Matthew Llaneza (Part 12)

Fragments of a future narrative

The Special Agent who filed Matthew Llaneza’s criminal complaint, in 2013, was Christopher Monika. He later filed the affidavit in a 2015 case—Fremont Man Charged with Attempt to Join Syrian Jihadists, ran one headline. Adam Shafi was that case’s Matthew: young (aged 22), depressed, isolated. 

But in October 2018, because the jurors in Shafi’s case were “hopelessly deadlocked,” “U.S. District Judge William Orrick granted Shafi bail, releasing him from an isolation cell in Alameda County’s Glenn Dyer Jail in downtown Oakland, where he had been held for three years pending trial.” Three years.

There’s little else about Monika, via basic searches. No information about other stings, other Bureau roles.

The prosecutors in Matthew’s case were Melinda Haag, then a U.S. Attorney, and Andrew P. Caputo, then an Assistant U.S. Attorney.

Haag shifted to private law. She’s now a partner with Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison—a role with a median salary, it seems, of some $220,000.

Caputo works for Earthjustice. I was surprised—that he switched from doing the FBI’s legal work to overseeing an “expansive docket of litigation to protect the nation’s public lands and cherished wild places, irreplaceable species, and ocean fisheries and habitats.” He earns nearly $300,000 per year, according to the group’s latest available 990.

The pattern is clear: ushering a paranoid man into prison is no bar to success in the U.S. It’s a standout line on your résumé. A stone on your path to a better life.