BabuK
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- Jul 30, 2008
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Media reveal damning truth about identity of polemic filmmaker amid growing protest against the controversial movie in Muslim world
Nakoula Basseley Nakoula claims role in 'Innocence of Muslims'
Angry demonstrations against an anti-Islam film spread to their widest extent yet around the Middle East and other Muslim countries in Africa Friday, Associated Pressthe global renown news agency reported.
But as the demonstrations grow, major US media including the Newsweek Magazine yesterday revealed the background of the man behind the controversial film, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, calling him a petty criminal, meth cooker, drug-addict and a man who likes easy money to bankroll his lavish lifestyle.
According to Associated Press(AP), protesters smashed into the German Embassy in the Sudanese capital and set part of it on fire and climbed the walls of the U.S. Embassy in Tunis, waving an Islamist banner.
However a quick survey conducted by the Guardian established that as the Middle East and North Africa continued to record more demonstrations, East African region remained calm even after the Friday prayers.
From Nairobi, Kenyan Muslim leaders yesterday demanded an apology from the US President Barack Obama over a video they say insulted Islam.
The leaders said the video, posted on Youtube by an individual in the US but yet to be clearly identified, that portrayed Prophet Mohammed as immoral was offensive and unacceptable.
The leaders said the video was provocative and a pure recipe for religious disharmony.
The joint-statement by the Jamia Mosque Community, the Supreme Council of Kenya Muslims, the National Muslim Leaders Forum and the National Council of Muslim Scholars condemned the blasphemous film adding that it depicted Muslims as immoral.
It is shocking that a film could be acted, edited, promoted and funded in the USA, a country that claims to be the champion of respect for fundamental rights, said the leaders in a statement read by Sheikh Ibrahim Lethome.
One protester was killed in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli in clashes with security forces, after a crowd of protesters set fire to a KFC and an Arby's restaurant. Protesters hurled stones and glass at police in a furious melee that left 25 people wounded, 18 of them police.
Protests were held in cities from Tunisia to Pakistan after weekly Friday Muslim prayers, where many clerics in their mosque sermons called on congregations to defend their faith, denouncing obscure movie produced in the United States that denigrated the Prophet Muhammad.
The numbers were not huge in most places, only a few hundred took to the streets, mostly ultraconservative Islamists but the mood was often furious. The spread of protests comes after attacks earlier this week on the U.S. Embassies in Cairo and the Yemeni capital Sanaa and on a U.S. consulate in Libya, where the ambassador and three other Americans were killed.
After standing aside earlier this week in the face of protesters, security forces in Yemen and Egypt fired tear gas and clashed with protesters Friday to keep them away from U.S. embassies.
Egypt's Islamist president, Mohammed Morsi, went on state TV and urged Muslims to protect foreign diplomatic missions his first direct public move to contain protests.
"It is required by our religion to protect our guests and their homes and places of work," he said. He also condemned the killing of the American ambassador in Libya, saying it was unacceptable in Islam. "To God, attacking a person is bigger than an attack on the Kaaba," he said, referring to Islam's holiest site in Mecca.
Ahead of the expected wave of protests on Friday a tradition day for rallies in the Islamic world U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton delivered an explicit denunciation of the anti-Muhammad video, aiming to pre-empt further turmoil at its embassies and consulates.
"To us, to me personally, this video is disgusting and reprehensible," Clinton said. "It appears to have a deeply cynical purpose: to denigrate a great religion and to provoke rage."
Nonetheless, protests in several places attempted to move on American diplomatic missions and other Western countries were pulled into the dispute.
Several thousand demonstrators protested outside the US embassy in Tunis and battled with security forces, throwing stones as police fired volleys of tear gas and shot in the air. Some protesters scaled the embassy wall and stood on top of it, planting a black flag with the Islamic profession of faith, "There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet."
Police chased them off the wall and took the flag down.
