The federal agent spotted Patrick Campbell as soon as he walked off the jetway at JFK. A slight 33-year-old African, he wore a business suit and a backpack. It was Aug. 21, 2013. Campbell was exhausted. He’d already spent more than 12 hours in the air, flying from his native Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, to Paris and then New York, and he had a reservation for a flight to Miami later that day. As he passed through immigration, retrieved his suitcase, and cleared customs, a surveillance team followed his every move. On the concourse, agents surrounded him. “Are you Mr. Campbell?” one asked. Then they threw on handcuffs.
Campbell was taken to a small interview room in the airport, where Loni Forgash, a special agent with Homeland Security Investigations, a division of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, freed his hands and asked him why he was headed to Florida. According to Forgash’s report of the interview, Campbell responded that he mined gold, diamonds, chromite, and bauxite, and that he was going to meet a potential investor in Miami. Forgash wasn’t satisfied. “I’m going to bring somebody to help you remember things,” she said.
That somebody was another HSI agent, Sammy Cruzcoriano, a large man with the face of a bulldog. He’d been watching the interview through a one-way mirror. “It’s me, Samuel,” he said. The face was familiar to Campbell; he recognized the agent as the man he’d known as Samuel Calcano, the partner he was supposed to meet in Miami. For the past 15 months, Cruzcoriano had posed as a businessman looking to ship 1,000 tons of uranium to Iran, which has been slapped with strict sanctions for its alleged pursuit of nuclear weapons. Campbell, Cruzcoriano recalled, “just looked at me and hunched down.” It had all been a sting.
As the interview continued, Campbell confessed that he had indeed been negotiating a shipment of uranium to Iran. Searching his belongings, the agents found a USB drive that contained a contract for the deal. Concealed beneath the insoles of a pair of pointy leather shoes in his suitcase, they found two plastic bags filled with a brown claylike substance—soil samples from a potential mine, Campbell said.
The next day, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida issued a press release announcing that Campbell had been caught with “a sample of uranium,” and DHS followed up with a press release of its own. It looked like an impressive catch for the government. The story made the Drudge Report, the New York Times, CBS (CBS), and the Daily Mail, and the BBC dubbed Campbell “uranium shoe man.” The government charged him with brokering goods to Iran, a violation of U.S. trade restrictions. He faced 20 years in prison.
Since Sept. 11, undercover operations launched in the name of national security have become a common tactic in U.S. law enforcement. Of the more than 500 terrorism charges the federal government filed from 2001 to 2011, about 30 percent came from stings. While critics have faulted federal law enforcement for making fake terrorists out of vulnerable young men, government officials argue that stings deter would-be terrorists and round up “lone wolves” who might otherwise fall prey to real terrorist recruiters.
Yet Campbell’s case represents a particularly baffling twist to the controversial practice. He was hardly a threat. As his e-mails and conversations with Cruzcoriano make clear, he revealed himself early on as a remarkably unsophisticated businessman and a highly suggestible target. It’s doubtful he would have even taken part in the deal absent the constant encouragement he received. “This went beyond a fishing expedition,” says Mike German, a former undercover FBI agent and a prominent critic of federal law enforcement. “It’s fishing in a place where you know there are no fish.”
Eager to tell his story, Campbell cooperated for this article. He grew up in Freetown and remembers well the civil war that tore through Sierra Leone during the 1990s. In a country whose total population then numbered 4 million, the conflict killed around 50,000 people, including, Campbell says, his father, a commercial sailor who was shot when rebels tried to seize his boat. Campbell was 16. His mother died of a disease, though Campbell wouldn’t say which, not long after.
Campbell became the breadwinner for his wife, Nanah, and four preteen children: a daughter named Ruth from an earlier girlfriend and three foster children left to him by his extended family. Although he was a social worker by training, he took to new enterprises with such fickle conviction—one month he was scheming to import paper, the next he was looking into energy drinks—that his friends called him “biznes edman,” Sierra Leonean creole for the brains of a business.
He drew most of his income from his job as a small-time mineral dealer, buying diamonds and gold from freelance miners in eastern Sierra Leone and selling them to other dealers in Freetown. In early 2012, with his business failing, Campbell decided to branch out into uranium, reasoning that the market would be his for the taking. (Sierra Leone exports no uranium, but at least one mining company has identified potential deposits there.) In May of that year he opened his laptop and went to ec21.com, a business-to-business trading site, to see if he could find a buyer.
