A man accused of harassing the mayor has his house searched and possessions seized.

At seven o’clock on the morning of November 7, Syaed Ali and his family were awakened in their Breckenridge Street home by a team of Buffalo police officers bearing a search warrant. The warrant, signed by Buffalo City Court Judge Craig Hannah one week earlier, accused Ali of aggravated harassment and empowered police to search his home and seize any and all electronic equipment—computers, discs, cell phones, etc.—that might provide evidence of the charge.

The person that Ali says he was accused of harassing: Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown.

Police searched Ali’s home, carted away boxes of his and his family’s possessions, and took him downtown for questioning, without an arrest warrant, without reading him his rights, without allowing him to contact relatives or an attorney.

Two months later, Ali—who denies harassing the mayor in any manner—hasn’t been charged and his possessions remain in the custody of the Buffalo Police Department. Nobody will return phone calls from his attorneys.

That morning, as police officers began rifling through his possessions, Ali asked whether he was under arrest. He says that Mike McCartney, an investigator with the New York State Attorney General’s office, told him that he was—for computer fraud. Later, Ali says, Buffalo Police Detective Anna Mydlarz said that he was under arrest for aggravated harassment.

Authorities later claimed he was never actually under arrest, but Ali’s lawyer, Richard Grimm III of the firm of Magavern Magavern & Grimm, says he may as well have been: Ali felt as if he was in custody and was told he could not leave. “He certainly doesn’t feel as if it was voluntary,” Grimm said of Ali’s subsequent trip downtown for questioning. “He apparently asked, ‘Am I under arrest?’ and they said, ‘No.” And he asked, ‘Can I leave?’ and they said, ‘No.’ It certainly sounds like a custodial interrogation when they won’t let him go.”

Buffalo police took Ali down to the Buffalo branch office of the New York State Attorney General in the Main Place Tower, according to a claim his lawyers filed in December. There he was questioned and accused of various crimes, including harassment. Ali says he was asked if he had ever spread defamatory rumors about the mayor. He replied that he had not, but the interrogators continued to press him.

Eventually Ali was taken from the Attorney General’s office to the local FBI office, where an agent asked him questions.

Ali was never read his Miranda rights. When he asked if he could talk to a lawyer, Ali says, he was told that if he spoke to a lawyer he’d be charged with a crime. He asked if he could talk to a relative, and he was told he could not. When he asked if he could leave, he was told that if he left he would be arrested and charged with a crime. He asked if he could use the bathroom, and he was told he could not.

Ali says he was shown a list of names that included politicians who are opposed to Brown and asked if anyone on the list had put him up to defaming the mayor. He again denied that he had spread any rumors about Brown.

Eventually, at about 2:30 that same afternoon, Ali was released from custody. He says he was told by authorities not to tell anyone what had happened that day. He was told that if his family asked what had happened, to tell them it was a case of identity theft and they had the wrong guy. He says he was told that if he talked to a lawyer or the media, he’d be arrested and charged with aggravated harassment.

November 7 was a Friday. The following Monday Ali contacted an attorney. Two months later he still has not been charged with any crime and authorities still have all the property they seized from him and his family.

The morning of the raid, police gave Ali a receipt for 16 items that they had seized. Ali says he counted 42 items, including material not covered by the warrant: credit cards, bank statements, checks, business records—not just Ali’s but those of his brother and father—even personal effects, including deodorant. He has since been told that his electronics remain in possession of Detective Mydlarz of the Buffalo Police Department and are being tested “off-site.”

Mydlarz did not return a call on the matter. Buffalo Police Department spokesman Mike DeGeorge said, “We would not comment on an ongoing investigation.” Asked if that meant there was an ongoing investigation, he said he would neither confirm nor deny that. When asked whether logic dictated that there must be an ongoing investigation if he was refusing to comment on it, DeGeorge said, “Listen again to my response” and repeated it. (Asked if he would comment if there was not an ongoing investigation, DeGeorge said, “I imagine our response would be the same.”)

Grimm, Ali’s lawyer, says that his firm has been unable to find an affidavit on which the search warrant was based. Ordinarily, a judge needs some sort of sworn statement to justify issuing a warrant. If such an affidavit exists, no one has been willing to provide it to Ali’s lawyers.

“From a criminal procedure standpoint, that’s critical, so we’re trying to figure that out,” Grimm said. “There’s clearly some peculiarity, something unusual about the way the search warrant was issued, and I haven’t figured out why or how or what it is exactly yet.”

Peter Cutler, the mayor’s communications director, declined to comment on the matter, saying it was a police issue. He would neither confirm nor deny that the mayor had made a complaint against Ali that led to the warrant signed by Hannah. But Ali has no doubt that’s what he’s been accused of, based on his interrogation the morning and afternoon of November 7. He just doesn’t seem to know what he did to deserve the accusation.

