 |
 |
 |
|
 |
by John H. Richardson | Feb 01 '03
Was
Nathan Powell's business partner a film director trying to shed himself of an
ineffective producer? Or was he "in league with the Taliban" and a
threat to Powell and his family? Either way, Jawed Wassel ended up dismembered,
and Nathan Powell is on trial for murder. His defense: Post-traumatic stress
from September 11. A story of our time.
This
much is certain: On the night of October 3 of the year 2001, a
man named Nathan Powell brutally killed a man named Jawed Wassel. The causes of
death noted by the coroner included two stab wounds in Jawed's back and signs
of "blunt force trauma" that included broken facial bones and an
"eggshell type" fracture of his skull.
The coroner's job was complicated because he was working from
fragments. As he stated in his report, speaking in the eternal present tense of
dictation, "body parts are received separately and these consist of a
torso, a severed head, and dismembered upper and lower extremities."
The pieces of Jawed Wassel arrived in various bags and boxes. The
torso was in Box 1, Bag A. In Box 2, Bag B, the coroner found "a
dismembered lower extremity including upper leg, lower leg, and foot." In
Bag D of the same box, he found bloodstained bath towels and socks and a V-neck
pullover shirt of the Club Monaco brand, along with a segment of blue hacksaw
blade with bone tissue still adhering to the teeth. In this box he also found
sponges, paper towels, a Brillo pad, and one bloodstained hand towel "with
a Christmas holiday pattern."
Jawed's head arrived in a refrigerator drawer. "The bony
portion of the neck is transected through the body of the fourth cervical
vertebra. The right arm is dismembered by incision of the skin and soft tissues
including muscle, tendon, nerve, and blood vessels.... Sectioning of the brain
reveals typical distribution of gray and white matter and deep cortical
structures."
These things are true. They are solid. The ventricles of Jawed's
brain were not dilated. His cerebellum, pons, medulla, and brain stem were all
"unremarkable," which is the word scientists like to use because
normal is too vague and easy to dispute. His paratracheal soft tissues were
unremarkable. The endocardium of his heart was unremarkable. His aorta was
unremarkable and his vena cava was unremarkable and his pulmonary vasculature
was also unremarkable.
And that is all I can tell you that is certain and solid.
This is a story for our time, dark and violent and complicated
almost beyond understanding. In one version of the story, the Twin Towers fall
and raise a cloud of madness and paranoia that sends Nathan Powell, a man with
a young daughter and no criminal record, off on his own personal war on
terrorism. He commits an act of senseless murder that makes sense to him, which
has both narrow legal implications in terms of his motive and also larger
implications in terms of the horror all around us. In the second version,
there's little sense and no point in puzzling over it. There's nothing but
greed and cunning and a monstrous attempt to use the falling towers to blame
the victim, and Jawed Wassel is the first casualty of a phony war. Either way,
Nathan Powell has pleaded not guilty by reason of temporary insanity, and the
difficult truth behind his terrible crime becomes a warning sign of the world
we entered on September 11, 2001.
First,
Nathan Powell's version of the story. This is how he has told it to me,
to the police, to his lawyer, to several psychologists, and to a polygraph examiner.
He's also written it out numerous times. Although some versions are more
detailed than others, the essential story has varied little.
In 1996, after a troubled childhood, a couple of failed
relationships, and a few stints at studying film at Columbia and Hunter
College, Nathan was thirty-three and living in New York when he started working
with an Afghan immigrant named Jawed Wassel on a film called FireDancer. He was
the producer and Jawed was the writer and director and they split their deal down
the middle, fifty-fifty. In 1997, Jawed went to Afghanistan and came back with
stories of fighting against the Taliban with the Northern Alliance. Nathan says
he saw pictures of Jawed with an AK-47 and also heard Jawed making
anti-American declarations--that the U.S. was responsible for the suffering in
Afghanistan because Ronald Reagan supported the Afghan rebels against the
Soviet Union but then abandoned them, or that the U.S. didn't care about
Afghans so much as an oil pipeline through Uzbekistan. But Nathan didn't give
it much thought because that kind of talk was typical in artsy circles, and
anyway he'd heard the same kind of thing many times from his father, a
banjo-playing socialist who worshiped Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie.