In Sudan, a prominent sheik on state radio urged protesters to march on the German Embassy to protest alleged anti-Muslim graffiti on mosques in Berlin and then to the U.S. Embassy to protest the film.
"America has long been an enemy to Islam and to Sudan," Sheik Mohammed Jizouly said.
Soon after, several hundred Sudanese stormed into the German Embassy, burning a car parked behind its gates and setting fire to trash cans. Protesters danced and celebrated around the burning barrels as palls of black smoke billowed into the sky.
Part of the embassy building was also in flames, German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle told reporters in Berlin. "Fortunately... the employees are safe," he said.
Police firing tear gas drove the protesters out of the compound. Some then began to demonstrate outside the neighboring British Embassy, shouting slogans, while others left, apparently heading to the American Embassy, which is outside of the capital.
In east Jerusalem, Israeli police stopped a crowd of around 400 Palestinians from marching on the U.S. consulate to protest the film. Demonstrators threw bottles and stones at police, who responded by firing stun grenades. Four protesters were arrested.
Security forces in Yemen shot live rounds in the air and fired tear gas at a crowd of around 2,000 protesters trying to march to the U.S. Embassy in the capital, Sanaa.
Though outnumbered by protesters, security forces were able to keep the crowd about a block away from the mission.
A day earlier, hundreds of protesters chanting "death to America" stormed the embassy compound in Sanaa and burned the American flag. The embassy said nobody was harmed.
Yemen's president, Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, quickly apologized to the United States and vowed to track down the culprits.
In Egypt, several hundred people, mainly ultraconversatives, protested in Cairo's Tahrir Square after weekly Muslim Friday prayers and tore up an American flag, waving a black, Islamist flag.
A firebrand ultraconservative Salafi cleric blasted the film and in his sermon in Cairo's Tahrir Square said it was upon Muslims to defend Islam and its prophet.
Many in the crowd then moved to join protesters who have been clashing for several days with police between Tahrir and the U.S. Embassy. "With our soul, our blood, we will avenge you, our Prophet," they chanted as police fired volleys of tear gas.
Ahead of the clashes, the president spoke for more than seven minutes on state TV, saying, "It is required by our religion to protect our guests and their homes and places of work."
"So I call on all to consider this, consider the law, and not attack embassies, consulates, diplomatic missions or Egyptian property that is private or public, " he said.
He denounced the killing of the American ambassador in Libya. "This is something we reject and Islam rejects.
His own Muslim Brotherhood group called for peaceful protests in Tahrir to denounce the film.
A small, peaceful demonstration was held Friday outside the U.S. Embassy in the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur.
Hundreds of hardline Muslims held peaceful protests against the film throughout Pakistan, shouting slogans and carrying banners criticizing the U.S. and those involved in the film.
Police in Islamabad set up barricades and razor wire to prevent protesters from getting to the diplomatic enclave, where the U.S. Embassy and many other foreign missions are located. Protests were also held in Karachi, Peshawar and Lahore, where protesters shouted "Down with America" and some burned the U.S. flag. About 200 policemen and barbed wire ringed the U.S. Consulate in Lahore.
About 1,500 protest in the eastern city of Jalalabad, shouting "Death to America" and urge President Hamid Karzai to cut relations with the U.S.
A prominent cleric in Indonesia urged Muslims there to remain calm despite their anger about the film. But Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia, a branch of the international network that advocates a worldwide Islamic state, on its website blamed the U.S. government for allowing the film to be produced and released, calling it "an act of barbarism that cannot go unpunished."
Meanwhile, the airport in Benghazi, the city where Tuesday's attack on the consulate took place, was closed for several hours on Friday. An airport official said the closure was due to security concerns, and the airport re-opened in the afternoon.
True identity of controversial man who angered Muslim world
Hes set the Mideast ablaze with his anti-Muslim film trailer, but Nikoula Basseley Nakoulas murky background shows that he was methamphetamine maker, a once drug-addict, a petty criminal, and above all an informant according to a detailed report published by the Newsweek Magazine yesterday.
