- Hey, everybody
get off the street.
- Off the street!
- Let's go!
Get off the street!
[distant sirens blaring]
- It's the middle
of the g*dd*mn night.
We don't have him.
We're finding bombs
in public transit places.
He knew how to make
a pressure cooker b*mb
with a certain expl*sive mix.
He knew how to make
another pressure cooker b*mb
with a different
expl*sive mix.
[expl*si*n booms]
[glass shattering]
- And in all likelihood,
you have a b*mb factory
in a residential neighborhood
in New Jersey.
[expl*si*n booms]
- Now he's got pipe bombs.
- The guy definitely was,
like, a homegrown
violent extremist, right?
- He was.
- No know knew it.
He wasn't on the radar.
- Massive manhunt right now
is underway
for 28-year-old
Ahmad Khan Rahimi.
- And we have a rush hour
coming Tuesday morning
where 5.6 million people are
going to crowd into
the subway trains of New York,
a million more into
the New Jersey Transit system,
and we have, literally,
a mad b*mber on the loose.
[g*nsh*t bangs]
- Holy sh*t.
[dramatic music]
- In the FBI, we make
a lot of headlines.
♪
Drug busts,
mob stings,
t*rror1st takedowns.
- Get down! Get down!
- We understand why people
want to tell stories about us.
- Mark it.
- Freeze!
- FBI.
- FBI!
- Action!
- But they don't know
the half of it.
[indistinct radio chatter]
What really goes down,
we save that for each other
when we're talking
agent to agent.
♪
This is "FBI True."
[ominous music]
♪
- Cindy Coppola is
a 23-year veteran of the FBI.
She worked on cases that
included organized crime
and terrorism,
and took part
in multinational investigations
into drug trafficking
and money laundering.
Coppola finished her career
with the Los Angeles division,
running two offices,
supervising investigations
and providing
undercover security
for special events.
- So refresh my memory.
In 2016, that's when
the Chelsea bombing happened,
and that's when you guys
ended up
working together, correct?
- September 17, 2016.
New York is
on security lockdown.
- John Miller was
the former assistant director
of Public Affairs for the FBI.
He was the Deputy Commissioner
for Intelligence
and Counterterrorism at the
New York Police Department.
- United Nations
General Assembly is there.
The world leaders who
represent literally 90%
of the globe's population
are in, like, what,
of the East Side of Manhattan.
Everything starts
to go a little crazy.
[dramatic musical sting]
- Breaking news out
of Seaside Park
where an expl*si*n
on the race course
of the Semper Five 5K puts
the entire area on lockdown.
- So I was at
Clemson University,
at a football game
with my son...
he was a freshman at Clemson...
and my phone buzzed.
- Chuck Berger joined
the New York Joint
Terrorism Task Force in 1999.
He spent 22 years working
with the FBI's
Counterterrorism Division.
- And I looked at the phone,
and I get this update
from the JTTF that a suspected
IED had gone off
in Seaside Heights
in New Jersey,
which is in Newark
Field Office's territory.
- You're down there in Clemson.
You're thinking, I hope I
don't have to go back for this.
- Exactly.
- Right?
- Right.
And then a couple minutes later
or half an hour later,
it came back,
was confirmed that
it was an actual device.
So Newark FBI was
investigating it.
- That's a symbolic target,
military target,
and civilian target
because there's,
you know,
a couple of thousand people
running in this race.
If the b*mb had
gone off on time,
there would have
been casualties.
Now we were looking at this
as something serious.
But it was 70 miles away,
so we were monitoring it
because you just don't know
what happens next.
- Their b*mb techs were
on the scene,
collecting the evidence,
doing the forensics,
and really,
the next thing we knew...
it was about 8:30 at night,
and one of my agents calls me.
And he's like, a b*mb
just went off in New York.
[expl*si*n booms]
[glass shattering]
[shouting]
- Hey, everybody,
get off of the street!
- Of the street!
- Let's go!
Get off the street!
[indistinct shouting]
[distant sirens blaring]
[suspenseful music]
- A device had been
placed outside
of a demolition dumpster
and had launched
this demolition dumpster
all the way
across 23rd Street,
about 125 feet downrange
across two-way traffic
and into the sidewalk
on the other side.