He found one in Cruzcoriano, who posted an ad saying his company, Paragon Trading International, was looking for a form of uranium known as yellowcake. Just one step more purified than raw uranium ore found in the ground, yellowcake emits little radioactivity and is composed of only 0.7 percent U-235, the isotope required for a nuclear reaction. But if converted into a gas and enriched to contain 3 percent to 5 percent U-235, it can be used to fuel a nuclear power plant. To be used for an atomic weapon, uranium must be enriched even further, to 90 percent U-235. In other words, it’s a long way from a barrel of yellowcake to a nuclear warhead.
“We export uranium to any part of the world,” Campbell wrote confidently in response to the ad. In what Cruzcoriano later admitted was a test to weed out scammers, he asked Campbell how much it would cost to send a 500-gram sample of yellowcake to Kuala Lumpur. Having never extracted even a milligram of uranium, Campbell declined to answer. Nonetheless, Cruzcoriano kept laying out the terms of the deal over e-mail, Skype, and the telephone. He said he was looking to send 1,000 tons of uranium somewhere in the Middle East.
Campbell was so excited by the opportunity he couldn’t sleep. “Shipping the mineral from my country will not be a problem,” he e-mailed back. He inflated his expertise, falsely claiming that he held a master’s degree in geophysics, that his business specialized in uranium, and that he’d already sold some to buyers in China and Ecuador. At one point, he even told Cruzcoriano he was a “Prince in West Africa.” The lies were simply part of doing business from Sierra Leone, Campbell says: “When you are looking for investors, you have to build yourself up.”
Campbell’s confidence notwithstanding, it’s hard to imagine how a single newcomer with no ties to large-scale mining could establish a uranium mine, build the facilities to process ore into yellowcake, then move 1,000 tons of it—equivalent to 1/70th of annual global production. In fact, the prospect seemed so implausible that a public defender originally representing Campbell later suggested at a hearing that his client was running a scam. Campbell, for his part, insisted he really would have been able to marshal the resources for a mining operation, once he got paid.
Cruzcoriano was corresponding with Campbell from the Fort Lauderdale office of HSI, where he works for what’s called the Counter-Proliferation Investigations Program. (DHS declined to make him available for this article.) A veteran of the U.S. Navy, Cruzcoriano spends most of his time cracking down on the export of sensitive military technologies—night-vision goggles, helicopter engines, and the like—but his unit is also responsible for preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction. Twelve of HSI’s 26 field offices have such teams, including the one in South Florida. Cruzcoriano’s online bait for Campbell represented one of more than 1,800 investigations nationwide that the program began in fiscal year 2012. The group relies extensively on undercover operations, which typically yield a wealth of evidence. Not surprisingly, more than 90 percent of the indictments originating in it result in convictions. But DHS as a whole, which boasts a $60 billion annual budget, has attracted criticism for overzealous investigations. The American Civil Liberties Union has alleged, “As a relatively new member of the Intelligence Community, DHS has struggled to establish a clearly defined role for its intelligence activities, leading at times to error and overreach.”
Like Campbell, Cruzcoriano was also acting, playing the part of a “shady businessman,” as he put it in court. The telephone recordings suggest he pulled off a community theater performance at best, creating an odd parallelism of incompetence between agent and target. In one conversation, Cruzcoriano proposed using a code word for uranium, saying, “I’ll say material instead of the actual word.” “I want you to use M-E-U-S,” Campbell replied. “What?” Cruzcoriano asked. “What does that mean?” Campbell spelled it out: Middle East Uranium Shipment. It was about as subtle as a drug dealer calling heroin “H,” but Cruzcoriano agreed to use the acronym. A week after they’d made contact, Cruzcoriano narrowed the destination from the Middle East to Bandar Abbas, the busiest port in Iran. Never having heard of the place, Campbell looked it up on Google Maps. Bandar Abbas? “No problem,” he replied.
By August 2012 much had been agreed on. At Cruzcoriano’s request, Campbell had written up a seven-page contract for “MEUS oxide.” Once the uranium was extracted from mines in eastern Sierra Leone, he would mix it with other ore, pack it in steel drums, and send it by ship to Iran. For now, he left the price blank.
