Side Quest: The Den of Thieves
Deter terrorism, compensate victims, and all that jazz.
Pshew.
*deep inhale*
I am not going to lie. I am fucking mad.
When our colleague wrote the AEDPA piece, and particularly about Ryan Madden, I was filled with grief and rage like it was the first day that I had read Ryan’s case or talked to his family.
*snorts with disgust*
A young man – a kid when he was arrested, a literal teenager – dies in prison a few months before his scheduled release, because a fuckton of senators and a double fuckton of representatives assumed procedural barriers complicating the filing of certain collateral appeals would somehow “deter terrorism.”
Terrorism. I know a little bit about terrorism. Enough for a PTSD diagnosis and an unshakeable belief in the power of therapy. Enough to know that the prospect of a difficult-to-parse filing deadline after exhaustion of direct appeal won’t do a goddamned thing to dissuade a committed someone from doing the kinds of things that should never fucking happen.
The kinds of things that should never fucking happen…
On April 19, 1995, I was a skinny, off-white, shit-whistle living in rural Saskatchewan1. I cried, as I watched the news, I maybe shouldn’t have been watching; I didn’t understand it, so I couldn’t look away.
We all remember the fireman, and the little girl. The dust and ash. First responders, picking through the rubble. I remember how the news developed. The FBI Agents. How they caught McVeigh. I was in awe. They solved something that I couldn’t even quite comprehend.
It made a mark.
They say you should never meet your heroes, and it’s true. Maybe you should also avoid getting drawn down a rabbithole of public records requests and reports relating to their agencies, too, on the suggestion of a convicted felon with a long memory.
But since I did, let’s go down together.
Get The Fuck Out of Here, Doug!
“No fucking way,” I yelled into the crackling, poorly-connected GTL call.
My friend, Doug Mouser, had been telling me about an inmate he’d known, a fellow
who’d spent some time in New York City, and maybe Las Vegas, before finding himself an involuntary guest of the California Department of Corrections. Doug’s friend had a dislike of law enforcement, unsurprising under the circumstances. But he really despised the New York Fire Department.
Who could hate fire fighters? And why? Even arsonists love fire fighters. The sheer unchecked heroism of it all. The red trucks. The uniforms. The competence. The brotherhood. Strength and sacrifice and they don’t even send you a bill afterward.
The reason shocked me.
Doug’s friend insisted that the FDNY stole from Ground Zero. Fucking 9/11 Ground Zero! It was a den of thieves.
I didn’t get much more from Doug before the GTL robot busted in, informing us we had sixty seconds left, in a sultry, robotic whisper.
“Doug? My man? I am going to run this down and report back to you on our Sunday call. I’ll see what I can find because those are some crazy allegations right here.”
I looked over my notes when the call ended, tapping, fidgeting, hoping that something might explain what I was reading.
If it was a rumor — and there are always rumors around big events — it should have been easily debunked. After all, Ground Zero wasn’t just the scene of a tragic fire, or the location of a natural disaster. It was a crime scene.
And nobody steals from a crime scene.
Thousands of detectives, police officers, FBI Agents loaded truck after truck with over a million tons of rubble, and brought it out to Fresh Kills to sort. A million man-hours of evidence preservation.
Nobody would have dared steal from that crime scene.
Right?
As usual, I immediately fired a message off to Somebody Else’s Lawyer. Get your justice bucket. Let’s roll. Etc.
Time is an Unruly Beast, So Get it in Line
You have heard us say it once or twice before, and you will most certainly get an entire, detailed chapter on the topic in my upcoming book so that it’s fully drilled in.
Timelines. Timelines. Timelines.
Timeline. Everything.
Wanna know how myself and my colleagues in advocacy break stories all the time?
Timelines.
Timelines are the central part of any of our cases and client research. They hold our main case parties, the main events, act as a hub of information to other documents and allow for us to head to the same place every time when we want to walk a case, front-to-back, in the fastest, most efficient manner possible.
When we hand over one of our timelines to an Innocence Project, production studio or a hedge fund, they all love them, they all use them and they all appreciate them. Below is a simple one that I created in Google Sheets, with a number of events collapsed.
This simple, but powerful 4-column timeline is a deadly weapon against bullshit, for building stories and for breaking them. I can’t stress this to you enough. Timeline the absolute shit out of everything you read, watch and listen to.
As we can see in (1) we have a simple: Start Date, Event, Category, Source set of columns all very self explanatory. As I will cover in other posts and more Freak in the Google Sheets posts, using the Dropdown functionality in Google Sheets to build categorized materials is extremely useful for timelining purposes.
