Amerithrax (27 page)
Also on Monday, employees at Brentwood, Southwest, and Trenton had their ten-day regimen of precautionary treatment antibiotics increased an additional fifty days and the USPS changed its recommendation from Cipro to the less-expensive Doxycycline. Vince Sombrotto met with the Trenton letter carriers, New Jersey Branch 380. Like their Brentwood brothers and sisters, they operated out of tents. In the New Jersey/New York area, 6,128 mail handlers had been tested or were now on medication. At 11:00 a.m., the USPS released its latest national update: 8,800 postal work- ers tested, 13,300 on medication, and of 202 mail processing and distribution centers tested so far six had been “tempo- rarily” closed. Six mail handlers with either cutaneous or inhalational anthrax were still hospitalized. Two hundred and ninety two postal facilities had been evacuated as a re- sult of 7,309 threats, hoaxes, and suspicious mailing inci- dents. Postal inspectors had arrested eighteen individuals for anthrax-related hoaxes and placed another fourteen under investigation. The good news was that the number of an- thrax hoaxes had dropped to 587 a day and was still falling. The get-tough policy was working.
But the unions were still in a turmoil. A postal Branch Worksheet asked:
Did management violate Articles 3, 5, 14.1, 14.2 & 14.3, 19 of the National Agreement and the respective sections of the JCAM when they failed to investigate, abate and respond to PS Form 1767 Report of Hazard, Unsafe Con- dition or Practice within the same tour of duty in which
the report was received? Did management violate Section
19 of OSHA when it failed to maintain an effective safety and health program?
On Tuesday, October 30, Sombrotto testified before the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee on the anthrax cri- sis. “We cannot allow the Postal Service to be intimidated,” he told a packed Senate hearing room. “The bottom line here,” replied Committee Chairman Joe Lieberman, “is the Postal Service is at the heart of this nation’s critical infra- structure and is one of the foundations of our quality of life.” Sombrotto applauded Postmaster General Potter, who also testified, for so swiftly assembling a union-management an- thrax task force. “Despite Sombrotto’s comments on man- agement’s actions,” said the
Postal Record
, “he told the committee some things had caused concern, noting that of- ficials acted quickly to test and provide antibiotics to U.S. Senate employees after anthrax infected employes in the of- fice of Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle, but initially refused to test letter carriers in New York City who had delivered mail to locations of anthrax infected individuals. Only after the NALC intervened were the tests done.”
Kathy Nguyen died Wednesday, October 31, of anthrax “indistinguishable” from the spores in Amerithrax’s other victims’ lungs. Autopsy findings included hemorrhagic me- diastinitis. Immunohistochemical staining confirmed the presence of anthrax in multiple organs. Lenox Hill was briefly shut down for testing.
The FBI placed an urgent call to the Pentagon, sharing the most recent analytical data and informing them of the latest victim. In retracing Nguyen’s steps, the investigators hoped to learn where she had contracted the bacteria. Over weeks that would stretch into months, they would interview 232 of Nguyen’s coworkers, 27 of her neighbors, and 35 of her friends. Gradually, over weeks, the Anthrax Task Force reconstructed the last two months of her life. The Anthrax War had begun. On the front lines were the nation’s postal inspectors, a group of professionals who had been anony- mously toiling on the country’s behalf for hundreds of years.
THE
Anthrax Task Force was composed of the FBI, CDC, local police, and U.S. Postal Inspectors, the government’s oldest law enforcement organization. The United States Postal Inspection Service, the investigative arm of the post office, harkens back to July 26, 1775, when Ben Franklin was appointed the first Postmaster General and the U.S. Postal Service was born.
In 1792 Congress imposed the death penalty for stealing mail. During the War of 1812, postal inspectors known as “surveyors” spied on the British fleet and reported ship movements. Sixteen years later, one of the inspectors, Noah Webster, published his dictionary. Postal Inspector Robert Cameron once got after Billy the Kid, suspecting the fast gun of robbing mail from stage coaches.
The inspectors are the Postmaster General’s “special agents, his eyes, his ears, and his hands.” Of all the federal agencies fighting crime, the Inspection Service has a match- less calling—to guard the sanctity of the United States mails and at the same time to prevent the use of the mails for criminal purposes.
These iron men of the post office recognized no statute of limitations. They never closed a case on a fugitive until his capture or death. Thirties’ crime boss “Dutch” Schultz once lamented that anybody would have to be “plenty stu- pid” to commit a crime against the Post Office. The agency’s formidable investigative powers and resources were brought to bear on any violators of postal statutes. Postal Inspectors are so feared that once, when thieves burglarized a depart-
Postal Inspectors were the first government agents to be is- sued “Tommy guns” (Thompson submachine guns). They still carry firearms as they make on average fourteen arrests a day, execute federal search warrants, and serve subpoenas. During “Operation Avalanche,” a coordinated strike between the FBI and postal inspectors, a hundred child molesters, sus- pects in child sexual exploitation, and pornographers were nabbed. They arrested 1,500 drug trafficking and money laundering suspects. Beginning in 1971, the agency became one of the first to hire female agents. They tracked con men, forgers, patent medicine and medical quacks—anyone who dealt in lies and half-truths. They hounded robbers, murder- ers, kidnappers, bomb and poison mailers to the ends of the earth. They investigated mail robbery, mail fraud, blackmail letters, and extortionists. Fraud on the Internet, in cyberspace, is cyber crime, but becomes mail fraud when payments for il- legal schemes are received via the mail. Any blackmail, ex- tortion, or poison pen letter that contained a threat of death or bodily harm automatically brought in the FBI. It hadn’t al- ways been that way.