The warrant itself is sloppily written, accusing Ali of “Aggravated harassment, in violation of Penal Law Section 240.31-1”—a section of the law that pertains to damaging places of worship:

A person is guilty of aggravated harassment in the first degree when with intent to harass, annoy, threaten or alarm another person, because of a belief or perception regarding such person’s race, color, national origin, ancestry, gender, religion, religious practice, age, disability or sexual orientation, regardless of whether the belief or perception is correct, he or she:

1. Damages premises primarily used for religious purposes, or acquired pursuant to section six of the religious corporation law and maintained for purposes of religious instruction, and the damage to the premises exceeds fifty dollars;…

For his part, Judge Hannah won’t say whether or not he signed the warrant, claiming he has no recollection of the event. He testily told AV he’d only look into his files to see if he’d signed the warrant if ordered to do so by a court. The warrant was filed on November 19 with Buffalo City Court’s Criminal Records division, which declined to release it. Both Grimm and Ali have copies of the warrant with Hannah’s signature.

Grimm says his firm sent letters to authorities inquiring into the status of Ali’s possessions. He says the firm tried to contact Mydlarz, who he was told was in charge of the investigation. Grimm says neither Mydlarz nor any other representative of the Buffalo Police Department have returned those calls. He has asked for the name of a prosecuting attorney and received no response. Both the FBI and the New York State Attorney General’s office have told Ali’s lawyers that it is Buffalo Police Department case, that they have no continuing interest in the case, and that Ali’s possessions are in the custody of the Buffalo Police Department.

On December 10, Ali’s lawyers filed a notice of claim against the City of Buffalo seeking to recover his property. They’ve received no response to that filing, which is preliminary to filing a lawsuit. (You can read the notice of claim here on AV Daily.)

“They came to my house,” Ali said. “They made frivolous claims that are just not true. They’re making the accusations that I was harassing the mayor, and I did no such things. They used the cops, they filed false reports with the New York State Attorney General’s office and the FBI. I fully intend on suing them.”

So what did Syaed Ali do to precipitate this trampling of his rights? Who is Syaed Ali that someone, allegedly the mayor, should send police raid his house and take his computers, business records, bank statements?

Ali is an IT entrepreneur whose company, SAIL-IT, was the subject of an article in Business First on October 31, the same day that Hannah was signing the search warrant that has turned his life upside down. In the article, Ali said SAIL-IT intended to add 150 new network engineers and software developers over the next 10 months, in addition to the 70 people the company already employed. The sort of efficiency consulting his company does, he told Business First, becomes more in demand in poor economic times.

Ali has also become a frequent email correspondent with city officials; most recently he sent a spate of emails criticizing the Brown administration for selecting the JW Pitts Properties proposal for a waterfront hotel in the Erie Basin Marina. In those emails he used words like “sham,” “fraudulent,” “corruption,” and “malfunction of judgment.” Harsh, but hardly threats of the sort that constitute harassment. (Others who have been copied on Ali’s emails tell AV that nothing they’d read rose to the level of a threat or of harassment.) Ali calls his emails “informational” in nature.

Ali recently became active in Democratic politics. In 2007 he formed a committee to run for Erie County Legislature against incumbent Betty Jean Grant. The challenge was self-funded and ineffective: Grant successfully challenged his petitions and Ali did not make it on the primary ballot. For advice on that race, he hired former North District Councilmember Dan Quider, who once worked on Brown’s staff when Brown was a state senator but who also is connected to Brown’s chief Democratic rival, Assemblyman Sam Hoyt.

Last summer Ali was a member of the Buffalo branch of the movement to draft New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg to run for president. Ali considered a challenge to State Senator Antoine Thompson last fall, too. A couple local pols said he was put up to that challenge by the Hoyt/Len Lenihan faction of the Democratic Party, but Ali insists that’s not the case. Asked if he’d ever done any political work for the Hoyt/Lenihan faction, he said, “Not to that extent.”

In any case, Ali did not run against Thompson, who maintains at least a nominal alliance with Mayor Byron Brown. (The widening breach between Thompson and Brown is grist for another mill, on another day.) He did not even form a committee to raise money for such a race.

So again: What did Ali do last fall to earn the mayor’s enmity?

Some sources have suggested to AV that Ali may have been behind an anonymous August email campaign alleging that the mayor led a secret gay life. (The emailer claimed to have a videotape that would prove this was true, and local TV news operations fell all over themselves trying to get a copy.) Or perhaps Ali had run another anonymous email campaign, under the name “Save Buffalo,” demanding that Brown and Deputy Mayor Steve Casey resign by August 19 or face revelations that would prompt a common uprising against the administration. That, of course, did not happen, nor did the allegations that Brown is a closeted gay amount to anything. No video ever materialized.

Ali denies taking part in any of this. He says that he’s done nothing wrong. (So, for the record, does his mother, who described the search of the family’s house as “armed robbery.”) And everybody on the other side of the story refuses to comment.

“These are very bad people,” said Ali, whose reluctance to compromise any future legal action by talking to AV is undone somewhat by his aggravation at what has happened to him. “If they can do it to me, they’ll do it to anybody.”

This story was posted earlier in the week on Artvoice Daily. If you'd like to comment on this story, join in the conversation already under way.