Why could the heavier charge be made to stick to Azamat and not to Robel? It was obvious: Robel was not a foreigner or a Muslim. Demissie used every opportunity to point out the distinction, stressing that Dias, Azamat, and Jahar “shared a language and a religion” that were foreign to Robel. At one point, Judge Douglas Woodlock instructed the jury that it would be “inappropriate” to take the defendant’s religion into consideration—but he allowed Demissie’s remark to stand.
Demissie even got former Governor Dukakis to take the stand. He admitted that he had no direct knowledge of the events in question, but his testimony demonstrated that Robel was one of Massachusetts’ own. That was evident even before he came to court, causing a minor news sensation. The local media, which had only briefly acknowledged Azamat’s trial and Dias’s guilty plea—there had been a day or two when I was the only journalist in the courtroom—turned out in force for Robel’s trial. Boston Globe columnist Yvonne Abraham published a piece titled “Robel Phillipos Made Stupid Mistakes That Any Kid Could Make.” In it she asked, “Is it absolutely necessary to bring the full force and power of the federal government down on him?” The following day, Abraham was a guest on a public-radio talk show, and listeners kept calling in to affirm her view: Robel seemed like a regular kid, he could be one of their kids, and he should not go to prison.
LOST IN THE DISCUSSION of just how stupid a mistake Robel had made was a simple question: How much damage had the three friends’ actions done? When Azamat was on the stand during Robel’s trial, prosecutor Siegmann asked him to explain to the jury why he had been convicted. “Because I took the stuff, it blocked the investigation,” he said.
Once the FBI learned of the backpack and its having been thrown in the dumpster, it appointed Special Agent Kenneth Benton, a twenty-six-year veteran of the agency who specialized in white-collar crime and public corruption, to look for it. Benton assembled a team of twenty-five agents who, dressed in hazmat suits and armed with rakes, spent a day and a half sifting through trash pulled up by an excavator at the landfill where a garbage truck had taken Carriage Drive waste on Friday afternoon. The agents produced a number of false-hope backpacks before they finally got one with the JanSport logo on the outside and an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven sheet of ruled paper inside, with some of Jahar’s ethics homework. It also contained the emptied-out fireworks containers and the Vaseline jar. Between assembling a team of agency volunteers, cordoning off a section of the landfill, and a bad-weather delay, the agents did not start digging through the garbage until Thursday the 25th and did not find the backpack until the afternoon of Friday the 26th. Jahar had been in custody for one week. Robel was just signing the confession with the inaccurate description of the backpack.
Robel was charged with “knowingly and willfully making a materially false, fictitious, and fraudulent statement.” The key word here is “material”—meaning that it had a substantial impact on the investigation, or, as Azamat said, “blocked” it. But Robel knew less than the investigators learned from Dias and Bayan almost as soon as they were detained—before Robel was interviewed for the first time, in the Price Chopper parking lot. Even if he had instantly spilled everything he had known about the fireworks and the Vaseline, it is difficult to imagine that the information could have influenced the course of the investigation. What if the investigators had learned of the backpack and the dumpster even sooner than they got to Robel, say, as soon as they laid siege to Carriage Drive? The garbage truck had already come and gone, so the FBI might have been spared a little time and expense but none of the humiliation and filth of the landfill search.
And what if Dias had not taken the backpack at all? That would not have aided the process of identifying Jahar: by the time investigators arrived at Pine Dale Hall, his name had been known for hours. Nor did the government ever claim that the contents of the backpack helped determine where or how the Boston Marathon bombs were made.
IN ROBEL’S CASE the jury was out for four days. Longer deliberations bode better for the defendant. But the jury returned with a verdict of guilty on two counts of making false statements, which left him vulnerable to the maximum sixteen years for that crime.
IN MAY 2014, a year after Amir moved to Boston, some young women from the boys’ informal support group happened to catch a cab with a Russian-speaking driver from Central Asia. They asked him for his number so that they could give it to Amir: not only did the guy speak Russian but he drove a minivan—handy for when Amir was going to visit Azamat in jail with family and friends, or members of the defense team. A day or two later, Amir called the cabbie to drive him and several others to the federal prison.
Khairullozhon Matanov, Kair for short, said he knew about the case—he understood whom Amir was going to see—but that is not what they discussed on the way. Kair was an ethnic Uzbek from Kyrgyzstan: he left in 2010, when mobs were attacking Uzbeks and setting fire to Uzbek-owned businesses throughout Kyrgyzstan. He had family back home—he had been sending them money from his work as a cabdriver, but now he had his green card and wanted to set up something more permanent and lucrative, like perhaps some sort of an export-import business with Kyrgyzstan. He asked Amir which he thought would be better to ship to Central Asia: clothes or cars. Amir was in favor of cars. “The profit margin is the same,” he said, “but there is less busywork. But you have to take care to have a customer lined up for every vehicle you ship—then it will work.” This was the kind of conversation Amir would have liked to have with one of his own sons. He decided he wanted to know Kair.
That was on a Wednesday. On Friday, Amir needed a ride, and he called Kair. Or maybe he just wanted to talk to Kair and needing a ride was an excuse, because Amir kept calling. There was no answer.
THE INDICTMENT against Kair was filed on May 29, 2014—the Thursday between the Wednesday he drove Amir and others to the jail and the Friday when Kair himself was arrested. The timing may have been a coincidence—or Amir’s acquaintance with Kair may have been the indirect cause of Kair’s arrest. Like other immigrants who had known the Tsarnaevs, he had been tracked by the FBI for months, but unlike all the others, he failed to stay as far away as possible from anyone else affected by the case. He was charged on two counts—obstructing justice by destroying evidence, like Dias and Azamat, and “making materially false, fictitious, and fraudulent statements,” like Robel.