They were like a million other petty criminals — until they embraced radical Islam behind bars, launching a terrifying march to a planned mass murder that ended only when authorities sabotaged their sinister plot.
“He was not born Muslim. He’s an institutional Muslim,” said Richard Williams, uncle of Onta Williams, one of the four Bronx terror suspects.
“He wasn’t raised that way.”
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Richard Williams said that his 32-year-old nephew fell under the sway of dangerously radical Islamo-fascists while serving time on drug charges — and that he became “brainwashed” after his mother died and his ex-wife fought him for custody of their child.
“They played on his weaknesses and what was going on with his family,” Richard said. “He was brainwashed and manipulated in the system.”
Authorities say Onta Williams fell in with his three alleged co-conspirators, James Cromitie, 45, David Williams, 28, and 37-year-old Laguerre Payen, at a Newburgh mosque, where they bonded when they discovered they were all ex-cons.
Relatives and friends of the other three men charged in the horrific plot to blow up two Bronx synagogues and shoot down an Air National Guard plane said the men never expressed any interest in terrorism. But they all quickly developed a deep interest in Islam in jail.
Williams’ uncle — who himself once served 10 years on a drug charge — said he was familiar with prison converts to Islam.
“All the ones in the system are fake Muslims,” he said. “Onta was raised in the church, like I was. His mother, his aunt and cousins, they all sang in the choir. He was a Baptist.
“We were against it,” he said of his nephew’s conversion. “The family was all against it.”
When Cromitie — a lifelong jailbird — last got out of prison two years ago, he similarly told stunned relatives in The Bronx that he had converted to Islam.
He announced that his new name was Abdul Rahman and that he was now living in Newburgh.
“He told me that he was a Muslim and that didn’t eat pork anymore, and I told him, ‘Get out of here!’ ” said his surprised mother, Adela Cromitie. “Why would he do something like that? He was raised Episcopalian.”
According to a criminal complaint, Cromitie told an FBI informant “that his parents lived in Afghanistan prior to his birth and that, because of his connection to Afghanistan, he was upset about the war there.”
But Adela was shocked by that claim.
“I don’t why he’d say that. We have no ties to the Middle East or anything like that,” she said. “We are from the South, although he has some relatives in Barbados.”
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A Newburgh neighbor, who gave only her first name, Kristina, said Cromitie was “dedicated” to his faith, but never expressed any anti-American or anti-Semitic beliefs.
“He never showed any kind of anger,” she said. “He was dedicated, but he never expressed it in a negative way.”
Other relatives said he used to be a fun-loving guy who enjoyed singing and doing impersonations. But now that he has been caught up in a plot to kill, his family flat-out dismissed him.
“Right now, to me he’s, like, the dumbest person on this Earth,” said his sister, Wanda Walker.
David “Daoud” Williams had a Muslim father who had never been much a part of his life. But Williams re-embraced the religion after serving time in 2004 and 2005 for criminal possession of a weapon, and had appeared to be getting on the right track since then, living and working in Brooklyn.
“He wasn’t a radical Muslim. He was raised that way. That’s just the way he is,” said David Williams’ girlfriend, Cassandra McCoy. “He is just a beautiful person in-and-out.”
Relatives said he had recently quit his job as a chef at the Boulder Creek Steakhouse at a mall in East New York and moved back to Newburgh to help care for his teenage brother, who was recently diagnosed with sarcoidosis, a debilitating lung disease.
He had been studying computer science at ASA College in Brooklyn.
“We know him as someone who was trying to get things together and trying to support his brother,” said his aunt Aahkiyaah Cummings. “We don’t know that part of him.”
But she said that she had detected a change in recent weeks — and that he acted strange when she gave him a hug in the parking lot of their housing complex about a week and a half ago.
“It was a coldness. It was an emptiness. It wasn’t him. Something was not right,” she said. “I asked my husband to talk to him because something was not right. He never got a chance to.”
Onta Williams’ uncle, Richard, said he recently sensed a change in his nephew, too — after he began spending more time with his Muslim friends.
“I knew something was going to pop off. I would ask him if something was wrong, but he would never tell me about it,” he said. “His whole mood had changed lately. His friends would come by to pick him up, and he would drop everything.
“He had always been a follower, not a leader,” he added.
The fourth man, Laguerre Payan, was born in Haiti and had been living in a boarding house in Newburgh since being released from jail in 2005 after serving 1½ years for attempted assault. Suffering from mental illness, he took anti-psychosis drugs and medication for depression, authorities said.
Earlier this year, he began appearing at the Masjid al-Ikhlas mosque, where he told the assistant imam, Hamim Rashada, that he was fighting deportation and engaged in a custody battle.
“He had some serious psychological problems. He suffers from serious paranoia,” Rashada said.
The imam said he once visited Payan at the boarding house and found his room in shocking disarray, with food rotting on the stove and a bottle of urine sitting next to the door.
He said he thought it strange that he saw Payan –who was penniless and living on food stamps and government assistance — on more than one occasion with a brand-new cellphone still in its box.
“I asked him why, if he already had a phone, why he would need another, and he responded, ‘I could use it for the minutes,’ ” Rashada said.
Authorities say the men had planned to use cellphones to detonate the bombs remotely.
Still, when Rashada once asked Payan what he thought about what was going on in Afghanistan, he didn’t seem to have any opinion.
“He told me, ‘I can’t even get a job here. I don’t concern myself with those things.’ ” Rashada recalled.
Although the suspects all met at the mosque, authorities have not indicated that they believe radicalism was being preached there or that anyone else there had any role in the plot.
The mosque’s head imam, Salahuddin Mustafa Mohammad, an ex-con himself who has worked as an Islamic cleric at the Fishkill correctional facility, said he remembered seeing Cromitie around the mosque only a handful of times, and had no recollection of either Williams ever being there.
“They have no affiliation with this mosque. We don’t teach that here. We teach respect to others. If a person has these thoughts, he is not a part of our community,” he said.
Mohammad said members of the mosque had detected a man they believe was the government’s informant, trying to get people to talk about jihad and radical Islam. The man would take people out for expensive meals to win them over, Mohammad said.
“Anyone with any smarts knew to stay away from this guy,” he said. “These guys are not bright enough to conjure up something like this.”
Additional reporting by Leonard Greene, Murray Weiss, Jeane MacIntosh, Austin Fenner and Kevin Fasick