Biography
Narseal Batiste was the founder and acknowledged spiritual leader of the Seas of David, the small Liberty City religious collective the FBI targeted in 2006. A Chicago native who had moved to Miami and worked in construction, he was the only Liberty City defendant convicted on all four counts of the federal indictment. He was sentenced on November 20, 2009 by Judge Joan A. Lenard to 162 months (13 years and 6 months) in federal prison, followed by 35 years of supervised release. He served his sentence in the federal Bureau of Prisons and was released in approximately 2018.
On June 23, 2006, the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested seven men in the predominantly Haitian-American Liberty City neighborhood of Miami, Florida. They were members of a small religious collective called the Seas of David — founded by Narseal Batiste, the group blended elements of Christianity, the Moorish Science Temple, and Black Hebrew Israelite practice, and met in a warehouse in Liberty City where its members worked construction jobs and studied scripture. Federal prosecutors charged all seven with conspiring with al-Qaeda to blow up the 110-story Sears Tower in Chicago, the FBI's Miami office, and other federal buildings.
The plot was, from the federal government's first contact with the group, manufactured by FBI confidential informants. After receiving an October 2005 tip, the Miami FBI inserted a paid informant (Abbas al-Saidi) into the group's circle, and later a second informant (Elie Assad) posing as an al-Qaeda recruiter. The informants supplied the group with cash, with combat boots, and with the suggestion that they "swear bayat" (an oath of loyalty to Osama bin Laden) — a ceremony staged at the informants' insistence. The defendants never had any actual contact with al-Qaeda, never possessed any weapons or explosives, never traveled to any of the buildings prosecutors said they planned to attack, and never made any concrete steps toward an actual operation. Their case became, alongside the Newburgh Four, one of the two most cited examples of post-9/11 FBI manufactured-plot terrorism prosecutions.
The case went through three federal trials before Judge Joan A. Lenard at the U.S. District Court in Miami. The first trial (October–December 2007) ended in a hung jury and acquittal for Lyglenson Lemorin. The second trial (January–April 2008) also ended in a hung jury for the remaining six defendants. The third trial (January–May 2009) finally produced convictions of Narseal Batiste, Patrick Abraham, Stanley Grant Phanor, Burson Augustin, and Rothschild Augustine, and an acquittal for Naudimar Herrera. The five convicted defendants were sentenced together on November 20, 2009. The Eleventh Circuit affirmed the convictions in 2013 over a vigorous dissent that compared the case to the wave of "outrageous government conduct" cases that had once been recognized in U.S. law.
