At 21, I was supposed to be worried about my education. Instead, I was worried about raising money for my parents’ bail.

The Atlantic

I was eating tandoori chicken at Shalimar Restaurant in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco on a school night when I received a call from my aunt, Yasmeen, who said my parents had been arrested.

Earlier in the morning, a dozen armed FBI agents had raided our home in Fremont, California; dragged my parents out of bed; handcuffed them while they were in their pajamas; and drove them to the county jail in Oakland. There was even a helicopter circling our house. My father later described it as being treated like a captured drug kingpin.

This piece is excerpted from Ali’s recent book.

My grandmothers were there, and begged the FBI agents in their broken English to at least explain why they were being taken. They didn’t receive an answer. My aunt deemed it best if I, the only child, drove down and figured out what the hell was happening.

It was April 2002 and I was about to graduate from UC Berkeley and head to law school. My biggest decision was choosing between UC Davis and UC Hastings. My “model minority” narrative and sheltered life, disrupted by the 9/11 terrorist attacks a few months prior, had been permanently reconfigured.

My parents had been caught up in Operation Cyberstorm, which at the time was the largest anti-​piracy sweep in the FBI’s history. Robert Mueller, then the director of the FBI, even came out to San Jose for a press conference. It was a two-​year undercover operation with more than two dozen arrests. The majority of the people arrested were alleged to be part of a highly organized criminal conspiracy involving the sale and distribution of counterfeit and infringing software.

My parents, who had owned a software-resale business, had nothing to do with the piracy ring itself. Instead, they were charged with 30 counts of conspiracy, mail fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering in what authorities described as a scheme to defraud Microsoft of millions of dollars by obtaining discounted academic software under false pretenses.

Microsoft initially alleged that it lost as much as $100 million, and the local newspaper ran with that number. Overnight, everyone heard that my parents had been scooped up in a massive anti-​piracy raid. Their faces were plastered on the FBI website for days, and people assumed I was somehow sitting on $100 million stashed away in domestic and foreign accounts.

Oh, how I wish it were true. I really could have used that money in the weeks and months that followed.

I have no desire to relitigate my parents’ case or clear their name. That’s their story, if they choose to tell it. My take on it after all these years is that my parents made dumb and questionable business decisions, but I sincerely don’t think they were Walter White from Breaking Bad, deliberately orchestrating a criminal plot. My parents, two Pakistani American immigrants who had a beef with Microsoft, spent nearly five years in jail, but the Wall Street architects of the 2008 financial crisis that ruined so many Americans mostly got wealthier and failed upward in life.

The day after their arrest, my father was able to call me from jail. “Did you do anything shady or criminal?” I asked him. “If you did, just let me know. I have to know what I’m dealing with.” Just because they were my parents didn’t mean I was going to bury my head in the sand and make excuses for alleged criminal acts.

He assured me that he had consulted with attorneys and believed everything they had done was legit. My mother eventually called, and I asked her the same. She was just as shocked as my dad to see their names on the indictment. In hindsight, my parents should have settled the case and taken a deal. But my parents believed they were being unfairly targeted by Microsoft, and didn’t want to plead guilty to something they felt was legal.

My father told me to call and retain Chris Cannon, a lawyer whom my father had hired before and, it turned out, had read about the arrests in the newspaper. I asked Cannon if he thought my parents were innocent. He said my father was a good man but reminded him of many of his other clients, who were “aggressive businessmen,” and “that gets them into trouble sometimes.” He also asked me to send him $5,000 so he could get started on the defense.

Where would I get $5,000? How long would this last? When would my parents be released? Who was going to take care of the house, the bills, the office? By then, my parents had used the proceeds of their software-resale business to launch a dietary-supplement company. Who would pay the salaries of its employees? How was I going to study and take my upcoming finals? What about law school in the fall?

I was a 21-​year-​old who was supposed to focus on my education. Instead I was in Fremont, taking care of my grandmothers and trying to pay all the bills, retain and maintain legal counsel for my parents, and raise money for their bail.

The Monday morning after my parents’ arrest, I went to their office, called the six employees of the dietary-supplement business, and told them to return to work if they were comfortable doing so. I spent the next two weeks trying to learn how to run every aspect of the business.