N.Y. Prosecutor Aided Case Against Hussein

Immersed in his own court docket of mob guys and criminal rackets, Vincent G. Heintz rarely keeps up with the big trial far away. But sometimes the Manhattan assistant district attorney gleans details of the case against Saddam Hussein and seven co-defendants from the paper on the way to work.

Amid the clatter and rumble of the No. 1 train from the Bronx, the witness accounts unleash a flood of memories: the dirt, the Tigris Valley salt marshes, the exhaust of the Humvees, the agony of the people of the Iraqi village where the New York Army National Guard captain was based last year, and a crime he helped dredge up from the dark depths of the past.

“I was interviewing this very old person who witnessed horrific atrocities in Dujayl in 1982 ... and he was hard of hearing, and to talk to this guy and get the story out was like a three-hour operation,” recalled Heintz, 38. “I had to bring him back and ask him again what he said.

“At one point he started to break down and cry because he was talking about the death of one of his children, a teenager. I apologized to him for making him relive this again in this kind of detail.... He said: ‘I’m not crying because I’m sad. I’m crying because I’m happy. For once, someone cares.’ ”

Today, Hussein stands accused of overseeing the collective punishment of Dujayl villagers for an attempt on his life, in what will probably be the first of multiple trials against the former Iraqi president. The trial, which has been beset by procedural delays, outbursts by Hussein, the resignation of the chief judge and the slaying of two lawyers, is set to resume Tuesday.

The Dujayl case came first at least in part because of Heintz’s efforts.

In a series of interviews about his time in Iraq in 2004, Heintz described how he and his colleagues, many of them New York police officers and firefighters sent to help stabilize and secure the area around Dujayl, wound up helping unearth the crime.

“I went there as an infantry officer,” said the stocky father of two, dressed in full military uniform for a police officer’s funeral. “We went there to do raids and ambushes and train the Iraqi National Guard.... I did not go there to do [legal] work.”

Before he arrived in Iraq, Heintz had little idea of what awaited him in Dujayl. As soon as the troops got their marching orders, his political advisor, Sgt. John Byrnes, did a Google search on the small town. He came up with an article that referred to the 1982 assassination attempt against Hussein and the retribution that followed. Heintz and his guys stored the information away.

Once they arrived, they found a poor, frightened town. Dujayl, a largely Shiite farming community smack-dab in the middle of the Sunni Triangle, had suffered immensely at the hands of the former government.

“Sewage, water, power, health and transportation facilities fell below international poverty standards,” Heintz later wrote in a lengthy report on the mission.

The conditions shocked Heintz and his men. Nevertheless, they were touched by the villagers’ kindness and welcoming attitude toward the troops. His men lovingly sang the Pogues song “Dirty Old Town” in homage to Dujayl. “I met my love by the gas works wall, dreamed a dream by the old canal,” the lyrics go, “kissed a girl by the factory wall. Dirty old town. Dirty old town.”

Heintz, a gung-ho soldier who signed up for the National Guard during his last year in college and was among the first troops to arrive at the site of the Sept. 11 attacks in Lower Manhattan, began making friends with his Iraqi counterparts.

From the beginning, Heintz and his men had noticed that some Dujayl residents lived better than others. The U.S. troops’ understanding of the town’s divisions was murky at first, but they slowly began to draw rough outlines of the area’s tribal structure. Hussein, they learned, had built loyalty among certain clans by giving them land seized from others. One house in particular they kept an eye on was that of Sheik Abdullah Rawed, a leading member of the Meshake tribe.

On June 28, 2004, Heintz’s men raided Rawed’s house, hoping to arrest his son, Maher, who was suspected of taking part in insurgent attacks. A gunfight ensued as soldiers entered the house, but instead of taking down Maher, the soldiers found the sheik himself.

He was taken into custody, and that’s when the Iraqis began telling Heintz that the sheik had been one of Hussein’s henchmen and hinted at his involvement in ugly crimes decades ago. That same day, however, Rawed was released at the behest of other tribal leaders, who promised that the son would turn himself in.

The longtime prosecutor who had spent a career bringing down bad guys didn’t like what villagers told him about Rawed.