Cruzcoriano had even persuaded Campbell to come to the U.S. to sign the contract with the Iranian buyers, sending an invitation letter so that he could get a U.S. visa. But the undercover agent and his mark could not agree on who would front the money for travel. Cruzcoriano told Campbell that Iranians would reimburse him only once he arrived in the U.S. “I’m gambling a lot here,” Cruzcoriano said. “For you to ask for money right away makes the buyers nervous. It makes me nervous.” In an exasperated e-mail, Campbell refused to risk so much money before a deal had been struck. Cruzcoriano had his suspicions, too. He later admitted in court that he worried his West African correspondent might take the travel money and run: “At the time, I remember believing it was a scam.”
Despite Cruzcoriano’s doubts, Campbell had in fact been trying to figure out the logistics of extracting and shipping uranium. Even after the deal fell apart, e-mails show, he asked suppliers about buying an excavator, a dump truck, and a container ship, though the inquiries went nowhere. (In a raft of unrelated ventures, he was also imploring various foreign companies, unsuccessfully, to hire him to sell portable solar chargers, X-ray machines, and private airplanes.) In March 2013, seven months after he parted ways with Cruzcoriano, Campbell resurfaced, asking to “resurrect our business.” His change of heart had come during a business trip to Dubai, he explained: After a Pakistani engineer warned him of Africa’s reputation for fraud, he understood why his American buyer had proved so skittish.
In this second round of negotiations, Cruzcoriano gave up on courtliness. He wrote Campbell back:
I just ended a very successful trip to Iran. The buyers are pleased with my success. You and your company no longer are of interest unless you come here and convince them otherwise. That’s all I have to say regarding this lucrative deal.
We see through you and ask that you don’t waste our time. IF you have the product and ways to get it to the port in Bander [sic] Abbas, we can talk. Otherwise don’t waste our time.
Samuel
In June 2013, after Hassan Rouhani was elected president of Iran, Campbell started to have some doubts about the deal. Rouhani had come to power as a reformer promising to improve relations with the U.S., so his election raised the odds of some kind of settlement on the nuclear issue. Washington was now more likely to lift economic sanctions. But instead of rejoicing that it would become easier to trade with Iran—the right reaction for anyone planning on exporting uranium to the country—Campbell worried aloud to Cruzcoriano that the change in leadership might jeopardize their project. The U.S. government contended the discussion proved his knowledge of trade restrictions, but the more straightforward reading is that it revealed a marked ignorance of geopolitics. “Nothing will change,” the agent replied. “The embargoes will be there.” Campbell said in court that he didn’t understand what the word “embargo” meant, but held back from asking the American. “I was embarrassed,” he said.
Campbell did wonder whether his partner might be an undercover agent. During the first round of negotiations, Cruzcoriano, seeding the transcript with dramatic irony, had warned Campbell, “We must remain vigilant because there are others out there posing as sellers or buyers and they can be intelligence officers.” In response to Campbell’s worries during the second round, Cruzcoriano wrote, “I’m NO agent but I understand.” He added, “I am a little doubtful about you.” Campbell followed up by boasting about his credentials. “Patrick, I have work to do,” Cruzcoriano replied. “Come here and visit us and then we can talk all you want.”
Cruzcoriano’s case depended on Campbell’s coming to the U.S. The trade restrictions HSI was attempting to enforce apply only to “U.S. persons.” For Campbell to be arrested, Cruzcoriano would have to make him a U.S. person. That meant getting him to set foot on American soil. One might think a deal involving Iran that went through Miami would raise red flags, but Campbell rationalized that Cruzcoriano’s demand was the understandable position of a skeptical American. Although Campbell had lied about that eye-opening meeting with a Pakistani in Dubai—he never visited the city—he did consider Cruzcoriano’s wariness legitimate. As he would explain his thinking in court: “White people, they don’t believe in African people until maybe they see them.”
On Aug. 7, after a month of radio silence, Cruzcoriano awoke to an e-mail from Campbell with the subject line “Good News.” Two days earlier, at the U.S. embassy in Freetown, Campbell had sat for a visa application interview, during which he omitted any mention of a uranium deal but talked about a conference at the United Nations headquarters he wanted to attend. “Willing to give him a chance,” an embassy official noted in the application file. Campbell had his visa. That suggests two possibilities: Either the U.S. embassy granted a visa to the target of a nuclear proliferation investigation unknowingly, or it did so to allow HSI to arrest Campbell. (The U.S. Department of State declined to comment.)
