On an evening in February when the Brooklyn human-rights activist Masih Alinejad was scheduled to speak at Fairfield University, in Connecticut, two men from New York visited the campus. They had been sent there as part of an Iran-backed plot to murder her, federal prosecutors said last week.
It was one of several attempts by Iran’s government to kidnap or kill Ms. Alinejad, who has criticized the country’s repression of women. In a criminal complaint made public on Friday, federal prosecutors in the office of the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York described a monthslong surveillance operation by the two men, who were charged in the murder-for-hire-plot along with a third man who was giving them instructions.
That man was working as an Iranian operative, prosecutors said, and he told federal authorities that he had been assigned to carry out a plot to assassinate Donald J. Trump before the presidential election.
“Actors directed by the government of Iran continue to target our citizens, including President-elect Trump, on U.S. soil and abroad. This has to stop,” the U.S. attorney for the Southern District, Damian Williams, said in a statement.
The day after the Fairfield University event, one of the New York men, Carlisle Rivera, received a money transfer of about $560, according to the complaint. In the following weeks and months, Mr. Rivera, 49, and his associate, Jonathan Loadholt, 36, staked out Ms. Alinejad’s home in Brooklyn, taking pictures and sending them to the third man, Farhad Shakeri, according to federal authorities.
In addition to the plot to kill Ms. Alinejad, Mr. Shakeri, 51, told federal authorities that he was assigned in September by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps of Iran to carry out the plan to assassinate Mr. Trump. Mr. Shakeri said that in October, he was directed to come up with a plan within seven days to kill Mr. Trump.
On Friday, the prosecutors with the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District charged the three men with murder-for-hire, conspiracy to commit murder-for-hire and money laundering conspiracy. Mr. Shakeri was also charged with providing material support to a foreign terrorist organization, identified as the Revolutionary Guards, and conspiring to do so, as well as with conspiracy to violate U.S. sanctions on Iran.
Mr. Rivera and Mr. Loadholt were arrested and are in custody in New York. Their lawyers did not respond to requests for comment. Mr. Shakeri is at large and believed to be in Iran, according to prosecutors.
The foiled plot was the latest effort by the Justice Department to stop foreign government influence across the United States, including by curtailing intimidation efforts on American soil and disrupting assassination plots.
Ms. Alinejad, after learning of the new arrests on Thursday, said, “My activism seems to hurt them so much that they tried to get rid of me for the third time.”
In 2021, federal prosecutors unsealed an indictment charging four Iranians with conspiring to kidnap Ms. Alinejad and bring her to Iran. Last month, federal prosecutors in Manhattan charged a senior official in the Revolutionary Guards and three other men connected to the country’s government with participating in a failed plot to assassinate her.
In recent years, the threat from the Iranian government has evolved, prosecutors said in the complaint. “Rather than solely engaging in lethal operations themselves, Iranian intelligence services have outsourced certain assassination plots to organized crime groups and violent criminals,” they wrote.
Iran’s Foreign Ministry denied the allegation. The ministry’s spokesman, Esmaeil Baghaei, called the accusations baseless in a statement.
The relationship between Mr. Shakeri and Mr. Rivera appeared to stretch back to the mid-2000s, prosecutors said.
In 1994, Mr. Shakeri, an Afghan national who immigrated to the United States as a child, was convicted on charges of robbery and spent 14 years in New York State prisons before being deported in 2008, according to the complaint. Prosecutors said it was in prison that he met those he would later recruit to carry out surveillance and assassination plots on behalf of the Revolutionary Guards.
Mr. Shakeri’s time in custody at Fishkill Correctional Facility in Beacon, N.Y., overlapped with that of Mr. Rivera, who was convicted in 1994 of second-degree murder, the complaint said. Mr. Loadholt is an associate of Mr. Rivera’s, according to prosecutors.
According to the complaint, Mr. Shakeri promised the men $100,000 to find and kill Ms. Alinejad. In July, Mr. Shakeri texted Mr. Rivera: “Just do it son, I’ll handle the rest. I won’t let you down,” the complaint said.
As the two men spent several months watching Ms. Alinejad’s residence, prosecutors said, they went out of their way to hide their activity, appearing to have removed the license plate from Mr. Loadholt’s vehicle to avoid license plate readers. In one episode, on the morning of March 31, the men left their stakeout and walked to a bagel shop near Ms. Alinejad’s home. At the store, Mr. Rivera paid with cash, and when Mr. Loadholt was about to pay with a credit card, he stopped him, according to the complaint.
The complaint outlines how, as time wore on, their agreement with Mr. Shakeri began to show fractures.
“I wish you can take care of it already,” Mr. Shakeri wrote in a text message to Mr. Rivera, according to the complaint. In a voice note, Mr. Rivera told Mr. Shakeri that his associate had asked whether he trusted Mr. Shakeri and that he had reassured him, the complaint said. Mr. Rivera added that it was difficult to find people willing to participate in the assassination plot given that they were “receiving next to nothing to start the job off with.” The two men were operating “on a promise” based on their relationship, he told Mr. Shakeri.
Since September, Mr. Shakeri has spoken voluntarily by telephone with the F.B.I. on five dates, prosecutors said, including as recently as last week. Mr. Shakeri, who said he was in Tehran during the conversations, said he had agreed to be interviewed in order to seek a sentence reduction for another federal prisoner, according to the complaint.
Mr. Shakeri told investigators that he had met a senior member of the Revolutionary Guards through his work in the Iranian oil and fuel business. When the official learned that Mr. Shakeri had lived in New York, he asked him about investigating Ms. Alinejad, he said. Mr. Shakeri said he had met with the official more than a dozen times in meetings arranged by an intermediary.
Mr. Shakeri also said he was instructed by the official to surveil two Jewish American citizens, who he said were business people residing in New York City. The official offered him $500,000 for each of the people’s murders, according to the indictment.
The official also asked him to target Israeli tourists in Sri Lanka and to “plan a mass shooting event in approximately October,” Mr. Shakeri said, according to the complaint.
On Friday, Mr. Rivera’s former neighbors in Staten Island’s Stapleton area said he had moved away from their block a few months earlier. The Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge — which the complaint said the men crossed on their trips to surveil Ms. Alinejad’s home — was visible behind the Victorian-era houses dotting the hilly street.
“Whoa, who am I living around?” said Michael Jones, 39, a construction worker who lives in the neighborhood.
Tasha Smith, who lives at the address reported to be Mr. Loadholt’s in the Stapleton Houses on Staten Island’s North Shore, said she was “at a loss for words.”
“That’s a shock to me,” she said. “I’ve got nothing else to say.”
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