'Monster' Beats The System
by Tim Madigan
Raising four children didn't allow time to dwell much on the past. But as hectic as a single mother's life might get, Ann could never forget that night, never be completely over it. The rape was too terrible, and she had come to know too much about rapist.
Every month now, it seemed, she learned something new. The man who attacked her, an Egyptian-born chemist named Sharif Abdul Latif Sharif, had committed rape twice before in Florida in the 1980s. He should have been in prison. Or he should have been deported. But he was a brilliant scientist with money, the kind of criminal who could beat the system and be out drinking at a Midland, Texas, nightclub on Halloween night 1993, the night he ran into Ann.
He talked her into visiting his home that night, then trapped her there, raping her again and again until the sun came up. There were moments when Ann wondered whether she would live to see her children.
But then no one believed her horrible story. At the time, Ann was married, and her husband had been at home with the kids while she was in the bars with a cousin, celebrating Halloween. That made her a tramp. She asked for what she got. That's the message Ann felt she received from Sharif's defense attorney, the police, even the prosecutors. What jury would believe a woman like her?
So they let him go, let Sharif slither across the border into Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, in the spring of 1995, and that was that. At least until a few years later, when Ann's cousin called and told her the news. Ann went to the public library and found the newspaper story herself.
Sharif was a killer in Juarez, the story said. He and a street gang had been accused of raping and killing many young girls. Ann felt a flood of relief as she read, thankful that she was alive. And she felt anger.
They should have stopped him. They should have believed her. She didn't deserve to be raped. None of it should have happened.
A genius with a sordid past
Midland is known as "The Tall City" because of the skyscrapers that rise like a mirage from the West Texas desert. The oil business built those impressive towers, a universe full of self-made entrepreneurs who were not above a few risks to get ahead in a cutthroat world.
And there was no question that hiring Sharif was a risk, at least to the reputation of Wayne Kinsey's Midland company, Benchmark Research and Technology. Sharif carried two convictions for Florida rapes on his resume, and when the company first contacted him, he was still in a Florida prison.
But he had been a good prisioner, officials there said, and the time behind bars did nothing to lessen Sharif's professional reputation as a chemistry wizard capable of devising ways to make oil wells more productive. When Sharif was released from his Florida prison in 1989, he was at work for Kinsey within two weeks.
And to use a term from the trade, Sharif was a gusher. Industry buzz quickly began, admiring talk of the innovations coming from the small compan in Midland. Sharif developed three patents and had ten more pending. He was worth big money to the company. Were it not for business generated by Sharif's inventions, many Benchmark employees would not have jobs.
Even the US Department of Energy had expressed interest in Sharif's work. One happy photograph seemed to symbolize it all. It was Sharif and US Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas, shaking hands and smiling in Sharif's Benchmark lab, looking down on a row of Sharif's beakers.
Even his personal demons seemed assuaged by the professional success. Twice in his first three years in Midland, Sharif was arrested on drunken-driving charges, but bosses chalked that up to difficulties adjusting from prison. Sharif insisted he had become sober after the last arrest in 1991, and was dutifully attending therapy and several meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous a week.
Convicted rapist or not, there came a time when friends in Midland thought so highly of Sharif that they trusted the man around their children.
It was such a shock, seemed like such a shame, that day in April 1992, when federal agents appeared in Midland with handcuffs, telling Sharif he was going to be deported.
Colleague offered pity, help
Not all of Sharif's colleagues, past or present, were so enamored. Tom Wilson had worked with the Egyptian chemist for three years in Florida, witnessing both Sharif's technical acumen and the spiral into drunkenness and violence that in 1984 led Sharif to be imprisoned for sexual battery.
Wilson knew that Sharif should have been deported after his second Florida rape. That's what federal immigration law said: two convictions for crimes of "moral turpitude" and a legal alien like Sharif was gone. But Sharif had a knack for falling through the legal cracks, and it had happened again. The dangerous sexual predator somehow managed to fly completely beneath the radar of the US Immigration Service, and Wilson was not about to let him get away with it.
Sharif was a charasmatic guy, and it had taken even Wilson a few years to get his true measure. Wilson was already employed at the Palm Beach chemical company Cercoa when Sharif was hired there in early 1981. Within months of arriving in Palm Beach, Sharif was charged with sexually assaulting a young woman in his beachfront condominium.
"Don't believe what you read in the papers," Sharif told Wilson. "I didn't rape her."