When the police pulled Nikoula Basseley Nakoula over outside Los Angeles on March 27, 1997, he had $45,000 in hundreds and twenties in a paper lunch bag on the seat beside him.
Fifteen years would pass before Nakoula would become known as the man who helped set the Mideast afire with an anti-Muslim film trailer. On this night, though, he was the subject of a drug investigation, and the Los Angeles County Sheriffs Department had been watching him as he drove a U-Haul rental truck from a storage facility in Downey to a Super 7 liquor store. Newsweek Magazine wrote yesterday
There, he picked up a liquor store employee named Khaled Abraham. They proceeded to Abrahams house in Lake Elsinore.
At the house, Nakoula and the others unloaded 30 boxes of pseudoephedrine, a prime ingredient of methamphetamine. Another 99 cases were found at the storage facility.
After his arrest, Nakoula insisted he had only been doing the bidding of his employer, Mansour Barsoum, whom he described as the owner of a firm called ABC Trading. The police determined that the storage unit had indeed been rented under the name Barsoum, but the manager identified Nakoula as the person who actually had rented it.
According to Newsweeks report, the police were unable to find any trace of Mansour or ABC Trading, though Nakoula was discovered to have receipts from a Santa Monica firm called M&A for the purchase of some $150,000 of pseudoephedrine pills. The authorities also could not find a business license for M&A Trading, but a federal DEA agent were able to trace a lot number on a March 3, 1997 receipt to pills recovered at an illegal meth lab.
Nakoula sought to explain his bosss absence by saying, Mansour had left for Egypt. Nakoulas lawyer subsequently produced a copy of an Egyptian passport for a man of that name, but the police do not seem to have been convinced.
Nakoula nonetheless only spent just two days in jail, getting off with three years probation when he could have gotten hard time.
Sounds like hes an informant, observes a law enforcement official familiar such matters, though not with the particulars of this case.
The bust came around the time the feds were launching Operation Mountain Express, which would become a huge investigation into pseudoephedrine-dealing involving numerous people of a Middle Eastern background. The authorities initially insisted there were no links to terrorism, but suddenly switched and decided that a chunk of the money was going to Hizbullah.
Im satisfied that portions of the drug sales have moved back to the Middle East and portions of that are going to support terrorist organizations, said then DEA Administrator Asa Hutchinson.
According to the Newsweek Magazine, Nakoulas lawyer is not returning phone calls or responding to emails, but it seems reasonable to wonder if Nakoulas case was not part of this investigation. One question that bears asking is whether Nakoula helped persuade the feds that the drug money was going to Muslim extremists. He is a Coptic Christian.
Meanwhile, the supposed employer, Mansour Barsoum, remained as much a mystery as the supposed movie producer Sam Bacile, whom Nakoula now insists was the man who actually made the incendiary anti-Muslim movie that aroused such fury in the Mideast. The authorities say they can find no trace of this man who purportedly triggered the murders of Americans in the U.S. consulate in Libya on the 11th anniversary of 9/11.
Just as he said back in 1997 that he was only moving money and drugs for his boss, the now 54-year-old Nakoula is insisting he was just a functionary in the production of a film that seems intended to incite Muslim extremists to violence.
As if to ensure continued fury, Nakoula has said the mysterious Sam Bacile is an Israeli Jew and that the film was financed by $5 million from Jewish backers. There are no laws against this, even when it results in the deaths of people who represent Americas very best, among them former SEAL Glen Doherty and U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens, whose mother flew from California to Washington yesterday to bring his body home. She is a retired symphony cellists and her son had always seemed to hear the music of the human heart even amidst gunfire.