Just as he had one year before, Cruzcoriano asked for a contract. Campbell delivered, with a price. Multiplying 1,000 tons of uranium by the below-market price of $25 per pound, he asked for $55 million. Despite the big figure, Campbell wasn’t acting like a big-time businessman. He misspelled his own secret acronym, writing, “MUES.” Cruzcoriano chided him, asking, “Have you ever dealt with Iranian people? They are very particular.”
To prove he was serious, Campbell would have to pay for his own ticket to Miami, though he would be reimbursed and given a hotel room. He bought a seat on an Air France flight to New York for $2,250 in cash.
There were a few other things Cruzcoriano wanted. He asked for photos of the mining site, so Campbell got a friend from a zircon mine out east to e-mail him pictures of a gravity-powered device called a spiral separator that refines ore. He asked for a presentation on the uranium project, so Campbell stayed up late putting together a 12-slide PowerPoint on mining in Sierra Leone. And he asked for a sample from the mine, so Campbell got another friend to send one to Freetown.
The question of how the samples ended up in his shoes is a matter of contention. At the time, Campbell told Cruzcoriano the “good news” that if he could talk to a friend who worked at Freetown’s airport, he could bring samples. That suggests that Campbell conspired with the airport insider to figure out how to conceal them intentionally. In court, however, he changed his story, explaining that to pack his luggage, he hired an errand boy, who placed the plastic bags in his shoes to keep his clothes clean. Just before Campbell’s flight was to depart, Cruzcoriano said he worried Campbell might be stopped at customs. Campbell replied in the manner of a teenager swatting away a parent. “Do not worry yourself,” he said. “You are working with a professional.”
After Campbell was arrested at JFK, he ended up in a series of jails in South Florida, where the case was being prosecuted. It took him a month to figure out exactly what had happened to him. A judge in Fort Lauderdale, invoking “the threat posed by Iran to the security of the United States,” denied him bail on the grounds that he’d been “charged with a crime involving explosives or destructive devices.” As Campbell bounced from cell to cell, he struck up friendships with fellow inmates. Some taught him basketball, one punched him in the face over a dispute about television, and one, at the Broward County jail, helped Campbell decode his indictment. “UCA,” the inmate explained, stood for “undercover agent.”
For someone who had supposedly inked two previous uranium deals, Campbell was destitute—he had arrived in America with $180 in his pocket, reasoning that he could find a hotel for $5 a night. The court appointed him a lawyer named Richard Serafini, a former New York prosecutor with an expertise in white-collar crime. As Serafini pored over the correspondence with Cruzcoriano, he came to realize that Campbell had a point: Where the government saw a devious uranium peddler, Serafini saw an energetic entrepreneur guilty of nothing more than getting in over his head. The trick now was getting a jury to buy that argument.
The trial took place this May, in a frigid, windowless courtroom in West Palm Beach. Campbell wore borrowed pants he had to hold up with his hands, along with a white dress shirt of his own. Stored with the rest of his luggage in a government facility with no air conditioning, the shirt had turned mildewy, but Serafini had gotten his dry cleaner to rehabilitate it.
The government insinuated that Campbell’s scheme would have ended with a mushroom cloud. In his opening statement to the jury, prosecutor Michael Walleisa promised, “You will hear in a recorded conversation that Mr. Campbell knew full well what that uranium was going to be used for.” After Walleisa played the tape, Cruzcoriano testified that Campbell said, “I am ready to make explosives.” But the sound quality was bad, and the defense argued that it was a case of a misheard phrase. Campbell claimed he actually said, “I am ready to make it snappy,” meaning that the deal would move quickly.
Then there was the matter of the claylike samples hidden in his shoes. The prosecution’s indictment, filed the day after his arrest, characterized them as uranium. Yet when a nuclear expert with Customs and Border Protection named J. Patrick Donnachie inspected the substance the next week, he thought it looked like dirt, not yellowcake. When he tested it for uranium, he found it contained only trace amounts. Because of what Donnachie termed “the high profile of this case,” the samples were sent to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California for further analysis. Scientists there came to the same conclusion. In an apparent reference to the government’s press release and ensuing media coverage, they wrote, “Despite initial open-source reporting that alleged the smuggling of uranium ore concentrate … the questioned material is definitely not UOC.”
