Businessman’s trail is a complex one
the 2006 sale of his Loudonville home to a mysterious buyer, was especially beneficial, netting him a substantial profit.
While Hussain’s son Nauman, 28, was charged with one count of criminally negligent homicide four days after the calamity, Hussain has been in his native Pakistan, where he is reportedly getting medical treatment and recovering from surgery a few months back.
And there is no indication that Hussain is returning anytime soon.
Recurring themes
The tendency to disappear for months at a time is a recurring theme in the more than two decades that Hussain has been living in the Capital Region and operating a variety of cash-generating businesses, ranging from gas stations and supermarkets to a motel and the limousine company.
Hussain — who has also gone by the name Malik — has said in court that he routinely has traveled to Dubai, London and Pakistan on business. He accomplished all of this while raising a family and serving for at least a decade as an undercover informant for the FBI, a job that required his participation as the federal government’s star witness in two high-profile terrorism trials.
Hussain’s life as a federal informant began in 2002 after he was arrested in an FBI sting that caught him working with a DMV employee to obtain drivers licenses for immigrants through the use of false identities. He quickly started working as an undercover informant, wearing a wire when needed, and helped to net more arrests in the DMV scam scandal and a heroin drug ring.
But beneath his secret work for the FBI and his purported international business connections, there are even more questions that have been raised about Hussain’s past, such as why he sought asylum here in the mid-1990s, and whether he was actually working on behalf of a foreign government.
Attorneys representing defendants in the two terrorism cases would often question him about his past, raising doubts about when he really entered the country and the truthfulness of his asylum claims.
During court testimony in the terrorism trials and a civil case that Hussain brought against the Saratoga County Water Authority during his time as a motel owner, he claimed to be part of a wealthy Pakistani family that owned a construction business. He claimed to be the brother of Malik Riaz Hussain, a billionaire Pakistani real estate magnate who founded a sprawling company called Bahria Town.
Hussain also testified that he is a close family friend and a onetime neighbor of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. Like many details of his life, it’s a claim that raises many questions: Hussain is believed to have grown up in Pakistan’s northern Punjab province, while Bhutto grew up in Karachi on the Indian Ocean to the south.
The details of Hussain’s life in the U.S. are even murkier and much harder to ascertain, due primarily to his deft use of the legal system and often mysterious sources of cash that have kept him in business despite decades of legal woes — including criminal charges, bankruptcy and civil litigation.
Loudonville house deal
Hussain and his now-deceased wife, Yasmeen Begum, were also involved in a mysterious real estate transaction in 2006 involving their Loudonville home, which was gutted in a 2003 fire.
Hussain and his wife bought the historic Queen Anne-style house along Loudon Road in 1998 for $90,000.
After the fire, Hussain obtained building permits and hired contractors to do work on the house, according to town of Colonie records. But the house never passed inspection, and the town refused to issue a certificate of occupancy after deeming it
unsafe. The house was uninhabitable, and town building inspectors threatened legal action if something wasn’t done.
But in the summer of 2006, Hussain was bailed out of his problem: An out-of-town buyer swooped in and bought the unfinished house for a whopping $450,000 — more than $300,000 above the former home’s market value before the fire.
The half-rebuilt house, which changed hands twice more since the sale, was torn down in 2010 by the current property owners.
Not even the town historian objected to the demolition, saying it “no longer resembled” the original structure. The lot remains vacant to this day.
The year after the fire, Hussain relocated his family to Memphis, Tenn., for “security” reasons related to his FBI work. He used the windfall from the 2006 home sale to buy the run-down Hideaway Motel in Saratoga County upon his return to the Capital Region the same year.
The family renamed the property the Crest Inn Suites & Cottages in 2009. Hussain and his wife had never run a motel before. Hussain used it as the business address for his limousine venture, which he launched in 2012 under
the name Prestige Limousine and Chauffeur Service.
Meanwhile, the new owner of Hussain’s former Loudonville home quickly became an enigma as well.
