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WELCOME TO TERRORLAND -- MOHAMED ATTA & THE 9-11 COVER-UP IN FLORIDA |
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Although in his many media appearances Rudi Dekkers portrayed himself as both president and owner of Huffman Aviation, this claim, like so many other of Dekkers' pronouncements, was untrue. "We all knew that the money he (Dekkers) flaunted was not even his money," stated Tom Hammersley. "What we heard was that he (Dekkers) had somebody in Naples backing him financially, that he was just a 'front' man for the man who had the money." Dekkers never actually owned the flight school, we discovered. It was a ruse, a paper agreement which was never executed, or meant to be. Wally Hilliard owned Huffman Aviation. He was the sole owner, and had been all along. We discovered this only after Hilliard sued Dekkers, his erstwhile partner. Hilliard was in the midst, in fact, of suing a number of his employees and business partners. He sued Stuart Burchill, his accountant, and he sued business partner Mark Shubin. If it came to it, his defense was going to be that he had been victimized by unscrupulous employees. A lot of unscrupulous employees. Court documents filed at the Sarasota Courthouse in Hilliard's suit against Rudi revealed that Dekkers never completed the terms of the Huffman sale with Hilliard. Rudi 'neglected' to pay for his shares of stock in the resulting corporation, said Hilliard's filing. In the suit, Hilliard accused Dekkers of failing to pay for 1,000 shares of Huffman Aviation stock called for in their partnership agreement, as well as failing to repay loans he'd made to Dekkers since 1999. Hilliard's lawsuit said that, as a matter of contract law, he had been Huffman Aviation's true owner ... at exactly the same time a Hilliard-owned Lear jet was involved in narcotics smuggling. This is probably just a coincidence. Still, it was time to take a closer look at 70 year-old financier and multi-millionaire businessman Hilliard, the linchpin to the 'goings-on' in Venice when the terrorists came to town. *** When we finally met him, Wally Hilliard turned out to be a slim, well-preserved 70 year-old man, with thinning reddish hair and still-bright blue eyes, impeccably attired in slacks and a gray golf sweater affixed with the insignia of the Augusta National Country Club. As Huffman's Aviation's secretive owner you're well-known in southwest Florida aviation circles, we began, as the 'money man' and deep-pocketed financial backer of Rudi Dekkers. So, just who is Wally Hilliard, the 'man who had the money?' He refused our offer to tell. We'd have to find out for ourselves. *** Wally Hilliard is the founder and former president of several Green Bay, Wisconsin-based health insurance companies. At the age of 65 he'd retired to Naples, Florida, in 1996. He was described in local newspaper articles as "a Florida businessman who made his career as an insurance executive in Green Bay, Wisconsin." How did a bland Midwestern 'insurance executive' get involved in major intrigue in Florida? Even among those who work with him, few professed to have a clue. He was considered in aviation circles to be something of a mystery. *** "I was Wally's jet manager. My office was next to his. I could overhear everything he said. I still don't know who he is." John Villada stated flatly. Hilliard's business partners professed to be mystified, as well. "Nobody knows for sure who Wally works for," said Mark Shubin, himself a bit of a mystery, as well as a partner of Wally's several aviation ventures. Wally was colorful as well. Not many business execs can boast a 21 year-old secretary who gets arrested for trafficking heroin while she's working for them. Wally (and Rudi) can. Summer Jeffries worked in Hilliard and Dekkers' Naples office. "Summer was street smart but had a coke problem," said Villada. "She was busted for 10 bags of heroin." Summer's bust revealed the level of surveillance Hilliard's operations were receiving ... before 9/11. "She told me that when they brought her in for interrogation," Villada said, "that they showed her dozens of surveillance photos of her, with Wally and Rudi. And she said there was even one of me getting in a Lear jet with Wally. When I asked the FBI later why they had so many pictures of me, they said 'Just be careful, because you've got your name on a list." "Summer was busted for trafficking. Not possession. How does a 20 year-old girl get involved trafficking heroin?" The question hung in the air. *** Rudi Dekkers didn't impress locals as a budding James Bond. But Wally was a different story. Some in aviation at the Venice Airport thought it conceivable that Wally might be -- of all things -- a spy. "You think of these guys looking like James Bond, or, you know, wearing