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Would you buy a used car from this guy?
Before the feds busted him in an Iranian military plot to blow up the Saudi ambassador in Washington, DC, Manssor Arbabsiar was a mullet-haired used-car salesman in Corpus Christi, Texas, who went by the nickname “Jack.”
“I was very shocked to see what happened,” Arbabsiar’s friend, Corpus Christi businessman Mitchell Hamauei, told FOX TV in Houston.
“That’s out of character for him, and he’s a businessman. Maybe he thought it was a joke. I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going on with his mind.”
In fact, Arbabsiar — who the feds say arranged to pay $1.5 million of Iranian blood money to a man he believed to be a Mexican drug-cartel hit man — came across more as an amiable bumbler than an international man of terror.
Friends said he couldn’t be bothered to pay his bills on time or keep his auto-sales records straight let alone pull off a deadly terror plot.
“He’s no mastermind,” said David Tomscha, who for a brief period co-owned a used-car lot with Arbabsiar before the now-incarcerated man stopped paying his share of the bills.
“I can’t imagine him thinking up a plan like that. I mean, he didn’t seem all that political.”
Arbabsiar, 56, a native of Iran and a naturalized US citizen who had lived and worked in the Corpus Christi area for 25 years, was busted on Sept. 29 after flying into Kennedy Airport from Mexico.
The Justice Department said Arbabsiar, who has admitted acting at the behest of the terror-sponsoring Qods Force faction of Iran’s military, repeatedly met over the summer with a man he believed to be an associate of the Mexican “Los Zetas” drug cartel.
The other man — who was secretly a Drug Enforcement Administration informant — agreed to accept the cash from Arbabsiar to carry out a bombing attack on Saudi Ambassador Adel Al-Jubeir in a Washington restaurant, authorities said. Arbabsiar told the man his paymasters in Iran included his cousin, a ranking member of the Qods Force, an arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.
“They want that guy done. If the hundred go with him, f–k ’em,” Arbabsiar said when the Mexican told him the bombing might have to take place at a DC restaurant crowded with as many as 150 people, among them US senators, a criminal complaint said.
Longtime friends of Arbabsiar were shocked at the charges — but quick to suggest that Arbabsiar would have been motivated more by cold, hard cash than by a burning love for his homeland.
“He didn’t do this for jihad, he didn’t do this for Iran, he did it for money. He was not religious. He loved money,” Tom Hosseini, Arbabsiar’s roommate from Texas A&I University, told the Corpus Christi Caller-Times newspaper.
Hosseini said Arbabsiar “was a regular guy” at school. “But someone can change a lot over 30 years,” Hosseini conceded.
He told the Caller-Times that Arbabsiar acquired the long scar on his face in 1981, when they both were ambushed while on a date with two women after work. Arbabsiar was stabbed 32 times by the assailants, who left a knife in his back, Hosseini said.
Since then — and until recently — Arbabsiar had led an apparently unexciting life. He married twice, had at least one child and, in addition to several used-car businesses, operated a kabob shop and a convenience store.
He had several minor scrapes with the law — including three motor-vehicle arrests in the 1990s and a 2001 arrest on suspicion of theft in which charges were later dismissed.
Last year, friends said, Arbabsiar moved to the Iranian capital of Tehran, leaving behind his wife, Martha Guerrero, from whom he has been separated for some time.
“He said ‘I’m crazy to stay in the US,’ that he was making good money in Iran,” Hosseini told the Caller-Times. “He didn’t tell me what he was doing.”
Arbabsiar, authorities said, recently had been spending a lot of time in the United States, traveling back and forth to Mexico to meet with the DEA informant.
“My wife and I always thought there was something weird about the guy,” said Eric Cano, a neighbor of Arbabsiar’s wife, who had spotted the accused terror middleman in recent weeks walking around the neighborhood at night, talking in a foreign language on his cellphone.
Guerrero said she believed Arbabsiar was innocent.
“I cannot for the life of me think that he would be capable of doing that,” Guerrero told CNN. “He was at the wrong place at the wrong time. I’m sure of that and I know that his innocence is going to come out.”
Additional reporting by Geoff Earle in Washington