It may be possible for authorities to least arrest Nakoula for violating the terms of his probation following a subsequent, 2009 criminal case where he pleaded guilty to federal charges of identity theft and bank fraud so extensive as to require $794,700.57 in restitution. He was sentenced to a relatively lenient 21 months in prison, followed by five years probation, which among other things prohibits him from using computers or in any other way accessing the Internet without explicit permission.
The YouTube movie trailer that set the Mideast ablaze was posted by someone identifying himself as Sam Bacile. The feds need only prove that the mysterious producer is in fact Nakoula, and they can toss him back in jail for four years.
In the court file for the second case, Indictment CR09-00617, the records regarding the plea deal are sealed. That can be construed as another indication that Nakoula had previously been an informant. His lawyer is not responding to calls or emails regarding this, either.
The actual charges remain public.
According to Newsweeks report, Nakoula engaged in what is known as synthetic identify theft, meaning he used real Social Security numbers but fake names to open a dizzying number of accounts at numerous banks. He had 14 accounts at Wells Fargo alone, shifting money from one to another to build up credit lines and then maxing them out. His many aliases ranged from Ahmad Hamdy to PJ Tobacco to Robert Bacily, which is not so very different from Sam Bacile. The one common denominator with the names was Nakoulas face in the ATMs camera when there was a withdrawal from the corresponding account.
In searching his household garbage, postal inspectors found a WAMU gold credit card in the name of Nicola Bacily and a Bank of America platinum check card in the name of Kritbag Difrat. WAMU happened to have been his biggest creditor when he filed for bankruptcy in 2000, stating in papers at the time that he was a $2,800-a-month service employee with Mobil. The vehicles he now owned included a silver 4-door Mercedes that was actually registered in his name.
A silver Mercedes was parked in the driveway of his suburban Cerritos home yesterday. He seems to be as fond of easy money as he is of lies and fake names. He does not immediately strike an observer as somebody who acts of out of principle more knowing than maybe hate.
One fact established by Nakoulas own admission is that a convicted drug dealing con man helped set in motion events that resulted in the death of people who were champions against religious intolerance and worked to make their names the realest of synonyms for goodness and truth.
SOURCE: THE GUARDIAN
Nakoula Basseley Nakoula claims role in 'Innocence of Muslims'
Angry demonstrations against an anti-Islam film spread to their widest extent yet around the Middle East and other Muslim countries in Africa Friday, Associated Pressthe global renown news agency reported.
But as the demonstrations grow, major US media including the Newsweek Magazine yesterday revealed the background of the man behind the controversial film, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, calling him a petty criminal, meth cooker, drug-addict and a man who likes easy money to bankroll his lavish lifestyle.
According to Associated Press(AP), protesters smashed into the German Embassy in the Sudanese capital and set part of it on fire and climbed the walls of the U.S. Embassy in Tunis, waving an Islamist banner.
However a quick survey conducted by the Guardian established that as the Middle East and North Africa continued to record more demonstrations, East African region remained calm even after the Friday prayers.
From Nairobi, Kenyan Muslim leaders yesterday demanded an apology from the US President Barack Obama over a video they say insulted Islam.
The leaders said the video, posted on Youtube by an individual in the US but yet to be clearly identified, that portrayed Prophet Mohammed as immoral was offensive and unacceptable.
The leaders said the video was provocative and a pure recipe for religious disharmony.
The joint-statement by the Jamia Mosque Community, the Supreme Council of Kenya Muslims, the National Muslim Leaders Forum and the National Council of Muslim Scholars condemned the blasphemous film adding that it depicted Muslims as immoral.
It is shocking that a film could be acted, edited, promoted and funded in the USA, a country that claims to be the champion of respect for fundamental rights, said the leaders in a statement read by Sheikh Ibrahim Lethome.
One protester was killed in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli in clashes with security forces, after a crowd of protesters set fire to a KFC and an Arby's restaurant. Protesters hurled stones and glass at police in a furious melee that left 25 people wounded, 18 of them police.
