EXCLUSIVE: Profile of Iran terror plot suspect Mansour Arbabsiar

CORPUS CHRISTI - Exclusive from ABC15 sister newspaper Corpus Christi Caller Times

A Corpus Christi man implicated in an international terrorist plot also was a used-car salesman who owned a lot but didn’t pay his bills, and was so disorganized he quite often couldn’t remember where he left car keys and paperwork, friends and former business associates said.

Mansour Arbabsiar, 56, was arrested in late September and implicated in a federal criminal complaint made public Tuesday in a plot to kill the Saudi ambassador to the United States. He attended Texas A and I University in Kingsville in the 1980s and moved to Iran in 2010, friends said.

Arbabsiar owned several businesses in Corpus Christi, including Gyros & Kabab in Sunrise Mall, Stop and Buy on Staples Street and used car lots.

David Tomscha, a Flour Bluff man who said he owned a used car lot with Arbabsiar about 10 years ago, said the 56-year-old Iranian was slick, but no mastermind.

“If he got involved, it was probably because of money,” Tomscha said Tuesday.

Tomscha said he met the “friendly, easy-going” Arbabsiar while buying a car from him wholesale. He said Arbabsiar preferred to go by “Jack” and also had the nickname of “Scarface.”

Tomscha, a small businessman with real estate interests in the city, said the two decided to go into business together, opening a used car lot at 620 S. Staples St.

Things went south, Tomscha said, when Arbabsiar stopped paying his half of the expenses.

“He tried to cheat me,” he said. “We parted ways.”

Tomscha said the two, although not close friends, kept in contact through mutual acquaintances, including local storekeeper Tom Hosseini, an Iranian who said his friendship with Arbabsiar dates back to the early 1980s when the two were students at Texas A and I University.

“We were roommates for one semester -- Martin Hall -- spring of 1981,” Hosseini said from behind the counter of a local convenience store.

“He was a regular guy,” he said. “But someone can change a lot over 30 years.”

Hosseini said he was with Arbabsiar the night he received the wound that left the scar on his right cheek that led to the “Scarface” nickname.

“We went to Houston after Hurricane Alicia to get work,” he said. “I worked at a Stop-n-Go. We met one night to go out after work with some girls.”

He said the two were ambushed.
Hosseini got away.

Arbabsiar was not so lucky.

His face was slashed and his assailants stabbed him 32 times, leaving him for dead, the blade still in his back, Hosseini remembered.

“He spent six months in the hospital,” he said.

Hosseini dismissed any notion that Arbabsiar’s experience might have motivated him to take part in the alleged plot, or fractured his mental health.

“He didn’t do this for jihad, he didn’t do this for Iran, he did it for money,” Hosseini said. “He was not religious. He loved money.”

He said his friend did not finish his mechanical engineering studies at Texas A and I, instead graduating years later from Southern University in Baton Rouge, La.

He said Arbabsiar gained U.S. citizenship when he married his first wife.

“She left him because he was so scatterbrained,” he laughed. “She’d joke that she worked only to make money to pay to have keys made for the cars.”

The last time Hosseini saw Arbabsiar, he said, he was visiting South Texas from Tehran, where he moved in spring 2010.
He stayed three days with Hosseini.

“He said I’m crazy to stay in the U.S., that he was making good money in Iran,” Arbabsiar said. “He didn’t tell me what he was doing.”

Tomscha said, although he had not had contact with Arbabsiar in more than a year, he had heard the man, whose wife lives in Austin, had moved to Iran.

“He just disappeared,” Tomscha said. But not before signing a quick deed for the money he owed on the used car lot over to Tomscha.

Tomscha’s wife, Cheryl, a retired Flour Bluff math teacher, teetered backward and clutched her chest when she heard Arbabsiar had been arrested.

“My god, my god, my god,” she repeated, briefly forgetting to close the front door to their Flour Bluff home.

Still, after a few minutes of recounting what little she knew of her husband’s former business partner, Tomscha said she was not surprised.

“From what I knew of him, he was not honest,” she said.
She said she was comforted in a strange way: the man had never been in their home.

“I never met him,” she said. “I told my husband I didn’t want to.”