.
In the late eighties, when Ronnie got into the game
and started dealing, he had his disposal in the West
(17:25):
End to use the business school term a network. He
grew up about a block from West End Park and
the kids he played with, many of them were still around.
That included Muslim kids too.
Speaker 3 (17:37):
Yeah. I hung with the smoked weeds and smoked cigarettes
and thrunk them. The ones that came to mind place
to shoot pool. But they still went and prayed every Friday,
you know.
Speaker 2 (17:48):
Just like Chris was just like all religions, all.
Speaker 3 (17:51):
Of them not good, all of them not bad. He's
just like the ones that hung around me. Probably was
the bad seeds. I was a bad seed. So and
that's that's that relation.
Speaker 2 (18:02):
I grew up with. How you gonna do?
Speaker 3 (18:03):
People say they just killed God men? One of us did?
Why he knews since we was kids.
Speaker 2 (18:09):
Shaheed abduer Rothman was maybe the Muslim who Rodney came
to know best in the West End. He had moved
to Atlanta from New York, where he'd lived through shattering trauma.
Speaker 3 (18:19):
It was the Jamaicans that killed his mom. He stayed
in the house for like four days with a dead body.
Speaker 2 (18:26):
When he was whole, he was really like a toxic
of self. I think he stayed in there.
Speaker 3 (18:31):
He stayed in high with a dead by it like
four days and was his mom.
Speaker 2 (18:35):
That's the story.
Speaker 3 (18:36):
Tell people, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 2 (18:39):
Shahid's passed is pretty mysterious. Other than that, but his
childhood seemed to have marked his destiny for darkness. Shahid
said that when he moved to Atlanta at seventeen or eighteen,
it was because he was flinging the aftermath of some shooting.
He joined the Master and the security team, and over
time built a reputation as a gentleman, a good Muslim,
and a family man. But he was secretly or not
(19:02):
so secretly, depending on whom you talk to, living a
double life, and the security team was his cover. If
most guys on the security patrol kept the defensive posture,
standing guard in the neighborhood or escorting families to their
houses at night, Shahid seemed to use his authority to
shake down the streets, going out sometimes with younger guys,
(19:22):
teenagers mostly, who went after drug dealers like they were cops,
busting into trap houses and confiscating dope, and that response
seemed to blow the lines between right and wrong. I
heard how these guys got rid of the drugs they
seized at first flushed them down the toilet, but after
a while they realized they were throwing money away, And
(19:43):
I wonder when dealers didn't back down what happened? Then
I got like Shahid, who seemed to have developed a
taste for blood. He thrived.
Speaker 3 (19:54):
With Shahi, everybody knew he was a dangerous person, and
my friends said, hey, whatever you do, don't get in
the call with that motherfucker, because they know you'd come
at When murt came.
Speaker 2 (20:08):
In nineteen ninety, Shahied was involved in two killings. The
victims were in that document we got the synopsis of
Western homicides. Then about a year later, Shahied was involved
in another killing. People began to suspect he was doing
hit jobs, and to wonder who was calling the shots.
Shahid became a leader of the patrol and became close
(20:30):
to a man Jamil, but eventually he was charged with murder,
and with Shahied off the streets, the violence in the
West End seemed to taper off. Meanwhile, after Shahid got
locked up, Rodney said he was doing well for himself.
When things are really humming. He was moving hundreds of
thousands of dollars worth of drugs on a monthly basis.
(20:52):
Rodney stayed in touch with Shaheed while Shahid was in prison,
sent him weed. Shahid was his friend and Rodney, in
his criminal way at the time, was generous like that.
Around this time the FBI came offering Shahied some help too.
We know that while Shahied was incarcerated, he met with
an agent named Bill Gant. Not long after Shahid testified
(21:15):
for the prosecution in the gun running case against two
brothers from the weston mass Jed, when a man Jamil
showed up in all black then likely in exchange for
Shahid's cooperation, Gant the agent put in a word with
the Georgia Parole Board and by nineteen ninety five, Shahied
was back on the street and back in the mass Jed.
(21:39):
He had done approximately four years for killing and this
is when folks on the outside started wondering what the
fuck is going on here. When Shahid got out, Rodney
was surprised he didn't hear from him right away. I'm
a man, I'm mother, I'm the man. He know that,
he know he didn't her.
Speaker 3 (21:58):
I'm taking care of his motherfuck in prison. I'm sending
weed to prison for free. Never ask for a penny.
So why when you come speak to me? Why?
Speaker 2 (22:15):
And Ronnie didn't want to worry about Shahied walking up
behind him on the street with a pistol or a shotgun.
Rodney was starting to think Shahied was a rat his words,
not mine. So after three months of waiting, Rodney got
his address and stopped by.
Speaker 3 (22:30):
I knocked on the door.
Speaker 2 (22:30):
He looked at him.
Speaker 3 (22:31):
I fucking seeing it with me, opened the door. I said,
what's up, man? How long you been out?
Speaker 6 (22:37):
You know?
Speaker 2 (22:37):
He was like, I've been a few coming out. Come
on in. Rodney asked Shahied straight up. How'd you get
out of jail? Shahid told Rodney that the brothers in
the mast and they wanted him back in the neighborhood.
They said, look, why don't you testify against one of
the accused in this gun running case so that you
can get your time cut. Just don't implicate the big man,
(22:58):
meaning a man Jimmy Rodney believed Shahied. But here's what's
weird about that story from my perspective. Anyway, the brothers
who Shahid testified against were members of the mass Jed
since the earliest days founding members. Really, why let them
take the fall so that Shahed, a much more dangerous
(23:19):
man by all accounts, could come home. Why would the
AmAm give that? The Okay people told me that Ammam
Jamil would not block anyone from practicing their religion, that
AmAm Jamil was close with everyone, including Shahed, a spiritual adviser,
always guiding people back to Islam. But that got messy.
Soon after Shahid got out of prison in March of
(23:41):
nineteen ninety five, he killed a man in April. There
was another body later that year two more. Shahid was
linked to at least eight killings just in the West
End before the end of nineteen ninety five. Shahed, Rodney said,
would brag about what he was doing.
Speaker 3 (24:00):
He's a serious killer.
Speaker 2 (24:01):
I'm telling you he got the kill.
Speaker 3 (24:03):
He gonna start some beef and it ain't gonna be
he gonna make up or reading to kill the mother fuck.
Speaker 2 (24:10):
You might remember sister Jamila Jahad from the first episode
of the podcast. She converted to Islam, took the Shahada
from my Mam Jamil, and raised her family in the
West End. Sister Jamila ran a construction company and she
was having problems with an employee or a contractor someone
she was working with. Anyway, one day, Shahi came up
to hurt the message.
Speaker 3 (24:32):
He said to me, you won't need to take care
of them, you know, for not not doing something, to
paying you or something like that.
Speaker 2 (24:39):
I said, no, what you're talking about?
Speaker 6 (24:42):
But do you take care of how?
Speaker 2 (24:43):
You know?
Speaker 5 (24:44):
But I had no idea.
Speaker 3 (24:48):
Who you know, who he had become.
Speaker 2 (24:49):
That's how he approached you.
Speaker 3 (24:51):
Yeah, but he was a part you know, his friend
were working for me?
Speaker 2 (24:56):
And now do you know what? You know what he
meant when he said that.
Speaker 3 (24:58):
Yeah, I'm thinking.
Speaker 2 (25:01):
Murder in a minute, you know, I think that's what
he was thinking too.
Speaker 3 (25:06):
And I said, no, what's you talking about? What your
clients on, what you're doing.
Speaker 2 (25:14):
It was so casual how Shahid asked her if he
should take somebody out. There's no doubt in my mind
that wasn't the first time that he asked that question
to a remember of the mass did. And there's little
doubt in my mind that after all the years he
spent in the community, that at least a few people
said yes. Why else would god fearing, family loving folks
keep a guy like him around if not for skeletons,
(25:35):
literally skeletons, what's worse And I'm sorry to drop this
bombshell on you. Shahik was grooming the more troubled boys
in the community to become killers, letting them touch his
guns at first, then taking them out shooting, and then
out on hits. I talked to one of these guys.
