36 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER21, 2020
FATEMEH SHAFIEE
Asgari shares an Iranian philosopher’s view: “Science is wild and has no homeland.”
in Asgari’s e-mails probable cause to
believe that he might have violated
sanctions, stolen trade secrets, and com-
mitted visa fraud. The agents never found
evidence of a sanctions violation, but
they did come across a proposal that a
student of Asgari’s had asked him to
review: a request for a research institute
attached to Iran’s petrochemical indus-
try to fund a project on low-tempera-
ture carburization.
For Asgari, the student’s proposal
had been a source of irritation, and a
waste of time. But the F.B.I. fastened
on the exchange as evidence of a con-
spiracy to expropriate Swagelok’s pro-
cess for the benefit of Iran’s petrochem-
ical industry. Asgari’s earlier e-mails
to Pirouz, looking for work, could be
characterized as prior intent, and the
tourist visa as a ploy. Such was the be-
ginning of the sealed indictment that
greeted Asgari upon his return to New
York in 2017.
Someone in the F.B.I. may have truly
believed that Asgari was funnelling in-
dustrial secrets to Iran. But the way the
agency conducted its investigation sug-
gested a fishing expedition—and an at-
tempt to push Asgari into becoming
an informant.D
uring Asgari’s first days in the Lake
County jail, in 2017, he emerged
from his isolation cell only for meals. The
prison population made him nervous—
and the other inmates apparently felt the
same way about him. The first one he
befriended confided that a rumor had
gone around the pod that Asgari was not
to be messed with—he was an Iranian sci-
entist who knew how to blow things up.
Asgari soon got to know many other
inmates, in part by playing chess and
cards, and he began to educate himself
about racial division and drug addiction
in the United States. He prided himself
on being able to talk to anybody, and he
was soon serving as a mediator between
prisoners having disputes, and as a coun-
sellor on matters of the heart. New pris-
oners often arrived after dinner had been
served, and Asgari took up a collection
for commissary items to feed them. He
fought a rearguard battle against pro-
fanity, quitting a game of spades whenhis opponent exclaimed, “This mother-
fucker plays good!” Asgari had recently
lost his mother, he explained, and would
not be called that name. The inmate
later apologized, asking, “Can I call you
‘fucking professor’ instead?”
Asgari taught physics to a small group
of inmates. He explained how infrared
detectors worked, and how optical scat-
tering produced rainbows, advancing all
the way to quantum mechanics. He
found the greatest aptitude among the
bank robbers and the racketeers. He had
three such students: one Russian and
two African-Americans.
He paid another inmate’s bail. “I knew
the minute you walked through that door
that you were different—special,” the in-
mate later wrote to Asgari, in a rounded,
childlike hand. “You intrigued the hell
out of me. I knew that when you talked
or had something to say, I should just
shut the hell up and listen.”
The first week of Asgari’s imprison-
ment, Fatemeh and Mohammad stayed
in Cleveland, visiting the jail and look-
ing for a lawyer. An attorney with a pic-
ture of Che Guevara in his office asked
for half a million dollars up front, and
when Mohammad said that he couldn’t
afford it the lawyer suggested hitting up
the Iranian government. The family went
with public defenders.
The first lawyer on the case, a warm
and voluble assistant federal public de-
fender named Edward Bryan, tried to
get Asgari released from Lake County
on bond. The U.S. Attorney’s office for
the Northern District of Ohio suggested
a proffer. Asgari would be temporarily
released to a hotel lobby, where a team
of F.B.I. agents and prosecutors would
join him for a conversation, in the pres-
ence of his attorney.
“I said, ‘No way,’” Asgari recalled. “Talk
to me in handcuffs and shackles—don’t
play nice. You want to talk? Come here.”
They came. Daniel Riedl, a prose-
cutor from the U.S. Attorney’s office,
was accompanied by agents from the
F.B.I.’s Cleveland field office, as well as
“some people from Washington,” ac-
cording to Asgari.
In Bryan’s twenty-two years as a pub-
lic defender, he had never witnessed a
proffer like this. Normally, a defendant
admitted to at least one of the charges
against him and provided information
about the crime, including details about