In 1999, Nathan and Jawed went to Washington, D.C., to start
shooting their film and immediately ran into many troubles, such as a huge
squabble over a line in the script that suggested that one of the characters in
the movie might not be a virgin. This led to physical threats and a lot of talk
about honor killing, the tribal custom of avenging stains on a family's name
with blood. Around that time, the lead actor was replaced with Baktash Zaher,
who had trained to be a pilot at a flight school in Florida. And members of a Taliban
delegation to Washington stayed at the house of one of the Afghans supporting
the production, sharing quarters with a couple of crew members.
In November 2000, Jawed mentioned that his contacts in northern
Afghanistan had offered to arrange an interview with Osama bin Laden. When
Nathan told another friend about this, the man offered to pose as a journalist
and kill bin Laden, so Nathan tried to contact the CIA through an acquaintance
named Marc Palmer, who brushed him off.
In June 2001, Nathan and Jawed attended a meeting with another
FireDancer producer named Kate Wood, and Jawed told them that he was going to
Afghanistan to make a documentary and please not to tell anyone where he was
going. When he came back six weeks later, he was limping and wouldn't answer
any questions.
Then the planes hit the Twin Towers. Nathan had a clear view of
the whole thing from the window of his loft just across the East River, sitting
there with his wife and their four-year-old daughter. At one point he used binoculars
and saw a person jump. Then he talked to Jawed on the phone and Jawed said
America was finally getting a taste of its own medicine.
On TV, Nathan saw pictures of Arabs in Jersey City celebrating the
attacks. The next day, he says, he saw some Arabs on his own street pumping
their fists and cheering. A few days later, he went to Jawed's house and found
Jawed watching the news with Baktash and his sister, Vida Zaher-Khadem, who was
Jawed's associate director. When they started glancing at the screen and
"whispering among themselves in Farsi," it made him suspicious. What
were they hiding? Then Jawed said the CIA must have organized the attacks to
provoke a war and bail out the floundering Bush administration.
Later there was a disturbing meeting with Jawed and a man named
Eric Rayman, who argued that the movie should say "something
positive" about the Taliban. Nathan couldn't believe it. What was going on
here? Jawed had always said he opposed the Taliban, but maybe it had all been a
horrible lie. And what about Baktash training at that flight school in Florida?
Why didn't Baktash ever actually become a pilot?
Over the next few weeks, Nathan couldn't sleep, or fell into vivid
nightmares. He stopped taking cabs because he thought the cabdrivers might be
terrorists. He made plans to leave the city, but he didn't tell people because
he was afraid they'd think he was crazy.
All through this, Jawed was pushing him to use the attacks to
promote FireDancer. At first he thought it was a horrible idea, but an investor
named Tom Fox encouraged him, and he was still so emotionally invested in the
movie himself that he sent faxes to 60 Minutes, 20/20, and the New York Daily
News. When the Daily News asked to interview Jawed, Nathan issued an ultimatum:
denounce the Taliban or else I'll tell the investors the kinds of things you've
been saying about America and the CIA. Jawed said he didn't want to say
anything "political." They must have argued for forty minutes.
And freaky things kept happening. One day six agents from the Drug
Enforcement Administration appeared at Nathan's door and asked to search the
files of the moving company that shared his loft. (Nathan worked there
answering phones.) Another day, four police officers showed up to poke around,
saying they had gotten a 911 call. At night Nathan dreamed of poisonous fogs
and burning people who screamed without making a sound.
On September 30, saying he was afraid for their safety, he put his
wife and daughter on a plane to Seattle.
On the morning of October 3, Jawed called to say the Daily News
article had come out. Still hoping for the best, Nathan ran downstairs and
bought a stack of copies. But there was just one line about the Taliban
"holding 18 million to 20 million people hostage" and another saying
that FireDancer "couldn't have been made anywhere else but in
America" before Jawed ruined it all by saying that the Afghans were
"pawns ... for the Americans."
At around six that night, Nathan met Jawed at the subway station,
and out of the blue Jawed mentioned an idea for a movie about an honor killing.
Then Jawed asked what Osama bin Laden would do to Nathan if he knew about the
plot to kill him by posing as a journalist--and suddenly Nathan realized that
al Qaeda had killed the famous Northern Alliance leader Ahmed Shah Massoud
exactly the same way. Jawed must have given them the idea! So it was
true--Jawed was in league with the Taliban!
By the time they got to Nathan's loft and Jawed pulled a contract
out of his backpack, telling him that since they'd been disagreeing so much, it
was time for him to take over the film, Nathan was already on the brink of
losing control. He said he'd never sign, that he'd tie the movie up in court
and it would never see the light of day, and Jawed retaliated with the fatal
threat that pushed Nathan over the edge: "With one phone call or one
letter, you will have no family!"
