Thursday, Sept. 12, 2002 | 11:18 a.m.
Born in Brooklyn, 35-year-old Carlos Nieves now calls Las Vegas home.
A waiter by trade, Nieves recently was forced to quit his job of five years at Emeril's New Orleans Fish House in the MGM Grand to prepare for a July surgery that successfully removed the cancer from his pancreas.
After attending his sister's funeral in New York, all Nieves wanted to do Wednesday was get home to Las Vegas to finish recovering from his surgery.
Instead he found himself detained and questioned by the FBI in Fort Smith, Ark., along with three men who would later be charged with interfering with a flight crew after their strange behavior spooked a plane full of people on their way to Las Vegas.
"I feel like I've been disgraced," Nieves said from his motel room at the Fort Smith Ramada Inn on Wednesday night. "It was the most embarrassing scenario of my life.
"All those people on the plane who I had been talking to a few minutes before were looking at me and thinking, 'He's one of them. He's a terrorist.' "
Nieves says that he was racially profiled by Northwest Airlines when the crew of Flight 979, an Airbus A320 flying from Memphis, Tenn., to Las Vegas, lumped him in with three men accused of interfering with the flight.
"I don't think it was the New York Fire Department hat or the Lakers jersey I was wearing that caused them to profile me," said Nieves, whose father was Puerto Rican and mother Costa Rican.
Nieves said he plans to sue the airline.
Northwest Airlines spokeswoman Mary Beth Schubert said that Flight 979 was diverted, and passengers were questioned, because, "the crew was concerned with the behavior of a group of four passengers."
Schubert declined further comment about Nieves.
Special Agent Karen Vorhees, a spokeswoman at the Little Rock, Ark. FBI office, said that crew of Flight 979 made the decision to land the plane in Arkansas.
"Everyone was taken off the plane and interviewed, based on the activities of four gentlemen who the crew felt were acting suspiciously," Vorhees said.
She did not elaborate on what suspicious activity the men allegedly were involved with.
Nieves said he doesn't know what he did to place himself under suspicion other than go to the bathroom to vomit.
The plane was diverted to Fort Smith after Harinder P. Singh, 41, Alaaeldin M. Abdelsalam, 37, and Gurbeep S. Wander, 47, allegedly began acting strangely on the plane and refused to follow the requests of flight attendants.
Passengers said the men walked up and down aisles, talked on a cell phone in a foreign language, refused to return to their seats and opened overhead bins. One of the men went to the bathroom at the back of the plane and began shaving his chest, passengers said.
"I got on the plane and took a nap," Nieves said. "When I got up I went back to the bathroom because I had to throw up, and there was one of these guys shaving his chest. I went back to my seat, and the next thing I know a stewardess has talked to a big guy sitting near me and the guy is staring at me."
When the plane landed police and FBI agents entered the aircraft and everyone was asked to get off the plane, Nieves said.
"I went to get off, and they said I needed to have a seat, and they sat me down by the three Middle Eastern guys," Nieves said. "I knew what was going on and I just said, 'Come on guys, I was born in Brooklyn.' "
The FBI detained Nieves for several hours and questioned him about his background, religion and whether he had ever been part of any kind of militia organization.
"They asked if I was Muslim and if I had been to Afghanistan," said Nieves, who is Catholic.
By the time Nieves was released and got back to Fort Smith Regional Airport, the last plane for Las Vegas had left. Northwest put him up for the night at the Ramada.
Nieves' nephew, Zenen Sanchez of Las Vegas, said that what had happened to his uncle didn't surprise him.
"My uncle's about as American as they get, but he is also the unluckiest guy I know," Sanchez said. "He has been hospitalized for the last three months, and last month he went to New York against doctor's orders to go to my aunt's funeral.
"He had to spend another month in a hospital in New York just to get well enough to fly back home."
Nieves left New York on Tuesday hoping to avoid flying on Sept. 11, but by the time he reached Memphis on Tuesday he had missed his connecting flight and had to stay the night in Tennessee.
Nieves' claims of racial profiling are not the first that Northwest has faced. Ali Khan, an executive board member of the American Muslim Council and an investment banker, alleges that Northwest employees profiled him at McCarran International Airport on July 29.
Khan, of Valparaiso, Ind., said he was detained and questioned at the airport for more than an hour, causing him to miss his flight. FBI officials say Khan's name and physical description were a close match to a man on a terrorist watch list and that he was detained for a short time while it was determined that he was not that man.
Gary Peck, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada, said that his organization has received a number of complaints involving profiling from various airlines including Northwest.
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