MCC Officer Maimed by Al Qaeda Prisoner Dies

Federal corrections officer Louis Pepe lost his left eye, and a lot more, 24 years ago in a brutal prison attack.

It was carried out by Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, a one-time advisor to Osama bin Laden, with the help of Salim’s cellmate at the downtown Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York.

Federal corrections officer Louis Pepe, then 43, spent 2 1/2 years in the hospital after MCC jail attack.

On November 1, 2000, Salim stabbed Pepe in the left eye with a comb that was sharpened into a shiv. The two prisoners pummeled the officer for close to an hour.

Louie refused to give up the keys, thwarting their efforts to escape. Louis Pepe was essentially the first victim of Al Qaeda in America, when he was assaulted ten months before the 9/11 terror attacks took down the Twin Towers, one mile away.

“That one day, that one hour, they hit me one hundred times,” Pepe once recalled, describing being jumped in the cell at the notorious 10-South wing of the MCC. “I should have been dead. I was dead, but I came back.”

Officer Pepe outside the MCC, showing the area of the 10-South wing where he was jumped.

When 67 year old Pepe, known as Louie, died Sunday, November 24, at Coney Island Hospital, it marked the end of a valiant struggle to regain a degree of normalcy in his life. The attack left him partially paralyzed, brain-damaged, and fighting to speak again.

His longtime home health aide, Leslie Achiaa, was called back to his Brooklyn apartment by the night aide on Thursday, November 21, shortly after she’d finished a 12-hour shift. Louie’s head was tilted down as he sat in his wheelchair and he appeared to be deceased, but he was resuscitated by EMTs and taken to the hospital.

Officer Louis Pepe with his aide, Leslie Achiaa, when Louie marked 20th anniversary of surviving prison attack.

“I was going there every day,” Achiaa told me of her visits to Coney Island Hospital. “Sometimes, his eyes were open. I said, ‘Mr. Louie, if you can hear me, blink your eyes.’” But Achiaa noted Louie's brain had suffered too much oxygen loss before he was revived. He died three days later.

Achiaa had cared for Louie during the last 15 years of his life, making a four-hour round trip from her Bronx home daily to Louie’s place in Brighton Beach in south Brooklyn.

“Louie was a fighter,” Achiaa told me through tears. “My best friend. I confided in him. He said, ‘Les, I don’t have anybody. I just have you.’”

Officer Louis Pepe with his longtime home health aide, Leslie Achiaa.

When Louis Pepe suffered his life-altering injuries in November 2000, he was living with his parents in the house he grew up in on 58th Street in Woodside, Queens. He was 43 years old. For security reasons, he wasn’t publicly identified for several years. He spent 2 1/2 years in Bellevue Hospital and then Rusk Institute, even receiving a visit from Janet Reno, who was U.S. Attorney General at the time.

U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno visited Louie and his family at Bellevue Hospital.

In the fall of 2003, Louie gave his first interview to PIX11 News, after his sister and advocate, Eileen Pepe Trotta, advised him the time was right. Only then did I realize, when I was given the Woodside address, that this was the same Pepe family that lived across the street from me during the first, six years of my own life. I clearly remembered the Pepe siblings, Eileen and Louie.

Louie and I felt an instant connection. Yet in 2003, he still had trouble speaking. He called all the women he met “Ms. G.”

But Louie vividly acted out the ferocity of the November 2000 attack. Louie said he had been escorting Mamdouh Mahmud Salim back to his cell after an attorney’s visit. Salim was facing trial in New York for the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in Africa that killed 224 people in Kenya and Tanzania. Salim’s cellmate and co-defendant jumped Louie, spraying hot sauce from the commissary in the officer’s face. That’s when Salim admittedly stabbed Louis Pepe deep in his left eye.

The officer was working alone in 10-South at the MCC when the attack happened.

It took nearly an hour for help to arrive, with Salim trying to grab Louie’s keys as part of a larger plan to break out of the federal jail.

After Louie’s TV interview, U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer was moved to visit Louie at his Woodside home and assisted in getting the stricken officer a wheelchair-accessible van. A former police officer donated a motorized wheelchair.

Louis Pepe, a federal corrections officer, lived for 24 years after Al Qaeda prisoners maimed him.

Louie’s father died, and the officer moved to an apartment by the ocean in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn with his mother, Margaret. The U.S. government assisted with the costs for his care and the apartment. Louie’s sister Eileen eventually moved to another apartment at the complex.

During my time at PIX11 News, I followed Louie Pepe’s story for two decades. Our photographer and I were there when Louie received a prosthetic eye, years after the attack. The adhesive that was used to keep the eye in place irritated Louie, so he eventually stopped using the prosthetic.

The officer had confronted Salim in court in 2004, when the terrorist pleaded guilty to attempted murder and initially received a sentence of 32 years in prison. Judge Deborah Batts had Louie Pepe removed from the courtroom, when the disabled officer repeatedly screamed at Salim from a middle aisle, after his 'victim impact' statement had already been completed. "Why didn't you kill me?" Louie demanded to know. "I am dead!" Salim was later resentenced to life in prison in 2010.

For many years, Louie would rise very early in the morning at the Brighton Beach apartment and use a wall to do muscle-strengthening exercises.

With the left side of his skull sunken in, Louie would often yell about the terrorists who put him into this position.

And Louie longed to have a wife and family.

He would share his emotional pain with his aide, Leslie, who started volunteering with him at a nursing home in Queens once a week. Louie felt he was doing a good thing by visiting elderly, military veterans--many of them in wheelchairs, like him.

“That was my work husband,” Leslie said, recalling Louie’s best qualities. “The love of him, the caring, the sense of humor.”

Leslie said Louie was still doing his exercises against the wall, and they talked of paying a visit to her native Ghana in Africa. We both remembered when Louie’s speech got better and he could say our names…Leslie and Mary.

“I worked through COVID,” Leslie said, remembering the first wave of the deadly pandemic in 2020. “Louie never got COVID.”

Officer Louis Pepe with his devoted aide, Leslie Achiaa, who cared for him the last, 15 years of his life.

On the 20th anniversary of the MCC attack, in November 2020, Louie arrived in his van at the downtown MCC prison, where he was feted at an outdoor barbeque and received a plaque from his former colleagues: "Senior Officer Specialist Louis Pepe. Your brothers and sisters at MCC continue to recognize and support you."

"Look what they gave me, Mary," he proudly said to me.

Leslie spoke of Louie’s kindness to her daughter, Chelsea, who was just 4 years old when the aide started caring for the officer. Leslie would take the little girl to Louie’s home on holidays. Her daughter is now 19 and attending college.

“She’s doing wonderful,” Leslie said with pride.

Louie’s sister Eileen died in February this year, and the retired officer was keenly aware that he had no more family left.

So it was Leslie who took care of funeral plans, when Louis Pepe died on November 24th. There was a brief wake at Aievoli Funeral Home in Brooklyn.

The MCC has closed in recent years, so Leslie wasn't able to reach Louie's old co-workers. She sent me photos of Louie's casket at his gravesite in Mount Saint Mary Cemetery in Flushing, Queens with an arrangement of red roses nearby.

"Everything I did for him, he deserved it," Leslie said.

Red roses left at Officer Louis Pepe’s grave in Mount Saint Mary cemetery by his aide, Leslie Achiaa.