When Tarik Shah left prison in 2018, he had not played the double bass in 13 years and his fingers were racked with arthritis.
“I never even considered quitting,” said Mr. Shah, 62, who four decades before was a go-to bassist in the New York jazz scene. He rented an instrument and relearned his art, studying with a classical teacher and practicing methodically to protect his fingers.
Making a living as a jazz musician is no easy task. Rebuilding a career after 13 years behind bars on terrorism charges might make it near impossible. Arrested in 2005, Mr. Shah pleaded guilty in 2007 to plotting to teach martial arts to would-be Qaeda fighters.
Prosecutors said he had told undercover F.B.I. agents that life as a musician was his “greatest cover” for jihad, and the evidence against him included recordings of him pledging loyalty to Al Qaeda.
“It was really good investigative work,” said David Raskin, who was co-chief of the terrorism and national security unit at the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan when Mr. Shah pleaded guilty. “It was not only good for the community — it was good for him.”
But Mr. Shah remains unconvinced and unapologetic. He says the federal agents lured him into the crime and that he pleaded guilty only out of hopelessness after spending more than two and a half years in solitary confinement while awaiting trial.
He served his time and regained his freedom, but it is taking more than that to step out of the shadow of his conviction. For some, Mr. Shah’s effort to rebuild his musical life is testing the limits of forgiveness.
The stigma of his past has hindered the networking crucial to landing gigs. Some old bandmates will not return calls or are leery of sharing the numbers of fellow musicians.
After prison, he scraped by cleaning offices, delivering food, driving for Uber and running a tractor on an organic flower farm. He is now largely supporting himself by teaching and performing, with gigs in New York City and in Albany, where he settled to care for his aging mother.
“A lot of people are really afraid to deal with me,” Mr. Shah said — afraid “that somehow being involved with me is going to mess with them getting gigs.”
Some feel Mr. Shah should not be hired at all. Mr. Shah said he lost a job after a woman who, citing friends who died in the Sept. 11 attacks, threatened to mobilize opposition.
“She told the club owner: ‘Why you hiring Tarik Shah? Don’t you know he’s a convicted terrorist?’” Mr. Shah recalled. “And that was not a one-off.”
Mr. Shah’s status is hardly unique. Of the more than 500 terrorism offenders arrested in the United States after 9/11, many are now being released, and some rejoin society more easily than others.
Having a lower-profile case and a well-established identity is a boon, said Mary Beth Altier, a professor at New York University’s Center for Global Affairs specializing in the reintegration of terrorism offenders.
“He’s probably not on people’s radar unless they Google him,” she said. “He’s got this positive identity as a jazz musician, so regardless of how the terror charges happened, he can lean into that. Returning to a different career, like a corporate lawyer, might be harder.”
Mr. Shah had played with the likes of Dizzy Gillespie and the singer Betty Carter, as well as Pharoah Sanders, Ahmad Jamal, Randy Weston, Abbey Lincoln and Barry Harris.
He was raised in the Bronx by parents who were jazz buffs and members of the Nation of Islam. They were close to Malcolm X, who named Mr. Shah at birth. Mr. Shah began playing bass at 12 and two years later was regularly working gigs, including summers at the Concord Resort Hotel in the Catskills.
At 16, he began studying with the bassist Slam Stewart, who had played with the pianist Art Tatum and was on seminal bebop recordings by Charlie Parker and Mr. Gillespie.
By 22, Mr. Shah had recorded and toured Europe with Ms. Carter, and he went on to become a sought-after sideman. In 1993, he played with the Duke Ellington Orchestra at an inaugural ball for President Bill Clinton and played gigs at the Blue Note and the Village Vanguard in New York.
But by age 42, he was in solitary in “Little Gitmo,” the detention wing for terror suspects at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Lower Manhattan.
The F.B.I. had been monitoring Mr. Shah on suspicions that he was looking to join Al Qaeda. He had taught martial arts in mosques and at his own storefront space in Harlem and, in 2003, the bureau sent a paid informant, Saeed Torres, to befriend him.
Mr. Torres, who had become a jailhouse informer while in prison for robbery, moved into an apartment below Mr. Shah’s in the Bronx and for more than two years chatted him up on political issues while taking bass lessons and attending his gigs.
