Sufian "Sam" Rahman, the man who fled to Jordan to avoid being charged as part of the ATM Solutions armed robbery, emails to say he’s just seen the article and wants to know why I didn’t interview him. I couldn’t find him, I point out. His name, incidentally, is Sufian Abdelrahman, but as he was charged in this country as Sufian Rahman, we’ll use that shorter version for consistency. He’s now in Qatar. And he wants to come back.
“This situation ruined my whole life,” he says. “I am unhappy in the Middle East. I lived most of my life in the U.S. I’ll be honest with you: I’m scared.”
Rahman owned Heavy Hitters, the custom-car business that worked—unwittingly, he insists—on the car used in the robbery. He starts at the beginning.
“Maybe three weeks before the robbery, James Wright and Latunya [Wright, his sister] introduced me to Face [John Wesley Jones]. He brought me a Dodge Charger to work on, and he started hanging around the shop all day every day. I didn’t care—to me, he’s a customer, and he was spending good money. I’ll be honest with you: He seemed like a cool guy. He even brought me business.”
He also defended Rahman’s employee, 22-year-old Hussein “Vinny” Odeh, from an irate customer. “Face pulls up with another guy. They get out with guns and call for Vinny and say, ‘Who slapped you?’ Then Face beat the crap out of that guy. I never seen it except in movies. He said, ‘Sam, Vinny, anybody talk to you guys, call me.’ Vinny said, ‘You did not get my respect back for me. He got it back.”
One day, Rahman says, Face asked him if he wanted to sell his shop.
“Why not?” Rahman said with a shrug.
“How much you want for it?”
Rahman, who thought they were just talking idly, tossed back, “Give me half a million dollars.”
A few weeks later, Rahman got a call from the police saying one of his cars was involved in an armed robbery. Odeh had let Jones take a black Grand Prix while his Dodge Charger was in the shop—and had worked on the brakes and tinted the windows. “He did it out of a good heart,” Rahman says. “Why would I give a car that’s registered to me for an armed robbery?”
That’s what the FBI wanted to know when they walked into Heavy Hitters.
“That,” says Sufian, “is when the panicking started. And a couple hours later, Latunya comes in and she says, ‘Are you still willing to sell your shop?” She comes back about an hour later with a duffel bag. I’ll be honest, we did not count, but she told me it was half a million dollars.
“I was 26 years old,” he adds. “Now, I’m 35 years old, and I know I could have did better. I could have called the FBI that morning and told them what happened.”
Instead, Rahman, 26, flew to Milwaukee, where he’d lived for a decade—until his wife died by suicide in 2007, and he needed a change of scenery. “I gave the money to Vinny and to a nurse named Nina—she was Face’s friend, too,” he continues. “I said, ‘I want you to drive this money to Milwaukee.’ And then there was another guy, his name was Mike. Mike, his wife, and his kid were the ones that took the speaker box in your story.” They were to drive the money up, because Rahman couldn’t fly with it. His plan was to start his business in Milwaukee. But because Heavy Hitters was still open in St. Louis, Odeh drove back to deal with the cars waiting for work and the customers nervous about all the police scrutiny.
Then people started getting arrested for the armed robbery, and Rahman’s nerves ratcheted tighter.
“I told Vinny, ‘I’m going to go to Jordan to visit family,’” Rahman says, adding, “and to wait for things to cool down. I stayed there for a few weeks or a month and came back to the States, finished a deal for a hair salon I bought in Milwaukee.”
A hair salon? Why?
“I don’t know! I knew the guy.”
Then he went back to Jordan—“I’d gotten into some business dealings there”—and waited for the rest of his money. Nina he describes as “an Arab girl, she hardly spoke English. She disappeared. So did Mike.”
Jones, meanwhile, was telling the feds that the robbery was a terrorist plot and he’d been forced to collaborate. This, one of many versions of the crime, implicated Rahman and Odeh, both of whom are originally from Jordan. Rahman says that when he read the article, he remembered hearing Jones say casually, the day he offered to buy the shop, “We’re gonna do it and blame it on the Arabs.”
“Now,” Sufian says grimly, “I understand.”
While he was in Jordan, planning his return, a weird email was sent, purportedly from him, to Odeh. It was written in a formal Arabic neither ever used. “You can tell the translation was done by, probably, Google,” Rahman says. “They sent it from my account to Vinny. So Vinny started replying to me crazy. I said, ‘Vinny, it wasn’t me. You should know my Arabic.’
“I canceled the whole idea of going back to the States until at least I know what’s happening,” Rahman continues. “And in February 2011, the indictments came out for me and Vinny.”
Odeh was sentenced to six years. “And all he did was tint some windows!”
Rahman stayed put, unhappily. “I sold the shop for half a million and I only collected $120,000. And some of that money was still in Milwaukee, and I still owe bills—it was a lost, lost situation. I went to meet Vinny. He said, ‘I never said you were the mastermind! My English is not that good!”
By now, Rahman was kicking himself. “I could have told the feds and gotten the reward! I could have had the feds for protection.” Yet when Assistant U.S. Attorney Tom Mehan offered to recall the warrant and have an FBI agent meet his plane and bring him to St. Louis, Rahman never called back. “I thought, “This guy is just telling me this to get me back to the U.S. I’d called out of frustration—I had a baby on the way, I couldn’t feed this kid. My father is still in the States, and my sisters are, too. There is no future in this part of the world. There is no middle class.” On the other hand, he says, “If I got back to the States, I don’t trust the system over there because the system goes by the book. You can’t always go by the book. This is the federal government of the United States. I’m pretty sure they should know everything. If they dig a little bit deeper, they should know that Sufian Abdelrahman has nothing to do with it.”