Protests were held in cities from Tunisia to Pakistan after weekly Friday Muslim prayers, where many clerics in their mosque sermons called on congregations to defend their faith, denouncing obscure movie produced in the United States that denigrated the Prophet Muhammad.
The numbers were not huge in most places, only a few hundred took to the streets, mostly ultraconservative Islamists but the mood was often furious. The spread of protests comes after attacks earlier this week on the U.S. Embassies in Cairo and the Yemeni capital Sanaa and on a U.S. consulate in Libya, where the ambassador and three other Americans were killed.
After standing aside earlier this week in the face of protesters, security forces in Yemen and Egypt fired tear gas and clashed with protesters Friday to keep them away from U.S. embassies.
Egypt's Islamist president, Mohammed Morsi, went on state TV and urged Muslims to protect foreign diplomatic missions his first direct public move to contain protests.
"It is required by our religion to protect our guests and their homes and places of work," he said. He also condemned the killing of the American ambassador in Libya, saying it was unacceptable in Islam. "To God, attacking a person is bigger than an attack on the Kaaba," he said, referring to Islam's holiest site in Mecca.
Ahead of the expected wave of protests on Friday a tradition day for rallies in the Islamic world U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton delivered an explicit denunciation of the anti-Muhammad video, aiming to pre-empt further turmoil at its embassies and consulates.
"To us, to me personally, this video is disgusting and reprehensible," Clinton said. "It appears to have a deeply cynical purpose: to denigrate a great religion and to provoke rage."
Nonetheless, protests in several places attempted to move on American diplomatic missions and other Western countries were pulled into the dispute.
Several thousand demonstrators protested outside the US embassy in Tunis and battled with security forces, throwing stones as police fired volleys of tear gas and shot in the air. Some protesters scaled the embassy wall and stood on top of it, planting a black flag with the Islamic profession of faith, "There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet."
Police chased them off the wall and took the flag down.
In Sudan, a prominent sheik on state radio urged protesters to march on the German Embassy to protest alleged anti-Muslim graffiti on mosques in Berlin and then to the U.S. Embassy to protest the film.
"America has long been an enemy to Islam and to Sudan," Sheik Mohammed Jizouly said.
Soon after, several hundred Sudanese stormed into the German Embassy, burning a car parked behind its gates and setting fire to trash cans. Protesters danced and celebrated around the burning barrels as palls of black smoke billowed into the sky.
Part of the embassy building was also in flames, German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle told reporters in Berlin. "Fortunately... the employees are safe," he said.
Police firing tear gas drove the protesters out of the compound. Some then began to demonstrate outside the neighboring British Embassy, shouting slogans, while others left, apparently heading to the American Embassy, which is outside of the capital.
In east Jerusalem, Israeli police stopped a crowd of around 400 Palestinians from marching on the U.S. consulate to protest the film. Demonstrators threw bottles and stones at police, who responded by firing stun grenades. Four protesters were arrested.
Security forces in Yemen shot live rounds in the air and fired tear gas at a crowd of around 2,000 protesters trying to march to the U.S. Embassy in the capital, Sanaa.
Though outnumbered by protesters, security forces were able to keep the crowd about a block away from the mission.
A day earlier, hundreds of protesters chanting "death to America" stormed the embassy compound in Sanaa and burned the American flag. The embassy said nobody was harmed.
Yemen's president, Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, quickly apologized to the United States and vowed to track down the culprits.
In Egypt, several hundred people, mainly ultraconversatives, protested in Cairo's Tahrir Square after weekly Muslim Friday prayers and tore up an American flag, waving a black, Islamist flag.
A firebrand ultraconservative Salafi cleric blasted the film and in his sermon in Cairo's Tahrir Square said it was upon Muslims to defend Islam and its prophet.
Many in the crowd then moved to join protesters who have been clashing for several days with police between Tahrir and the U.S. Embassy. "With our soul, our blood, we will avenge you, our Prophet," they chanted as police fired volleys of tear gas.