And Nathan did what he felt he had to do--what any good husband
and father and patriot would have done if he had walked in his shoes for the
last month through the dust of all those vaporized buildings and people.
Of
course, Jawed Wassel's friends and relatives and defenders view this
version of events as vile, repugnant, and offensive. What a preposterous story!
What a pack of lies! With one voice, they insist that Jarred was a kind and
peaceful man who spoke four or five languages, who loved poetry and European
films, who dedicated himself to telling the story of Afghanistan through
movies. He used to say that art was the best way to "thread the needle of
human understanding," one friend remembered. At least three of his
American friends said he was a great patriot who especially appreciated the
freedom of expression that gave him a chance to tell his story. His brother,
Khaled, told me that when he thought about Jawed, he remembered his brother as
a man who always tried to do the right thing. The suggestion that he would
bad-mouth the United States or support the Taliban is beyond insulting--it's
another violation.
"If Nathan's claiming that Jawed was some sort of Taliban or
terrorist," a cinematographer named Bud Gardner told me, "that's the
ultimate misnomer and a complete piece of crap."
If you want to know Jawed, his friends say, look at his movie. And
certainly FireDancer shows that Jawed's essential attitude was humane. The lead
character is a solitary artist haunted by images of Russians killing his
parents in Afghanistan, the woman he pursues an aspiring fashion designer who
is being pushed into an arranged marriage with a thuggish Afghan man. In one
scene, she cuts the face out of a burqa and gazes through the hole. In another,
the artist makes a plea to stop the violence that could have come right out of
a Spike Lee film.
"There was something in Jawed that made all of us believe in
him," said Vida Zaher-Khadem. After Jawed's death, Vida took over the job
of finishing FireDancer. "I should have been working on my own film, but I
wanted to finish his because I believed in him. And Nathan robbed him from
us--a person who would have done so much."
Backing Jawed's family and friends are the police and prosecutor
and the media, who have all lined up behind the second version of this
story--that Nathan was a weirdo and loser who latched on to Jawed early in the
making of FireDancer but couldn't cut it as a producer and made people feel so
uncomfortable that he slowly got squeezed out of the movie. This made him
jealous and angry and he retaliated in petty ways, such as refusing to give
Vida points or credit although she had done most of his job. He was also
greedy. From the beginning, one of his coproducers said, Nathan seemed to have
an unrealistic sense of how much money FireDancer could make. So he must have
seen 9/11 as a great marketing opportunity that would give him a perfect way to
satisfy both his lust for money and his lust for revenge--doubly so because his
contract with Jawed specified that if one of them died, the other would get
complete control of the film. So Nathan began to plot his heinous crime,
sending his family out of town not to protect them but to clear the way. He
built a trail of "evidence" by mooning over 9/11 to his friends and
ranting about the Taliban, and he cut up the body not in some kind of
"fugue state" (as his attorney now claims) but in a spirit of cold
calculation that shocks the soul--as evidenced by his storing Jawed's head in
his freezer so he could dispose of it separately and reduce the chances of
getting caught. And finally, he concocted his ridiculous tale of trauma in the
most monstrous imaginable exploitation of the 9/11 attacks, literally to get
away with murder. In some ways, this is the most shocking thing of all. As
prosecutor Fred Klein said in various media interviews: "To use that awful
tragedy to somehow justify a brutal murder is insulting." Nathan
"never mentioned any trauma of the World Trade Center or the Pentagon.
This was a business dispute with the victim." In another news report,
Klein repeated this quite definitely: "His statement to police clearly
shows the motive was money, not politics."
Nathan
Powell invited this skepticism and hatred, and it's likely that there's
nothing that anyone can say that will keep him from being convicted of a
ghastly murder. Especially given what he did afterward.
First he went to a friend's house and watched The West Wing. On
his way home, he stopped to buy plastic bags and paper towels. Then he cut up
Jawed's body with a hacksaw and wrapped the pieces in plastic before packing
them in boxes. At one point he stopped to make a phone call to a friend in
California. The next day he went to work and, in the evening, put on a suit to
attend a viewing of FireDancer at a DuArt screening room--where he came
face-to-face with Jawed's brother and mother but somehow managed to act as if
nothing was wrong. He even went with Jawed's brother to the police station to
report him missing. Then he went home and loaded the boxes into a van and drove
out to Long Island to dispose of the body, stopping at Home Depot to pick up a
shovel, pick, charcoal, and lighter fluid. He stopped at the first dark spot he
saw and he went into the woods and started to dig, then stopped and went back
to the van and started to drive, forgetting to turn on his headlights. A few
minutes later, a police officer named Peter McGinn pulled him over.