flowered shirts and carrying Walther PPK's," said Coy Jacob. "It seemed like he (Rudi) wasn't quite as astute as I would have thought someone in the intelligence community would be." "Wally certainly could be, though ... I mean, Wally was unassuming, a nice guy, had a cell phone ringing all the time, and had an affinity for Lear jets." Wally may have been a man with a busy cell phone and an affinity for Lear jets, but he wasn't a businessman anymore. His aviation businesses weren't designed to make money, we heard over and over. When we learned of the staggering sums Hilliard has invested in aviation after supposedly 'retiring' to Florida, we were stunned. "Wally's lost $40 million in the last 3 years, which is easy to do if you are spending $14 million on jets in one year as he did," explained jet manager Villada. How does a retired insurance executive from Green Bay, Wisconsin, 'lose' $40 million? Whose money was Hilliard throwing around? "I managed all of his jets. And I said to him, 'you have people flying all over the world and you don't know where they are, and where they are going.' This is crazy. Wally's planes went all over the free world, flying wildly," Villada said. "How could you have a fleet of jets and not even know what they're doing?' But the pilots' attitude was always: 'I'm not telling you where I've been and I'm not telling you where I'm going."' *** Whatever Hilliard was doing cost lots of money ... "The man quickly bought -- in very short order -- a fleet of 12 to 15 jets. He spent between $30 and $40 million on planes and he still has 20 very expensive airplanes left, including Lear 35s, and Gulfstreams." Flight manager Danielle Clarke in Naples told us Hilliard liked to portray himself as a 'pious man.' "Wally came in quite a bit, seemed very compassionate, made a lot of references to God," she said. "You'd be talking about business and all of a sudden he'd mention the good Lord, and it got to be a bit much." As a man of God, Hilliard's taste in secretaries was fairly un-Godly. "Summer was 5'7" with long blond hair. She wore exceedingly short skirts and very low cut tops. You were struggling to find a bit of cloth on the woman," said Danielle tartly. *** Another odd note was that Hilliard also hobnobbed with characters you might not expect a Midwestern insurance executive to come across. Aviation mechanic Dave Montgomery, known as "Jet Dave" at the Naples Airport, told of witnessing a secretive meeting between Wally and Miami Dolphins owner Wayne Huizenga, for example, who choppered in on a large helicopter with the Dolphins logo emblazoned on the side. Hilliard got into the helicopter, and the two men held a meeting that lasted almost an hour, before Hilliard exited and the helicopter took off. Almost 40 years ago Wayne Huizenga was a founder of Waste Management, we learned, which grew to become the nation's largest trash hauler. As anyone who's ever watched The Soprano's can tell you, garbage is a big, big business. Hilliard flirted with disaster in ways more staid executives avoided. He was recently subpoenaed by a Federal Court in Denver, for example, in a case in which he bought a plane from a man with connections to a Colombian drug cartel. We wondered: How does a Midwestern insurance executive get connected to a guy fronting planes for drug kingpins from Colombia? Had he sold Group Health to the Medellin Cartel? Maybe Green Bay Wisconsin had a sister city somewhere in Colombia. "Why Wally went to Colorado (to testify)," said the source, "was because years ago Wally bought a King Air B-200 from the Colombian mafia." According to Stuart Burchill, Hilliard's former accountant, "Donald Pritchard was taking deposits on planes and then not producing the planes. He called Wally and told him he had a plane in South America and said he was going to ship it up. He (Pritchard) would advertise a plane for sale, do a contract, wire a deposit, then he'd start stalling and would never deliver the planes." Why would a retired insurance executive be dealing with an international thief? "Everybody knows a general in South America who they can get really good deals from on planes," replied Burchill. "You can get a jet in Mexico for a million less than its invoice. Pay $1.5 mill instead of $3 mill, and people do it, it's greed. I just don't get it. He (Hilliard) had some mysterious understanding about the deal that I didn't see. I saw him throwing money away." Why was Wally "throwing money away?" Did he suffer from premature senility? Had he fallen prey to people who took advantage of old men? If he was such a sucker, how did he get so rich? Not too many suckers are friends with the President of the United States. Hilliard was friends with Bill Clinton. He kept a picture taken of himself with Clinton prominently displayed in his $3 