A murder-for-hire in Brooklyn: How the Iranian regime targeted a dissident with help from the Russian mob

Masih Alinejad, a journalist and prominent critic of the Iranian regime, was in the garden of her Brooklyn home when she locked eyes with the hitman hired to assassinate her. It was late July, and she had gone into her garden to pick vegetables.

"He was gigantic," she later testified in federal district court in Manhattan at the trial of the men who plotted to kill her. "He was in the sunflowers staring into my eyes."

Though she eyed him with some suspicion, she also thought he might be taking pictures of her garden of "beautiful sunflowers."