Ahead of the clashes, the president spoke for more than seven minutes on state TV, saying, "It is required by our religion to protect our guests and their homes and places of work."
"So I call on all to consider this, consider the law, and not attack embassies, consulates, diplomatic missions or Egyptian property that is private or public, " he said.
He denounced the killing of the American ambassador in Libya. "This is something we reject and Islam rejects.
His own Muslim Brotherhood group called for peaceful protests in Tahrir to denounce the film.
A small, peaceful demonstration was held Friday outside the U.S. Embassy in the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur.
Hundreds of hardline Muslims held peaceful protests against the film throughout Pakistan, shouting slogans and carrying banners criticizing the U.S. and those involved in the film.
Police in Islamabad set up barricades and razor wire to prevent protesters from getting to the diplomatic enclave, where the U.S. Embassy and many other foreign missions are located. Protests were also held in Karachi, Peshawar and Lahore, where protesters shouted "Down with America" and some burned the U.S. flag. About 200 policemen and barbed wire ringed the U.S. Consulate in Lahore.
About 1,500 protest in the eastern city of Jalalabad, shouting "Death to America" and urge President Hamid Karzai to cut relations with the U.S.
A prominent cleric in Indonesia urged Muslims there to remain calm despite their anger about the film. But Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia, a branch of the international network that advocates a worldwide Islamic state, on its website blamed the U.S. government for allowing the film to be produced and released, calling it "an act of barbarism that cannot go unpunished."
Meanwhile, the airport in Benghazi, the city where Tuesday's attack on the consulate took place, was closed for several hours on Friday. An airport official said the closure was due to security concerns, and the airport re-opened in the afternoon.
True identity of controversial man who angered Muslim world
Hes set the Mideast ablaze with his anti-Muslim film trailer, but Nikoula Basseley Nakoulas murky background shows that he was methamphetamine maker, a once drug-addict, a petty criminal, and above all an informant according to a detailed report published by the Newsweek Magazine yesterday.
When the police pulled Nikoula Basseley Nakoula over outside Los Angeles on March 27, 1997, he had $45,000 in hundreds and twenties in a paper lunch bag on the seat beside him.
Fifteen years would pass before Nakoula would become known as the man who helped set the Mideast afire with an anti-Muslim film trailer. On this night, though, he was the subject of a drug investigation, and the Los Angeles County Sheriffs Department had been watching him as he drove a U-Haul rental truck from a storage facility in Downey to a Super 7 liquor store. Newsweek Magazine wrote yesterday
There, he picked up a liquor store employee named Khaled Abraham. They proceeded to Abrahams house in Lake Elsinore.
At the house, Nakoula and the others unloaded 30 boxes of pseudoephedrine, a prime ingredient of methamphetamine. Another 99 cases were found at the storage facility.
After his arrest, Nakoula insisted he had only been doing the bidding of his employer, Mansour Barsoum, whom he described as the owner of a firm called ABC Trading. The police determined that the storage unit had indeed been rented under the name Barsoum, but the manager identified Nakoula as the person who actually had rented it.
According to Newsweeks report, the police were unable to find any trace of Mansour or ABC Trading, though Nakoula was discovered to have receipts from a Santa Monica firm called M&A for the purchase of some $150,000 of pseudoephedrine pills. The authorities also could not find a business license for M&A Trading, but a federal DEA agent were able to trace a lot number on a March 3, 1997 receipt to pills recovered at an illegal meth lab.
Nakoula sought to explain his bosss absence by saying, Mansour had left for Egypt. Nakoulas lawyer subsequently produced a copy of an Egyptian passport for a man of that name, but the police do not seem to have been convinced.
Nakoula nonetheless only spent just two days in jail, getting off with three years probation when he could have gotten hard time.
Sounds like hes an informant, observes a law enforcement official familiar such matters, though not with the particulars of this case.