- Did people get hurt?
- A number of people were hurt.
- Come with me.
Come with me.
Come with me.
I'm holding you, okay?
Come with me.
You're okay.
Nothing's going to happen.
Okay?
[sirens blaring]
♪
- About half an hour later,
a lady comes out
of her building
on 27th Street,
sees something suspicious
in the garbage.
- I was at the scene
on 23rd Street.
And my sergeant called,
and he said,
hey, we have a suspicious
package up on 27th Street.
And I said, Andy, a b*mb
just went off in Manhattan.
Everything is gonna be
a suspicious package.
And he said, Boss,
I'm looking
at a pressure cooker
with a cell phone taped
to the top of it,
and, like, a red light flashing
and wires going inside.
- Holy sh*t.
There's another one.
[suspenseful music]
- Now we're sitting
on a third device.
We had this
beautiful thing here.
It's a ticking b*mb,
but it's intact.
That is a potential
bottomless pit of evidence,
forensics, you know.
- Yeah, for fingerprints
or anything.
- For everything.
- Everything.
- We want to know
what's inside it.
- Yeah.
- Who touched it.
Who had a hair fall
off their head
while they were closing it that
could, you know,
could get us the DNA.
I mean, we wanted
to know everything
that device could tell us.
We also had to get inside it,
and this was...
this was a very
diabolical b*mb-maker,
because it had been
epoxied shut with this cement.
It means that the b*mb maker
was saying,
I want so much pressure that
the top isn't gonna pop off,
that the pressure
cooker itself...
the pot is gonna break
into a million pieces,
and my shrapnel is gonna fly
at, you know,
and k*ll anyone nearby.
But somebody had worked hard
to make this deadly.
There's opportunity there.
[chuckles] It's also
a little bit dangerous.
- Because they'd use the robot?
[upbeat music]
♪
- The b*mb squad
is operating the robot.
The FBI agents
and the detectives are saying,
get us the phone.
♪
So the robot's claw cuts
the wires on the phone,
picks up the phone,
turns around,
and rolls slowly
down the street,
west on 27th Street.
And at the end of the street,
half a block
from where the b*mb is,
There's a b*mb squad
detective with a bag,
and the robot comes up
with its claw,
opens the claw.
The phone drops into the bag.
So that phone is rushed,
like, right then and there.
This phone and evidence
from the post-blast scene
on 23rd Street...
everything's going
to Quantico.
One lab, one team,
one set of evidence,
one chain of custody
for that evidence.
♪
They called
the whole expl*sive section
of the lab in and said,
stand by.
Evidence is going to be
coming in in dribs and drabs,
'cause we got one post blast,
and we got one hot,
live device here.
So we didn't know
if we had one person...
- Or several.
- Putting down bombs
or several people putting down
several bombs.
- How did you end up linking
the subject to that house?
- The Jersey phone and
the other phone are burners.
And we eventually find out
it came from a Dollar Store,
and it was a set of five,
I think.
- So what do you do then?
- We have a house
under surveillance
that's above a chicken store.
- And that, when one
of the phones was activated,
it was activated
from that house.
- So it was activated
at that address,
but there's a bunch
of people there, right?
- Yes.
- So you have no clue
who's gonna be the bad guy.
- So at this point
we're looking at the house
and who's there,
and there's a number of people,
siblings, parents,
and cousins, and husbands.
[ominous music]
And this has taken
a tremendous amount of work.
This wasn't just the JTTF,
right?
We pulled in scores of agents
from outside the JTTF,
detectives
from all over the NYPD
and just going block to block,
giving them an assignment,
pulling video, seeing who
walked where, and going back.
It's a very manual process.
- We were doing an extensive
video canvas, saying,
let's go up and down
all of these streets
and try and figure out how
did these things get here.
And on 27th Street
we get a couple of breaks.
- We're able to pull video,
and we could see
a male pulling
two rolling bags.
He's wearing a backpack
and a fanny pack.
- Walks in.