million Naples, Florida home. "Wally knew Clinton well," confirmed a former employee. "Clinton called Wally a couple of times when I was there." Hilliard had been in business with an international cast. We recalled the doubts expressed by jet mechanic Dave Montgomery. "Why is Wally doing business with all these foreigners? There's Diego Levine, Alfonso Bowe -- a black South African who runs Wally's FBO in Nassau, Bahamas ... Wally went to South Africa with him to 'see the vineyards' ... And Pervez Khan, Pakistani, and Mark Shubin, who's Russian, and used to fly for the Israeli Air Force ..." Mark Shubin was Hilliard's business partner in a number of airplanes, including a $35 million Gulfstream. Shubin lived in Miami. We had heard a number of different stories about him, each more lurid than the next. "Mark Shubin is a KGB agent married to an American woman," said one usually reliable aviation source. "Mark Shubin is ex-Jamaican military in his 50's and ex-KGB Colonel," said another. "His family was in the trade for the pilot who got shot down over Russia in a U-2. Shubin's an ex-CIA pilot who also flew U-2's over Russia. He's also flown for the Israeli military. He's also connected with the Russian mob." A third source said: "Mark Shubin used to fly for the KGB. He used to fly the President of Russia, Putin. And he still has one of Wally's Falcon 10 jets." If only one-tenth of this was true, it was quite a curriculum vitae. We were anxious to meet Mr. Shubin. He sounded like a swash-bucklingly-interesting character. If Wally Hilliard, the man who owned Huffman Aviation, was in business with a KGB agent -- even a former KGB agent -- it would be pretty big news. We figured news that big would have already been on CNN. On the off chance it hadn't, we traveled to Fort Lauderdale to meet the man himself. *** In his office in a hangar at the Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport, Mark Shubin came across as a pleasant and highly intelligent man in his later fifties, who carried, or so it seemed to us, an aura of authority. The first thing we noted when we arrived was that the offices of his company, Sky Bus, Inc., were located in the same hangar as the Whittington Brother's company, World Jet. Somehow it seemed prudent not to mention it. At least, not right off the bat. We told him what we'd heard about him. He smiled a little in bemusement as we spoke. Then he nodded, and said, "You know more about me than the FBI." The true story was that Shubin's father was indeed a KGB Colonel imprisoned after being caught by his own government spying for the United States. He and his family, including young Mark, had been 'traded out' of Russia in the spy exchange involving Francis Gary Powers, the pilot of a U-2 shot down over Russia in a famous incident in 1960. After settling in America, the KGB Colonel's son grew up to become a CIA pilot flying U-2's over Russia, where his native Russian language skills proved useful. We were already well into spy lore, and we'd barely sat down. "Wally was manipulated by somebody with a lot of power," said Mark Shubin. "He was blackmailed. Rudi was the one person who knew what was going on." *** Shubin had quite a bit of business with Wally Hilliard, we learned. He had a company, Sky Bus, Inc., whose planes were shared in common with Hilliard's Plane 1 Leasing. Three of Skybus's four planes moved from Plane 1 Leasing to Sky Bus between March and August 2000. Plane 1 Leasing remained an 'owner of sorts.' Two of the planes that flowed from Hilliard's Plane 1 Leasing, tail numbers N 11 UN and N 111 UN, were listed as being owned by both Plane 1 Leasing and Sky Bus. We thought the "UN" designation on the tail number might be a clue. We were right. We discovered Shubin had established a company called "International Diplomatic Courier Services," on August 28, 2001. We asked an aviation business owner about the planes with "UN" numbers. Coy Jacob said the last letters in an 'N' number are picked by the individual plane owner. So Shubin and Hilliard's two planes either flew for the UN or were trying to look like they did. Then we recognized the name of another business partner of Shubin's, a man who gained a bit of fame during the Savings and Loan Scandal of a decade ago. Mark Shubin was in business with the notorious Ken Good. Kenneth Good was a big part of the Silverado Savings and Loan collapse. He was in business with Neil Bush. In fact, Ken Good had been so clearly a Bush family retainer that it strained credulity to think that Shubin -- and Wally Hilliard-- now were not similarly connected. In 1983 Neil Bush, President George H. W. Bush's son, and our current president's brother, became partners in an oil venture with Ken Good and William Walters, a Denver developer. Two years later Bush joined the board of Silverado, a