When Azamat saw Agent Walker, he rushed to tell him what he had found out—that Dias had thrown the backpack in the dumpster. He also said he remembered that the garbage had been picked up the previous afternoon.
Dias and Azamat were taken to Boston, to the Thomas P. O’Neill, Jr., Federal Building, a 1980s stack of glass and concrete bands that houses a variety of government agencies, including a number of Homeland Security offices. Dias and Azamat were questioned again. Then they were booked and taken to county jail. They still did not have lawyers.
AZAMAT HAD CALLED his father, Amir, as soon as the FBI agents had left in the early morning—it was the middle of the day in Kazakhstan. “Everything is fine,” Azamat told him. “We’ve been released.” It was late at night in Kazakhstan when he called his father again: “They are taking us again, it’s about the visas.” This was when Amir started looking for a lawyer and booking a ticket to Boston.
Amir Ismagulov (in the Kazakh tradition, the eldest son takes his surname from the grandfather’s first name, which is why Azamat and Amir have different last names) is the kind of man who may not believe in the system but is certain of his ability to work the system. Amir became famous in Kazakhstan in 2011, after he addressed the country’s authoritarian president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, publicly asking that authorities stop gratuitous inspections of businesses, and immediately received personal assurances for himself and his enterprise. Later that year, two bombs went off in Atyrau, the Kazakh oil capital, where Amir had a house; a radical Islamist group took credit for the bombings. Amir played a role in the ensuing shake-up of the city and received a government medal for his role in the fight against terrorism. Not only did Amir have money, expertise, and connections that always made him feel safe and confident, he even had proof that his family was on the right side in the War on Terror.
By Sunday, April 21, Amir had engaged a large Chicago law firm that had done work for Kazakh oil and gas companies. He expected VIP service from it. It took only a few days to get a visa, and on Thursday Amir landed in Boston. A Russian-speaking representative of the law firm—a junior partner, not a flunky—greeted him at the airport. Then he informed Amir that the firm had decided to drop the case: “It’s too high-profile for us.” It was also the wrong profile; the firm did not generally handle criminal cases. But Amir was now certain it had something to do with the fact that the firm’s senior partners were Jewish. The junior partner recommended a Boston-based immigration firm, with which he had already made the preliminary arrangements. The immigration lawyers assured Amir that there was nothing to worry about; they had handled hundreds of visa-snafu cases. While the immigration lawyer was preparing for the arraignment, the criminal defense lawyer who was representing Dias recommended lining up an experienced criminal attorney as well, and had an acquaintance of his come up from New York to start familiarizing himself with the case. Amir hired everybody.
On the morning of May 1, both Dias and Azamat were scheduled to appear at an immigration hearing. They had been in jail for ten days; their fathers, who were both in Boston, had not yet been allowed to see them. But when Amir got to the courtroom, his son and Dias were not there: each of them in turn appeared on a video screen through an uplink from the jail, and the judge informed them that their cases were continued for a week. Reassured by his son’s new immigration lawyer, and by seeing his son on the screen, Amir left the court certain that Azamat would be free in a week’s time.
At four o’clock that afternoon, Azamat and Dias were brought to the federal courthouse. The FBI had filed a criminal complaint against them. The document, which named both Azamat and Dias, described their alleged crime as follows:
[They did] willfully conspire with each other to commit an offense against the United States, to wit, 18 U.S.C. § 1519, by knowingly destroying, concealing, and covering up objects belonging to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, namely, a backpack containing fireworks and a laptop computer, with the intent to impede, obstruct, and influence the criminal investigation of the Marathon bombings, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 371.
An accompanying affidavit by Special Agent Scott Cieplik explained that Dias, Azamat, and Robel had “collectively decided to throw the backpack and fireworks into the trash because they did not want Tsarnaev to get in trouble.” Although the criminal complaint concerned only Azamat and Dias, the affidavit stated that there was probable cause to charge Robel with lying to investigators.
Amir got on the phone with the Kazakh consul in New York, Yerlan Kubashev. Amir had had enough of the slick American lawyers who seemed to think their job was to take his money and issue reassurances in exchange. “Find me a Russian-speaking lawyer!” Amir demanded. Kubashev thought it was a bad idea. Amir clarified: “Find me a good Russian-speaking lawyer!” The conversation lasted two hours, and in the end Kubashev helped Amir make contact with Arkady Bukh, a forty-one-year-old New York City criminal attorney given to wearing long velvet jackets and red bow ties. Bukh had immigrated to the United States from Azerbaijan in the early nineties and was admitted to the bar in 2003. He had represented a long line of Russian cyber-criminals, including hackers, spammers, and child pornographers. His website called him “Top New York Criminal Defense Lawyer” and implored: “Stop being a victim of the circumstances. Trust your freedom to No-one [sic] but Bukh.” Amir hired him. By this time he was out about seventy thousand dollars, between the bulk of the retainer that the big Chicago firm had kept and the fees he had paid the immigration lawyer and the criminal lawyer, both of whom he had taken off the case almost as soon as they entered it.
Amir’s belief in his ability to work the system might have been shaken, but his faith in his son remained firm: Azamat was innocent, and he was a good young man. Amir finally got to see him on May 3—two weeks after the arrest, two days after the arraignment—and Azamat told him everything. He said that lots of students had gone to Jahar’s room that evening—it just so happened he and Dias and Robel were the only ones who got in. He said that he and Dias had both told investigators the truth, and if there had been any obfuscation at all, it concerned the marijuana. He said that he had not even realized that the FBI was interested in the fireworks. He also said that he would never snitch on Dias; he would never agree to testify against him. And in any case, no one had ever intended to do anything bad, except smoke pot.
It looked like the classic game-theory setup known as the prisoner’s dilemma: Bonnie and Clyde are held separately and pressured to testify against each other. If either testifies, he or she will get a reduced sentence, while the other is put away for a long time, but if neither testifies, both have a chance of going free. Just as Azamat would never snitch on Dias, father and son were sure Dias would not give Azamat up either; the young men had been brought up with similar concepts of honor and friendship.
AFTER A FEW DAYS back in Cambridge, Robel had started to feel safer. Dias and Azamat had been jailed—they were probably getting deported—but he was home. Although the FBI had called, Robel remained a free man. By April 22, he was even feeling cocky again about having come that close to real danger.