Hiring Bukh had been a good idea: it was by far the highest-profile case he had ever handled, and he threw everything he had at it. Seven of his people rented a house together in a Boston suburb, and, when they were not busy apartment-hunting for Amir, they were cramming for the trial. They went to see every person with whom Azamat had been friendly in college; most of them refused to talk to the lawyers, a few explained that the FBI had told them not to talk to anyone, and not one person agreed to testify for the defense. The legal team reconstructed every FBI interview and interrogation, finding numerous inconsistencies and digging into them. Since they had no witnesses, they would mount a defense based solely on attacking the government’s case.
They did it like it’s done in the movies—in fact, while I was reporting on the trial, I enticed two of my own family members to come watch on two separate days, promising them a cable-series-worthy spectacle, and they were not disappointed. Cross-examining Special Agent Sara Wood, defense attorney Nicholas Wooldridge asked whether Azamat had been allowed to use the bathroom on request—and after Agent Wood asserted that he had been, and denied that he had been told he needed to sign his waiver of rights in order to be allowed to pee, the defense showed a video of Azamat being taken to the bathroom several minutes after the time recorded for his signature on the form that said he had agreed to talk to the FBI without a lawyer. Agent Wood had not merely denied coercion: she had claimed that Azamat signed the form after he returned from the bathroom. What made this cross-examination particularly cinematic was that the lawyers had been able to establish that the clock on the wall at the police barracks had not been set forward to daylight saving time, so a video that at first glance appeared to show an innocuous sequence of events was revealed to tell a different story.
After that day, which came about halfway through the two weeks of testimony, I could not imagine the jury convicting Azamat: the FBI agent who had conducted the first and most important interview with him had just been caught lying on the stand. That, I thought, served to discredit her report—the only existing record of the interview—and without the report, the government’s case would seem to fall apart. Later, Wooldridge caught Wood’s partner, Agent Azad, in the same fib, cementing what I thought was a victory for the defense. Perhaps even more important, the government’s case was not so much about facts, which were not in dispute—Dias, Azamat, and Robel had certainly gone to Jahar’s room, they had driven away with the backpack holding the fireworks, and Dias had thrown it in the trash—as it was about intention. Did they, as the charges alleged, “willfully conspire,” and did they have the “intent to impede, obstruct, and influence” the investigation? The prosecution repeatedly pointed to Azamat’s obsessive surfing of news sites as proof that he was trying to track the manhunt in order to help Jahar get away. The defense was arguing that Azamat kept checking the news because he was confused, scared, and incredulous. The government’s only witnesses who could testify to Azamat’s state of mind before he knew that Jahar had been caught were the FBI agents who had interviewed him then—and the jury had now seen that they could not be trusted.
But Amir, who did not speak any English—the court provided simultaneous translators, but they had some trouble keeping up with the defense—had picked up on cues to which I was not paying attention. The New York lawyers were indeed talking too fast. They also looked too good: their suits fit too well, and Wooldridge’s hair actually shone. The government’s lawyers—the men in their baggy suits, the lone woman in her boxy outfits—and their speech, which struck me as occasionally hokey, and broad Massachusetts accents, had a much better connection with the jury.
The jurors took a day and a bit to return a verdict, but as I found out later, that had been an illusion of deliberation: one of the jurors had simply been ill on the first day. In fact, the jury’s unanimous decision had been nearly instant. Azamat never had a chance.
Azamat and Dias were in solitary for the first six months in federal prison. Then they were placed together for a few months, then separated again—and placed in solitary—before Azamat’s trial began. Once they were in separate cells, each was offered a deaclass="underline" a reduced sentence in exchange for pleading guilty and testifying against the codefendants. Azamat told Amir he had turned the deal down. Amir told me that Dias’s father had told him that Dias had said no as well—indeed, he did not testify at Azamat’s trial.
Dias was scheduled to face trial two months after Azamat, in September. A month earlier, at what was scheduled as a pretrial hearing, Dias pleaded guilty. In exchange, the government asked that he be sentenced to no more than seven years behind bars.
THE SENTENCING was scheduled for 2015. If Bayan’s father, by being first to hire a lawyer, proved that he was the smart one, now it looked like Dias’s father, who had had his lawyer cut a deal with the prosecutors, was not so dumb either, while Amir, who had spent a million dollars on lawyers and uprooted his family to come to Boston to try to move mountains for a year, was enough of a fool that his son was staring at twenty-five years in prison. Amir instructed the lawyers to look for a deaclass="underline" it was a question of survival now, not of honor. At Robel’s trial in November, Azamat was a witness for the prosecution.
Azamat’s head was shaved now. He was prison-pale, the kind of pale that results from spending twenty-three hours a day in a tiny locked room. Amir must have bought him a new shirt for this trial—he was well used to the routine of exchanging a laundered white shirt for a soiled one through a special window at the courthouse—but he made a mistake with either the size or the style: the cutaway collar of the shirt spread out over the collar of Azamat’s navy English-cut suit, making him look like he was wearing someone else’s clothes.
When Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephanie Siegmann asked Azamat to tell the jury of his agreement with the prosecution, he said, “As long as I tell the truth, it may help with my sentencing.” He had been given no promises.
Azamat had not testified at his own trial, so now he told the story in court for the first time. Answering the prosecutor’s questions, he ran through it step by step: Dias texted him, they went to Jahar’s room, it was locked, later they got in, he and Robel watched Project X while Dias searched the room, they left, they ate, some of them smoked, they watched The Pursuit of Happyness, they slept, and then Dias emerged from the bedroom. “He wanted to throw the backpack,” testified Azamat. “I agreed with him.” When the prosecutor asked him what language he and Dias used to talk about the backpack, Azamat said it had been English. When Robel’s defense attorney pointed out that Azamat had not said this in earlier interviews and interrogations, Azamat said that he did not remember.
The question of whether Russian or English was spoken that morning in the apartment was essential to Robel’s defense. His lawyers’ strategy rested on two assertions: Robel was too stoned to remember anything, and he did not understand what Dias said about the backpack because Dias and Azamat spoke Russian to each other. The prosecution, basing its case in large part on the strange statement Robel had signed in April 2013, in that little room Agent Delapena had locked, promising to keep the “wolves” out, insisted that the conversation had been conducted in English—and Robel had even said, “Do what you have to do,” which his defense now denied. In other words, in the prosecution’s narrative, Robel and Azamat had played identical roles in the story: neither of them had touched the backpack or the fireworks, and both of them had passively acquiesced to Dias’s intention to dispose of them. Indeed, they had been together every step of the way, from eight in the evening on April 18 to nine in the morning on April 19. They had watched Project X together while Dias searched Jahar’s room, and they had both napped together while Dias and Bayan had words about the backpack. Unlike Robel, Azamat had never denied going to Jahar’s room. So why was Azamat charged with conspiracy and obstruction of justice while Robel was charged only with lying to investigators? The prosecutors would not answer that question, but when I asked Robel’s defense attorney Derege Demissie, he suggested the government chose the lighter charge for Robel because “they could make it stick.”