It took him decades to get his life on track.
For the life of me, I can't understand how a
(25:57):
person like Shaheed could fly under the radar in such
a small commute unity. AmAm Jamil would ultimately pay a
price because after Shahid got out of prison and returned
to the community, he was on the federal payroll as
an FBI and foreman. I don't know how anyone could
be surprised by that. Everyone knew Shahid had already cooperated once,
(26:19):
but he was secretly helping the FED to build another case.
In the nineties, long before September eleventh, the FBI was
targeting alleged Muslim extremists. There was a surveillance operation named
(26:40):
Vulgar Betrayal. We know from the documents obtained by Karema Alamin,
a Mam Jamil's wife, that the FBI suspected A Maam
Jamil was some kind of terrorists or maybe supporting Islamic
terrorists abroad. One report describes as Maam Jamil as a
leader of a network of master JITs with international connections
(27:01):
that are basically fronts for criminal activity. It's true that
AmAm Jamil had some relationships with Muslims abroad, but was
he a terrorist. We've seen zero evidence of that. Meanwhile,
people in the West End were still losing their lives,
people right there in a Maam Jamil's neighborhood. From what
(27:21):
we can see in the documents, the FBI wasn't so
concerned about that. Shahidz Handler was the FBI agent Bill Gant,
who appeared to surveil A Maam Jamil in the mass
Jed for most of the nineties. We don't know much
about Gan except that he started to work for the
FBI in the late eighties and he allegedly got into
(27:44):
it once with one of his supervisors for pursuing a
Mam Jamil even after he'd been ordered to stop while
he was under oath. Gant set his role in the
investigation of a man Jamil and the mass jed ended
at the beginning of ninety five, but months later, in
the summer of ninety five, he helped arrest of Maam
Jamil after he was accused of shooting that man in
(28:04):
West End Park William Miles, and then a year later
in ninety six. This was after Shahied was connected to
at least three killings over the previous year and a half.
Gant said he had contact with Shahied once a week,
and he had seen him in person two weeks earlier.
Gant was meeting with a killer on the regular. Atlanta
(28:26):
police were looking into all the bodies piling up in
the West End, and Shahid seemed to be telling the
cops that people other than himself were involved, possibly even
saying that a Maam Jamil was calling the shots. By
around ninety six, local police knew that Shahied was at
least connected to multiple killings. A detective in the Atlanta
Police Department was investigating, and he brought in Gant for
(28:49):
an interview. The detective wrote up a summary afterward. He
said that Gant appeared nervous. He did not volunteer information
unless specifically asked in investigand how much he was paying Shahied,
but Gan wouldn't say. When Gan asked which murders were
linked to Shahied, the detective said, all the homicides in
(29:10):
the West End area. Here's Rodney Brown again.
Speaker 3 (29:17):
L beyond agent. The agent knew, maybe found out later on,
but he had to find out that boy was killing people.
Speaker 2 (29:25):
He had to.
Speaker 3 (29:26):
If you investigating Jamil, and I mean the West End
and all these boys coming up dead from the West End,
what the fuck while we're investigate Now we say, okay,
this guy got killed. This guy, Now the next question
who killed him? So that would have led him back
to Shahid, Right, come on, man, that is just no,
(29:47):
none of it really makes sense.
Speaker 2 (29:48):
What if Shahied's telling them that Jamil is the one
who's doing it, do you think they would believe.
Speaker 3 (29:52):
That that Jamil is committing to.
Speaker 2 (29:55):
Miss Jamila is ordering it. And so this is you
talk about how Shahid's playing everybody. Maybe he was playing
them too, and he was.
Speaker 3 (30:03):
That's a good fact. He deathinitely was telling him that.
But still of them or how many of us would
they want.
Speaker 2 (30:11):
To sacrifice to bust it?
Speaker 3 (30:14):
It ain't like they're selling bricks, man, We're dealing with
people's bodies. They want a drug deal?
Speaker 2 (30:21):
How many of us, Rodney asked, would they be willing
to sacrifice to bust a man? Jamil to me, all
this clearly says some human lives were dispensable in whatever
grand calculation the FEDS were making. Black lives troubled lives.
At the time of the shootout involving the Fulton County
(30:42):
Sheriff's deputies in March of two thousand, Shahid was in
prison on a parole violation. After he got out, he
kept killing. In March of two thousand and two, he
shot someone in the back of the head and killed them.
Then he killed another person later that year and the
next year he was involved in at least two more murders.
(31:06):
In two thousand and four, narcotics detectives targeting a drug
house found Shahed with guns and drugs. They arrested him
with him off the streets. Another man from the West
End told law enforcement about at least one murder he
knew Shahid was responsible for. An Atlanta police detective went
to interview Shahed, and Shahid started confessing. By our count
(31:27):
he was involved in killing at least eleven people, but
he allegedly killed many more. There was a story about
his confession in Atlanta's biggest newspaper, the Atlanta Journal Constitution.
It had the following line, Police believed the death toll
may be as high as fifty fifty bodies. Rodney thinks
(31:48):
the number is even higher. Shahid is now serving a
life sentence in prison. Finally, he tried to appeal his conviction,
arguing that the recorded confession shouldn't be admissible, but the
Georgia Supreme Court rejected his appeal. We couldn't get an
interview with Shahied, but we got this recording that someone
made of him.
Speaker 3 (32:09):
When you look at that article, like I don't have
to deal with that article a lot of times.
Speaker 5 (32:12):
You know, I'm saying he's in here.
Speaker 3 (32:14):
You got some niggas want to say I'm a rat.
You know that. Ain't that Ain't that ain't delayed when
you want to be having any prison, know what I mean.
Speaker 2 (32:20):
In the recording, Shahid doesn't deny that he killed anyone.
He suggests that he confessed to make a point, basically
to brag about how many murders he committed. Shahid was
mad at the man who snitched on him to get
a deal. I'm gonna keep awading with you, I said.
Speaker 3 (32:34):
I look, so y'all, let y'all don't even lock these
niggas up about one murder.
Speaker 5 (32:39):
I tell you what I think about twenty murders? Do
you let the niggas out for one body?
Speaker 1 (32:47):
That?
Speaker 2 (32:47):
Basically, Shahid said, if you left this other guy off
because he gave you information on one murder, I'll show
you I can give you information on way more than
just one murder.
Speaker 3 (32:58):
When he comes to the west hand, man, I look
at it like split up with your man.
Speaker 5 (33:02):
It's like, you know, ain't nobody perfect?
Speaker 4 (33:05):
Bro?
Speaker 6 (33:06):
You don't We all got skeletons When.
Speaker 2 (33:09):
It comes to the west end, Shahid said, we all
got skeletons. This one guy played a huge part in
who a mam Jamil came to be. In the eyes
of local and federal law enforcement built him up into
parts mobster and terrorists. It's impossible for me to separate
fact from fiction here or again to really know why
(33:30):
mam Jamil kept a guy like Shaheed around. But shouldn't
there have been limits to a man Jamil's policy of
keeping the mass shed open for anyone to practice is
slam Limit's far short of turning a blind eye to
a serial killer. From where I stand, keeping Shahid around
was either a severe miscalculation on the Mam Jamil's part,
or he was okay with the violence, maybe even endorsed it.
(33:54):
I do know that a Mam Jamil traded on fear.
Many people in the West End were scared of him.
That's part of the way he brought the neighborhood under control.
How he cleaned it up one of the accusations in
the synopsis of Western homicides I haven't told you about yet.
(34:16):
It's a case that could be helpful in determining where
Shahid's stories end and the Maam Jamil's own actions begin.
The very first victim listed in the dossier was a
man whose name was Clive Hunter, though he also went
by a Muslim name. Clive served prison time with the
Maam Jamil in New York. By some accounts, he taught
a man Jamil slam after he converted, and a Maam
(34:39):
Jamil pledged loyalty to him, and Mam Jamil left prison
first moved to Atlanta and established the Weston MASSTJD. When
Clive got out later, he figured that Maschd was his
to take over since a Maam Jamil had pledged loyalty.