Denver S&L to which Walters and Good already owed more than $100 million that was never to see the light of day again. Neil Bush received a $100,000 'gift' from Good, as well as other major financial assistance. Yet he was pressing Silverado's management -- without mentioning these favors -- to let Good off the hook on his debts. There was no conflict of interest. It was all just a coincidence. *** By the late summer of 1988, examiners made ready to seize the company. But then they got a phone call from the White House, according to TIME magazine. The election was too close; Silverado's collapse would inevitably have spotlighted the Republican candidate's son, whose conduct had certainly been unethical and possibly illegal. So the bank board's seizure of Silverado was delayed. When Silverado finally collapsed, it cost U.S. taxpayers over $1 billion. But it hadn't been anybody's fault ... *** The Houston Posts Peter Brewton, who broke the CIA-Mob Connection to the Savings and Loan Scandal, said Neil Bush's Silverado partners "all had connections to individuals or S&Ls in Texas that did business with organized crime figures or CIA operatives. Good is one Silverado borrower who got a large loan at a Texas S&L connected to (Herman) Beebe, allegedly connected to the underworld." Herman Beebe was an intimate, as they say, of New Orleans 'Mafia Kingfish,' Carlos Marcello. So Ken Good hung with both the Bushes and the Mob. Ken Good cost Americans over $132 million, just from loans from Silverado. He was destitute, said Bush. Yet the very next year, the supposedly destitute Good donated $100,000 to the Republican Party. Shubin's former partner Kenneth Good was an example of a certain type of rich person who is bankrupt for purposes of paying their bills, yet remains a fat cat when it comes time to buy political influence. Sociologists call them 'elite deviants'. They think of themselves as Masters of the Universe. When Neil Bush was called before Congress to defend himself against charges he'd failed to disclose potential conflicts of interest as a director of Silverado, he conceded he was a go-between with Silverado and his partner Kenneth Good. But although the disclosure wasn't reflected in documents provided to Silverado directors, Neil Bush insisted he'd told Silverado officials that he was involved in an Argentina oil venture with Good. When a government attorney asked him whether he should have corrected the document, Bush said: "Well, yeah, I would have, if I were a real technical, nit-picky guy." How strange to find ourselves, while profiling Atta's American associates, right back in the realm of spectacular and unsolved crime. Mohamed Atta's American connections were with people who were crooks. But a certain kind of crook ... The well-connected kind. *** Shubin and Good's partnership seemed to share a lot in common with Hilliard-Dekkers and Richard Boehlke's. Good's airline, Express One International, supplied both aircraft and crews to Sky Bus, the way Boehlke had for Dekkers and Hilliard. And Shubin's Fort Lauderdale based carrier was soon-to-be-bankrupt, a fate which Atta's Florida associates seem to face with an awful regularity. Good's Express One -- drat the luck -- will itself soon be bankrupt, and in bankruptcy proceedings the company's leading lessor will be revealed to be Fillova Capital, a Canadian company 'linked' to the CIA, and which also financed Iran Contra-era proprietary airlines like Richard Secord's Southern Air Transport. Mark Shubin was every bit as fascinating a character as we'd been told. Shubin told us much we didn't know about Wally Hilliard's international 'associates.' "Wally owns an FBO in Nassau called Executive Jet Support with a guy named Alfonso Bowe," stated Shubin, "whose sister is married to the Prime Minister of the Bahamas. He (Bowe) also runs a flight school he started with Pervez Kahn." Alfonso Bowe we'd heard about. P.J. Kahn, we knew, had crashed one of Wally's Lear jets in September of 2002, with eight doctors on board. All eight needed treatment. Other than that, he was a mystery, a Pakistani national who had somehow ingratiated himself with southern Florida's movers and shakers. "Hilliard signed a contract with P.J. Kahn, who bought the old Air Florida Certificate," said an aviation observer. "P.J. Kahn moved in with Mr. Hilliard's backing. He's an Arab operator with a license to fly (an airline). Kahn's got a contract with the U.S. Treasury Foreign Assets Control to fly directly to Havana. He has special permission as an authorized carrier to fly direct to Havana." We were puzzled. Foreign nationals aren't allowed to own U.S. air carriers. Also, U.S. air carriers aren't supposed to be flying to Havana. Puzzlement turned to incredulity when we heard from several people that P.J. Kahn had disappeared. "I