At the time, Wilson was still willing to take Sharif at his word. Wilson pitied him, actually. The poor guy seemed to be getting the shaft from bosses at Cercoa, which was probably the cause of his chronic drinking. Sharif dreamed of having his own business, he told Wilson, a place to pursue his experiments as he wished. Current frustrations were getting the better of him.
So Wilson stepped up with a solution, which later he'd come to regret: A family friend in Gainesville offered to bankroll a new company in the Central Florida college town. Sharif would be the president and creative force behind the new firm. When established in 1982, the job would be everything Sharif had professed to want. But within weeks in Gainesville, the truth about Sharif had become clear.
He was soon arrested on a drunken-driving charge. A brief marriage ended one night when Sharif's wife said he beat her bloody. After each successive episode, Sharif promised Wilson and his other partners that he would quit drinking for good, abstinence that generally lasted a week, two at the most.
Then, in March 1983, a 20 year old college student answered Sharif's ad for a live-in housekeeper. Sharif attacked the woman, Lisa, on her first night in his house - punched, choked, kicked and raped her. And that night, there was a particularly sinister element to his behavior. To Lisa, he bragged of killing other women and burying them; he threatened to kill her if she tried to escape.
Wilson said he was appalled after Sharif was arrested in Lisa's attack. Then it was clear. Sharif was more than a drunk. He was a psychopath and Wilson was the one who had brought him to Gainesville, where an innocent young woman had been scarred for life.
"You've done it this time, big boy," Wilson told Sharif in a jail visit. "She's got permanent injuries, and you're not getting around this one. This time you can't deny it. You can't say it was consensual."
The long deportation battle
Sharif went to prison in Florida in 1984, with a 12 year sentence, but spent less than six years behind bars. His new gig in Midland began immediately after his release.
Wilson had no doubt that Sharif would rape again. And maybe remorse also had something to do with Wilson's 1991 call to the US Border Patrol in Midland.
"Let me tell you who you have out there," Wilson told border agents. "You have a tiger by the tail."
Border-patrol agents who looked into Sharif's past came to agree. But within hours of his arrest for deportation in 1992, Sharif was freed on bail and back at work. In the deportation fight to come, he would have plenty of allies.
In the proceedings, Capt. Sadie Darnell of the Gainesville Police Department provided the most damning evidence. Wilson had alerted Darnell that deportation hearings seemed to be going in Sharif's favor, which prompted Darnell's scathing affidavit to US Immigration Judge William Nail.
"In general, Sharif attacks women while on dates or approaches them, gives a fake name and states that his car is disabled," Darnell wrote to Nail on Nov. 6, 1992. "Once they are within his span of control, he physically attacks them, beating them severely, usually in the face, and rapes them. The (victims) were all verbally and physically abused. The detectives stated the victims were terrified, and said Sharif threatened to kill them.
"His behavior has demonstrated him to be a predator of women and his repeated irresponsibility of driving while under the influence of alcohol or drugs endangers everyone," Darnell continued. "The victims have been irreparably damaged. Please consider them."
But the criminal Darnell described could not have been the same man in Nail's El Paso courtroom, humbly fighting to remain in the country he said he had grown to love.
Sharif would be his own star witness, insisting during emotional testimony that his mistakes were long behind him. Therapists were helping him work through the trauma of his Egyptian childhood, of being sodomized as a child by his father and other male relatives, Sharif said. Sharif swore he stopped drinking. In Midland, for the first time in his life, Sharif said he had found a sense of family and inner peace.
"I mean, I...I sit there having nightmares about not being able to go fishing in the lake and catch bass," Sharif testified on July 28, 1992, during the first of his deportation hearings. "I would like to have another chance. I won't you down, Your Honor."
Witnesses who followed him turned court proceedings into a virtual love fest. Several letters to the judge from friends in AA swore to Sharif's increasingly stable sobriety and his example to others in his Midland group. Colleage after Benchmark colleague testified about Sharif's rehabilitation and his value to the company. On that issue, they at times overdid it.
"If you think for a moment that I'm going to let him stay because he's going to line somebody's pocket with gold, you're mistaken," an angry Nail said at one point in the testimony.
But by the final hearing, even Nail confessed to being swayed. To avoid deportation, Sharif needed to prove his rehabilitation and his value to American society. He seemed to have done it. In the final hearing, on July 26, 1993, Nail congratulated Sharif on his apparent reformation.
"I would like you to understand that this is one of the most difficult cases that I've ever had to decide," Nail told Sharif. "I can't tell you what the decision is at this point. I just have to look at it and do the very best I can. Okay?"