Long story short, A rivalry developed that ended in nineteen
(34:59):
eighty when Clive was shot to death by assailants who
were never identified. Some folks in the community thought of
Maam Jimiale was behind it, and this was before Shahid
ever got to town. It places a body at the
foundation of everything that came afterward. These are the names
(35:25):
of the people in the West End who lost their lives,
the ones we know about Kennedy Keller, Clive Hunter, James Farrell,
Tommy Jones, Quantavius Kelly, Carlon Wilson, Jamie Lee, James, Sammy
(35:46):
Lee Sawyer, Roderick Fulton, Damon Brown, Clarence Poon, Andre Lane,
Jacqueline Johnson, Marlins, Antonio Wyatt, James, Gary Jones, Cornelius, James Nelson,
(36:09):
Perry Miller, Tommy Warren, Corey Dunn, Corey Whitehead, Shannon Frasier,
and Calvin Battle. Many people Rodney knew from the West
End were killed over about a decade, most of them
(36:31):
by Shahid ab du Rahman, a man who was paid
by the federal government. Remember, someone in the Atlanta Police
Department said Shahid may have killed as many as fifty people.
That would rank him along the top three most prolific
known serial killers in modern American history. Rodney has become
obsessed with all these cases. He wrote a book from
(36:53):
the West End to Loyal Pakistan. He called it about
Muslims moving into the neighborhood, and he's about to publish
the sequel, looking more closely at Shahida. He's working on
a documentary too. But the murder that Rodney seems to
think about the most is the one of his partner,
Lee Sawyer.
Speaker 3 (37:12):
Me and Lee was like brothers, the best of brothers.
Speaker 2 (37:16):
Yeah, we was.
Speaker 3 (37:17):
Lee was a wild guy. He was a guy. H
He's the hardest guy. He wasn't he wasn't afraid of anything,
and that's kind of dangerous, you know. But he was
the coolest person, give you anything, real good host, a
ladies man, you know, you get him mad. He was
just he he could beat you to death with his hand.
(37:41):
He was that type of guy. But he was everybody.
If you ask anybody else, they'll say he was a
night always smile. That's how I say. He was always
big smile.
Speaker 2 (37:52):
Lee's mom visits Rodney sometimes.
Speaker 3 (37:55):
And with her she she ain't never gonna recover from it.
Speaker 2 (38:00):
There are mothers and fathers and children connected to all
the people killed in the West End, and Rodney thinks
about them.
Speaker 3 (38:07):
People that was in charge. They need an answer to
these people. The victim they need answer to. It's a
victim impact behind this. They need some answers man, because
it is too much. It's just it's so much, and
you know, I'm just stretching the surface on this man.
Speaker 2 (38:24):
Maybe most of all, Rodney wants more attention on the
whole mess.
Speaker 3 (38:29):
That ain't news. I think it's ridiculous. I I just
look at it like every day, like if this ain't
world news, what is what we're watching now?
Speaker 2 (38:42):
You know, we tried our best to put Rodney's questions
in our questions to the people in charge. I'll start
at the bottom. The Atlanta detective who investigated some of
the killings in the mid nineties, he did an agree
to an interview. Really, it seems like he did his
best to make something happen with these cases. He interviewed
(39:04):
the FBI agent Agan, and he took the evidence he
had to prosecutors.
Speaker 6 (39:09):
I did have presented to me a collection of investigations
into these deaths.
Speaker 2 (39:14):
When Robert McBurney, the prosecutor, was with the Fulton County DA,
he reviewed some materials about the killing of drug dealers
in the West End. It was years before he was
assigned to a man Jamial's murder trial.
Speaker 6 (39:27):
Some leads and theories as to how they might be
connected and who might connect them, but it never got
to the level where I or anyone I talked with,
was comfortable saying, that's a case we could bring get
past a grand jury.
Speaker 2 (39:42):
That's less difficult.
Speaker 6 (39:43):
But ultimately, were we confident that we could prove something
beyond a reasonable doubt. If you don't have that confidence,
you really shouldn't then say, great, we're going to indict you. Anyway,
there was nothing. There was zero on the forensic side.
But there were people who said things, but not necessarily
people who would come to court to say these things.
Speaker 2 (40:04):
Maybe Shahid was good at killing people and not getting caught.
That seems legit, And it's not mcburnie's job or the
job of other prosecutors to gather evidence for a case.
Still McBurnie or other prosecutors the DA, maybe they could
have pushed for more attention within law enforcement on these murders.
(40:24):
We know there were meetings, but we don't see any
evidence of an elevated level of concern like you might
expect for a potential serial killer on the loose. On
the federal side of things, let's consider the biggest potential
allegation against AmAm Jamil during the nineties, that he was
an the Islamic terrorist. Again, to be clear here, we
(40:46):
know that AmAm Jamil has some connections with Muslim leaders abroad,
but we have seen no evidence of any terrorist activity.
But for argument's sake, let's say the FBI knew something
that we don't know. Maybe that would in their minds
justifies I'm going to say radical steps by the federal government,
like using a murderer as an informant. Maybe they would
(41:07):
consider it worth it to allow some harm in order
to prevent even greater harm, like a big terrorist attack
or something. But when I asked Bernie about this, who
by the way, was hired as a federal prosecutor after
AmAm Dmil's trial, he said, building a case based on
information from a guy like Shaheed u dur Rahman, it
would have been shoddy police work.
Speaker 6 (41:28):
This was an area and a climate and a community
where it advanced people's interests to say they were involved
or they weren't. They did these things and they didn't.
But the scenario you described would be yet another reason
why I think it didn't make sense to if that's
going to be your source of information. Is like one
(41:48):
of these mob cases where yeah, I killed twenty people,
but let me tell you who the real bad guy is. Well,
what do you mean the fact.
Speaker 2 (41:55):
That you pulled the trigger?
Speaker 6 (41:56):
Who where's your credibility? Even if your answer is well,
but did it on the direction of so and so,
I do know that federal agents would not be permitted
to continue to use a source if that source engaged
in unauthorized activity, and certainly killing someone would be unauthorized.
(42:17):
And certainly, had there been any evidence that he did
these things, not only would he be pursued and prosecuted,
but there would have been no more relationship between him
and his handlers.
Speaker 2 (42:29):
Right. But in either case, if he did these things
while on informant, that would be a violation of some sort.
Speaker 6 (42:36):
Oh, I'd agree, it's a violation of the law.
Speaker 2 (42:38):
He's a murderer, and.
Speaker 6 (42:42):
I am confident that if a federal handler had any
inkling that abdur Rockman was doing anything along the lines
of what you're describing and what he's describing, that would
have been the end of it for Abdurachman. He'd be
off the streets and in custody.
Speaker 2 (43:00):
So baced on mcburnie's criteria here, I think it's fair
to say the FBI messed up, maybe even broke its
own rules for the law in the years after Gant
helped Shahid get out of prison, he should have known
that Shahied was killing people. Sure, maybe it was more
of a problem for Atlanta police to handle. It was
(43:21):
their jurisdiction. Maybe this is an issue of failed oversight
in communication, but we know Gant was at least still
close to an investigation of a man, Jamil. How could
all these killings in the same neighborhood not come up?
Hi looking for a mister Gant. Yeah, my name is
(43:42):
Mostly's secret. I'm here with Johnny Coffin. We're producers working
on a podcast about Jamille Alami.
Speaker 4 (43:52):
Okay, are you familiar with him?
Speaker 2 (44:01):
All we got from Gant through the door of his
apartment was a not interested and a thank you. We
left him a letter, but we never heard back. We
also emailed the FBI a list of questions. Nothing back
from them either. Despite all the death and destruction, the
FBI still didn't make a case against a man Jamil,
but the bureau persisted in the West End even after
(44:22):
Shahid was locked up in the late nineties. They had
other informants there and they were surveilling the mass right
up to the time of the shootout, and so it
seems possible on the night of March sixteen to two thousand,
someone with the FBI, maybe an informant, maybe an agent,
would end up with blood on their hands too. He
(44:50):
was very irritable and upset about what was going on,
and I had never seen him like that before that
on the next and final episode of Radical. Radical is
(45:18):
a production of Campside Media, Tenderfoot TV, and iHeart Podcasts.