heard he has to flee the country for some reason," shrugged an aviation insider in Naples, who would say no more. *** Another of Hilliard's executives in Naples was Chuck Hathaway, the VP of Ambassador Charter. We discovered a police report in Naples about a stolen Lear jet Hathaway had supposedly flown in from Canada in 1999. Eventually no charges were filed. Still, it was interesting enough. So we asked around about it in Naples. "Chuck Hathaway flies for Continental Aviation," said John Villada. "The Lear in Canada that Hathaway was suspected of stealing -- Kevin Frater talked this Canadian guy into buying the Lear. Kevin Frater is involved in this." Frater, we were informed, had also disappeared recently, after a partner was arrested with 400 pounds of heroin. He, too, had been in business with Mark Shubin, in a $25 million company they jointly owned. Heroin seemed to be a leitmotif running through many of Wally Hilliard's business connections. But these weren't dese-dem-and-dose kind of guys. We'd already heard that the pilot on Hilliard's seized Lear jet doubled as chief pilot on Venezuela's Air Force One. Now we discovered that the co-pilot, conspicuously unnamed in court documents, had an interesting second career as well. He's a DEA agent. "Mike Brassington was co-pilot with Diego Levine on the heroin runs on the Lear jet," an insider in Naples said. "He is DEA, assigned to Guyana." *** Several people told us that Hilliard's former accountant, Stuart Burchill, had intimate knowledge of what was going on. So we set out to find him, after hearing several versions of what was obviously an incredible story. According to some, Wally Hilliard's operation was penetrated by the KGB. "Stuart ran all of Wally's businesses," Danielle Clarke began. "Wally said he wasn't happy with Rudi. Rudi said he would have his own accountant to do the books. Enter Stuart. Stuart was very efficient." "Then one day we heard Stuart was going to Russia, he'd found someone on the Internet," said Danielle. "So Stuart went to Russia. And I'll never forget the day he came back with Anna, his new bride. She was about 6'3" and looked like Bridget Nielson, Sly Stallone's ex-wife." "She was just like a Barbie doll, and I thought, 'Why does somebody that looks like this have to advertise on the internet for a friend?' She had a 6 year-old daughter and when they were together they looked like big Barbie and little Barbie. She was a very spectacular looking woman." "And Stuart is rather slight, you know," recalled Danielle with a smirk. "He was for a while at quite some risk of domestic violence." Mark Shubin got Stuart involved with Anna, said John Villada. He compressed the story this way: "A really tall blond woman got deported. Anna's parents were KGB. Stuart brought a Russian girl back from the KGB, married her, and brought her here. "Stuart was warned that if anything ever happened to Anna, he was dead. Then Wally started wondering how Stuart knew so much all of a sudden. And that's when it came out that Stuart's new girlfriend was involved with the KGB." "Stuart went from a little rinky-dink apartment to a brand new million dollar home, with all new furniture, maids, the whole bit. And that's when Wally started getting suspicious and went through the roof." Hilliard expressed his disappointment by having employee Burchill charged with embezzlement. "Rudi and Stuart embezzled $500,000 from Wally," said another former Hilliard employee. "Then Stuart took the rap. Nobody knows why." "Stuart took the rap for Rudi in the embezzlement case," confirmed a source. "Wally turned him in. And then Wally sued him. But ... he kept Stuart working for him. And I said to him, 'How can you sue Stuart and still have him working for you at the same time?" Hilliard's response had been non-committal. At least he was consistent. After a brief search, we found Stuart Burchill, still in Naples, and still working occasionally for Hilliard. "I am still friendly with my ex-wife today," Stuart told us. "Anna is haughty and egotistical. Her uncle was a big businessman in aviation over in Russia -- in the Russian mob." "I met her on the internet at Russianbride.com. Anna's father's name is Boris Georgeva. He's a former Russian Olympic gold medalist in the shot-put." When we questioned Wally Hilliard about Stuart Burchill, a guy he had busted for the embezzlement of $500,000, we asked if his displeasure with Burchill owed anything to his Russian bride's curious connections. "I don't know anything about a Russian bride," Hilliard replied blandly. "I don't know anything about her connections. All I know is that he started writing checks a week after he came to work for me, and never stopped, and so that is why he got charged with embezzlement. If he doesn't do a couple of years, I'll be disappointed." "I'm