Double Agent: An FBI Informant Makes a New Career as a Defense Expert

May 21st, 2015

Awake Goy

NOT LONG AFTER the U.S. Department of Justice announced terrorism charges in February against a group of Brooklyn men who allegedly plotted to join the Islamic State in Syria, a defense lawyer for one of the men received an unusual phone call. It was from Craig Monteilh, a former FBI informant who is positioning himself as a for-hire expert witness and defense consultant.

Monteilh offered a cocksure proposition — he could help derail the government’s case, which relied on an FBI informant to help facilitate the alleged plot. In fact, Monteilh volunteered, he’d already helped to undermine one counterterrorism prosecution. He could do it again, he promised.

With a clean-shaven head and imposing figure, Monteilh hardly looks the part of paid defense consultant. He’s 6 feet 2 inches tall and weighs 278 pounds. His biceps measure 23 inches around. His cadence is slow and deliberate, as if he weighs words carefully in his mind before delivering them.

A longtime informant for the FBI, the fair-skinned Monteilh, who is African-American, has proved to be an effective chameleon. He says he has portrayed himself as a Russian hit man, a Sicilian drug trafficker and even a white supremacist. In 2009, Monteilh went public with a jaw-dropping story during a press conference hastily assembled in his living room: He told the news media that he had spent months undercover in Southern California’s Muslim community on orders from the FBI, posing as a French-Syrian convert named Farouk al-Aziz and on the lookout for would-be terrorists.

He admitted that he was a convicted criminal, and despite a non-disclosure agreement he’d signed with the agency, alleged that FBI agents sent him into mosques with no reason at all to be suspicious of their targets other than that they were Muslim. Monteilh even said that FBI agents told him to have sex with Muslim women in order to gather pillow-talk intelligence.

Monteilh’s story made national and international headlines. This American Life even came to town to document this weird slice of post-9/11 Americana. Monteilh alleges that, at the behest of the FBI, he once pleaded guilty to stealing $157,000 from two women as part of a undercover informant operation that involved buying and selling of human growth hormone. The FBI, according to Monteilh, reneged on its promise to scrub that from his criminal record and sued the agency for having led him into the legal mess despite “immunity” that is supposed to be granted to informants. (Monteilh says the case ended in a confidential settlement, but, according to a spokesperson for the Department of Justice, Monteilh’s suit against the agency was dismissed.)

Information Monteilh exposed also led the American Civil Liberties Union and others to file a class-action lawsuit that accused the FBI of targeting Muslim Americans for surveillance because of their religion. That lawsuit was hobbled after the Department of Justice asserted the state secrets privilege.

The former FBI informant has always been in the game for money. During his FBI counterterrorism work, which was part of a project called Operation Flex, he was pulling in more than $10,000 in cash per month. After burning the FBI and going public with his story, he expected to find a new payday — a book contract, perhaps, maybe even a movie deal. But the Hollywood agents never called.