Radical was reported and written by Johnny Kaufman and me
Mossey's Secret Johnny Kaufman is our senior producer. Sheba Joseph
is our associate producer. Editing by Eric Benson. Johnny Kaufman,
Emily Martinez and Matt Cher. Fact checking by Sophie Hurwitz,
(45:40):
Kayln Lynch and Layla Dos. Original music by Kyle Murdoch
and by Ray Murray of Organized Noise. Sound design and
mixing by Kevin Seaman. Recording by Ewan Le trem Ewen
and Sheba Joseph. Campside Media's operations team is Doug Slaywan,
Ashley Warren, Alijah Papes, Destiny Dingle, and Sabina Mera. The
(46:02):
executive producers at Campside Media are Josh Dean Vanessa, Gregoriatis,
Adam Hoff, and Matt Cher. For Tenderfoot TV, executive producers
are Donald Albright and Payne Lindsay. The executive producers at
iHeart Podcasts are Matt Frederick and Alex Williams, with additional
support from Trevor Young,
The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely
those of the podcast author or individuals participating in the podcast,
and do not represent those of iHeartRadio or their employees.
This podcast also contains subject matter which may not be
suitable for everyone listening to.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
Discretion is advised. Radical is released every Tuesday and brought
to you absolutely free. But if you want to add
free listening and early access to next week's episode, subscribe
to tenderfoot Plus. For more information, check out tenderfootplus dot com.
Enjoy the episode Campsite Media.
Speaker 3 (00:49):
So you now it is really why I should started
real here Casscase dot claim right.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
Up the hill. It took months of reporting on this
store before I had a good reason to return to
Atlanta's West End, to the leafy neighborhood of bungalows and
Victorian homes surrounding the mass hit the corner store and
the park the side of the shootout on March sixteenth,
two thousand. The community, the village, even founded and led
(01:15):
by Imam Jamille A Lamine, with its own school, its
own security force, even something like its own laws.
Speaker 3 (01:22):
Make a right right and we'll come back in the back,
come out for what I did.
Speaker 2 (01:28):
It was this man, Rodney Brown who brought me back here.
Rodney grew up in the West End and he was
a teenager when crack cocaine hit in the eighties. So
many people on his side of town got sucked into
a zombie like existence, traded their spirit for the little
white rocks, and Rodney he got sucked into the fast
cash started dealing. He said he can make three or
(01:51):
four thousand dollars a day when he started out, as
long as he was willing to risk standing out on
the corner. I remember those days. I was just a kid,
but I saw how older relatives got caught up in
and out of jail, on and off the streets. Drugs,
guns and violence were cornerstones of the life. My parents
(02:12):
steered me and my siblings clear of it. We even
kept a distance from some relatives. And Mam Jimial was
in the thick of it, though, and as a leader,
he had little choice but to confront the problem head on.
In time, he developed a reputation for a quote cleaning
up the West End, making it a safe place to
raise families, not just for Muslims in his community, but
(02:34):
also others who lived nearby. Rodney witnessed some of that
from his particular perspective.
Speaker 3 (02:43):
Did rad Hill was a maid to Trout this happen?
This is what tim of got key you.
Speaker 2 (02:48):
Rodney was still a teenager when he bought his first
eight K forty seven, so he saw some things more
than his share of violence in his younger days. He
might have had more acquaintances who were killed than I
had friends in all of high school. Driving through the
neighborhood with him, the specter of violence gave me a headache.
We were surrounded by places where people who Rodney knew
(03:09):
had been struck down. Back in the book, I told
you I wasn't selling drug until.
Speaker 3 (03:14):
The girl got killed on the bridge, Tanya Natalia mine.
He got killed on the bread. I just got got
myself caught up in sound. I don't think they chopped
him up back though, but I know they are. This
is what they dunk about it at. This was black giants.
This was black giant trap house. This way he sold
(03:35):
his weight. He was right here, but he ain't get killed.
He got killed back up though. I should have showed
down that when I was up there.
Speaker 2 (03:43):
These killings happened in and around the part of the
West End controlled by a man Jamil, the area he
had supposedly cleaned up. It's the roughly six or seven
mostly residential blocks, apartments and houses that surround the park.
Just to the south of the park was the mas
Jed and the man Jamil's corner store. That was Jamel's store.
(04:09):
Exactly we turned and drove over the place where Deputy
Kinchin and Deputy English were shot. The part of the
street that was littered with shellcasings that.
Speaker 3 (04:21):
Night in two thousand. It's the mobs, this green and
white one. That's the mobs. Jamil Alami stayed all these
his house, each one of these houses. See all these
this community mobs. I's see up in here. Ain't nobody
(04:45):
never sold no drugs here.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
And Man Jamil hated drugs and drug dealing. So Rodney
and the seasoned dealers in the West End they knew
better than posting up on the corners next to the
mass Jed, the park and the corner store, the spot
where a mam gmial could be found most days, shooting hoops,
tending to the store, or chilling outside at the picnic table.
It was considered holy land. Instead, Rodney and the other dealers.
(05:12):
They did their business on the edges of a mam
Jamil's community. Still, somehow many of them ended up shot
and dead. Rodney was one of the few who survived.
In the nineties, before the shootout in March two thousand,
dozens of people were allegedly murdered in the West End,
dozens with little accountability. And it wasn't just the typical
(05:36):
violence you might expect drug dealers to encounter. In my
reporting of this story, so many people described for me
the breezy way a mam gmial moved through the West End,
how he seemed to carelessly float past his though catching
the wind. But my question after hearing these stories was this.
(05:59):
Did a mam Jamil rest control from the dope dealers
with that kind of grace alone, or was there something else?
When I looked into the killings all those folks who
Rodney knew who died, what I learned was disturbing, far
worse than I ever imagined. From Campside Media, Tenderfoot TV,
(06:21):
and iHeart podcasts, this is radical. I'm Mosey's Secret Episode
seven Sacrifices. We learned about the murders and the thousands
(06:51):
of pages of documents were received from the Fulton County
DA's office. The stuff we got in response to our
open records request. Reading those reports, what started out as
a quest to get to the bottom of the shootout
with the deputies and to figure out whether a Mam
Jamil was really capable of that kind of violence, suddenly
got this whole other layer because the documents described a
(07:15):
man who allegedly was way more than capable, who was
involved in a rash of killings in the West End
way before the shootout, who used a mafioso like ruthlessness
to get what he wanted. Figuring out whether the accusations
had any merit had every bearing on understanding who a
Maam Jamil was and just as importantly, who law enforcement
(07:37):
thought he was in the period leading up to the shootout.
The key document we got is called Synopsis of West
End Homicides. It's just eleven pages long, a list mostly
with quick summaries, dates and the names of victims, and
the section at the top law enforcement connects a Mamjmil
(07:59):
to see sixteen killings over about a decade nineteen eighty
six to nineteen ninety seven. Most of the victims were
drug dealers. Rodney knew many, if not all, the people
who were killed, and we looked over the list with him.
He's not in the streets anymore. He spent time in
prison and started fresh. So part of what he felt
(08:20):
was shocked at seeing the world he was so close
to with more perspective. He struggled to make sense of
the amount of killing.
Speaker 3 (08:30):
I guess when they started happening, it was normal to man.
Think about you walk out the door and they have
shot his dude face off. When they shot Tome and
face off, and it was you know, it was always
violand in the West then but they shot his face
off a month not even a month later, shot n
them times in the face. Then everybody on your neighborhood.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
You go to the globe, y'all killing there. Everybody.
Speaker 3 (08:53):
They thought we was killing the motherfucker.
Speaker 2 (08:55):
You know, we thought about it, so it was attached
to us.
Speaker 3 (08:59):
Really they went or one for it because we won't over.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
The synopsis of the Weston Homicides portrays a man Jamil
as some kind of kingpin heading up a group of
brothers from the mass jed An inner circle who ran
guns and extorted drug dealers, secretly killing the competition and
anyone else who knew too much about what they were doing.
