The fake sheikh and Abdul Enterprises

Abdul Enterprises, Ltd., was the FBI’s invented company, said to manage the fortunes of two Arab principals. The name later gave the operation its code name: ABdul SCAM. Agents played the sheikhs and their aides, in robes for the meetings. The Senate report names one of them, Special Agent Richard Farhart, who was brought in because he spoke Arabic. Much of the rest rested on props and on what people wanted to believe about oil money. [1][2]

Settings did much of the work. Meetings took place at a rented house in Washington, a hotel near JFK airport and aboard a yacht in Florida. Videotaping began on 12 February 1979, which is why the earliest dealings survive only on audio or in agents’ notes. [2]

The FBI’s case supervisor, John Good, later wrote that Weinberg was unreliable in important ways but uniquely good at opening doors, and that the people who came to the front brought their own schemes. That is a participant’s account, written to defend the operation. [3]

The design was effective. The Senate committee also found it dangerous: the front made it easy for middlemen to sell the sheikh names they had no right to sell, and the sheer amount of money on offer raised the question the defendants later pressed in court, of whether the government had created crimes rather than found them. [2]

The cash was real government money. The DOJ summary describes $50,000 to Myers’s side, of which he kept $15,000; $50,000 to Thompson’s side through middleman Howard Criden, of which Thompson took about $20,000; $50,000 to Lederer’s side; $25,000 to Kelly; and $50,000 to Jenrette’s associate John Stowe. [3]

The middlemen took cuts. Errichetti and Criden split money before it reached the members, which is why some members were convicted of bribery without being filmed holding the full amount. [1]

The Senate committee found worse. By the weight of the evidence, it concluded, Weinberg himself received part of a $100,000 payment that the operation gave Errichetti on 31 March 1979, then met Errichetti the next day and made a misleading tape. Taxpayer money given to a corrupt mayor may have found its way back to the government’s own informant. [2]

That finding is one of the strongest arguments the operation’s critics have, and it comes from a bipartisan Senate committee, not from a defense lawyer.