The man behind an alleged plot to paralyse a US city is long on petty crime and short on al-Qaeda zeal, write Michael Grunwald and Amy Goldstein
José Padilla was born in Brooklyn, New York. In Chicago, where he and his mother had moved when he was aged four, he joined a Latino gang, where he was reported as a teenager to have been involved in a killing.
He worked at a hotel in Florida, where he was sent to prison after a road-rage shooting incident. Now the 31-year-old man who calls himself Abdullah al Muhajir is the first accused al-Qaeda operative with José tattooed to his right arm.
The transformation of a chubby Catholic boy into an Islamic terrorist suspected of plotting to unleash a so-called dirty bomb on a US city is a mystery.
He apparently converted to Islam in or after prison; he apparently completed a substance-abuse course; he apparently married an Egyptian woman and left the country, but this much is definite. He was arrested on May 8th after getting off a flight from Pakistan at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago and he is now in a navy jail in South Carolina.
When José was four, he and his mother, Estela Ortega, moved to west Chicago, where they lived in a modest rowhouse they shared with two other families; his father is said to have died when he was young. Neighbours recalled that his nickname was Pucho, or Pudgy, and that he played softball in the streets.
He joined the Latin Kings, a street gang which used to promote itself as a non-violent source of empowerment for young Latinos before dozens of its leaders were sent to jail. The sources also say he was involved in a gangland murder when he was only 13.
FBI officials said he was arrested five times in Chicago for assault and other crimes from 1985 until 1991. He spent several years in juvenile jail; he last attended a public school for troubled children when he was 15.
In 1991, he moved to Florida, where he was living with a girlfriend and working at hotels for $200 a week - according to a successful worker's compensation claim that netted him an additional $5 a week - and driving a car with tinted windows.
In a traffic accident in October 1991, he produced a .38-calibre revolver, then drove away, according to a police report. After a year in prison, he was arrested nearly a dozen times up to 1997 on traffic offences. In no instance did he give his name as Abdullah al Muhajir.