Very strong allegations. In the earliest days of the West
(09:25):
End mass Jed, a mam Jamil set up a security team.
This I know it to be true. Nothing unusual there.
Most mass Jeds have them. Brothers would walk people home
from the mass Jed after prayer make sure nobody out
on the street caused any trouble. But the West End
seems to have taken their security further than most. A
member of the mass Jed told me how once some
(09:47):
guys started fighting during a basketball game at the park.
It was the West End versus a different neighborhood. The
outsiders left, but they were so pissed they came back
with guns before they could do any home though the
Muslim brothers fired. Even a mammaed Meal came out of
his little shop and let loose. As the outsiders fled,
(10:08):
they nearly flipped their car over, and when the cops
came by afterwards asking if everything was all right, the
Westend brothers said yeah, they had it under control. It
was frontier justice and guns were critical. On any given
day in the park, a good number of men had
rifles hanging on straps under their thobes. At night, they
(10:29):
rode around in cars or stood out on corners, also strapped,
they could hold their own behind the trigger too. The
brothers sometimes went to the shooting range together for target practice,
and the Mamas Meal would often join, just like he
used to in his earliest days in the movement. There
were many many guns flowing through the West End in
(10:52):
the late eighties and early nineties. Rodney he wasn't only
dealing in cracking weed. He sold guns too.
Speaker 3 (11:00):
Yody who wanted guns in a lon did like they
want weed in Lona. They came to the West End.
They want a pistol. I said, okay, what kind won't.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
Rodney's gun supplier was right around the corner. He was
buying from the Muslims.
Speaker 3 (11:17):
I had Muslim knock on my door in the middle
of the night with boxes. Man, No, lie, I can't
count them. I'm talking about guns, rifles. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (11:29):
In the early nineties, two brothers from the mass Jed
were charged with running guns out of the storefront right
next to a man Jimill's corner store. They bought the
guns legally, but they were accused of selling them like
they might have done to Rodney without keeping the right
paperwork to track where they went. A federal agent testified
that a handful of guns went to the mass Jed's
security patrol, but more than two hundred were recovered in Philadelphia, Detroit,
(11:53):
New Haven, and New York City over three years. The
two accused men allegedly bought at least seventy three thousand
dollars worth of firearms, and they probably weren't just being
used for target practice. Many were Davis three eighties, a
handgun with a reputation as a Saturday Night special because
it's cheap and often used in crimes. At the gun
(12:15):
running trial, a member of the Masjid and the security
patrol testified for the prosecution. His name was Shahid ab
duur Rahman. He was in prison at the time for
shooting and killing a man. On the stand, he said
he bought guns from the accused men and then sent
them to New York, but he stopped short of saying
(12:35):
that the defendants knowingly sold gun to criminals planning to
commit crimes. Maybe that was because on the day he testified,
AmAm Jamil showed up the picture of menace he was
wearing an all black thobe and a black turban and
black charcoal around his eyes. If the FBI thought this
dude Shahid might implicate the AmAm, they better think again.
(13:00):
Not long after the gun running case wrapped up, Ma'am
Jamil got caught up in a case himself.
Speaker 4 (13:07):
He was once the leader of the Student Non Violent
Coordinating Committee and part of the Black Power movement. Today,
h Rap Brown is known as Jamil Abdullah a La
Main and he appeared in court. He is charged with
aggravated assault and weapons violations after allegedly shooting a man
July twenty sixth.
Speaker 2 (13:25):
In nineteen ninety five, Atlanta police responded to a shooting
at West End Park of a man named William Miles.
One bullet entered and exited his leg without doing any
permanent damage. The responding officer said, Myles I d'ed to
Maam Jamil as the shooter. Then the next morning, AmAm
Jamil and another brother from the mass Jed went to
visit Miles at home. When an Atlanta police detective later
(13:49):
interviewed Myles, he did not identify a man Jamil as
the shooter, but a few days later that detective and
some federal agents pulled a Mam Jamil over in his
black Mercedes. They arrested him for aggravated assault and for
carrying a forty five caliber pistol without a license. We
found the recording of an interview a local television reporter
did with a Man Jamil a few days later after
(14:10):
he got out of jail on bond. He was in
his early fifties at the time. During the interview, he's
standing on the sidewalk outside his store wearing a black
thoat and a black knitted coofee. He has a thin
beard and oval glasses.
Speaker 5 (14:23):
Do you know William Miles only from reading the paper
and seeing his name? You know this is my familiar
being familiar with him through that you never met with him?
Speaker 2 (14:34):
And I went to his house. If he's the same
person who was shot?
Speaker 5 (14:38):
I asked him, was it true that he was saying
that a Muslim shot him? He said that he saw
a tall person and the person had black on and
the person who shut him, you know, was tall and.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
Had black on.
Speaker 6 (14:52):
Was it you to do?
Speaker 2 (14:53):
Do?
Speaker 5 (14:54):
What to go see him, to talk to shot him?
Speaker 2 (14:56):
To shoot him?
Speaker 5 (14:58):
That's the allegation of police of made Well again. That's
the thing that has to be determined in court.
Speaker 2 (15:03):
Man Then the reporter asked to Ma'am Jamil if he
still thinks violence is as an American as cherry pie.
Speaker 5 (15:09):
I think it's evident, and I think that more people
realize what was being said. And I've always advocated self defense.
A loss is in the Qur'an tyranny and oppression is
worse than slaw. To fight them wherever you may find him.
So again, that whole sense of the right to self
defense as a human is a platform we've always stood on.
Speaker 6 (15:28):
I guess then the obvious question is did you have
a forty five automatic pistol on you as a means
of self defense.
Speaker 5 (15:35):
That's a part of the case again that has to
be litigated in court.
Speaker 2 (15:40):
Imam Jamil didn't seem to be denying he was involved,
but William Miles, the victim of the shooting, he later
suggested that he was actually pressured by the police to
name a Maam Jamil as the shooter. Four national Islamic
groups urge the Department of Justice to investigate the arrest.
The charges were eventually dropped and the case went away.
(16:00):
So not counting the incident with the sheriff's deputies. That's
two shootings at the park that a Maam Jamil may
have been involved in, the one after the basketball game
and the shooting of William Miles. Nobody that we know
of was seriously hurt, and the shootings could be described
as part of protecting the community self defense in a way.
(16:23):
Like a Maam Jimil told the reporter in that interview,
it's a platform he's always stood on. But the a
Maam killing all those drug dealers, or even ordering them killed,
like the allegations we saw in the synopsis of Western homicides,
that would be on a whole other level. I don't
(16:43):
think a Mam Jmil was pulling the trigger in those murders,
but he didn't know the man who did much of
the killing, if not all of it, because he was
a well respected member of the Master JD and the
security patrol. Law enforcement knew this killer too, and not
just because they were trying to catch him. No, they
had a secret relationship with him, one that reveals just
(17:04):
how far they'd go to take down a man Jamil.
In the late eighties, when Ronnie got into the game
and started dealing, he had his disposal in the West
(17:25):
End to use the business school term a network. He
grew up about a block from West End Park and
the kids he played with, many of them were still around.
That included Muslim kids too.
Speaker 3 (17:37):
Yeah. I hung with the smoked weeds and smoked cigarettes
and thrunk them. The ones that came to mind place
to shoot pool. But they still went and prayed every Friday,
you know.
Speaker 2 (17:48):
Just like Chris was just like all religions, all.
Speaker 3 (17:51):
Of them not good, all of them not bad. He's
just like the ones that hung around me. Probably was
the bad seeds. I was a bad seed. So and
that's that's that relation.
Speaker 2 (18:02):
I grew up with. How you gonna do?
Speaker 3 (18:03):
People say they just killed God men? One of us did?
Why he knews since we was kids.
Speaker 2 (18:09):
Shaheed abduer Rothman was maybe the Muslim who Rodney came
to know best in the West End. He had moved
to Atlanta from New York, where he'd lived through shattering trauma.
Speaker 3 (18:19):
It was the Jamaicans that killed his mom. He stayed
in the house for like four days with a dead body.
Speaker 2 (18:26):
When he was whole, he was really like a toxic
of self. I think he stayed in there.