Just walking.
- He's walking down
the street, and he...
- No car.
- Nope.
He walks down the street,
and he places the rolling bag
next to the dumpster
and walks away.
Two gentlemen walked down
the street, well-dressed.
One of them spots
the rolling bag in the garbage,
pauses, picks it up,
unzips it,
takes out the b*mb,
and looks at it.
- Are you kidding me?
- I kid you not.
- Who are these two guys?
And we're thinking,
the b*mb didn't function,
so they sent
the second team, like,
to flip the arming switch,
to adjust the timer,
to see what was wrong, which,
in and of itself,
is not a desirable job.
Gee, the b*mb didn't
quite go off.
Go play with it.
- Yeah.
I wouldn't want that job.
- And they take the b*mb,
and like John described,
it looks like a b*mb
from, like, the Road Runner
cartoon, right?
It looks like a b*mb.
- There's a pressure cooker
with a telephone
attached to the top of it.
He puts that down.
He picks up the bag.
He holds it up,
like "look what I got."
It's a Louis Vuitton
roller bag.
And then they keep going down
the street, talking like...
- Nothing happened.
- Like nothing happened.
- It wasn't really...
it was a knockoff, counterfeit.
But...
- Knockoff.
I was going to say,
it's probably a knockoff.
It's New York, yeah.
- But that becomes part
of the debate, which is,
we had a room full
of agents and detectives,
and the room splits
down the middle,
where half the room is saying,
that's a guy who...
that guy's to arm the device.
And other people are like,
this is New York.
It's garbage day.
He's garbage-picking.
But now we're pulling video
and trying to backtrack
to figure out, you know,
where did these two gentlemen
come from?
Where did they go?
Where did our b*mber come from?
Where did they go?
- So when you guys saw
the video of the guy bringing
the roller bag and you
potentially had that house,
you know, in New Jersey
with the family,
did you ever show that video
to the family
to identify
if that's a family member?
- So we looked at
the family members
that we knew who
were in the house
and compared their photos
to the video.
- And you had two brothers.
- Okay.
Two brothers, okay.
- So you had Ahmad,
and you had his brother.
And as we got more
and more video of him
in different places and
clearer shots of the face...
and now you're looking
at the two.
You're like, is it this brother
or that brother?
You're like, no,
it's that brother.
- And it appeared to be Ahmad.
- We know somebody bought
five burner phones in a store.
We know we've got
three phones attached
to bombs that have already
gone off or been rendered safe.
It means there's a couple
of more phones out there,
which suggests there
could be more bombs out there.
- And in all likelihood,
you have a b*mb factory
in a residential neighborhood
in New Jersey.
Well, you're not just gonna
go knock on the door
and say, where's Ahmad.
- I remember hearing
that the suspected b*mber
tested a b*mb at
the house or some...
or somewhere in New Jersey.
- He was blowing stuff up in
the backyard to figure out,
like, is this b*mb design
functional?
- Sure.
- Is my mixture going
to high order
when it's time to blow up.
[expl*si*n booms]
But we don't find that
till later.
We think we know
who the b*mber is.
We have a house
under surveillance
that's above a chicken store,
you know, in a Jersey town
and a whole bunch
of people come out.
The surveillance team
is saying, we got a male out,
we've got a female out,
we've got another male out,
groups getting into the car.
I'm sitting there saying, okay,
now what are we going to do?
One of them looks like our guy.
Confirmed it's our guy?
Not confirmed it's our guy,
looks like our guy.
Car is on the move.
We got a very good
surveillance team.
We've got elements
of SWAT behind them,
and then they get
on the highway,
heading to New York City.
And now it's really
decision time.
Here's the problem.
I mean, these are people
from New Jersey.
If they go south,
they're probably
going to Kennedy Airport.
If they go north,
they're probably
coming into Manhattan.
Neither one of those
is a good option for us,
so we've got to do this stop.
- Right.
- So what happened next?
- Surveillance team drops back,
SWAT ops, operatives, close in.
They block the car off.
There's broken glass.
There's flash-bangs,
people pulled out of the cars.