In fact, the sample contained just 33 parts per million of uranium—higher than typical soil in the U.S. would register, but nothing special for parts of Sierra Leone. When Matthew Bunn, a nuclear security expert at Harvard Kennedy School, hears that figure, he bursts into laughter. “If I were Iran, I’d mine elsewhere,” he says. Usually, for rock to be commercially viable, uranium must exist in concentrations above 500 parts per million. Campbell’s sample, as Serafini put it to the jury, “was literally garden-variety dirt.”
It wasn’t part of his defense, but even if Campbell could somehow extract, refine, and export all that uranium, the Iranians might not have been that interested; if they were, they would certainly have preferred a more capable broker. Although Iran gets uranium from its own deposits, it is plausible that it might like a secret source to circumvent international inspectors, who have access to its mines. But at this point, it’s too late to stop the country’s nuclear weapons program through denying it uranium or anything else. As U.S. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has conceded, Iran does not want for know-how or material; all that’s lacking is the political decision to produce a bomb.
Serafini’s argument to the jury was more legalistic. For the export regulations in question, the prosecution had to prove that Campbell had violated them knowingly. But Serafini said his client never knew about “arcane American law.” While the prosecution pointed to Cruzcoriano’s comments during negotiations that the shipment was “delicate” and “discreet” as evidence that Campbell must have known he was engaged in illegal activity, those adjectives can apply to legitimate business negotiations, too. And Cruzcoriano never informed him the deal would be illegal, a standard move in undercover operations. When Serafini was a prosecutor in New York, he said, police carrying out a sting always knew to get the suspect to admit on tape, “We could all end up in the slammer for this.” According to Campbell, he realized the U.S. and Iran were not on speaking terms only in jail, after he read an article in the Sun Sentinel about the historic phone call between Obama and Rouhani on Sept. 27, 2013, the first contact between leaders of the two countries in 34 years. In fact, Campbell says that before he was arrested, all he knew about U.S.-Iranian relations was that “the U.S. always goes to the Middle East and fights and all that.”
HSI declined to discuss its investigation into Campbell. But Al DeAngelus, who heads the unit for which Cruzcoriano works, did speak in general terms about its procedures. He says that from the beginning of an investigation, his unit brings in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida, which “walks hand-in-hand with us,” and that DeAngelus’s unit works with Walleisa on “almost all” its cases. (The U.S. Attorney’s Office also declined to discuss the case.) Moreover, DeAngelus says, undercover agents always try to get targets to admit that they are violating export laws. “Nobody wants to put an innocent person in jail.”
“Nobody wants to put an innocent person in jail”
In the deliberation room, when the jury took a poll, 10 of the 12 voted not guilty. “It was evident that this was just a poor schnook,” says Don Pucillo, one of the jurors. As time wore on, one holdout remained: a man who heard “explosives,” not “snappy.” But he ultimately gave way, and the jury reached unanimity. When it announced the verdict, Campbell fell to his knees and made the sign of the cross. His nine months in the U.S. had come to an end.
A week after his acquittal, Campbell recounted his story from an immigration detention facility in Miami. He wore the standard navy blue jumpsuit of a detainee but also, beneath his thin mustache, the smile of an exonerated man. He wanted to see his family back home. He also wanted to get back to selling gold and diamonds.
Yet another week later, after flying back to Freetown, Campbell’s mood would grow desperate. The Sierra Leonean government had issued a statement following his arrest claiming he wasn’t a Sierra Leonean but a “common criminal using a false name.” Not long after, a website seemingly designed to inflict maximum damage to his Google search results, patrickcampbellexposed.com, inexplicably appeared, attempting to link him to various corrupt business figures. Campbell’s partners in Freetown hadn’t heard from him in Florida, but they read about him online. That, Campbell says, explains why his staff had abandoned him, as he discovered on his return. His office had been looted; the safe where he kept gold and diamonds was gone.
So was his wife, who, not knowing when her husband would return from the U.S., had left him. Perhaps they might reconcile when she learns the truth, Campbell speculates. But he also learned of a more permanent loss: his daughter and one of his foster children, he says, died in early May during heavy rainfall in Freetown that dislodged houses, while Campbell was still in West Palm Beach. He now lives off the kindness of friends and sleeps alone on the floor of a church. “Everything fell apart,” he had said before he went home. “Things Fall Apart—I hope you’ve read that story before.”
Reid is a Bloomberg Businessweek contributor.
