The Informer: Behind the Scenes, or Setting the Stage?

Eldawoody -- who has small, pale eyes, badly yellowed teeth and a tendency to gesture wildly and wander conversationally -- participated energetically in the new program. While an informer, he attended 575 prayer services in New York mosques, sometimes four or five a day.

His police department handler wrote more than 350 reports based on their often twice-a-day calls. Eldawoody wrote down license plate numbers in a mosque parking lot and reported on the tone of religious services and internal debates. The department paid him about $25,000 for work over the 13 months, and $75,000, including relocation costs, over 20 more months leading up to the trial. Now the department covers his rent, plus he collects $3,200 a month, he says, and a police spokesman says the direct payments will likely continue indefinitely.

Of course informers are often critical to terrorism probes, but even the Justice Department acknowledges that problems arise. A 2005 department study of confidential informers in the FBI found violations of the agency's guidelines for handlers keeping track of them in 87 percent of the files examined.

"There's this idea that we just sort of willy-nilly have put informants out there because it's a Muslim community," said Paul J. Browne, the chief spokesman for the New York police. He said the department places informers in response to threats, and that it was not Eldawoody who first alerted the NYPD to Siraj.

Indeed, it later emerged that at least three men were working undercover at one time in the Bay Ridge mosque where Siraj prayed, including a young Bangladesh-born detective who first reported Siraj's anti-American rants.

A civil rights group suggested this amounts to surveillance of protected religious activity. Says Christopher Dunn, the associate legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, "I don't think when Catholics are going to St. Patrick's, they're worried about undercover police officers."

Life After Testifying

Last fall, CBS News aired a report on Eldawoody. On camera, he traipsed through Manhattan streets near the 34th Street subway station, talking about the potential bombing he helped avert and his need for support from the police. Soon after, the police helped arrange his move and escorted him to his current home. The episode taught him the power of media attention.

"I am so honored that you are here," Eldawoody says to his visitor .

In truth, he has retreated into a kind of suburban depression. He wears the same black shirt two days in a row, with dark marks of perspiration under the arms. He can't stop smoking and says he has gained weight. At night, while his wife, Fotna, and daughter Marwa sleep in the master bedroom, he stays up late using the Internet in the second bedroom, trawling for real estate deals or writing to defend himself on a Muslim-themed Web site that calls him an agent provocateur.

He hasn't been to any mosques since he moved, he says, and prays only a few times a month.

He drives what he laughingly calls "the historic car" -- the small Toyota in which he recorded Siraj -- but rarely goes farther than to pick up 10-year-old Marwa from school, or to shop for groceries at the nearby Wal-Mart.

The police helped him look for a job. He remains unemployed, but says he plans to buy a house, with the down payment coming from Fotna's savings. He wants to put down roots, start fresh -- even if he has only vague ideas of what that life will be.