And then Nathan started telling lies. Testifying at a preliminary
hearing, McGinn said that when he approached the van, Nathan was panting
"very heavily" and his "whole face, hair, neck, and shirt"
were soaked with sweat. When McGinn asked his name, Nathan simply didn't
respond. Asked who owned the van, he still didn't answer. Asked what he was
doing, he said he was delivering a couch. Asked where he was delivering the
couch, he said he didn't remember. Asked who he was delivering it to, he said a
friend. Asked the friend's name, he said he didn't remember. Asked what he was
doing in the woods, he said first that he stopped "to take a leak"
and then, when the officer asked about the shovel and the dirt and the sweat on
his face, answered, "All right, I'll level with you. I was just looking
for $10,000 that I buried three years ago."
"Well, whose boxes are those?" McGinn asked.
"What boxes?"
"Those boxes."
"What boxes?"
"Those two boxes right there."
Nathan said he hadn't noticed the boxes. Maybe they were there
when he rented the van. And when McGinn pointed out that he had just said that
he worked for a moving company, Nathan offered to throw the boxes into the
woods.
And so it continued, until at last Nathan opened the door to look
for his wallet and the officer saw blood on the boxes. When he drew his gun and
told Nathan to lie on the ground, Nathan started to cry. (When Nathan's lawyer
took him back to this moment, McGinn couldn't hold back his contempt: "He
started to cry and then he laid on the ground and he cried some more.")
There were more lies to come. While Nathan was handcuffed in the
backseat of a police car, a detective named James Cereghino asked his name and
address. Nathan said he lived at 317 East Seventy-third Street in Manhattan and
that his roommate was a man named Ed Greissle. He repeated this again an hour
later when Cereghino and a detective named John McHugh began the formal
interrogation at the police station, adding that he had been living there for
about a year and paid "between $1,500 and $1,800 a month." It was
only after about three hours in custody that Nathan finally told them where he
really lived.
By the time they got around to asking about the murder, the cops
were clearly fed up. You can hear it in Cereghino's account of what happened
when they discovered Jawed's head wasn't in any of the boxes. "The first
question we asked him, 'Where's the head?' He stated, 'It's in the freezer at
my apartment.' I asked him, 'Why didn't it go in the box?' He said that it
wouldn't fit. I asked him, 'What do you mean it didn't fit?' And he just stated
it wouldn't fit."
Nathan
has told other lies. On the bio he released with an early FireDancer
press kit, he claims to have been an associate producer of a Beverly D'Angelo
movie called Pterodactyl Women from Beverly Hills. The director and producer of
that movie is a man named Philippe Mora, and he told me he'd never heard of
Nathan. Nathan said that he met several times with Jay Leno's wife, Mavis, and
officials of an organization called the Feminist Majority Foundation about
investing in the film, but a spokesman for Mavis Leno denied it and no one at
the Feminist Majority remembered him either. And Kate Wood says she's the one
who met with the Feminist Majority. "If Nathan was having three or four
meetings with Mavis Leno, Jawed and I and Vida would have heard all about
that."
And lie may be too strong a word, but it's safe to say that
Nathan's memories of his skills as a producer are much different from what
others remember. He tends to talk in a rather grandiose way about his
"contacts" and his film experience, but Kate Wood says that she and
Jawed would give him an assignment and weeks would go by and they wouldn't hear
from him. Cinematographer Renato Tonelli says that Nathan was out of his
league, seemingly clueless about simple things like arranging locations in
advance and bringing in food for the crew. One day he got arrested for driving
an equipment truck without a license, and even though it carried at least $200,000
worth of rented equipment, he just kept on driving. "Now it makes
sense," Tonelli says. "There's a problem here, an underlying problem.
But at that point we just chalked it up to being incompetent."
But
this is where it gets complicated. Because at least part of
Nathan's story is true, and he did tell the whole strange tale to police after
his arrest. Technically, prosecutor Klein doesn't seem to have been lying when
he said that Nathan didn't specifically mention the World Trade Center or the
Pentagon. And the statement Nathan signed the next morning does narrow the
dispute exclusively to business: "Our relationship had deteriorated but I
had to stay around him or I wouldn't get my money." Nor is there anything
in the statement about the Taliban or honor killing or 9/11. Nor did any of
these details appear in the supplementary document prepared by detectives
called "Oral Statements of Nathan Powell." Nor do they appear in
notes Cereghino made during the interrogation.
