Just Cases: Issue #8
Assassins from Iran—Part Two: Farhad Shakeri
The Just Cases newsletter focuses on tracking cases that are politically charged in some way. I will give commentary here and there, but my primary aim is to track the progression of these cases and, along the way, perhaps determine if they are just.
In this issue, we continue a series of newsletters providing breakdowns of four major assassination-related cases that played out during the 2024 election.
Those cases are Asif Merchant, Thomas Crooks, Ryan Routh, and Farhad Shakeri.
One has recently completed sentencing (Routh), another has reached sentencing for one defendant with another defendant scheduled to be sentenced next month (Shakeri), a third recently resulted in a conviction at trial just a week ago (Merchant), and a fourth—the one that came closest to succeeding—was investigated, but the defendant died at the scene and no charges were brought against anyone (Crooks). All four cases are extraordinary in their own ways: highly interesting, deeply political, one decidedly bizarre, another chilling and sobering.
All concern the same target: President Donald J. Trump.
I believe these cases are important, beyond the memes, shoot-from-the-hip hot takes, superficial clickbait, and conspiracy theories that surround them. So, I’ve decided to create a series of articles for the Just Cases newsletter that sets aside all those frivolous elements in favor of case filings, court transcripts, testimony, investigative documents, and fact-based reporting. I’ve included information from those sources and provided links to them.
Originally, I wrote these as a single long form issue, but the deep dives grew beyond what is typical for the newsletter format (8,000+ words haha), so I’ve broken them into four issues that will come out back-to-back over the next several weeks. Updates on other cases I’m tracking (Don Lemon, Hannah Natanson, Richman, Comey, and others) will appear in future issues of the Just Cases newsletter.
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Please share your thoughts on the cases featured in this issue in the comments section. If there’s a case you’d like to see me report on, let me know!
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United States v. Shakeri
Defendants: Farhad Shakeri, Carlisle Rivera, Jonathan Loadholt
Charges: Material Support to a Foreign Terrorist Organization, Murder-for-Hire, Conspiracy to Commit Murder-for-Hire and Money Laundering Conspiracy, etc.
Trial Date: None. Two defendants in custody have plead guilty, the other is believed to be in Iran (more on that later).
Summary: The defendants in this case are recent additions to an increasing list of Iran-sponsored criminals who have been directed by the Iranian Regime to suppress, harass, kidnap, and murder Iranian-American journalist Masih Alinejad as well as other Americans. Ms. Alinejad is a Iranian dissident who lives in exile in New York City. She became a U.S. citizen in 2019. Because of her steadfast and vocal opposition to the Iranian Regime, she has been the target of numerous plots to silence her.
Farhad Shakeri is an Afghan national who immigrated to the United States as a child and grew up here, primarily in Virginia. As an adult, he married a successful lawyer, she converted to Islam, and they went on to have five kids together. They lived in New York City. In the early 90’s though, Shakeri turned to crime and in 1994 was convicted of robbery and kidnapping. He was sentenced to 21 years in New York State prison, but would serve just 14 years of it. (Man, you don’t often see long sentences like that for robbery, or even more severe crimes, these days.)
The couple stayed together while Shakeri served his prison sentence. They later moved to Kabul for three years and then to Dubai, but would end their marriage in 2015. She and the kids returned to New York, Farhad Shakeri went to Iran.
While in the New York prison system, Shakeri developed a network of criminal contacts, including contacts with ties to various organized crime syndicates. Authorities refer to this contact group as the “Shakeri Network.”
Among those contacts were the other two defendants in this case—Carlisle Rivera and Jonathan Loadholt—plus three additional unnamed co-conspirators. Shakeri and one of the co-conspirators were both housed at Woodbourne Correctional Facility from 1996 to 2002. That co-conspirator was serving time for manslaughter. Shakeri was later transferred to Fishkill Correctional Facility, where his time there from 2005 to 2007 overlapped with that of Rivera, who was serving a sentence for second-degree murder.
Shakeri, upon completion of his prison sentence, was released in 2008 and deported from the United States to Afghanistan. According to court filings and DOJ press releases, at some point afterwards he became an asset of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and began operating out of Tehran. Through Shakeri, the IRGC utilized this network to conduct surveillance and assassinations abroad—including operations in Europe and in the U.S..
Several of those operations were aimed at assassinating a particular critic of the Iranian Regime—Masih Alinejad.
Beginning in December 2023, at the IRGC’s request, Shakeri contacted one of the unnamed co-conspirators—a New York resident whom Shakeri had recruited into his network during their overlapping time at Woodbourne—to locate the victim in this case: Ms. Alinejad. Shakeri began tasking and paying this co-conspirator to surveil Alinejad. He created a cloud account in which he stored images of, contact information on, and biographical details regarding Alinejad.
The ultimate aim of the operation was to assassinate Alinejad.
But first they needed to locate her.
