Amerithrax (12 page)

It had been one month since the tragedy at the WTC. As the first reports of anthrax letters made their way into the media, the FBI was speaking of multiple mailed envelopes from St. Petersburg. Later on Friday, police closed in on First Avenue N where the main post office in St. Petersburg was. Shortly after 5:00 p.m. St. Petersburg police chief Mack Vines’s intelligence officers came to his office to inform him of what was going on. The FBI was investigating multiple mailed letters from there. Vines’s detectives were working with them, the U.S. Postal Service, and the Manhattan hom- icide squad of the NYPD.

“We’re on top of the issue,” he told the press. “We’re working with the Bureau to determine if we can identify any

type of situation relating to the postmark. We’re just trying to develop any kind of information that would tie in to something like that. We’ll see if we can trace some of these things back.”

At 10:00 p.m. paramedics rushed to the mail processing center in St. Petersburg to check some workers who were complaining of headaches and other symptoms. They thought they had been exposed to something a couple of days earlier.

In New York, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, flanked by Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik and FBI agent Barry Mawn, conducted a press conference. All they knew was an assis- tant to Tom Brokaw had opened a “threatening” letter to her boss and come down with the skin form of anthrax. Giuliani said two suspicious letters postmarked from St. Petersburg had been sent to NBC and the
New York Times.
He criticized the FBI for being slow to react. There were “some similar- ities,” said Mawn, between the NBC and
Times
handwriting on the letters. The
New York Times
assured its readers that no copies of the newspaper had been printed in their Man- hattan headquarters.

Doctors would confirm Richard Morgano’s cutaneous an- thrax on October 17 and Claire Fletcher’s and mail carrier Teresa Heller’s cases the following day. At first the CDC thought Heller might have handled one or more terrorist letters before they reached the Hamilton Mail Processing Center, but when the FBI began an investigation for possible suspects along her route, they found none. And if she had delivered contaminated mail then why weren’t any illnesses reported along her route? Now authorities suspected she might have become infected by mail that had picked up spores at Hamilton before being sent to the West Trenton Post Office where Heller picked up mail for her route.

There had been so many recent hoaxes (such as the bogus St. Petersburg envelope), that an actual anthrax letter might have been discarded after infecting some unknowing person. Since Amerithrax had used premetered envelopes, sold at post office vending machines in sets of five, the total number of letters mailed might be that number. If his mailing to the media was five letters, and NBC, CBS, ABC, and possibly

AMI amounted to four lethal letters—where was the fifth anthrax letter? A deadly, unsuspected fifth time bomb might be ticking away somewhere in New York.

People in the city, still gasping amongst the deadly un- breathable residue of 9-11, had discovered that they might also be breathing an invisible pathogen. Mid-October testing had shown significant asbestos contamination in the indoor air of buildings within a radius of a quarter-mile of Ground Zero. After the collapse of the Twin Towers, Kevin Mount, a heavy-equipment operator, and many other sanitation workers had been driving dump trucks filled with debris away from Ground Zero. His only safety equipment was a paper dust mask. As time went by, he became sicker. “His breathing is deteriorating each day,” his wife said. “He can’t walk up a flight of stairs without being out of breath.” The nation felt that way too.

The Lost Letter

ON
Saturday, October 13, 2001, the day after Erin O’Connor tested positive for cutaneous anthrax, the NBC bioattack was reported in depth. If, somewhere in New York, an unsuspected anthrax letter was leaking invisible death, the coverage might bring it to light. As for where it could be, the detectives realized that Amerithrax had tar- geted all three major networks based in New York. They ticked them off: an NBC letter addressed to Tom Brokaw, an ABC letter addressed to Peter Jennings, and a CBS letter to Dan Rather. When Rather’s twenty-seven-year-old assis- tant Claire Fletcher contracted cutaneous anthrax, he was heartbreakingly distraught on the
David Letterman Show.
He

collapsed in Letterman’s arms, the stress of 9-11 and the recent attack at his office weighing heavily on his shoulders. One bad break for the investigators was that all the anthrax- laced letters and envelopes but Brokaw’s had been destroyed before anyone became aware how deadly they were and how many clues they might offer. As for other targets, a suspi- cious letter addressed to the Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly had shown up sometime after October 8. The phony return address listed the name of Sean Hannity, an- other of FNC’s top personalities. Shortly before October 13, CBS News in Washington, D.C., had received an envelope with powder visible on the outside. A total of fifteen letters to the media had been mailed from Indianapolis, Indiana. These were apparently part of that mailing.

One had been mailed to the Indianapolis FBI. Another had gone to the Defense Security Service, part of the De- partment of Defense located in Indianapolis. The last was posted to the Community Oriented Policing Services in Washington, D.C. All said, “You die now.” Police arrested an Indianapolis man for sending three hoax letters doused with white powder. Released on bond, the suspect promptly vanished.

On October 9, an envelope had arrived addressed to: MR HOWARD TROXLER, ST. PETERSBURG TIMES, ST.

PETERSBURG-FL. 33701
+
4204. It had no return address, though the postmark indicated the letter had been collected south of St. Petersburg at the beginning of October. That covered a lot of ground—Seminole, Largo, Gulfport, Bay Pines—in mid-Pineullas County. The “337” meant it had been processed at the main post office on First Avenue N. As the columnist opened the enveloped a white salt- or su- garlike substance had spilled onto his desk.

