'Smiling' Somali Pirate Says Jailers Have Ruined His Grin
The handwriting is his, as it matches court documents that he personally filled out and signed. It is a near-certainty that a native English speaker coached him very heavily for the letters.
I asked him about the Alabama hijacking, but Muse insisted he couldn’t say much about it since he had appeals pending. (He has since lost those appeals.) He said his plan had been to work as a fisherman in what he described as a "small village on the ocean,” a place identified in a sentencing memorandum as Garacad, "one of a number of piracy centers” in the semi-autonomous province of Puntland.
Muse said he had never seen Captain Phillips, the movie. He said he would probably watch if it was ever shown on the prison TV system.
He also asked if I would send him a copy of Capt. Richard Phillips’ memoir of the hijacking, A Captain’s Duty, which he said he hadn’t read, either.
Somewhat reluctantly, I sent Muse "the ‘Captain Phillips’ book,” as he called it, via Amazon, as he instructed; federal prisons require that books sent to inmates come directly from the publisher or distributor so nothing can be smuggled inside of it.
I was automatically notified by Amazon when Muse got the book. I waited eagerly for his response, regularly checking the P.O. box I had rented to facilitate our correspondence. I wrote to him a few more times, asking what he thought about the story, which parts he considered most accurate, and so forth.
I
kept the P.O. box months longer than I probably should have, finally
canceling it only when it became obvious I would never heard from Muse
again.
But if Muse was curious about what Richard Phillips had to say
about the hijacking in his book, I wondered how Phillips—and other
crewmembers that were there—would react to Muse’s take on things in his
letters to me.
So I asked them.
For starters, Muse’s teeth
"were terrible to begin with,” Capt. Richard Phillips told me. Nor did
he ever once smile during the hijacking, Phillips said.
Phillips
said Muse, who claimed not to speak any English when he arrived in
America, likely understood more than he let on in court.
"His
English was better than half my crew,” said Phillips. "He may not have
all the words, but he has all the curses. That’s one thing [the
hijackers] all said, they wanted to come to the U.S. And he got his
wish.”
Muse is housed in FCI Terre Haute’s Communications
Management Unit, or CMU, a highly restrictive wing reserved for some of
America’s most notorious criminals and terrorists, including "American
Taliban” John Walker Lindh. The CMU is colloquially known as "Guantanamo
North,” which Muse noted in his first letter, and contains 55 cells, of
which five are used for disciplinary segregation. CMU inmates aren’t
allowed contact visits, and everything they say to family or friends
must be in English.
All letters to and from inmates in the CMU
are read by prison officials, all telephone calls are recorded, and
audio surveillance picks up all inmate conversation, which is then
analyzed by an offsite counterterrorism unit.
Muse makes $19 a
month working as a prison orderly, though he sees considerably less than
that on payday. The judge in his case ordered his wages garnished to
pay the $550,000 in restitution he owes for the hijacking, plus a court
fee of $600 due upon conviction.
A planned documentary by
Lesotho-Canadian documentarian Kaizer Matsumunyane about Muse stalled in
2013. Matsumunyane continued to post very occasional updates about Muse
on Facebook until they ended abruptly 16 months ago. According to the
postings, Muse got his GED in 2016 after struggling with the English
portion. He also spent at least one 30-day stretch in solitary for being
"a bit disruptive” and lost his phone privileges for a month.
Phillips said Muse is still better off in the U.S., even in prison, than he was before.
"He didn’t have a chance to sue anybody in Somalia,” he laughed.
There
were about 45 inmates in the CMU when Muse and I first corresponded.
Roughly 25 of them were Muslim, said Muse, who described himself as
devoutly Islamic. Without many activities with which to occupy himself,
Muse said he spent free time reading, writing, watching television, and
talking to "my brothers. We do get along well, the place is quiet and
peaceful.”
However, Phillips claimed Muse was actually a
Christian convert to Islam, something he was told during the four days
Muse and his compatriots held him hostage on one of the Alabama’s
lifeboats.
His time on that boat "was a lot worse than what you
saw in the movie,” Phillips told me. "What they did to me was a lot
worse than that. They made it very clear to me, had anything come into
that lifeboat, a bullet, a person, whatever, the first person who died
would be me. They had guns to my head many times.”
Muse never
broke character, perpetually "coughing, spitting, cussing, belittling
me,” Phillips said. Still, he has a grudging respect of sorts for Muse,
calling him "a good leader.”
"He snapped his three guys up and they followed him explicitly,” Phillips recalled.
