by Alan Feuer
NYT

Man­hat­tan on a Fri­day after­noon: down­town along the East River, where the sun was flash­ing brightly and a lazy week­end called. Women strolled through the South Street Sea­port in their sum­mer dresses; tourists went on round-the-island heli­copter tours. It was close enough to Wall Street to almost feel the bro­kers get­ting ready to head off to their houses by the sea.

Then, from a clear blue sky, an ordi­nary A-Star heli­copter touched down at a heli­pad on Pier 6. Armed fed­eral agents waited for it blandly, dark shades catch­ing the sun. A white-haired man, in shack­les, emerged from the cabin and was led across the tar­mac to a wait­ing black Cadil­lac Escalade. The Escalade turned gen­tly onto South Street, merged with local traf­fic and dis­ap­peared in the direc­tion of the fed­eral jail, half a mile up the street.

The city has its secrets, many of them openly on dis­play, and this was one of them: an inter­na­tional arms dealer arriv­ing in New York, hav­ing just been extra­dited by the gov­ern­ment of Spain. His name is Monzer al-Kassar, and he had recently come off a flight from Europe, fol­lowed by a 40-minute heli­copter jaunt from Westch­ester County Air­port. He looked hag­gard, and was per­haps wear­ing the clothes that he had slept in. He did not look pleased.

Before his arrest last June at Madrid Bara­jas Inter­na­tional Air­port, Mr. Kas­sar, 62, was a vastly wealthy weapons dealer, a wanted man for more than 30 years who offi­cials say played roles in the Iran-contra affair, the Achille Lauro hijack­ing and the insur­gency in Iraq.

His arrest in Spain last year (despite the pres­ence of his two body­guards) was the cap­stone of an Amer­i­can under­cover oper­a­tion that resulted in his indict­ment in New York in a plot to ship mil­lions of dol­lars of weapons on a Greek freighter bound from Roma­nia to mem­bers of the Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Armed Forces of Colom­bia, or FARC.

No one would have known that a cap­tured sus­pect, accused of sell­ing arms to ter­ror­ists and of help­ing Sad­dam Hus­sein spirit a bil­lion dol­lars out of Iraq, was land­ing in a crowd at the Wall Street heli­port unless he or she had been alerted in advance. (In fact, the news media were tipped off in advance, and a row of pho­tog­ra­phers with tele­photo lenses lined a rail­ing near the river as French and Ger­man tourists asked them who was coming.)

Still, if one knew what to look for, there were signs: the Escalade, a fast boat from the Police Depart­ment Har­bor Unit bob­bing on the water, a few fit men in dark­ish suits with corkscrewed plas­tic wires in their ears.

Mr. Kas­sar had been in cus­tody in Spain since his arrest, when he was lured to Madrid by agents of the Drug Enforce­ment Admin­is­tra­tion from his sea­side villa in Mar­bella. Pros­e­cu­tors seek­ing his extra­di­tion filed papers ear­lier this year, accus­ing him of agree­ing to sell a cargo freighter’s worth of rifles, pis­tols, grenade launch­ers and shoulder-fired rock­ets to the rebels in Colom­bia who seek to kill Amer­i­can forces there on antidrug missions.

Should it go to trial, the case will most likely be a cin­e­matic thriller with a cast of char­ac­ters that includes a man named “Samir” who was the D.E.A.’s infor­mant; Luis Felipe Moreno Godoy, Mr. Kassar’s accoun­tant; Tareq Mousa al-Ghazi, another arms dealer who 20 years ago, offi­cials say, helped Mr. Kas­sar pull off deals in Hun­gary, the Czech Repub­lic and Yemen; and var­i­ous of Mr. Kassar’s employ­ees, not the least a Greek ship­ping cap­tain named Kris­tos who worked for him for more than 30 years.

All of which came as news to Andrew Mox­ley, a postal clerk from Texas, who had strolled around the Bat­tery with his fam­ily and was look­ing for a snack. The Mox­leys passed the heli­port just sec­onds after the A-Star 350 had departed. They were going to a Broad­way show that night, but Mr. Mox­ley sighed.

“I wished I would have seen it,” he said. “That’s way cooler.”