For decades the post office had battled for more effective laws to deter one of the most despicable crimes committed against the American public—murder by mail. Up to the time where death resulted because of a bomb or substance sent through the mails, the matter was subject to state juris- diction. The Inspection Service had long felt that matter be- longed in the federal courts.
On January 23, 1957, Maurice H. Stans, deputy Post- master General, sent the Speaker of the House of Represen- tatives a new legislative proposal to amend Section 1716, Title 18, United States Code, and increase the penal provi- sions applicable to cases where death or injury results from the mailing of articles. The bill, approved by the Senate and House on September 2, 1957, became Public Law 85-268. President Dwight Eisenhower signed it the next day, revis- ing the law on placing deadly substances in the mails. The
Back then there were 950 postal inspectors, each charged with two hundred specific duties. In modern times there were only nineteen hundred postal inspectors to cover forty thousand post offices and twelve thousand smaller branches and coin-operated facilities. In Trenton alone, the Ameri- thrax case involved forty-seven post offices and seven hun- dred collection boxes feeding mail into the Hamilton Township sorting center. Trenton lies along the wide Del- aware. During the Revolutionary period it had been the na- tional capital for little over a month at the end of 1784. Had that meant something symbolic to Amerithrax?
Locating anonymous extortionists like Amerithrax might be the most difficult job the Inspection Service encounters. The Postal Inspection Service estimated that the average American would receive at least three anonymous poison pen letters over a lifetime. Anonymous letters—whether li- belous, poison pen, targeting the famous, defamatory, spite- ful, practical joking, racist, or obscene—all take their toll.
Though given a modern twist in its avenue of delivery by Amerithrax, poison by mail had been a long-standing form of murder. Postal inspectors knew it well. Poison, in its truest meaning, is a substance introduced into the body in small quantities (a teaspoonful or less) that produces a morbid or deadly effect. Drugs and other poisonous sub- stances which can be inhaled exert their toxic effects with astonishing rapidity. The transfer of the toxin to the lungs can be made directly to the bloodstream and from there to the brain in only a few seconds. In the postal inspectors’ experience, poisoned mail was usually sent by women. Could the anthrax mailer be a woman?
Years ago, postal inspectors J. A. Callahan, M. V. Saylor, and J. R. Stokes of the Atlanta Division caught such a case. It began in Charleston, South Carolina, on Wednesday, No- vember 19, 1952, the day a small parcel arrived at a home. The parents were at work so their seventeen-year-old daugh- ter unwrapped it. Inside was a box of candy—bonbon car- amels, molasses, and coconut-vanilla-raspberry.
A note on top read: “Hello, folks. I am on my way to
tion of the liver.
Like inhalational anthrax, phosphorus poisoning has a honeymoon period. If death does not follow within a few hours, the patient seems improved for a time, only to be- come jaundiced as the liver degenerates and the victim grad- ually sinks. Only prompt hospitalization saved the daughter from lasting ill effects.
Inspectors Callahan, Saylor, and Stokes, polite, noncom- mittal and composed as concrete posts, examined the pack- age wrapping. The package had been mailed from St. George, South Carolina. The name “Gracie” was unknown to the family, but was in feminine handwriting. After his wife left the room, the husband admitted he suspected who’d sent the poisoned sweets. He’d met a waitress named Nan at the D & D Cafe while working on the Savannah River “H” bomb project at Barnwell, South Carolina, a city near St. George. They had gone on three dates before he returned home to his wife and family.
“Just innocent episodes and forgotten,” he said. “I’m not
The inspectors traveled to Barnwell to see Nan, Mrs. Nancy Coyle. She denied sending the package, but provided samples of her handwriting. The handwriting on the wrap- ping and her exemplars were sent to the Washington labo- ratory of the Inspection Service for comparison.
Meanwhile, the dispassionate inspectors asked the cafe owner to keep tabs on Mrs. Coyle. She asked another wait- ress to throw away a box of stationery in the glove com- partment of her car. The waitress put the box in the trash, but told the owner, who retrieved the box and its contents and notified the inspectors. They discovered, impressed on the bottom of the stationery box, a perfect copy of the note which had accompanied the poison candy. When Mrs. Coyle used the bottom of the box as an improvised writing table, she had applied sufficient pressure to make an impression of her writing in the cardboard.
When confronted, she confessed, but could not explain why, only vaguely claiming, “He done something to me.” She pleaded guilty in court and was sentenced to three years’ probation. United States Judge Williams told the in- spectors the case represented “such an abnormal situation that I can’t understand it. It’s a crime an ordinary person would not conceive of.”