But Nathan didn't actually write his official statement. It was
prepared for his signature by Detective McHugh, and the notes McHugh made that
evening show that he left a lot out: "Italian project--Afghan marries
outsider. Family sends killers. Summer 2000--Afghanistan. Jawed--interview Bin
Laden. WTC--increased problems Jawed--CIA responsible. Jawed--2 faced, thought
nice--Taliban supporter."
During Cereghino's testimony at the preliminary hearing, more
inconvenient details surfaced. Yes, Nathan told them that Jawed was a Taliban
sympathizer. Yes, he said that he and Jawed had discussed a plot to kill Osama
bin Laden. Yes, he said that Jawed had "made some very unpatriotic
statements." Yes, Nathan told them that Jawed had made a trip to
Afghanistan just before the 9/11 attacks.
And some of it checks out. Jawed did go to Afghanistan that
fateful summer. Baktash did train at a flight school in Florida. And there
seems to be some truth to the Osama bin Laden story too. Several of Nathan's
friends remember him talking about it at the time. So does Marc Palmer, a
lawyer and building inspector who is not his friend. Reluctant to talk at
first, Palmer eventually said that yes, his retired father-in-law did once work
for the CIA and there was a day about a year before the murder when Nathan came
over to his house to show him a trailer of FireDancer and told some complicated
story about someone the government or the mob was after. "There were some
weird machinations that he wanted me to get involved in. I don't recall much
because it got very convoluted so I sort of blanked it out."
This
is the problem: Nathan faces a charge of second-degree murder,
which in New York is applied in cases of deliberate intentional killing or
killing with depraved indifference. To defend against this charge, Nathan's
attorney-a rumpled admirer of William Kunstler's named Tom Liotti--would have
to prove that Nathan acted "under the influence of extreme emotional
disturbance for which there was an explanation or excuse, the reasonableness of
which is to be determined from the viewpoint of a person in the defendant's
situation under the circumstances as the defendant believed them to be."
This means that Nathan's case really hangs on one thing: Was he
really and truly afraid of Jawed in the moment that he killed him?
Liotti argues logic: If Nathan had planned to kill Jawed, why did
he do it in his loft instead of some back alley? Why did he assault him with a
pool cue, a weapon of convenience, instead of a gun? Only fear explains it, and
only fear explains why Nathan went through with the horror of cutting up the
body--because he was sure that if they knew what he had done, Jawed's family
would be bound by the rules of honor killing to come after his wife and
daughter.
Because no one believed his story, Nathan asked for a lie-detector
test and wrote up a list of hundreds of questions he wanted to be asked. In the
first round, the polygraph expert asked him three questions:
1. In November 2000, did Jawed say he could set up a meeting with
Osama bin Laden?
2. Did Jawed tell you that he would have supported the terrorist
action publicly if it were not for the loss of life?
3. Did Jawed tell you, on 9/11, that the U. S. was getting a
little of its own medicine?
Nathan answered yes to all the questions, and the polygraph expert
says he was telling the truth.
But Nathan wanted to answer more questions, so his mother paid for
another test. This time the most important questions were:
1. Did Jawed Wassel threaten the lives of your family that night
on October 3, 2001?
2. Did you strike Jawed Wassel over the head with a pool cue in
order to stop him from killing you?
Nathan answered yes to both questions. And the polygraph expert
says that he did not lie.
So
who is Nathan Powell and what was going on in his mind the night he
killed Jawed Wassel? Nathan's mother, Gail, is a short, plump woman with
bowl-cut gray hair. She attends a Baptist church. In 1959, she was a waitress
in an ice-cream parlor in New Hampshire when Ralph Powell came in and swept her
off her feet, talking about folk music and socialism. After scuffling around a
bit, they ended up living in Ithaca, New York, where Ralph worked at a
typewriter factory and a Boy Scout summer camp before landing a job as a
librarian. They called themselves husband and wife though they never did get
married, and Ralph collected thousands of books and always talked about the big
important book he was going to write that would explain everything.
In 1963, Nathan was born, and Ralph taught him to read and how to
play chess. When Nathan was three, Ralph chased Pete Seeger up a hill so the
boy could shake his hand. But later he starting wanting Nathan to be perfect,
which meant learning Russian and wearing a suit and tie to school and stopping
all that silly talk about becoming an astronaut because that would mean working
for the government.