"Thank you, Judge," Sharif said.
To many in Midland, it thus came as a bitter disappointment when Nail ordered Sharif's deportation to Egypt.
In his 14-page order issued Sept. 28, 1993, Nail acknowledged Sharif's scientific ability and the strides he seemed to have made in his rehabilitation. But two drunken-driving arrests in the past four years "provide little assurance that the respondent will not again be an abuser of alcohol."
And it was while drinking, Nail wrote, that Sharif seemed to undergo "a remarkable transformation...much like the principal character in Robert Louis Stevenson's popular story, 'The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde'."
Ultimately, it boiled down to money. Those most adament in their defense of Sharif also depended on him for their livelihood, Nail said. Who wouldn't want such a man to remain in the United States?
"Since the respondent contributes to their livelihood, they are willing to assume the risk of the respondent's potential for abusive behavior," Nail wrote. "Individuals who are not benefited by the respondent's presence may be less willing to assume that risk, however."
Sharif's lawyers immediately appealed, a process that could take years. He would remain free on bail in the interim. And his employers at Benchmark would continue to demonstrate their loyalty.
Victim becomes the accused
Ann had seen Sharif before in the various Midland nightspots, and he always seemed the perfect gentleman, the sort of guy who could turn a woman's head with his silk shirts and sophisticated manner.
So on Halloween, Ann had no problem drinking and dancing with Sharif when they met in a crowded nightclub called the Cactus Moon. She told him about her children. He spoke of his big house and persuaded her to pop in and see it, just for a minute.
It was a large, beautiful place in a new neighborhood on the edge of town. They entered through the garage, and when Ann asked to use the bathroom, Sharif pointed the way. He was waiting outside when she came out, and punched her when she refused his advances. He called her a whore and bitch, and raped her.
Then he poured her a glass of orange juice, chatting amiably, until his rage swelled back up. She said he raped her again and again until the sun came up, each attack interspersed with kindness, causing Ann to arrive at the same metaphor used a month earlier by Judge Nail. Sharif was first Dr. Jekyll, then Mr. Hyde, a monster not content to attack her body. Sharif seemed to need to mess with her head, too.
Sharif's defense lawyer didn't seem interested in what his client had done that night. He wanted to know Ann's history in the bars, what she wore when she went to nightclubs, whom she had slept with.
The same day she talked to the lawyer, she passed a polygraph examination. But as far as Ann knew, that was the end of her case. She had no idea what became of her accusation, no clue about what had become of Sharif until that day a few years later when her cousin called with the news from Mexico.
To Midland County District Attorney Al Schorre, the case was a loser from the beginning. The victim had passed a polygraph exam, Schorre said, but had given inconsistent statements to police before arriving at the final version of her attack. Though married at the time, she had previously left a bar and had sex with a man not her husband. Sharif insisted the sex between them had been consensual. The case was clearly unraveling, Schorre believed.
Which was why the prosecutor was receptive to the proposal offered in the spring of 1994. Jack Ladd, the corporated lawyer for Benchmark Research and Technology, was also defending Sharif in the rape case. Ladd's deal was this: Dismiss the charges against Sharif, and he would leave the contry. Benchmark would set Sharif up with a lab in Juarez, Mexico, and keep him on the company payroll, Ladd said. But at least Sharif would be gone.
Schorre agreed.
In August 1994, the sexual-assault indictment against Sharif was dismissed.
Next stop: Ciudad Juarez
The move to Mexico had been Sharif's idea, Benchmark CEO Wayne Kinsey said in a recent interview. Sharif had become familiar with Ciudad Juarez during his deportation hearings in El Paso, just across the Rio Grande. The company's relationship ended with Sharif a few months after he crossed the border, Kinsey said, but he declined to say exactly when or why.
Kinsey said his company cooperated with Mexican and American law-enforcement officials when Sharif was charged with the Mexican slayings.
"We've had conversations and meetings with them," Kinsey said. "We've done everything we feel like a good company and good citizen should have done."
In another interview this spring in his Midland office, District Attorney Schorre explained his handling of Sharif's case.
"I just wanted something done on the case," Schorre said. "They were bad allegations even though the case had gotten weak. We were still trying to get something done that we could find acceptable. I thought we were doing okay.
"I don't think Mexico looks at it that way," Schorre said.
It was a safe assumption. With the deal in Midland, Sharif's grotesque American odyssey finally came to an end. But almost simultaneously, a five-year nightmare for the women of Juarez had begun.
Copyright 1999 Seattle Times