He’s locked away in a heavily guarded wing of the naval brig in Charleston. Elsewhere in the prison, sailors who face court martial on a variety of charges go about their daily lives in confinement. But Padilla is under around-the-clock guard. The lights on his cellblock never go out. And he has no contact with anyone on the outside.

His lawyer has not spoken to him since he was transferred to Charleston. Nor has his mother. Even now, as lawyer Donna Newman and government attorneys face off in court over the government’s right to hold Padilla, Estela Ortega Lebron, Padilla’s mother, is holding her tongue.

She does not believe that her son is a terrorist, says Victor Olds, the former assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York who is now representing her. But she is  afraid to say anything more about her son for fear that she might anger federal prosecutors and jeopardize him.

Jose Padilla, police mugshot

In fact, few people who know Padilla are willing to discuss his life or the circumstances he is now facing.

What is known about the man has been gleaned from old court records and leaks, but together it offers a glimpse of the one-time street tough now at the center of a monumental legal debate.

He was born in New York City. A chubby kid nicknamed “Pucho,” Padilla was an avid softball player, but clearly was no choirboy. After her husband’s death, Padilla’s mother moved her family to Chicago’s West Side when the boy was 4 years old and by the time he was in his early teens, he was running with the Latin Kings, a notorious Chicago street gang, and using a half-dozen aliases, among them Jose Rivera, Jose Alicea, Jose Hernandez and Jose Ortiz.

His first major scrape with the law came when he was just 14 when he and six other youths attacked and robbed two members of a rival gang. One of the young gangstas was stabbed in the melee. He died, and Padilla, who had kicked the wounded victim in the head during the robbery, was convicted of the juvenile equivalent of aggravated assault and armed robbery.

He spent a few years in juvenile detention facilities. After his release, he drifted to Broward County, Florida, where he lived with a girlfriend and earned $200 a week working at local hotels. Along the way he sired a son.

But again, he ran into trouble with the law. On October 8, 1991, he was arrested in Sunrise on charges of waving a gun out of his car window during a road-rage incident. He spent the better part of a year behind bars for that offense, and during his incarceration was charged with assaulting a guard.

After being freed on August 5, 1992, it seemed that Padilla had put his life of street crime behind him, according to published reports. His only other encounter with the law, apart from his arrest in May of this year by federal agents at Chicago’s O’Hare airport, came in 1997 when he received a traffic ticket for driving with a suspended license, records show.

Perhaps, his family speculates, he first began exploring Islam in jail. Padilla’s mother, a Roman Catholic, told neighbors that her son had “joined the Muslims,” according to Olds, but prison officials say they had no record of Padilla’s conversion during his 10-month stint in the Broward County Jail.

A few months after his release, however, Padilla queried Muslim co-workers at the Fort Lauderdale Taco Bell about nearby mosques. A short time later, Padilla told his co-workers that he had taken the name Abdul al Muhajir, a name commonly associated with Muslim warriors, and that he and his Jamaican-born fiancé, Cherie Stultz had converted to Islam, according to published reports.

Jose Padilla in kaffiyeh, traditional head covering (AP)

He studied the Quaran for a time at a Pembroke Pines mosque, and made a point of wearing a kaffiyeh, or traditional head covering, but friends told journalists and investigators that the man now known as Abdul al Muhajir never seemed to be fanatical or extreme.

In 1996, he married Stultz, but within two years the marriage had collapsed. When Stultz was finally granted a divorce in 2000 she told the court that she had not seen her husband in two years. He had moved, she said, to Cairo. In the years that followed, federal authorities allege, Abdul al Muhajir wandered through some of the most dangerous streets in the Muslim world. He turned up, they alleged, at an al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan and later found his way to a safe house in Lahore, Pakistan, where, according to court papers, he learned how to wire a bomb. It was during this time, Ashcroft alleged, that the plot to attack the United States with a dirty bomb was hatched.

“While in Afghanistan and Pakistan, al Muhajir trained with the enemy, including studying how to wire explosive devices and researching radiological dispersion devices,” Ashcroft said as he announced Padilla’s arrest.  His handlers, Ashcroft said, believed that a man like Padilla could easily slip through American borders. “Al Qaeda officials knew that as a citizen of the United States…holding a valid U.S. passport, al Muhajir would be able to travel freely in the U.S. without drawing attention to himself.”