Law Beat column on legal defense in wake of crash.
To veteran Albany defense lawyer Terry Kindlon, former FBI informant Shahed “Malik” Hussain was an untrustworthy con man whose testimony helped convict his client of supporting terrorism.
To his son, Albany defense lawyer Lee Kindlon, Hussain has a different distinction: client. The younger Kindlon took on the defense of Hussain, and his 28-year-old son Nauman, after their limousine crashed in Schoharie on Oct. 6, killing all 18 people in the limo and two pedestrians. The younger Hussain was charged with criminally negligent homicide. His father is outside the country.
The law, just like politics, can sure make for strange bedfellows.
“I have no issue with Lee’s representation,” said the elder Kindlon, who retired in late July as the chief assistant to Albany County Public Defender Stephen Herrick. “Lee’s record speaks for itself. Clients make decisions about who to retain for any number of reasons and I am confident that, in this matter, Lee was selected because he is such a talented, fearless and zealous advocate.”
Shahed Hussain was the FBI’S star informant
in their 2004 counterterrorism sting case that ensnared two men: Yassin Aref, a Kurdish refugee from Iraq and imam of the Masjid Al-salam mosque in Albany, and Mohammed Hussein, a Bangladeshi immigrant who owned the Little Italy pizzeria on Central Avenue in Albany.
The men were convicted in 2006 in U.S. District Court in Albany of planning to launder money from the fictitious sale of a shoulder-fired missile. Both were later sentenced to 15 years in prison.
Terry Kindlon represented Aref.
In 2009, when the Times Union reported that Hussain worked as an informant in a Newburgh terrorism case, Terry Kindlon referred to the informant as a “highly sophisticated confidence man” (aka con man) who could not be trusted because he was a paid informant.
The next year, Terry Kindlon and Kathy Manley, a lawyer in his firm, attended the trial of the men Hussain testified against. They were monitoring his testimony to look for avenues to appeal Aref’s and Hussein’s convictions.
“Sometimes it happens that you’ve got to do a couple trials with a snitch before you really break through the surface and find out what’s going on,” Terry Kindlon said at the time. “There was certainly smoke, but now there’s fire . ... We have done everything within our power to assist them in their defense of this case and in their destruction of Malik.”
With that sort of history, one might think Hussain or his son would be the last people on earth the younger Kindlon would defend.
Terry Kindlon, however, told Law Beat that his son, a Marine like his father, was on active duty for almost the entire case against Aref.
“Lee never had any substantive contact with the case, i.e., no legal research or writing or anything of that nature, and, at most, he may have stopped by the jail to check on Aref’s welfare while Laurie and I were defending Chris Porco in Orange County,” Terry Kindlon said, referring to his wife and law partner, Laurie Shanks, and their representation of Porco, the notorious ax murderer convicted of killing his father, Peter, and maiming his mother, Joan, in their Delmar home in 2004.
“He was not involved in the trial and had nothing to do with any of the government’s witnesses,” Terry Kindlon said. “There is no legal reason why Lee cannot represent the family and I’m certain they retained Lee because of his splendid reputation and extensive experience.”
Lee Kindlon told Law Beat that when he first moved to Albany, he was trying to get his feet under himself as a new father and assistant public defender.
“When it first happened, I remember hearing about the case and thinking that my father would probably be assigned,” he said. “There are only a few people I know who could stand strong against the headwinds of anti-muslim sentiment and defend his client with every ounce of his energy. Maybe it’s just because kids think their parents can do anything, but I think Terry’s record speaks for itself.”
Now the younger Kindlon is adding to his own record — for the unlikeliest of clients.