When the couple broke up in the late sixties, Ralph went off to
live in a tent and blamed his failures on the FBI. Then one day Nathan went out
to play basketball and never came back--it turned out that Ralph had left a
plane ticket for Nathan at the airport.
Three years later, Ralph called Gall up and said she had to take
Nathan back right away--this day, this hour, this minute. Gail was mystified.
But it's only six weeks before the end of the school year, she said. Why now?
"He's an enemy in my own house," Ralph said.
The only explanation she could get out of him was that Nathan had
let ice cream melt in his dresser drawer. In a voice that scared her, Ralph
made a threat: "Either you take him now or I'll put him in reform school
or I'll bury him in the backyard."
When he got back to Ithaca, Nathan went up and lay on his bed.
"You know," he said, "my dad really wants me, but he thinks I
can get a better education here."
Gail cried then and cried again telling me the story. That's the
thing about Nathan, she said: Because his father was so intolerant, he always
wanted to be the total opposite. He wanted to be good.
Before going to college, Nathan went all the way to Russia to
check out the workers' paradise and came back to tell his father he was
"totally wrong." After that they didn't speak for a long time, which
is one reason Nathan was so obsessed with Osama bin Laden. "Because of my
father and how I grew up," he told me, "I've always kept track of
enemies of the United States."
In April of 2001, six months before the murder, Nathan's father
died.
By that time, Nathan was living in an illegal loft with bed sheets
for walls with his wife and their four-year-old daughter. Around that time his
wife changed her name from Jenny to Maia because she wanted a new name to go
with a new life, maybe somewhere out west.
The daughter of a Hawaiian blues musician, Maia's thirty and has
Nathan's initial tattooed on her leg. When she talks about Nathan in the weeks
leading up to the murder, she paints a picture of a man who was steadily coming
unhinged. She doesn't mind that. She just wants you to understand why. She met
him in Manhattan in 1996, found him too short and an "appallingly bad
dresser," but loved talking to him because he was so thoughtful and
idealistic. His favorite movies were Robin Hood and Tombstone and Braveheart,
his favorite book was The Lord of the Rings. When he started working on Fire
Dancer with Jawed, the three of them would sit on the floor at Barnes &
Noble and tear the script apart. The way she remembers it, she was the first to
get suspicious of Jawed, in part because she's got Hawaiian blood and Jawed
took that as license to criticize America when Nathan wasn't around. "It
was like my country had also been raped by America so I could understand him
the way Americans couldn't," she says. She insists she isn't shading
things just to defend Nathan. "He'd always talk like that. He would say
Americans are just fat idiots, and if he had his way he'd live in France."
When they started to shoot FireDancer, Jawed would tell her every
day never to trust an Afghan, that they'd been lying to one another and
backstabbing one another for thousands of years. "He'd go, 'Shh shh shh,'
and I'd say, 'What?' and he'd say, 'That person is Taliban' or 'That person is
Northern Alliance.'" She also remembers the threats over the virginity
issue, and "all this honor stuff."
And yes, she heard Nathan and Jawed talking about the offer to
meet Osama bin Laden. And yes, definitely, Nathan freaked out after September
11. Right away he started saying he wanted to get out of the city, that it
wasn't a safe place anymore. She was there when Nathan saw the Arabs pumping
their fists in victory. She remembers him getting so quiet and not sleeping,
and she remembers the day he came back from that investors' meeting talking
about this idiot named Eric who suggested they say something good about the
Taliban. And the day he came home all upset because Jawed said something about
the CIA bombing the Trade Center--and the day the DEA showed up at the loft,
asking questions about Arabs, and the day she left town with a sprained ankle
and Nathan wouldn't let her take a cab because he had this thing about
terrorist cabbies. "It was ridiculous, it was nuts.... It got to the point
where I was crying. He'd never acted like that before."
And she also remembers Nathan saying that maybe they shouldn't
release the damn movie at all. "He would say he didn't want anyone who
felt like that to make money off of it, and he felt very strongly about that.
And it was hard for him, because he had worked a long time on the film."
When Maia came to say goodbye, she brought their daughter.
Standing on a street corner in a red Supergirl T-shirt, her loopy grin shining
through a mass of tangled black hair, she said, "I wrote a story for my
daddy."
"What is it about?"
"It's about a wizard and a mommy and a daddy who go to the
beach."
"And what did the wizard do?"