The bust came around the time the feds were launching Operation Mountain Express, which would become a huge investigation into pseudoephedrine-dealing involving numerous people of a Middle Eastern background. The authorities initially insisted there were no links to terrorism, but suddenly switched and decided that a chunk of the money was going to Hizbullah.
Im satisfied that portions of the drug sales have moved back to the Middle East and portions of that are going to support terrorist organizations, said then DEA Administrator Asa Hutchinson.
According to the Newsweek Magazine, Nakoulas lawyer is not returning phone calls or responding to emails, but it seems reasonable to wonder if Nakoulas case was not part of this investigation. One question that bears asking is whether Nakoula helped persuade the feds that the drug money was going to Muslim extremists. He is a Coptic Christian.
Meanwhile, the supposed employer, Mansour Barsoum, remained as much a mystery as the supposed movie producer Sam Bacile, whom Nakoula now insists was the man who actually made the incendiary anti-Muslim movie that aroused such fury in the Mideast. The authorities say they can find no trace of this man who purportedly triggered the murders of Americans in the U.S. consulate in Libya on the 11th anniversary of 9/11.
Just as he said back in 1997 that he was only moving money and drugs for his boss, the now 54-year-old Nakoula is insisting he was just a functionary in the production of a film that seems intended to incite Muslim extremists to violence.
As if to ensure continued fury, Nakoula has said the mysterious Sam Bacile is an Israeli Jew and that the film was financed by $5 million from Jewish backers. There are no laws against this, even when it results in the deaths of people who represent Americas very best, among them former SEAL Glen Doherty and U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens, whose mother flew from California to Washington yesterday to bring his body home. She is a retired symphony cellists and her son had always seemed to hear the music of the human heart even amidst gunfire.
It may be possible for authorities to least arrest Nakoula for violating the terms of his probation following a subsequent, 2009 criminal case where he pleaded guilty to federal charges of identity theft and bank fraud so extensive as to require $794,700.57 in restitution. He was sentenced to a relatively lenient 21 months in prison, followed by five years probation, which among other things prohibits him from using computers or in any other way accessing the Internet without explicit permission.
The YouTube movie trailer that set the Mideast ablaze was posted by someone identifying himself as Sam Bacile. The feds need only prove that the mysterious producer is in fact Nakoula, and they can toss him back in jail for four years.
In the court file for the second case, Indictment CR09-00617, the records regarding the plea deal are sealed. That can be construed as another indication that Nakoula had previously been an informant. His lawyer is not responding to calls or emails regarding this, either.
The actual charges remain public.
According to Newsweeks report, Nakoula engaged in what is known as synthetic identify theft, meaning he used real Social Security numbers but fake names to open a dizzying number of accounts at numerous banks. He had 14 accounts at Wells Fargo alone, shifting money from one to another to build up credit lines and then maxing them out. His many aliases ranged from Ahmad Hamdy to PJ Tobacco to Robert Bacily, which is not so very different from Sam Bacile. The one common denominator with the names was Nakoulas face in the ATMs camera when there was a withdrawal from the corresponding account.
In searching his household garbage, postal inspectors found a WAMU gold credit card in the name of Nicola Bacily and a Bank of America platinum check card in the name of Kritbag Difrat. WAMU happened to have been his biggest creditor when he filed for bankruptcy in 2000, stating in papers at the time that he was a $2,800-a-month service employee with Mobil. The vehicles he now owned included a silver 4-door Mercedes that was actually registered in his name.
A silver Mercedes was parked in the driveway of his suburban Cerritos home yesterday. He seems to be as fond of easy money as he is of lies and fake names. He does not immediately strike an observer as somebody who acts of out of principle more knowing than maybe hate.
One fact established by Nakoulas own admission is that a convicted drug dealing con man helped set in motion events that resulted in the death of people who were champions against religious intolerance and worked to make their names the realest of synonyms for goodness and truth.
SOURCE: THE GUARDIAN
