Sheikh Ahmed Yassin loomed over a Brooklyn courtroom last week like the Dark Sith Lord of the Middle East. Jurors stared at a grainy blow-up of the Hamas founder’s glowering face, four feet high and about that far from the jury box, his full, wrinkled beard and eyebrows framing a fixed frown and pouchy eyes.
It was the opening of the world’s first terror finance trial, Linde v. Arab Bank. Over the next two months, jurors from East New York, Crown Heights and Canarsie will get to pass judgment on events that happened half a generation ago in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Ramallah. The man who would sway them is America’s king of rollover vehicle verdicts, Tab Turner, originally of Arkadelphia, Ark.