And Nathan's daughter flashes her grin, eyes narrowing with the
delicious secret on the tip of her tongue:
"He turned the sand blue!"
Steve
D'Ambrose is the guy Nathan called after he cut up Jawed's body. These days
Steve is working on a master's degree in screenwriting at UCLA. He seems gentle
and idealistic and spoke to me after some hesitation because, he said, it was
the right thing to do. He said that Nathan was a good and loyal friend who
loved heroic movies and stories about knights in armor, a man who dreamed of
using movies to do good.
When he met Nathan in the late eighties, Nathan was jolly,
good-natured, likable. He knew a lot about Christianity and the religions of
the early American tribal peoples. He's not surprised that Nathan was a failure
as an on-set producer because that was never Nathan's thing. "What he
always told me in film school is that he wanted to be the background guy--the
invisible producer motivating the artist. That was something I always found
kind of fascinating, because most other people in film school wanted to be
famous."
He also knew Jawed slightly but didn't really have much of a take
on him. There was one strange incident. When Nathan and Jawed were raising
financing for FireDancer, Jawed asked Nathan to ask Steve to go visit an uncle
of Jawed's who lived in Beverly Hills. But when Steve mentioned Jawed's name
the man started screaming at him. He apologized and got back in his car and
started to drive away. "And this is where it gets really weird. He got in
his Mercedes, chased me, cut me off, and then got out of his car and ran to my
car yelling and screaming. I mean this guy literally chased me down."
So Steve understands why Nathan might have been freaked out by
some of these Afghans. He also remembers Nathan talking about the offer to
interview Osama bin Laden.
But mostly he remembers that haunting call at midnight on October
3. "It was a weird phone call, to say the least. One of the key points
that stuck in my head was that Nathan apologized to me. He said, 'I'm sorry for
not calling you earlier about 9/11.' Which I thought was odd, because I was in
L. A. and he was in New York, and if anybody should have called it should have
been me."
They talked about September 11 and the likelihood of future
attacks. Nathan asked if Steve's family was okay. "And he said something
else that really stuck in my head. He said that all the Afghans who were here
should be put in jail."
Steve was shocked. That was not the Nathan he knew. "So I
told him, 'You know, Nathan, that's wrong. That would be the equivalent of
interning the Japanese Americans during World War II.'"
Nathan went silent.
Of
all the people who loved Jawed, the one who spoke most openly
was Kate Wood, a dignified older woman who was drawn to FireDancer's idealism
after a long career in educational TV. The first thing she told me was that she
never felt comfortable around Nathan, even avoiding simple things like riding
in a car with him. "I was scared," she told me. "There was no
basis for it, but I knew that I did not want to be riding home with
Nathan."
But there were good things about him, she said. She liked the way
he talked about his daughter--"I would think, He's got to be okay, he's
just so wrapped up in his child"--and she always believed in his love for
FireDancer. "I heard him say to investors, 'I read this script and it made
me cry.' I didn't doubt that. I still don't doubt that."
Alone among Jawed's friends, Kate was willing to say--after a
certain amount of verbal squirming--that there was truth in Nathan's stories
about Jawed defending the Taliban. "There were a lot of people who said
the Taliban were good for some women in Afghanistan because the Russians had
done such terrible things to women. The Taliban were protecting the women. I
did hear him say things like that. But at the same time he said, 'Now they've
gone too far.' It was always in context."
It's also true that Jawed was secretive about going to Afghanistan
in the summer of 2001, she said. Her impression was that Jawed felt that the
various factions in the Afghan American community might not understand what he
was doing over there. "He just thought it was better if people didn't
know."
People
in this story are afraid of reprisals. Maia doesn't want
anyone to know where she lives. Vida Zaher-Khadem doesn't want anyone to know
where she lives. It's as if the distinction between paranoia and justified fear
has blurred for all of them.
During a break at Nathan's preliminary hearing, Vida approached
him and hissed in a low voice. A few minutes later, Liotti described the scene
to the judge: "She said to Nathan, 'We're going to kill you.' And those
are her exact words."
Liotti milked the moment for all it was worth, offering to swear
to the quote under oath "as an officer of the court" and demanding an
investigation and extra metal detectors. The judge asked if anyone else had
heard it. A court officer named Dan Robinson said he had. "Your Honor, as
you left the bench she approached the rail here, leaned over, became abusive,
started using foul language." But Robinson said he didn't hear the
specific words.
