In 2004 a gruesome video from Iraq went viral on the internet. It showed a 26-year-old American telecommunications worker, Nicholas Berg, seated on the floor in front of a phalanx of masked terrorists. One terrorist, believed to be Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, produced a long knife and promptly beheaded Berg in what must be one of the most graphic episodes ever aired on YouTube. In the ranks of al-Qaeda terrorists, few men descended to the depths of al-Zarqawi, who was linked to the deaths of more than 700 people before the US military killed him in a 2006 airstrike (BBC News 2004; Miklaszewski 2004; Burns 2006).

Like many terrorists, al-Zarqawi depended on financing from abroad, and his key lieutenant, Shaqwi Omar, apparently produced some of the funds through a set of elaborate money laundering and fraud schemes perpetrated by his brothers, nephews, and other accomplices in the United States. According to a US federal indictment, in one of several such conspiracies Shaqwi Omar’s brother, Bassam, formed a shell corporation in Utah called Wasatch Front Construction Services. He and his nephew, Alaa Ramadan, used the shell to perpetrate an intricate mortgage fraud involving sham improvements on two Utah houses and a “straw buyer” to swindle a title company out of more than $121,000 at the closings on the sales of the homes, both of which quickly went into foreclosure. Multiple indictments placed the sum of all the known Omar schemes at more than half a million dollars. The FBI has traced some of the money to wire transfers to Jordan where, again, the trail has gone cold due to the multilayered shrouds common in modern international finance. Despite an ongoing FBI investigation, a definitive link to al-Qaeda has not yet been made (MSNBC 2006; NBC News 2006; Dollar 2006).