“Tony Soprano and John Gotti don’t even come close,” recalled Heintz, who was on the team that brought down alleged mob boss John Gotti Jr. “Before the ground war, Abdullah Rawed bought a brand new car. Nobody had gotten a new car in Dujayl in years. How obvious and insane was it that this guy had a luxury car?”

When Maher didn’t turn himself in, Heintz got the OK to raid the house again, and on July 5 he brought in the two Raweds. Their arrest had an unexpected effect: It dispelled the cloud of fear that hung over the town, allowing witnesses of the deaths of Dujayl villagers to come forward and triggering a process that wound up with both father and son sitting in a courtroom next to Hussein as his co-defendants.

For Heintz, who has devoted his life to the rule of law, it was the first glimmer of the restoration of justice in a land where it had been ripped away. He began dutifully taking notes and interviewing witnesses, telling the old man who broke down in tears, “It will be just 10 more minutes.”

But after 23 years, Heintz said, the events affecting those from the village had become mythologized, as the judge and attorneys trying the Dujayl case in Baghdad have discovered when they try to distinguish facts from the hazy memories of witnesses.

“You have to have persistence in breaking down the lore, the mystique and the horror of the event,” Heintz said.

The interviews challenged his legal skills. He worked painstakingly to separate witness accounts from hearsay and rumor in accounting for the actions of Hussein, his half brother Barzan Tikriti and other officials on the ground in Dujayl in the days after the assassination attempt.

“This is where my skills as a prosecutor helped,” Heintz said. “As an attorney, we develop a sensitivity to detail. What I did was extract pictures from these witnesses.”

Heintz and his men heard from the villagers that the Dujayl incident was a seminal event in the elder Rawed’s rise. The locals said Rawed had assisted Hussein’s intelligence apparatus in choosing the villagers who were to be abducted, tortured, killed, dispossessed of their lands and banished to the desert.

Through nearly 60 hours of interviews, Heintz was moved not just by the harrowing accounts of torture chambers and street-side executions, but also by how twisted the law and government had become in Iraq.

“For decades, government in Iraq meant your sister got raped,” he said. “For generations, government in Iraq meant you were beaten or tortured if you weren’t on the right team. Government had nothing to do with sewers, water, education, healthcare.”

Heintz immediately forwarded the witness accounts of torture, killings and destruction up his chain of command and waited for something. And waited. But nothing became of them for months.

In fact, all of Heintz’s work regarding the case might have come to naught had it not been for a chance encounter inside Baghdad’s fortified Green Zone in the fall of 2004.

One day, Col. Randy Fritz, a Homewood, Ill.-based civil affairs officer, sat at the same lunch table as Anne Tompkins, then a North Carolina federal prosecutor working for the Regime Crimes Liaison Office, the agency set up to help Iraqis bring Hussein and his deputies to trial.

Fritz asked her about Dujayl, where he had been based for a few months after he arrived in May 2003.

Back then, Tompkins said recently, Dujayl was on the list of about a dozen cases the Iraqi High Tribunal was considering bringing to justice, but one they knew very little about. Fritz suggested to Tompkins that she make her way there and arranged for her and her team to do so.

Heintz gave the legal team a tour of the city, showing which parts had been bulldozed as part of the regime’s collective punishment, and he gave the lawyers copies of his work. Tompkins said they were ecstatic. They couldn’t believe their luck that the guy in charge of the town was a fellow prosecutor.

“He’s already in there and walked us through the case,” Tompkins, now a criminal defense attorney in Charlotte, said by telephone. “He had already put together a witness list and summarized witness statements. He had already done most of the work in putting the case together.”

Tompkins and her team took up where Heintz had left off. On that trip and a later one, they began conducting interviews and asking witnesses to return.

Today, Heintz is content to know that Rawed and his son sit in the defendants’ dock with Hussein. When Heintz heard about the elder man’s indictment last February, he was pleased.

“That was cool,” he recalled. “This was a guy who shot at us. I bet he wishes he stayed in bed that day.”

*

Daragahi reported from Baghdad and Farley from New York.