“HOWARD TOXLER [
sic
],” ran the wavering block- printing,

1ST CASE OF DISEASE NOW BLOW AWAY THIS DUST SO YOU SEE HOW THE REAL THING FLYS. OKALHOMA-RYDER TRUCK! SKYWAY BRIDGE— 18 WHEELS.

This letter, like the others, was filled with misspellings. The writer was not familiar printing all capital letters. He had dotted the uppercase “I.”

At least the crank knew Chicago geography. Judith Mil- ler’s letter (mailed from St. Petersburg on the same day) had mentioned the Sears Tower in Chicago. However, by day’s end Troxler and his desk had tested negative for presence of anthrax and other pathogens, and so had Miller, whose letter was found to contain only talcum.

Could the hoax letters to Miller and Troxler have been perpetrated by Amerithrax? They were different from the Brokaw letter, though. The writer had affixed them with thirty-four-cent stamps. The envelopes were different sizes. If Amerithrax had sent them too, then he had been in New Jersey on September 18 and in Florida two days later.

The fact that the St. Petersburg mailing contained fake anthrax might mean only that Amerithrax kept his supply in New Jersey. The choice of St. Petersburg as a return address also had a double meaning, at least to those involved in engineering bioweapons. St. Petersburg, Russia, was the site of a facility represented as a civilian pharmaceutical and medical complex. Actually, it was a secret lab where four hundred scientists had toiled developing anaerobic bacteria for antidote-resistant bioweapons. That bacteria, dried and ground into powder, had once been packed into munitions shells aimed at the West.

Bob Stevens or others at AMI had probably received sim- ilar hoax letters before, but since they were so used to seeing them, an authentic terrorist letter had probably been dis- missed as a hoax. The missing J-Lo letter may have been mailed from St. Petersburg, not so far from Boca Raton. But if Amerithrax had sent hoax letters as dry runs, they still might contain a clue to his identity. The postmark on the September 20 letter to NBC led postal officials and the FBI to converge at the main post office in St. Petersburg. They were frustrated when they learned that the Postal Service had no way of tracking a single letter to its source. Inves- tigators were impeded on another front. They had still not found a link between the 9-11 terrorist attacks and the let- ters.

That afternoon, a check to a vendor in Malaysia was returned intact to a Microsoft office in Reno, Nevada. The envelope not only contained the uncashed check, but por- nographic pictures snipped from a magazine and dusted with “anthrax spores.” Though reported as testing positive for anthrax, the powder turned out to be another hoax.

THE
terrorism President Bill Clinton had witnessed during his presidency
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had included a growing number of hoaxes in which people claimed to have dispersed deadly biological agents like anthrax. Of the 128 such fakes reported in the twentieth century, 57 had occurred since 1984. All but 10 took place in the 1990s. “The radical right may or may not possess the expertise necessary to launch effective biological attacks here in America,” author Daniel Levitas writes, “but in the wake of 9-11, there is no shortage of highly charged racial issues for hate groups to inflame and exploit.” Right- wing activists had already stockpiled a number of bio- agents.

When the FBI raided the Arkansas compound of the Cov- enant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord in 1985 they unearthed thirty-three gallons of cyanide. Four members of the Minnesota Patriots Council were arrested and convicted for possessing ricin, the potent toxin derived from the beans of the castor plant. Ricin acts swiftly and irreversibly and is thousands of times deadlier than cyanide and twice as deadly as VX nerve agent. The Patriots intended to smear this fa- vorite tool of assassins onto auto steering wheels and door- knobs to kill law enforcement authorities. In 1993 Arkansas survivalist Thomas Lewis Lavy also smuggled ricin in from Canada.

In 1995 in Ohio, a right-wing Army veteran, white su- premacist, survivalist, and Aryan Nations member named

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Thirty-five days after Bill Clinton took office in January l993, Islamic radicals detonated a bomb under New York City’s largest building com- plex, the World Trade Center. Collapsing walls, smoke, and fires claimed the lives of six people and injured almost a thousand.

Larry Wayne Harris placed an order with the nonprofit American Type Culture Collection in Rockville, Maryland, a nonprofit biological supply house for academic and govern- ment researchers. Using the state lab license number of the water treatment plant where he worked as a microbiologist, Harris ordered three vials of freeze-dried bubonic plague for

$240. Since requests for such dangerous pathogens were re- quired to be made on the letterhead of a university or labo- ratory, Harris manufactured his own stationery. The order was still being processed when he phoned ATCC less than two weeks later to ask why his order was taking so long. Company officials grew suspicious (legitimate medical re- searchers knew it normally takes a month to fill an order) and turned him in. Harris eventually pleaded guilty to one count of mail fraud and operating a lab without a license— the most serious charges under existing law at the time. He was sentenced to eighteen months probation.

In 1998, Harris was rearrested in Las Vegas and his car quarantined after he bragged of possessing “weapons-grade anthrax... enough to wipe out a city.” His “anthrax” turned out to be a harmless veterinary medicine, an innocuous vac- cine strain that didn’t give people the disease, but triggered an immunity to it. The charge was dropped. Harris then self- published
Biological Warfare: A Major Threat to North America
, a do-it-yourself manual for “mass destruction.”

A discussion of Harris dominated a March 6, 1996, Sen- ate Judiciary Committee hearing. “It is apparent,” said the committee’s chairman, Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, “that there has been kind of an ignoring of the potentials for harm.” Partly as a result of this incident, Congress passed a law in April 1996 requiring germ banks and biotech firms in the