- The entire Belt Parkway
is now jammed with traffic
because there's these cars
and people being yanked out
and put on the ground
and hands up.
And everybody's got
their cell phones,
and they're filming this.
And it's going to Twitter.
It's going to YouTube.
- And Ahmad's not there.
[dramatic music]
♪
- We don't have
our felony subject.
We have a bunch
of family members.
And now, in the train station
in Elizabeth, New Jersey,
two homeless guys find
a backpack.
One of them happens to be
looking for a backpack.
He wants it
for a job interview.
So these two guys go
be-boppin' down the street
till they open the backpack,
and there's pipes
and there's wires
and there's cell phones.
And now we have another
ticking b*mb.
[suspenseful music]
- That's one
of the other phones.
- So there's a number
of different devices
of different designs,
which is interesting.
So these devices
are not pressure cookers
with phones on them.
They're pipe bombs with fuses.
- Okay.
- We're not liking this guy
because he knew
how to make
a pressure cooker b*mb
with a certain expl*sive mix.
He knew how to make
another pressure cooker b*mb
with a different
expl*sive mix.
Now he's got pipe bombs.
- They bring out the FBI robot.
And again,
they pull open the bag.
The devices were so unstable...
[expl*si*n booms]
They detonate,
and it destroys the robot.
- Oh, wow.
- The entire robot...
they blew up...
it blew up the robot,
k*lled the robot.
- He got a full
robotic funeral, though.
[laughter]
So it's not just a guy
who went on the internet
and figured out
how to make a b*mb.
This seems to be
a skilled b*mb maker
who knows how
to make a number
of different kinds of devices.
It's the middle
of the g*dd*mn night.
We don't have him.
We're finding bombs
in public transit places,
and we have a rush hour
coming Tuesday morning
where 5.6 million people
are going to crowd
into the subway trains
of New York,
a million more into
the New Jersey Transit system,
and we have, literally,
a mad b*mber on the loose.
- So we don't
have him in-pocket.
Now the presumption
is he knows that we know,
and so where are
we doubling our efforts,
trying to find Ahmad?
So this is truly a manhunt.
[suspenseful music]
♪
- Meanwhile,
at police headquarters,
we're swearing in
the new commissioner.
His first day started
at midnight the night before,
and he's saying,
we've been all this time
without a t*rror1st attack
in New York City, since 9/11,
and on my first day
we have one
and now a mad b*mber
on the loose.
He said, I need this guy
to be caught
before I'm sworn in,
and I said, we're on it.
- [chuckles]
- And It's 5:00 in the morning.
We've got a couple of thousand
law enforcement people
who know this guy's identity
and are looking for him
along with the FBI, the NYPD,
the JTTF, the NSA, the CIA.
I mean, there's no part
of the intelligence community
that isn't pulling threads on,
where did this guy travel?
Who does he know?
Who does he call?
All those wheels are turning.
But at this point,
we're sitting in the JOC,
talking about, okay,
so how do we get this
to everybody who's not sitting
in front of a television
or listening to the radio
in their car?
And somebody says,
you know that thing where
all the phones go off and
they make that terrible noise
and they say, like,
a storm is coming
and here's
the evacuation route?
That's FEMA.
It's like, who's FEMA?
Federal Emergency Management.
That's Homeland Security.
Homeland Security.
We got Homeland Security there.
Get FEMA on the phone.
And we're talking to
the FEMA guy, and we're saying,
we need to put this out.
He said, that's not
a weather alert.
That's like a "wanted" thing,
you know.
Like, I know, but you guys
have that button
where you can make it
to 50 miles
or 100 miles or 150...
we need that entire
Metropolitan area donut.
We're talking New York,
New Jersey, you know,
the entire Metropolitan area.
We need that
to go to every phone,
and you can make that happen...
this guy's picture,
this guy's name.
Find this guy.
And the guy says, I'm going
to have to get authorization
because it's not weather.
[chuckling]
But we can't do a picture.
Do you know what year it is?
What do you mean you
can't text out a picture?
My kid's 12.
He can text out a picture.
