Trial to begin in terror plot targeting Kennedy Airport

Overshadowed by more recent terror cases such as the Times Square car bomb attempt and last year's subway bombing plot, two defendants charged in a 2007 plan to attack Kennedy Airport are scheduled to begin trial Wednesday in a Brooklyn case that may focus on the role of a government informant.

Russell DeFreitas, 66, a former Kennedy baggage handler, and Abdul Kadir, 58, an engineer and former member of parliament in Guyana, are charged in the three-year-old case with conspiring to blow up jet-fuel tanks and the Buckeye Pipeline, which carries jet fuel to area airports.

Prosecutors allege that the conspirators sought support for their plot, code-named "Chicken Farm," from a radical Islamic group in the Caribbean, Jamaat al Muslimeen, and also reached out to an al-Qaida operative and Iran-backed terror groups.

The government insisted on an anonymous jury, which took two weeks to pick, to hear the case. "The plotters were deadly serious about their criminal aims," prosecutors said in a court filing this week.

DeFreitas and Kadir face up to life in prison if convicted on multiple conspiracy counts. A third defendant, Compton Eversley, 60, also known as Abdel Nur, pleaded guilty Tuesday to providing material support to the plot, which carries a maximum 15-year sentence. A fourth defendant, Kareem Ibrahim, is not being tried at this time because of medical problems.

Accused mastermind DeFreitas, a Guyanese-American living in Brooklyn, allegedly began plotting in early 2006, but by midyear a government informant had joined up. The informant secretly recorded DeFreitas as he filmed surveillance video at Kennedy, prosecutors say, and traveled to the Caribbean to meet with other conspirators. On one audio tape, they say, DeFreitas describes the planned Kennedy attack as so big "even the Twin Towers can't touch it."

Later, when he was arrested in June 2007, prosecutors say, DeFreitas told agents he was "the brains of everything."

Since it first made headlines, however, the Kennedy case has been dogged by questions about whether DeFreitas and his ragtag band had the capacity for a full-fledged conspiracy. This week, defense lawyers signaled they may try to convince the jury that the government had as much to do with the plot as the plotters.

A newly disclosed law enforcement memo from late 2006, they say, concludes the plotters "lacked sufficient funding and logistical support" to carry out an attack, and suggests that the informant will be used to "mount a full-court press" to get DeFreitas to commit an act that will "make him arrestable."

After that, public defender Len Kamdang said, the informant provided DeFreitas with "lodging, transportation, plane tickets" and even took him to a camera store, used government money to buy a camcorder to make surveillance videos, and showed DeFreitas how to turn on the camera.