At
one point, Phillips suddenly leapt from the lifeboat and began swimming
toward the USS Bainbridge, which was on the scene trying to negotiate
an end to the standoff.
"The escape bid was witnessed by the U.S.
Navy but happened too quickly for them to come to his aid,” the
Guardian reported at the time. "It was not clear if the pirates had
aimed at Phillips, but he is believed to be unharmed. News of Phillips'
daring escape attempt came after the pirates vowed to fight if they are
attacked. There were also unconfirmed reports that the hijackers had
called in reinforcements.”
But Phillips told me he actually wasn’t trying to escape.
"It
was just so hot” inside the unventilated, covered lifeboat that he
simply "wanted to jump in the water.” Phillips’ captors fired shots at
him, and he quickly swam back to the boat.
Five days later, the lifeboat ran out of gas.
As
it sat motionless, a Navy launch pulled up to deliver food and water to
Phillips and the four hijackers. At this point, Muse stepped aboard and
asked to make a phone call. He had also suffered a cut on his hand when
the Alabama’s crew rose up against him days earlier, and Muse wanted
medical treatment. He was then taken aboard the Bainbridge, which now
had the lifeboat under tow.
When spotters aboard the Bainbridge
saw one of the pirates holding an AK-47 to Phillips’s back and
determined his life was in imminent danger, snipers on the ship’s
fantail took out all three pirates with single shots to the head.
Phillips was unharmed.
"I
thought I was caught in the crossfire between the three pirates,” he
said. "I could see them breaking down with Muse not being there, and
that’s one of the things that caused the end to come. I think he knew
something was going down, we were getting closer to the coast. But also,
I’ll say he was weak—he quit.”
In one of his letters, Muse
complained of depression and said he was suffering from PTSD—court
papers filed by his defense team allege this was at least partly brought
on by seeing his cohorts shot in the head with .30-caliber slugs. He
said he was held in solitary confinement, with no outside communication
except for visits from his court-appointed lawyer, for the first year of
his incarceration. In court papers, the government argued this was
necessary because Muse allegedly called a pirate crew in Somalia from a
prison phone during his pre-trial detention at the Metropolitan
Correctional Center in Manhattan, and ordered the captain of another
hijacked vessel, the Win Far 161, to be assassinated. Muse’s lawyers
argued the government made a translation error.
Phillips holds no
grudge against Muse, saying he had no opportunities in Somalia and
ultimately made bad decisions that led him to where he is today.
"Somalia
is a lawless country,” said Phillips. "Muse was working for the
warlords up north. The only thing that’s going to get rid of piracy,
which starts on land and then reaches out to sea, is to do something
about that lawlessness.”
While he was interested to hear about Muse’s life now, Phillips doesn’t feel a particular need to know much more.
"We
got our points across very clear in that lifeboat,” he said. "I have no
ill will toward the guy, but I have no desire to meet him or talk to
him again.”
But Captain Phillips’ second-in-command on the
Alabama, First Mate Shane Murphy, said he’d actually be kind of
interested in sitting down with Muse for a one-on-one.
"We were
both captains of that ship at one point,” Murphy told me. "I went to
school, that’s what got me to that spot in the ocean. He took a
different route to get there. Now, it’s ended differently—I’m where I am
and he’s where he is. He’s living with the consequences now.”
Murphy,
who vividly remembers having his hands around Muse’s neck at one point
during the hijacking, is now the captain of his own ship, the MV Energy
Enterprise. His routes no longer take him to Africa; he now prefers U.S.
waters.
While Murphy continues his life as a mariner, another
crewman that was on the Maersk Alabama when it was hijacked decided to
pack it in shortly afterward.
"I [later] went back on a ship and
after a month I had enough, so I got off and I retired,” said the former
crewman, who asked for anonymity.
It’s clear that he has mixed
feelings about Muse and the other three pirates, expressing dismay that
Muse was even given his day in court.
"But, who am I to say?” he
continued. "I was made to understand that these people were fishermen
and when these warlords came into it, they were threatened if they don’t
go out and do the pirate thing, their families would be killed.”
In his letters (and confirmed in court documents), Muse said he was driven to piracy because he had no other choice.
"Throughout [his] early years, Abduwali [Muse] experienced a state of deprivation that is almost inconceivable in the United States,” his lawyers wrote in a sentencing memorandum.
young child, Abduwali
survived primarily on camel’s milk, although sometimes he had fruit or
nuts. About once a month, he might be given a cooked meal. He vividly
remembers the agonizing hunger that he experienced as a young boy.