Speaker 3 (18:31):
He stayed in high with a dead by it like
four days and was his mom.
Speaker 2 (18:35):
That's the story.
Speaker 3 (18:36):
Tell people, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 2 (18:39):
Shahid's passed is pretty mysterious. Other than that, but his
childhood seemed to have marked his destiny for darkness. Shahid
said that when he moved to Atlanta at seventeen or eighteen,
it was because he was flinging the aftermath of some shooting.
He joined the Master and the security team, and over
time built a reputation as a gentleman, a good Muslim,
and a family man. But he was secretly or not
(19:02):
so secretly, depending on whom you talk to, living a
double life, and the security team was his cover. If
most guys on the security patrol kept the defensive posture,
standing guard in the neighborhood or escorting families to their
houses at night, Shahid seemed to use his authority to
shake down the streets, going out sometimes with younger guys,
(19:22):
teenagers mostly, who went after drug dealers like they were cops,
busting into trap houses and confiscating dope, and that response
seemed to blow the lines between right and wrong. I
heard how these guys got rid of the drugs they
seized at first flushed them down the toilet, but after
a while they realized they were throwing money away, And
(19:43):
I wonder when dealers didn't back down what happened? Then
I got like Shahid, who seemed to have developed a
taste for blood. He thrived.
Speaker 3 (19:54):
With Shahi, everybody knew he was a dangerous person, and
my friends said, hey, whatever you do, don't get in
the call with that motherfucker, because they know you'd come
at When murt came.
Speaker 2 (20:08):
In nineteen ninety, Shahied was involved in two killings. The
victims were in that document we got the synopsis of
Western homicides. Then about a year later, Shahied was involved
in another killing. People began to suspect he was doing
hit jobs, and to wonder who was calling the shots.
Shahid became a leader of the patrol and became close
(20:30):
to a man Jamil, but eventually he was charged with murder,
and with Shahied off the streets, the violence in the
West End seemed to taper off. Meanwhile, after Shahid got
locked up, Rodney said he was doing well for himself.
When things are really humming. He was moving hundreds of
thousands of dollars worth of drugs on a monthly basis.
(20:52):
Rodney stayed in touch with Shaheed while Shahid was in prison,
sent him weed. Shahid was his friend and Rodney, in
his criminal way at the time, was generous like that.
Around this time the FBI came offering Shahied some help too.
We know that while Shahied was incarcerated, he met with
an agent named Bill Gant. Not long after Shahid testified
(21:15):
for the prosecution in the gun running case against two
brothers from the weston mass Jed, when a man Jamil
showed up in all black then likely in exchange for
Shahid's cooperation, Gant the agent put in a word with
the Georgia Parole Board and by nineteen ninety five, Shahied
was back on the street and back in the mass Jed.
(21:39):
He had done approximately four years for killing and this
is when folks on the outside started wondering what the
fuck is going on here. When Shahid got out, Rodney
was surprised he didn't hear from him right away. I'm
a man, I'm mother, I'm the man. He know that,
he know he didn't her.
Speaker 3 (21:58):
I'm taking care of his motherfuck in prison. I'm sending
weed to prison for free. Never ask for a penny.
So why when you come speak to me? Why?
Speaker 2 (22:15):
And Ronnie didn't want to worry about Shahied walking up
behind him on the street with a pistol or a shotgun.
Rodney was starting to think Shahied was a rat his words,
not mine. So after three months of waiting, Rodney got
his address and stopped by.
Speaker 3 (22:30):
I knocked on the door.
Speaker 2 (22:30):
He looked at him.
Speaker 3 (22:31):
I fucking seeing it with me, opened the door. I said,
what's up, man? How long you been out?
Speaker 6 (22:37):
You know?
Speaker 2 (22:37):
He was like, I've been a few coming out. Come
on in. Rodney asked Shahied straight up. How'd you get
out of jail? Shahid told Rodney that the brothers in
the mast and they wanted him back in the neighborhood.
They said, look, why don't you testify against one of
the accused in this gun running case so that you
can get your time cut. Just don't implicate the big man,
(22:58):
meaning a man Jimmy Rodney believed Shahied. But here's what's
weird about that story from my perspective. Anyway, the brothers
who Shahid testified against were members of the mass Jed
since the earliest days founding members. Really, why let them
take the fall so that Shahed, a much more dangerous
(23:19):
man by all accounts, could come home. Why would the
AmAm give that? The Okay people told me that Ammam
Jamil would not block anyone from practicing their religion, that
AmAm Jamil was close with everyone, including Shahed, a spiritual adviser,
always guiding people back to Islam. But that got messy.
Soon after Shahid got out of prison in March of
(23:41):
nineteen ninety five, he killed a man in April. There
was another body later that year two more. Shahid was
linked to at least eight killings just in the West
End before the end of nineteen ninety five. Shahed, Rodney said,
would brag about what he was doing.
Speaker 3 (24:00):
He's a serious killer.
Speaker 2 (24:01):
I'm telling you he got the kill.
Speaker 3 (24:03):
He gonna start some beef and it ain't gonna be
he gonna make up or reading to kill the mother fuck.
Speaker 2 (24:10):
You might remember sister Jamila Jahad from the first episode
of the podcast. She converted to Islam, took the Shahada
from my Mam Jamil, and raised her family in the
West End. Sister Jamila ran a construction company and she
was having problems with an employee or a contractor someone
she was working with. Anyway, one day, Shahi came up
to hurt the message.
Speaker 3 (24:32):
He said to me, you won't need to take care
of them, you know, for not not doing something, to
paying you or something like that.
Speaker 2 (24:39):
I said, no, what you're talking about?
Speaker 6 (24:42):
But do you take care of how?
Speaker 2 (24:43):
You know?
Speaker 5 (24:44):
But I had no idea.
Speaker 3 (24:48):
Who you know, who he had become.
Speaker 2 (24:49):
That's how he approached you.
Speaker 3 (24:51):
Yeah, but he was a part you know, his friend
were working for me?
Speaker 2 (24:56):
And now do you know what? You know what he
meant when he said that.
Speaker 3 (24:58):
Yeah, I'm thinking.
Speaker 2 (25:01):
Murder in a minute, you know, I think that's what
he was thinking too.
Speaker 3 (25:06):
And I said, no, what's you talking about? What your
clients on, what you're doing.
Speaker 2 (25:14):
It was so casual how Shahid asked her if he
should take somebody out. There's no doubt in my mind
that wasn't the first time that he asked that question
to a remember of the mass did. And there's little
doubt in my mind that after all the years he
spent in the community, that at least a few people
said yes. Why else would god fearing, family loving folks
keep a guy like him around if not for skeletons,
(25:35):
literally skeletons, what's worse And I'm sorry to drop this
bombshell on you. Shahik was grooming the more troubled boys
in the community to become killers, letting them touch his
guns at first, then taking them out shooting, and then
out on hits. I talked to one of these guys.
It took him decades to get his life on track.
For the life of me, I can't understand how a
(25:57):
person like Shaheed could fly under the radar in such
a small commute unity. AmAm Jamil would ultimately pay a
price because after Shahid got out of prison and returned
to the community, he was on the federal payroll as
an FBI and foreman. I don't know how anyone could
be surprised by that. Everyone knew Shahid had already cooperated once,
(26:19):
but he was secretly helping the FED to build another case.
In the nineties, long before September eleventh, the FBI was
targeting alleged Muslim extremists. There was a surveillance operation named
(26:40):
Vulgar Betrayal. We know from the documents obtained by Karema Alamin,
a Mam Jamil's wife, that the FBI suspected A Maam
Jamil was some kind of terrorists or maybe supporting Islamic
terrorists abroad. One report describes as Maam Jamil as a
leader of a network of master JITs with international connections
(27:01):
that are basically fronts for criminal activity. It's true that
AmAm Jamil had some relationships with Muslims abroad, but was
he a terrorist. We've seen zero evidence of that. Meanwhile,
people in the West End were still losing their lives,
people right there in a Maam Jamil's neighborhood. From what
(27:21):
we can see in the documents, the FBI wasn't so
concerned about that. Shahidz Handler was the FBI agent Bill Gant,
who appeared to surveil A Maam Jamil in the mass
Jed for most of the nineties. We don't know much
about Gan except that he started to work for the
FBI in the late eighties and he allegedly got into
(27:44):
it once with one of his supervisors for pursuing a
Mam Jamil even after he'd been ordered to stop while
he was under oath. Gant set his role in the
investigation of a man Jamil and the mass jed ended
at the beginning of ninety five, but months later, in
the summer of ninety five, he helped arrest of Maam
Jamil after he was accused of shooting that man in
(28:04):
West End Park William Miles, and then a year later
in ninety six. This was after Shahied was connected to
at least three killings over the previous year and a half.
