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When Marianne Weber met Abouhalima, she was studying in Munich, dreaming of becoming a dancer and trying hard to recover from the death of her 17-year-old brother in a motorcycle crash. "I was mostly depressed and looking for a purpose to my life," she says today. After meeting Abouhalima, she started skipping classes. She took him to meet her parents, Ernst and Hildegard, in her hometown of Vogt, a picturesque village in the hills of Swabia in southern Germany. The Webers, who own a wine shop next to their house, considered Abouhalima a harmless boyfriend. In a family photo album, beside a label that reads last picture, a smiling Marianne and Mahmud pose in the German countryside. He wears a moustache, jeans and a pair of thongs. She wears a sleeveless blouse and summer skirt, her hair long and blond.
It was the last time she allowed herself to be photographed. After marrying Abouhalima, she converted to Islam and moved with him to a government- subsidized high-rise. Her parents didn't find out about the wedding until four months later. In the fall of 1985, the couple announced that they were flying to the U.S. for a three-week visit. They settled in Brooklyn and never returned, leaving behind most of their possessions. "After they lied about the trip to America, I had real doubts about my son-in-law," says Hildegard. When Abouhalima's German residency permit expired in 1986, police came looking for him in Munich and found a vacant apartment. It remains unclear why the authorities took such an interest in Mahmud the Red.
THE STREETS OF NEW YORK
Six months after Abouhalima arrived in New York, his tourist visa expired. Fortunately for him, Congress was preparing to authorize an amnesty program for more than 1 million illegal aliens who merely had to assert that they worked as migrant farmers. Abouhalima applied for amnesty in 1986, received temporary legal residence in 1988 and became a permanent resident two years after that. Through an attorney, Abouhalima now claims he worked for seven months on a farm in South Carolina. But his current wife told a TIME reporter that she can remember no travels outside the New York metropolitan area except for one trip to Michigan to visit friends. "The amnesty program was a joke," says Duke Austin, a spokesman at the Immigration and Naturalization Service. "Since documentation wasn't required, the burden was on the government to prove the aliens were not farmers. Fraud was widespread and enforcement virtually impossible."
After getting his right-to-work papers in 1986, Abouhalima got a chauffeur's license and proceeded to drive taxicabs in New York for the next five years. His license was suspended 10 times for failing to respond to summonses for traffic violations. He regularly passed through red lights, drove without a license and neglected to have his car registered and inspected. Once, he was even found guilty of driving with broken meter seals, a telltale sign of an attempt to rip off customers.