According to the deed and mortgage documents, the purchaser was a man named Sajid Rehan. He never lived in the home, which quickly fell into foreclosure before being sold at auction in July 2009 at a steep discount to Well Fargo Bank.
Throughout the process, Rehan could not be located by the mortgage company, or by the investigators hired to try to serve him with court papers notifying him that he was in danger of losing his home.
An investigation by the Times Union could not locate Rehan, either.
The Memphis, Tenn., apartment given as Rehan’s address on the 2006 deed to the Loudonville home is the same one that had been used to incorporate a supermarket business that Shahed Hussain and his wife ran while they were living in Tennessee from late 2004 to early 2006.
During their time in Tennessee, the FBI reimbursed the couple for their relocation expenses as well as their rent.
The FBI will not comment on any of the details of Hussain’s business or personal transactions, although there is no indication from any court testimony or other public documents that the bureau was involved in any of them.
“The FBI does not confirm or deny the identity of our sources,” Sarah Ruane, a spokeswoman for the FBI’S Albany field office, said in a statement after the Times Union provided the FBI with copies of court documents from the foreclosure case. “Sources and informants are tremendously important to the bureau and we go to extensive lengths to protect their identities.”
But Hussain had been identified as a federal informant in multiple courtroom proceedings.
Mortgage Lenders Network USA, the Connecticut subprime mortgage company that had financed the August 2006 purchase of the Loudonville home, filed for bankruptcy only months later, becoming one of the largest casualties of the housing collapse that would sweep the nation in 2008.
Wells Fargo, which was the trustee of the mortgage-backed securities that contained the note on the Loudonville home, filed a foreclosure suit against Rehan in state Supreme Court in Albany in June 2007. A bank spokesman declined to comment.
None of the investigators or attorneys hired to track Rehan down by the bank had any success, including Daniel Centi, an Albany attorney who was appointed by the court to act as a “guardian” in the case since Rehan couldn’t be located.
When Centi visited the site of the Hussains’ former home at 456 Loudon Road in early 2008 as part of his search, he discovered that the unfinished house had been abandoned, apparently for a long time. A small bulldozer was still on the site, but a neighbor told him he hadn’t seen anyone at the property since the previous year.
While foreclosures happen all the time, and sometimes the owners skip town, this case was different, especially since Loudonville is the type of upscale suburb where people don’t just vanish into thin air.
“I remember thinking at the time that it was a little stranger than usual,” he said last week. “That wasn’t a bad neighborhood. That’s why I think it was a little unusual.”
Another investigator hired to find Rehan also checked the Memphis apartment listed on the deed, to no avail.
That investigator did uncover that the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles had issued a Class “E” drivers license, typically used by taxi drivers, to someone named Sajid Rehan who claimed to have a Long Island address. The license was surrendered in Tennessee in December 2006.
A DMV spokeswoman declined to comment.
When the Times Union visited the Central Islip home listed on the license, the owner of the house, who has lived there since buying it in 2002, said he never heard of Rehan.
Colonie’s oversight
Even before the Loudonville house was sold to a buyer that appeared not to exist, it was a major headache for town officials.
Documents on file with the town of Colonie’s building department show that town inspectors had repeatedly warned Hussain after the fire that the Loudon Road home was a public safety hazard, and that no one should be living in the house until construction was complete.
Although Hussain had let his homeowners insurance policy lapse before the blaze, the bank that held the mortgage, Ocwen Federal Bank, had a $225,000 “forced placed” insurance policy on the house that was used to pay off the mortgage.
The Hussains were given the balance of the insurance payout, around $83,000 that they intended to use to rebuild the house. Hussain has testified in court that a unnamed contractor made off with some of that, although there is no documentation to confirm that.
Hussain hired Paul Zostant, a local carpenter and contractor, to help oversee some of the work being done on the Loudonville home in December 2005. Zostant also acted as a liaison with building inspectors.
In a letter to the town, Zostant found dozens of issues with the reconstruction and noted that parts of the home were “structurally unsound.” A previous contractor doing the work, he said, had taken the building permit off the house and wouldn’t return it.
When contacted by the Times