Gant said he had contact with Shahied once a week,
and he had seen him in person two weeks earlier.
Gant was meeting with a killer on the regular. Atlanta
(28:26):
police were looking into all the bodies piling up in
the West End, and Shahid seemed to be telling the
cops that people other than himself were involved, possibly even
saying that a Maam Jamil was calling the shots. By
around ninety six, local police knew that Shahied was at
least connected to multiple killings. A detective in the Atlanta
Police Department was investigating, and he brought in Gant for
(28:49):
an interview. The detective wrote up a summary afterward. He
said that Gant appeared nervous. He did not volunteer information
unless specifically asked in investigand how much he was paying Shahied,
but Gan wouldn't say. When Gan asked which murders were
linked to Shahied, the detective said, all the homicides in
(29:10):
the West End area. Here's Rodney Brown again.
Speaker 3 (29:17):
L beyond agent. The agent knew, maybe found out later on,
but he had to find out that boy was killing people.
Speaker 2 (29:25):
He had to.
Speaker 3 (29:26):
If you investigating Jamil, and I mean the West End
and all these boys coming up dead from the West End,
what the fuck while we're investigate Now we say, okay,
this guy got killed. This guy, Now the next question
who killed him? So that would have led him back
to Shahid, Right, come on, man, that is just no,
(29:47):
none of it really makes sense.
Speaker 2 (29:48):
What if Shahied's telling them that Jamil is the one
who's doing it, do you think they would believe.
Speaker 3 (29:52):
That that Jamil is committing to.
Speaker 2 (29:55):
Miss Jamila is ordering it. And so this is you
talk about how Shahid's playing everybody. Maybe he was playing
them too, and he was.
Speaker 3 (30:03):
That's a good fact. He deathinitely was telling him that.
But still of them or how many of us would
they want.
Speaker 2 (30:11):
To sacrifice to bust it?
Speaker 3 (30:14):
It ain't like they're selling bricks, man, We're dealing with
people's bodies. They want a drug deal?
Speaker 2 (30:21):
How many of us, Rodney asked, would they be willing
to sacrifice to bust a man? Jamil to me, all
this clearly says some human lives were dispensable in whatever
grand calculation the FEDS were making. Black lives troubled lives.
At the time of the shootout involving the Fulton County
(30:42):
Sheriff's deputies in March of two thousand, Shahid was in
prison on a parole violation. After he got out, he
kept killing. In March of two thousand and two, he
shot someone in the back of the head and killed them.
Then he killed another person later that year and the
next year he was involved in at least two more murders.
(31:06):
In two thousand and four, narcotics detectives targeting a drug
house found Shahed with guns and drugs. They arrested him
with him off the streets. Another man from the West
End told law enforcement about at least one murder he
knew Shahid was responsible for. An Atlanta police detective went
to interview Shahed, and Shahid started confessing. By our count
(31:27):
he was involved in killing at least eleven people, but
he allegedly killed many more. There was a story about
his confession in Atlanta's biggest newspaper, the Atlanta Journal Constitution.
It had the following line, Police believed the death toll
may be as high as fifty fifty bodies. Rodney thinks
(31:48):
the number is even higher. Shahid is now serving a
life sentence in prison. Finally, he tried to appeal his conviction,
arguing that the recorded confession shouldn't be admissible, but the
Georgia Supreme Court rejected his appeal. We couldn't get an
interview with Shahied, but we got this recording that someone
made of him.
Speaker 3 (32:09):
When you look at that article, like I don't have
to deal with that article a lot of times.
Speaker 5 (32:12):
You know, I'm saying he's in here.
Speaker 3 (32:14):
You got some niggas want to say I'm a rat.
You know that. Ain't that Ain't that ain't delayed when
you want to be having any prison, know what I mean.
Speaker 2 (32:20):
In the recording, Shahid doesn't deny that he killed anyone.
He suggests that he confessed to make a point, basically
to brag about how many murders he committed. Shahid was
mad at the man who snitched on him to get
a deal. I'm gonna keep awading with you, I said.
Speaker 3 (32:34):
I look, so y'all, let y'all don't even lock these
niggas up about one murder.
Speaker 5 (32:39):
I tell you what I think about twenty murders? Do
you let the niggas out for one body?
Speaker 1 (32:47):
That?
Speaker 2 (32:47):
Basically, Shahid said, if you left this other guy off
because he gave you information on one murder, I'll show
you I can give you information on way more than
just one murder.
Speaker 3 (32:58):
When he comes to the west hand, man, I look
at it like split up with your man.
Speaker 5 (33:02):
It's like, you know, ain't nobody perfect?
Speaker 4 (33:05):
Bro?
Speaker 6 (33:06):
You don't We all got skeletons When.
Speaker 2 (33:09):
It comes to the west end, Shahid said, we all
got skeletons. This one guy played a huge part in
who a mam Jamil came to be. In the eyes
of local and federal law enforcement built him up into
parts mobster and terrorists. It's impossible for me to separate
fact from fiction here or again to really know why
(33:30):
mam Jamil kept a guy like Shaheed around. But shouldn't
there have been limits to a man Jamil's policy of
keeping the mass shed open for anyone to practice is
slam Limit's far short of turning a blind eye to
a serial killer. From where I stand, keeping Shahid around
was either a severe miscalculation on the Mam Jamil's part,
or he was okay with the violence, maybe even endorsed it.
(33:54):
I do know that a Mam Jamil traded on fear.
Many people in the West End were scared of him.
That's part of the way he brought the neighborhood under control.
How he cleaned it up one of the accusations in
the synopsis of Western homicides I haven't told you about yet.
(34:16):
It's a case that could be helpful in determining where
Shahid's stories end and the Maam Jamil's own actions begin.
The very first victim listed in the dossier was a
man whose name was Clive Hunter, though he also went
by a Muslim name. Clive served prison time with the
Maam Jamil in New York. By some accounts, he taught
a man Jamil slam after he converted, and a Maam
(34:39):
Jamil pledged loyalty to him, and Mam Jamil left prison
first moved to Atlanta and established the Weston MASSTJD. When
Clive got out later, he figured that Maschd was his
to take over since a Maam Jamil had pledged loyalty.
Long story short, A rivalry developed that ended in nineteen
(34:59):
eighty when Clive was shot to death by assailants who
were never identified. Some folks in the community thought of
Maam Jimiale was behind it, and this was before Shahid
ever got to town. It places a body at the
foundation of everything that came afterward. These are the names
(35:25):
of the people in the West End who lost their lives,
the ones we know about Kennedy Keller, Clive Hunter, James Farrell,
Tommy Jones, Quantavius Kelly, Carlon Wilson, Jamie Lee, James, Sammy
(35:46):
Lee Sawyer, Roderick Fulton, Damon Brown, Clarence Poon, Andre Lane,
Jacqueline Johnson, Marlins, Antonio Wyatt, James, Gary Jones, Cornelius, James Nelson,
(36:09):
Perry Miller, Tommy Warren, Corey Dunn, Corey Whitehead, Shannon Frasier,
and Calvin Battle. Many people Rodney knew from the West
End were killed over about a decade, most of them
(36:31):
by Shahid ab du Rahman, a man who was paid
by the federal government. Remember, someone in the Atlanta Police
Department said Shahid may have killed as many as fifty people.
