Muse never broke character, perpetually “coughing, spitting, cussing, belittling me,” Phillips said. They made it very clear to me, had anything come into that lifeboat, a bullet, a person, whatever, the first person who died would be me. “What they did to me was a lot worse than that. His time on that boat “was a lot worse than what you saw in the movie,” Phillips told me. However, Phillips claimed Muse was actually a Christian convert to Islam, something he was told during the four days Muse and his compatriots held him hostage on one of the Alabama’s lifeboats. We do get along well, the place is quiet and peaceful.” Without many activities with which to occupy himself, Muse said he spent free time reading, writing, watching television, and talking to “my brothers. Roughly 25 of them were Muslim, said Muse, who described himself as devoutly Islamic. There were about 45 inmates in the CMU when Muse and I first corresponded. “He didn’t have a chance to sue anybody in Somalia,” he laughed. Phillips said Muse is still better off in the U.S., even in prison, than he was before. He also spent at least one 30-day stretch in solitary for being “a bit disruptive” and lost his phone privileges for a month. According to the postings, Muse got his GED in 2016 after struggling with the English portion. Matsumunyane continued to post very occasional updates about Muse on Facebook until they ended abruptly 16 months ago. The judge in his case ordered his wages garnished to pay the $550,000 in restitution he owes for the hijacking, plus a court fee of $600 due upon conviction.Ī planned documentary by Lesotho-Canadian documentarian Kaizer Matsumunyane about Muse stalled in 2013. Muse makes $19 a month working as a prison orderly, though he sees considerably less than that on payday. CMU inmates aren’t allowed contact visits, and everything they say to family or friends must be in English.Īll letters to and from inmates in the CMU are read by prison officials, all telephone calls are recorded, and audio surveillance picks up all inmate conversation, which is then analyzed by an offsite counterterrorism unit. The CMU is colloquially known as “Guantanamo North,” which Muse noted in his first letter, and contains 55 cells, of which five are used for disciplinary segregation. Muse is housed in FCI Terre Haute’s Communications Management Unit, or CMU, a highly restrictive wing reserved for some of America’s most notorious criminals and terrorists, including “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh. That’s one thing all said, they wanted to come to the U.S. “He may not have all the words, but he has all the curses. “His English was better than half my crew,” said Phillips. Phillips said Muse, who claimed not to speak any English when he arrived in America, likely understood more than he let on in court. Nor did he ever once smile during the hijacking, Phillips said. Box months longer than I probably should have, finally canceling it only when it became obvious I would never heard from Muse again.īut if Muse was curious about what Richard Phillips had to say about the hijacking in his book, I wondered how Phillips-and other crewmembers that were there-would react to Muse’s take on things in his letters to me.įor starters, Muse’s teeth “were terrible to begin with,” Capt. I wrote to him a few more times, asking what he thought about the story, which parts he considered most accurate, and so forth. Box I had rented to facilitate our correspondence. I waited eagerly for his response, regularly checking the P.O. I was automatically notified by Amazon when Muse got the book. Somewhat reluctantly, I sent Muse “the ‘Captain Phillips’ book,” as he called it, via Amazon, as he instructed federal prisons require that books sent to inmates come directly from the publisher or distributor so nothing can be smuggled inside of it. Richard Phillips’ memoir of the hijacking, A Captain’s Duty, which he said he hadn’t read, either. He also asked if I would send him a copy of Capt. He said he would probably watch if it was ever shown on the prison TV system. Muse said he had never seen Captain Phillips, the movie. (He has since lost those appeals.) He said his plan had been to work as a fisherman in what he described as a “small village on the ocean,” a place identified in a sentencing memorandum as Garacad, “one of a number of piracy centers” in the semi-autonomous province of Puntland. I asked him about the Alabama hijacking, but Muse insisted he couldn’t say much about it since he had appeals pending.
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