And they said, sir,
the system was designed
with the carriers,
and it carries
a minimum amount of data,
which is what they agreed to.
And that doesn't write...
look, mister,
we've never asked
the general public,
have you seen a storm
that looks like this before?
- So it wasn't an obvious call.
You put somebody's face out
and it's the wrong person,
and that person either
accelerates the violence,
or maybe an act of violence
is committed against him
or somebody who looks like him.
It was...it was a hard call.
- But it was the right call.
- Everybody's phone blows up.
- BOLO alert.
[alarm sounding]
- And here's this thing...
find Ahmad Khan Rahimi.
- And I remember seeing
cable news,
and the hosts look down
at their phones
because their phones
all started...
- And they're all
going off at...
- Right.
- Outstanding.
- So it went off on live TV.
[suspenseful music]
It was about
half an hour later.
We get this call
from Linden, New Jersey.
And so a business owner
owns a bowling alley
kind of bar.
There's a person sleeping
on his...
by the front door.
So he called 911.
- The police officer from
Linden, New Jersey, pulls up.
- So this is Angel Padilla.
He's an ex-Marine.
He wakes up that morning.
He sees the BOLO
and gets his ballistic helmet
and puts it in the car
and his other vest.
And he tapes the picture
of this guy to the dashboard,
and he gets the call
of the homeless guy sleeping
in the doorway.
- As you watch
the body camera video,
if there was a noise
that went off
like when your head clicks,
holy sh*t, that's the guy...
- Right.
- You could almost hear it
because you see Angel's
demeanor change slightly.
He goes to his radio,
and he says...
- He calls another car.
He says, are you out there?
And nobody answers.
[radio beeps]
- Dispatch to 709.
[ominous music]
♪
[g*nshots bang]
- Angel Padilla's hit.
Meanwhile, a couple
of blocks away,
there's a cop named Hammer,
is coming down in the SUV,
sees Rahimi.
Rahimi shoots at him.
[g*nsh*t bangs]
The b*llet goes through
the window,
hits his light package up
at the top there,
and ends up hitting
him in the forehead.
So he's been shot in the head.
- Holy sh*t. Wow.
- And he says,
well, I don't have time
to sh**t at this guy,
so he goes to run him over.
And he just misses him,
and Rahimi dodges the car
and is still running
and sh**ting
as other officers are trying
to set a perimeter
around him, respond in.
And there's a brand-new rookie,
also an ex-Marine.
[g*nsh*t bangs]
Rahimi is firing at him
from across the street.
- They're sh**ting at the car!
[g*nsh*t bangs]
[sirens blaring]
[g*nsh*t bangs]
[indistinct]
[g*nsh*t bangs]
He's sh**ting [inaudible].
- As the rookie comes out
with his g*n,
he remembers, oh, there's
a r*fle in this car,
and I was a Marine.
So he picks up the r*fle,
and he aims at Rahimi.
- [inaudible]
- And he fires the shots.
[g*nshots bang]
And Rahimi is hit.
[indistinct shouting]
[suspenseful music]
♪
- Meanwhile,
the new commissioner
has taken the oath.
We hand him
an index card saying,
"Suspect down, shot by cops
in Linden, New Jersey,
in custody."
And he's like, okay,
now I can get sworn in.
[applause]
- Our Counterterrorism
and Intelligence Bureaus
are second to none.
We saw this in action
on Saturday night
when our personnel responded
quickly and decisively
to that blast in Chelsea.
- There was a lot going on
that day.
[expl*si*n booms]
[glass shattering]
[dramatic music]
♪
[g*nsh*t bangs]
♪
- Going back to the two guys
that were on the street
that came out at dinner...
did you guys ever
identify them?
- They went to their room.
They turned on the news.
They realized what they did
and that they were
in big trouble.
So they went out
the back of the hotel
and threw it in a dumpster.
So of course... [laughs]
- They didn't take
the fake Louis Vuitton.
- They did not.
- [laughs]
- So, of course, they're like...
- And now we want the bag.
- Yeah.
- We want the bag.
And so now we had agents
and detectives
tracking dumpsters
to landfills,
trying to recover the bag.
♪
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