Abduwali’s life was difficult in other ways ... When his father was
particularly upset, he would tie Abduwali to a tree and tell him that a
lion would come to eat him.”
The prosecution acknowledged Muse’s
difficult childhood, but explained to the court that the Alabama
hijacking was not his first one.
"During a five-week period in
the spring of 2009, Muse, a Somali citizen, led a gang of pirates on a
series of violent attacks against three different ships that were
navigating in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Somalia,” the government
said in their argument for the maximum sentence of 405 months, which he
ultimately received.
"By all accounts Muse did not just commit
the acts to which he pled guilty; he reveled in them. From boasting
about the millions he had made from prior hijackings to laughing after
pulling the trigger of his pistol next to a hostage’s head to suggesting
that he would cut up a hostage and sell his organs, Muse derived joy
from the suffering of his victims. He abused them physically and
psychologically in an effort to subdue and control them.”
"Fifty-three
sailors spread across six countries along with their families have been
profoundly affected by Muse’s choices and actions,” the filing said.
One
of them, Maersk Alabama Third Engineer John Cronan, was unable to go
back to work after the hijacking and ultimately lost his home to
foreclosure. His wife experienced panic attacks anytime he left the
house and she couldn’t reach him. His daughter suffered from nightmares
and said she was afraid that Muse would escape from prison and harm her.
Four
years after the hijacking, Alabama chief engineer Mike Perry, who had
ambushed Muse early on and managed to stab him in the hand in an
unsuccessful attempt to turn the situation around, sent an email to the
rest of the crew:
"To all of the Alabama Shipmates, On this
anniversary of the Navy freeing Richard [Phillips], I have just received
a phone call from Special Agent Steve Sorrells of the FBI. Steve is the
agent that came to Mombasa to perform the investigation and collect our
statements. Two years ago, he went out of his way to personally return
to me the knife that I used to take down Abduwali [Muse] with. They came
right to my house to present it to me. Anyway, he called because he
wanted us all to know that we have not been forgotten. They remember
what we went through and what we did. He is a nice guy, and truly has
reached out in respect to all of you. We all did good, we all came home.
A job well done. Thank you.”
Retired Rear Admiral Terry McKnight was
the commander of anti-piracy naval forces off Somalia when the Alabama
was hijacked. He calls the pirates he has interacted with "desperate,
desperate people.”
"When we capture pirates on the ships, that’s
the first time in their life some of them have seen toilet paper, or
three meals a day, or dental care,” McKnight told me. He said the
fishermen who get into piracy are generally coastal fishermen who work
the shorelines, and are "terrified” of going to sea. Many of them don’t
even know how to swim.
The point isn’t to kill anyone, said
McKnight. Hijacking operations are in fact "investments” overseen by
local warlords, who take the bulk of any ransoms collected for
themselves. Someone like Muse might get a few hundred bucks for
hijacking a vessel like the Alabama. For someone who regularly struggled
to feed himself, as Muse said he did, that’s a big incentive.
Unfortunately,
the conditions on the ground that created this problem in the first
place "haven’t changed one little bit,” said Steed, the former UN
counter-piracy head.
Yet, pirate attacks off the Horn of Africa have gone down drastically since Muse and his crew seized the Alabama.
The
drop is due in part to better ship tracking, and transiting risky areas
at higher speeds, but more than anything else, it’s the now-standard
presence of armed guards on vessels, according to Steed. Since the
Alabama incident, "it’s only ships without armed security on board that
have been taken.”
Accordingly, piracy is no longer a profitable
business, and Steed said the number of active pirates in Somalia has
dwindled to mere double-digits. He estimates only four pirate groups
remain, with eight to 10 members each.
The only one that has made
it to America now sits in an midwestern penitentiary. He unsuccessfully
appealed his conviction in 2016, arguing that he was only 16 at the
time of his arrest and shouldn’t have been tried as an adult, something
he also mentioned in his letters to me. U.S. investigators testified
Muse told them he was between 18 and 19.
"Pretty interesting [that] he thinks he was unjustly punished,” said Shane Murphy. "Shooting at us?”
Although I haven’t heard from him in five years, Abduwali Muse surely has more to say.
As he signed off his last letter to me, "P.S. I’m writing my own book, so someday you may see that!”
'Smiling' Somali Pirate Says Jailers Have Ruined His Grin
The lead hijacker of the MV Maersk Alabama off the coast of Somalia nearly 10 years ago has lost nearly half of the teeth in his mouth, according to a federal civil rights lawsuit he filed from prison. Abduwali Abdukhadir Muse, who was portrayed b