Mr. Torres, who refused to comment for this article without being paid, told Mr. Shah he could make money by giving martial arts training. “When I fed him that line, that’s what he went at,” Mr. Torres said in a documentary.
He introduced him to an undercover F.B.I. agent posing as a representative of Osama bin Laden, at which time Mr. Shah was recorded pledging an oath of loyalty to Al Qaeda, according to the charges.
In an interview, Mr. Shah said Mr. Torres was constantly “egging me on.”
In 2005, federal agents swarmed Mr. Shah’s home in a predawn raid, hours after he finished a gig at St. Nick’s Pub in Harlem.
The federal authorities never claimed Mr. Shah was on the verge of violence or had contact with real terrorists. They have defended the sting as vital to national security and said there was no escaping the fact that Mr. Shah had been recorded discussing his desire and intent to aid Al Qaeda. He also, they said, talked about a failed attempt to attend a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan and checked out a warehouse on Long Island as a possible jihad training facility.
Ali Soufan, the former F.B.I. agent who posed as a bin Laden representative in the sting, declined to comment on the specifics of the case, but defended it as a solid investigation that helped ward off danger to an already wounded city.
Mr. Soufan, in a 2013 article in The Wall Street Journal, said that Mr. Shah’s own lawyers advised him to plead guilty. He said that the many antiterror stings after the Sept. 11 attacks demonstrated that “these were real threats to the U.S., and we are fortunate that the F.B.I. intercepted them.”
Mr. Soufan, who now runs a global intelligence and security consulting firm, recounted in his 2011 book the “The Black Banners” that Mr. Shah in 2004 had knelt and pledged the same oath of allegiance to Al Qaeda that the Sept. 11 attackers had sworn.
Mr. Shah said that in the wake of 9/11, he resented the rise in Islamophobia and anti-Muslim policies, including the New York Police Department’s aggressive surveillance program. He was also angry about the Bush administration’s actions leading up to the invasion of Iraq.
In an interview, Mr. Shah called the sting a sham. He said the F.B.I. operatives had seen that he was in financial straits and offered to hire him to train Muslim “brothers,” which he took to mean self-defense against “the onslaught they faced during the Bush era.”
But Mr. Raskin, the former prosecutor, said that investigators had been careful to avoid entrapment by giving Mr. Shah numerous offramps. When Mr. Shah did not take them, he said, “at that point, the government has no other choice but to move.”
While Mr. Shah was incarcerated, he directed a prison band and gave music lessons to inmates, but had no access to an upright bass. He and his brother, Antoine Dowdell, a pianist, would sometimes trade musical ideas and compositions during visits.
Once released, Mr. Shah eventually obtained a newly hand-carved instrument with help from the Jazz Foundation of America.
“I was taken away from it for so long that I have the same burning desire that I did when I got my first bass, on my 12th birthday,” he said.
Mr. Torres later moved upstate. Mr. Shah said that the two men have crossed paths, and that he has forced himself to ignore Mr. Torres. Mr. Shah has a cadre of students and has secured a weekly jam session at a club in Troy, N.Y. In New York City, he plays a wide range of venues, including clubs like Mezzrow and Smalls.
Spike Wilner, who owns those clubs, said he was largely unfamiliar with the details of Mr. Shah’s case, but that “his musical reputation over the years prevailed.”
“It’s not my place to judge a man beyond his music-making,” he said. “So if you get out of jail and you want to play a gig at my club, you’re welcome to do so.”
He added: “Was he guilty or not guilty? I have no idea because we never discussed it.”
Last month, Mr. Shah drove his old minivan three hours to South Jamaica, Queens, for a gig. He laid down a sturdy line that swung the rhythm section behind Alvin Flythe, who is known as Wink, on saxophone.
“He’s back and he’s playing the hell out of the bass,” said Mr. Flythe, who began playing with Mr. Shah in the 1970s, when the bassist was 16.
Mr. Shah said that after everything that has happened, playing the bass again is his therapy. It was no Village Vanguard — the gig was at a senior center — but Mr. Shah played with a fervor.
Corey Kilgannon is a Times reporter who writes about crime and criminal justice in and around New York City, as well as breaking news and other feature stories.
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