"There's no question in our mind that they would have played this out completely," says Cohen. "If they couldn't get the explosives or if they just got frustrated, they had other options. All it takes is an AK-47 and a desire to become a martyr. Well, they have no options now."

Craig Horowitz has covered politics, crime, and the New York Police Department for more than a decade as a contributing editor at New York magazine. Horowitz, who has written more than forty cover stories for New York magazine, is at work on his first novel.

The arrest of the would-be subway bombers took place barely forty-eight hours before the opening of the Republican convention in New York. As a result, it was, for the most part, a one-day news event. While under different circumstances the successful undercover police operation might have been a significant ongoing story, given the timing, it was swallowed up by convention coverage.

Consequently, police department brass couldn't have been more eager when I approached them about doing a piece that examined the undercover operation. They were so eager, in fact, they did something they never do-they gave me access and details against the wishes of the U.S. Attorney's office. The accused terrorists hadn't even been indicted yet and the U.S. Attorney's office was taking great pains to insure that nothing interfered with the successful prosecution of the suspects. This included a ban on talking to the media.

But the cops desperately wanted this story told. Three years ago, when Ray Kelly became New York City's Police Commissioner, he revamped the NYPD to deal with the dangers of a post-9/11 world. He created a counterterrorism unit, he hired talent from the CIA and the military, and he vowed that fighting terrorism would be just as important as fighting street crime.

However, when you're battling street crime, success and failure are easy to measure. Murder goes up or goes down. Rapes increase or they decrease. But how do you effectively measure the terrorist acts that didn't happen? The ones all the painstaking work may have prevented? In fact, most of the successes will never be made public.

Telling the story of the arrests of James Elshafay and Shahawar Matin Siraj gave the NYPD an unusual opportunity to get the word out.

Justin Kane and Jason Felch

To Catchan Oligarch

from San Francisco magazine

The strange and epic case of the United States of America versus Pavel Ivanovich Lazarenko, which this spring asked twelve Bay Area residents to decide whether the former prime minister of a country six thousand miles away had broken the nation's laws more than a decade ago, actually began one cool night in January 1998 when FBI special agent Bryan Earl paid a visit to a small Dumpster in Sausalito.

Earl is not the type to skulk under cover of darkness. A smoothfaced man with hints of gray at his temples, gentle blue eyes, and a profound sincerity, he looks more like a tax accountant than one of Louis Freeh's or Robert Mueller's blue-suited special agents. His pious demeanor hints at his Mormon upbringing on the quiet side of Las Vegas, and it's easy to picture him wandering around Mexico in a suit and tie, with a small black name tag on his chest and the Book of Mormon under his arm, as he did twenty years ago. Not the first man you would imagine in the FBI, he is the first man you would want working there-the embodiment of God, family, and country.

At age thirty-two, tired of practicing corporate law in D.C., he had sent an application to the FBI on a whim and then surprised himself by joining up. A year later, as a rookie fresh out of Quantico, he found himself in San Francisco, eventually part of the FBI's local ten-member Eurasian Organized Crime Squad, investigating financial fraud and money-laundering schemes linked to the former Soviet Union and, in some cases, the infamous Red Mafiya. Earl enjoyed being part cop, part missionary, spreading the gospel of the American legal system among former communists for whom the distinction between politics, business, and crime had fallen with the Berlin Wall.

In late 1997, Earl had been handed the name of Peter Niko-layevich Kiritchenko, a Sausalito businessman whom Ukrainian authorities had asked the FBI to check out. It was a routine foreign police request, the kind, Earl's supervisor would later say, that most FBI agents would fulfill and forget. According to the Ukrainians, Kiritchenko had come up in the early stages of a Ukrainian investigation into the just-deposed prime minister, Pavel Lazarenko. At the time, Ukraine was a new ally of the United States, helping reduce the dangerous stockpile of nuclear weapons in the former Soviet Union, and nobody wanted to endanger the fragile relationship that had been forged with Ukraine's autocratic president, Leonid Kuchma. Lazarenko was Kuchma's biggest political rival. Many Ukrainians considered the investigation into the upstart presidential challenger to be a politically motivated ploy.

But Earl pushed on. By January 1998, he had pieced together an outline of Peter Kiritchenko's story. Three years earlier, Kirit-chenko had uprooted his life as a middle-aged Ukrainian commodities trader in Warsaw to move his wife, daughter, and business to the Bay Area. A compact man with sandy blond hair, cheeks ruddy from vodka, and a taste for excess, Kiritchenko stuck out in San Francisco's Russian-speaking community. He drove a burgundy Bentley and, on a two-acre lot high atop Tiburon, was building a Mediterranean-style mansion with a 360-degree view of three bridges that he dubbed Shangri-la. His neighbors knew him from his petition asking the city to let him install a shooting range in the basement. Meanwhile, he had invested about $25 million in local real estate, snapping up a Sausalito condo, two small San Francisco apartment buildings, and over eighty undeveloped acres in Tiburon. The Ukrainian, Earl thought, was worth a closer look.

At 10:00 p.m. one weeknight that January, Earl tucked his young child into bed, kissed his wife good night, and slipped into jeans and a sweatshirt. From his home in the city, he drove north across the Golden Gate Bridge into the hulking darkness of the Marin Headlands, following the necklace of lights to the Sausalito shoreline. From Bridgeway he turned onto Harbor Drive and pulled his standard-issue domestic sedan into the empty parking lot of the brown three-story office building at One Harbor Drive. In a Dump-ster at the back of the lot, he found a single trash bag with the day's detritus from Kiritchenko's office. He tossed it in his trunk and drove away. No search warrant needed. By eleven, Earl was home in bed.

The "trash cover," as agents call it, became Earl's nightly routine. Every weekday morning for eighteen months he would bring the bag thirteen floors up the elevator of the Phillip Burton Federal Building on Golden Gate Avenue and dump its contents on his desk. Occasionally Earl felt silly taking off his suit jacket to sift through garbage like a Tenderloin hobo. His colleagues ribbed the rookie for the mess he made. But it was fruitful. The trash yielded clues- envelopes from something called European Federal Credit Bank; a Post-it note with the word Dugsbery scrawled on it; envelopes bearing the return addresses of some of San Francisco's most respected banks. All of it suggested to Earl that the Ukrainians could be right-there appeared to be a multimillion-dollar pipeline between Ukraine and the Bay Area.

Among San Francisco's thirty thousand Russian-speaking emigres-many of whom are Jews and political refuseniks who arrived as refugees over the past thirty years and congregate in the bakeries, churches, and restaurants along Geary Boulevard-only a small number have attracted the attention of the Eurasian Organized