That would rank him along the top three most prolific
known serial killers in modern American history. Rodney has become
obsessed with all these cases. He wrote a book from
(36:53):
the West End to Loyal Pakistan. He called it about
Muslims moving into the neighborhood, and he's about to publish
the sequel, looking more closely at Shahida. He's working on
a documentary too. But the murder that Rodney seems to
think about the most is the one of his partner,
Lee Sawyer.
Speaker 3 (37:12):
Me and Lee was like brothers, the best of brothers.
Speaker 2 (37:16):
Yeah, we was.
Speaker 3 (37:17):
Lee was a wild guy. He was a guy. H
He's the hardest guy. He wasn't he wasn't afraid of anything,
and that's kind of dangerous, you know. But he was
the coolest person, give you anything, real good host, a
ladies man, you know, you get him mad. He was
just he he could beat you to death with his hand.
(37:41):
He was that type of guy. But he was everybody.
If you ask anybody else, they'll say he was a
night always smile. That's how I say. He was always
big smile.
Speaker 2 (37:52):
Lee's mom visits Rodney sometimes.
Speaker 3 (37:55):
And with her she she ain't never gonna recover from it.
Speaker 2 (38:00):
There are mothers and fathers and children connected to all
the people killed in the West End, and Rodney thinks
about them.
Speaker 3 (38:07):
People that was in charge. They need an answer to
these people. The victim they need answer to. It's a
victim impact behind this. They need some answers man, because
it is too much. It's just it's so much, and
you know, I'm just stretching the surface on this man.
Speaker 2 (38:24):
Maybe most of all, Rodney wants more attention on the
whole mess.
Speaker 3 (38:29):
That ain't news. I think it's ridiculous. I I just
look at it like every day, like if this ain't
world news, what is what we're watching now?
Speaker 2 (38:42):
You know, we tried our best to put Rodney's questions
in our questions to the people in charge. I'll start
at the bottom. The Atlanta detective who investigated some of
the killings in the mid nineties, he did an agree
to an interview. Really, it seems like he did his
best to make something happen with these cases. He interviewed
(39:04):
the FBI agent Agan, and he took the evidence he
had to prosecutors.
Speaker 6 (39:09):
I did have presented to me a collection of investigations
into these deaths.
Speaker 2 (39:14):
When Robert McBurney, the prosecutor, was with the Fulton County DA,
he reviewed some materials about the killing of drug dealers
in the West End. It was years before he was
assigned to a man Jamial's murder trial.
Speaker 6 (39:27):
Some leads and theories as to how they might be
connected and who might connect them, but it never got
to the level where I or anyone I talked with,
was comfortable saying, that's a case we could bring get
past a grand jury.
Speaker 2 (39:42):
That's less difficult.
Speaker 6 (39:43):
But ultimately, were we confident that we could prove something
beyond a reasonable doubt. If you don't have that confidence,
you really shouldn't then say, great, we're going to indict you. Anyway,
there was nothing. There was zero on the forensic side.
But there were people who said things, but not necessarily
people who would come to court to say these things.
Speaker 2 (40:04):
Maybe Shahid was good at killing people and not getting caught.
That seems legit, And it's not mcburnie's job or the
job of other prosecutors to gather evidence for a case.
Still McBurnie or other prosecutors the DA, maybe they could
have pushed for more attention within law enforcement on these murders.
(40:24):
We know there were meetings, but we don't see any
evidence of an elevated level of concern like you might
expect for a potential serial killer on the loose. On
the federal side of things, let's consider the biggest potential
allegation against AmAm Jamil during the nineties, that he was
an the Islamic terrorist. Again, to be clear here, we
(40:46):
know that AmAm Jamil has some connections with Muslim leaders abroad,
but we have seen no evidence of any terrorist activity.
But for argument's sake, let's say the FBI knew something
that we don't know. Maybe that would in their minds
justifies I'm going to say radical steps by the federal government,
like using a murderer as an informant. Maybe they would
(41:07):
consider it worth it to allow some harm in order
to prevent even greater harm, like a big terrorist attack
or something. But when I asked Bernie about this, who
by the way, was hired as a federal prosecutor after
AmAm Dmil's trial, he said, building a case based on
information from a guy like Shaheed u dur Rahman, it
would have been shoddy police work.
Speaker 6 (41:28):
This was an area and a climate and a community
where it advanced people's interests to say they were involved
or they weren't. They did these things and they didn't.
But the scenario you described would be yet another reason
why I think it didn't make sense to if that's
going to be your source of information. Is like one
(41:48):
of these mob cases where yeah, I killed twenty people,
but let me tell you who the real bad guy is. Well,
what do you mean the fact.
Speaker 2 (41:55):
That you pulled the trigger?
Speaker 6 (41:56):
Who where's your credibility? Even if your answer is well,
but did it on the direction of so and so,
I do know that federal agents would not be permitted
to continue to use a source if that source engaged
in unauthorized activity, and certainly killing someone would be unauthorized.
(42:17):
And certainly, had there been any evidence that he did
these things, not only would he be pursued and prosecuted,
but there would have been no more relationship between him
and his handlers.
Speaker 2 (42:29):
Right. But in either case, if he did these things
while on informant, that would be a violation of some sort.
Speaker 6 (42:36):
Oh, I'd agree, it's a violation of the law.
Speaker 2 (42:38):
He's a murderer, and.
Speaker 6 (42:42):
I am confident that if a federal handler had any
inkling that abdur Rockman was doing anything along the lines
of what you're describing and what he's describing, that would
have been the end of it for Abdurachman. He'd be
off the streets and in custody.
Speaker 2 (43:00):
So baced on mcburnie's criteria here, I think it's fair
to say the FBI messed up, maybe even broke its
own rules for the law in the years after Gant
helped Shahid get out of prison, he should have known
that Shahied was killing people. Sure, maybe it was more
of a problem for Atlanta police to handle. It was
(43:21):
their jurisdiction. Maybe this is an issue of failed oversight
in communication, but we know Gant was at least still
close to an investigation of a man, Jamil. How could
all these killings in the same neighborhood not come up?
Hi looking for a mister Gant. Yeah, my name is
(43:42):
Mostly's secret. I'm here with Johnny Coffin. We're producers working
on a podcast about Jamille Alami.
Speaker 4 (43:52):
Okay, are you familiar with him?
Speaker 2 (44:01):
All we got from Gant through the door of his
apartment was a not interested and a thank you. We
left him a letter, but we never heard back. We
also emailed the FBI a list of questions. Nothing back
from them either. Despite all the death and destruction, the
FBI still didn't make a case against a man Jamil,
but the bureau persisted in the West End even after
(44:22):
Shahid was locked up in the late nineties. They had
other informants there and they were surveilling the mass right
up to the time of the shootout, and so it
seems possible on the night of March sixteen to two thousand,
someone with the FBI, maybe an informant, maybe an agent,
would end up with blood on their hands too. He
(44:50):
was very irritable and upset about what was going on,
and I had never seen him like that before that
on the next and final episode of Radical. Radical is
(45:18):
a production of Campside Media, Tenderfoot TV, and iHeart Podcasts.
Radical was reported and written by Johnny Kaufman and me
Mossey's Secret Johnny Kaufman is our senior producer. Sheba Joseph
is our associate producer. Editing by Eric Benson. Johnny Kaufman,
Emily Martinez and Matt Cher. Fact checking by Sophie Hurwitz,
(45:40):
Kayln Lynch and Layla Dos. Original music by Kyle Murdoch
and by Ray Murray of Organized Noise. Sound design and
mixing by Kevin Seaman. Recording by Ewan Le trem Ewen
and Sheba Joseph. Campside Media's operations team is Doug Slaywan,
Ashley Warren, Alijah Papes, Destiny Dingle, and Sabina Mera. The
(46:02):
executive producers at Campside Media are Josh Dean Vanessa, Gregoriatis,
Adam Hoff, and Matt Cher. For Tenderfoot TV, executive producers
are Donald Albright and Payne Lindsay. The executive producers at
iHeart Podcasts are Matt Frederick and Alex Williams, with additional
support from Trevor Young,
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
The Nikki Glaser Podcast
Every week comedian and infamous roaster Nikki Glaser provides a fun, fast-paced, and brutally honest look into current pop-culture and her own personal life.