Now you might have a few questions. Why did I line up the Oklahoma City Bombing, Ted Kaczynski, and the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center in a timeline, you might ask?
Why don’t we let the U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General tell you instead, in their letter dated December 17, 2003 to Robert Mueller, III, then director of the FBI.
When we ran down the rumors — and reviewed articles, reports, public records, chased a few FOIAs from a small town in the Midwest where a bag of debris turned up in an old cigar shop — it turns out, people do take things from crime scenes.
It turns out, people did take things, from this one.
It turns out, the people who were meant to protect the scene, and preserve evidence, and identify victims, and return personal effects…well, they took souvenirs.
Swapped them. Gave them as gifts. In summary:
A Minneapolis FBI agent took a Tiffany globe from the Fresh Kills recovery site, while assisting in evidence recovery efforts.
He brought the Tiffany globe back to the Minneapolis field office, and gave it to his secretary. She displayed it on her desk.
Shortly thereafter, a new agent is transferred into that office. She’s investigating theft of Ground Zero debris by a disaster recovery contractor. She notices the unusual globe, and asks about it. The secretary tells her the history of the item, noting that she thought it was “creepy” because its owner was “probably dead.”
The new agent blows the whistle. Her career with the FBI didn’t last much longer after that. And the case she’d assembled involving the private contractor — dropped.
The Office of the Inspector General investigated, after a time, finally handing this letter to Robert Mueller, III. The OIG Report confirmed that agents took debris from Fresh Kills. And in fact. It was much worse.
I’ll let the OIG report speak for itself about our favorite thing! Primary sources!
FBI Precedent
Our investigation revealed that the removal of items as mementos and for display purposes by FBI personnel did not only occur at the WTC recovery sites. Several FBI personnel interviewed in this case justified taking mementos based on FBI precedent. As previously mentioned one ERT member stated he "saw the taking of mementos as an accepted common practice throughout the FBI." Interviews revealed that non-evidentiary items had been removed as mementos from previous crime scenes pertaining:
The U.S. Embassy Bombings in Africa (1998) ", here building pieces, a U.S. flag, and an African bunting were taken by FBI personnel.
The Execution of a Search Warrant at the Cabin of Convicted Unabomber Ted Kaczynski (1996) where elk antlers and shingles and other pieces of the cabin were taken by FBI personnel
The Bombing of the Alfred J. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City (1995), where building pieces were taken by FBI personnel and engraved with the FBI seal and the date of tragedy
Some NY ERT members also told the OIG that had they seen non-evidentiary building pieces from the Bombing of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia (1996), and the WTC Bombing (1993) in the possession of other FBI employees. Yet, we have no indication that any item worth the value of the Tiffany globe was removed from any of these sites.
As long as none of it was “worth the value of the Tiffany globe” then? I guess that’s fine?
Except it wasn’t.2
The Crystal Ball That Started It All
A Tiffany globe.
Let’s have a look at it, shall we?
If you follow the trail to the original OIG report3 you’ll find a picture of said crystal Tiffany ball, well kinda, as you’ll see below in Figure 3.
So what ever happened to that globe?
In March of 2004, a woman in New Jersey said it belonged to her son, who died at Ground Zero.4 A few weeks later, the FBI issued a press release, announcing they were still searching for the “true owner” of the globe.5
Some quick Googling by Somebody Else’s Lawyer and myself yielded our final horror of this investigation before we put it down and returned to our advocacy work.
We hope that the owner’s next of kin consented to this donation. We truly hope.
Perhaps that caption should be: Tiffany crystal globe removed from debris of the World Trade Center by FBI Agent, recovered subsequent to shitstorm.
It was a rabbithole, wasn’t it?
Not quite enough, though, to forget about AEDPA.
And how the people who should be the most committed to justice — police, prosecutors, first responders, FBI Agents — can fail to live up to that ideal.
Never meet your heroes, folks. And never send them public records requests.
Are you a production studio, or documentarian looking to pick our files up and partner for a deeper dive into this story? Contact MJ Banias: mj@bullshithunting.com
Footnotes
I would have been standing right about here: 52.957918777266116, -109.6991982427785
There are always consequences. https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna13355796
https://oig.justice.gov/sites/default/files/legacy/special/0403a/final.pdf
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2004/03/17/mother-of-911-victim-seeks-sons-memento/6af1f5d3-9a60-41f1-abb1-536cd8edd701/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2004/04/03/justice-dept-seeks-owner-of-911-globe/e14e7781-b7df-4d56-920f-17e04a094aeb/