Later, describing the moment to me, Liotti got worked up all over
again. "A woman comes over and says, 'We're going to kill you.' And after
I bring it to the court's attention and the court bars her from the courthouse
for the duration of the case, she doesn't say, 'I didn't mean that, I didn't
mean that.' To me she looked like she was very resolved and very mean and knew
exactly what she was saying, and the part that's also very disturbing--I don't
know who the 'we' is. I have an ongoing concern about these folks, I really
do."
One
night, I sat down at a Starbucks with Vida, Khaled, Jawed's friend John
Roche, and Eric Rayman. Rayman, who once worked as an attorney for The New Yorker,
had already told me he didn't want to talk about the case. "I want to see
him convicted," he said. "And I don't want to do anything that might
undermine that." Instead they wanted to know what I thought of Jawed's
movie. I said that while it seemed very humane, the Afghan American culture
seemed depressing and crazy--the forced marriage, the obsession with virginity.
Rayman immediately started lecturing me on the difficulties of "culture
clash," insisting that in context, back in Afghanistan, the Afghan culture
was just fine. Roche joined him, arguing that some women actually like wearing
burqas. And I know that they were just worried I might not understand the
cultural complexities and take away a negative impression of Afghans, but at
the same time I couldn't help thinking that in the wrong circumstances, in a
very dark time, if you were kind of crazed already, it might sound like they
were defending the Taliban.
But the reason they met me was to talk about Jawed. He was a
father figure, they said. He liked the novels of Robert Musil and the
philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. "He used to say that through cinema we
can do a lot for Afghanistan," Vida said. "Everybody thinks of us as
beards and guns. Nobody knows us."
Did he fight for the Northern Alliance? Did he think the CIA
bombed the World Trade Center? Did Eric say they should say something good
about the Taliban? All that was off-limits, and they clearly thought it
despicable of me even to ask.
At one point I asked what went wrong that first week of filming.
"Nathan lied and cheated," Vida said.
"Don't talk about that," Eric said.
"Why can't we say that Nathan lied and cheated?" John
asked.
Later, the incident in the courtroom came up. I asked Vida to tell
me what happened. But again Eric shook his head, and she fell silent.
When
I met Nathan at the Nassau County jail, he was waiting for me
in a bare room with one glass wall. The fluorescent lights on his orange
jumpsuit made everything seem vaguely clinical. "I have one request before
we start," he said. "Please don't mention where Maia is living in
your article."
Prison had improved his looks. He'd burned off his fat, shaved his
goatee, cut his hair. In some of his old pictures, he looked soft and lost. He
didn't look that way anymore. He answered all my questions in a quiet and
somber voice, looking me right in the eye. And it was a bit odd the way he told
his story almost exactly the way he told it to the cops, to the psychologists,
to his lawyer. I kept wondering if that was just because he'd repeated it so
many times, or if he was holding on to the narrative so tight because it was
the only thing left for him to hold--or if he really was a fiendish evildoer
mustering all his powers to keep his load of crap from shifting.
Two things surprised me. One was a certain sophistication; he
referred to a Woody Allen movie and quoted John Lennon, mentioned that he'd
volunteered for John McCain but said he believed in spiritual solutions more
than political ones. The other was his anger. I expected him to be more
contrite, but when he talked about Arabs celebrating 9/11 and said that
"all foreign-born" Muslims should be expelled from the country, there
was an icy bitterness in his voice that was almost shocking; "It bothered
me that everybody was being so damn politically correct right away," he
continued. "I don't know which journalist it was, Brokaw or Peter
Jenninngs, who said they were worded about the impact on Arabs. What about the
impact on us?"
Nathan's anger reminded me of the way he attacked the prosecutor
in one of his written statements. "Fred Klein should be ashamed that he
feels the need to conceal evidence that Jawed was anti-American.... Fred Klein
is trying to drape an American flag over an Afghan who at best sympathized with
terrorists and who at worst actually aided the attackers by providing planning,
expertise, information, and money.... My life is no man's game, Mr. Klein, and
you may take my life away from me but you will never take my honor."
Before I left, I told him that I had met his child. "You have
such a beautiful daughter," I said.
"Thank you," he whispered.
"It seems crazy, that you would do this thing."
"Does to me, too."
In two and a half hours, he didn't once express regret that Jawed
Wassel was dead.
FireDancer,
the film Nathan Powell made with Jawed Wassel, is Afghanistan's
official nominee for Academy Award consideration in foreign-language film. In
April, in Nassau County, New York, Powell will stand trial for the murder of
Wassel. -30- |