not mad at him," Hilliard explained. "I'd just be disappointed." Someone still working for Hilliard explained the Burchill imbroglio this way: "Wally's accountant, Stuart, discovered that money for Wally's flight schools was really being used for something else." *** All of this might be of nothing more than anecdotal or even prurient interest, but for the fact that there were so many important and unanswered questions about the man who financed Rudi Dekkers' terror flight school. One of Hilliard's ventures, for example, is called Oryx, LLC. An "Oryx" is a kind of African gazelle, we learned. And a British mining company in Africa named Oryx was accused by the BBC of having links to Al Qaeda and trading blood diamonds. We asked Hilliard to tell us how he had come to name a company Oryx. He declined. "There is a company called Oryx," said Hilliard. "If I thought it was germane to anything I would tell you, but I don't see it is germane to anything." We persisted. "It is a strange name, I just wanted to know why you named the company Oryx?" "I didn't," replied Hilliard. "There's no relationship. My relationship with them is small, there are other people involved and therefore I'm not going to talk about a company that is owned by others." Whoever Oryx is, and whatever it was incorporated to do, Wallace J. Hilliard most assuredly owns the company, according to filings with the Florida Department of Corporations and FAA. We always get intrigued when we discover we've been lied to. When people lie, its always for a reason. Did diamonds fit into Wally's South African dealings? Was that where the name Oryx comes from? When we finally got the chance to ask Hilliard about Mark Shubin, his reply was, "Another name I wish I never heard of." "How do you meet these guys; especially since you look like you should be playing golf?" we asked. Hilliard used an aphorism to describe his version of the series of seemingly-inexplicable business decisions that ultimately had horrifyingly tragic results. "I have done some very stupid things with airplanes, and it has cost me lots of money," he said, pausing before delivering the punch line: "Brilliance has its limitations, but stupidity has none." It sounded like a line scripted by one of Bob Hope's writers, but he kept coming back to it to answer our 'specific' questions. Hilliard actually used it so frequently that it got to the point where he just alluded to it in shorthand: 'The difference between brilliance and stupidity,' he'd say tersely. It developed a rhythm; Hilliard began to sound like somebody practicing pleading the Fifth: 'I refuse to answer that question, Senator.' 'The difference between genius and stupidity.' Sadly for Hilliard, however, we don't think 'stupidity' -- should it ever come to it -- is a valid legal defense. And even if it were, the slim and sharp-eyed man lounging elegantly across from us in a gray golf sweater affixed with the insignia of the Augusta National Country Club would have a difficult time convincing a jury that he was in any way mentally challenged or impaired. Why? The thought came unbidden: Very few "stupid" people ever own that many Lear jets. Or get near that much heroin. CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: LIVING WITH MOHAMED Revelations about "shadowy financier" Wally Hilliard had been coming fast and furious. They were frankly more than we'd bargained for. While interviewing Wally's partner Mark Shubin we'd realized we were overmatched, never a happy conclusion. We'd never met anyone who'd allegedly worked for both the CIA and the KGB. How do you ask somebody about something like that? We didn't know where to start. And we still couldn't figure out Wally Hilliard, a retired-to-Florida insurance executive now living like a Midwestern James Bond. Maybe not as much razzle-dazzle, but owning twenty jets was Impressive. We had no idea what made Wally so ... different. A lot of people retire to Florida. But most retired men settle for hobbies like woodworking. Boating. Golf. Shuffleboard. We'd never heard of anyone retiring to Florida to pursue espionage and drug trafficking. Worrying that your organization's been penetrated by a foreign intelligence service cuts down on hammock time. So we turned our attention back to Mohamed Atta's activities in Venice, to see if his behavior offered any clues to the riddle of Wally Hilliard's motivation. Since they knew each other, we thought maybe we'd find a common thread. We re-visited our interview with Amanda Keller. We have to admit we weren't immune to the tabloid aspects of the story of her living with a terrorist ringleader. We'd wondered what terrorists like to do for fun, during the odd hour when not planning mass murders. If America had a free press anymore, we figure we would already have seen headlines like "Terrorist's Stripper Girlfriend Bares All: The Mohamed no one knew." But of course we haven't. It's a puzzlement. Had good taste suddenly become fashionable on the networks? Maybe we missed it. *** "When they first mentioned Venice on the news," Amanda Keller told us, "I went, oh my god, what if I knew one of them? Then they mentioned the name Mohamed, and I was like, oh my god." We sympathized. If the FBI called and told us we were buddies with a major terrorist, we'd be like, 'oh my god' too. "Then the FBI started calling. They asked me what I knew, I told them, and they told me not to talk to anybody, to keep my mouth shut." We asked her: "When you first saw his picture on TV afterwards, how did you know that, that was the guy you'd been living with?" "It was that look on his face. That was the look he kept on his face most of the time," she replied. "Very moody, somber, but he had a little goatee, very close-shaven, when I knew him. So he looked a little different too." Amanda's sister Tammy met Atta when he drove up to her mother's house in Lady Lake. Looking to her sister for confirmation, she told us, "It was in March that you brought him up to Lady Lake, remember?" "I waited and waited for them to get here, and then finally took my lunch break, and that's when they showed up," explained Tammy. "He got pissed off and told me I was a rude bitch for not waiting for him. He smelled of patchouli oil." *** We'd heard this patchouli oil story from several people. Amanda confirmed it. "He had a very intimidating look about him. He smelled like patchouli oil, wore a foreign cologne every day," she said. "And it stunk." Almost by accident we learned from Amanda that two other of the nineteen terrorists -- the less publicized ones -- also lived in Venice. 'Majed Moqed' moved in to the Sandpiper, she recalled. Also 'Ahmed Alghamdi' (another Alghamdi). "I recognized his picture," she said. "He used to come to the beach, and hit on my friend Tania." *** Atta's two months with an American girlfriend went as badly as you'd expect. And his American girlfriend, as American girlfriends do, let him know about her disappointment in him ... a lot. "After I lived with him, I noticed he was an asshole," Amanda stated flatly. "He called me an infidel all the time. But I was working nonstop at Tampico Bay (a nursing home in Venice) and Papa John's because I needed to buy a car." What she meant was she wasn't yet ready to lower the boom on Mohamed. But it was coming ... She ticked off a litany of his irritating qualities. "Mohamed was really anal," she explained. "Very anal about the way he hung his clothes. He ironed everything, and got mad at me because I didn't iron. So he bought an ironing board and an iron. He would sit there and press his pants. He had to have perfect creases in his pants. He had a particular way he hung everything. He was very anal retentive." "Even his bathroom routine was exactly the same every day," she continued. "Exactly. He would go in, shave his goatee, trim his hair, wash his face, brush his teeth, go to the bathroom, then take a shower." "I remember lying in bed listening to the different noises he made, and they were always exactly the same ... exactly. Every single day, same order, the same time." She made him sound like a dripping water faucet. The litany continued ... *** "He didn't like animals. Charlie (Grapentine, the apartment manager) had a great big dog, a puppy, and he would paw on my door, come to our door, and I would let it in. And I would give him lunch meat, and that pissed Mohamed off to no end. He said, 'You let that dirty beast in here?"' "So I said, 'Well, I let your ass in here. What's the difference?"' "Then there were always dirty dishes in the sink," she continued. "He said, 'Aren't you going to do the dishes?' I said 'You made the mess, you clean it up.' He said, 'That's your role.' I said 'No, you're in America, and its my name on the lease. This is my house."' A moment of truth was approaching. Mohamed Atta's last girlfriend on Earth, (that we know about), was getting ready to do him wrong. "See, I had talked him into using his money to get the apartment, but it was in my name," she said. "Basically, I was just using him." It was, ironically, Amanda's new job at Fantasies & Lingerie that led to the split. We'll let her tell it: "As soon as I started making good money there, I kicked him (Atta) out," she said. "I was pulling like three grand a week. You wouldn't believe how many doctors, lawyers, judges, came in there. All high profile people. To spend money there you had to have money. They sucked me in." "I started working there, and Mohamed called me a whore, cause I was stripping. He started cussing at me. Either Harley or Page drove me to work. And Mohamed would start arguing with him, (the driver) and Page once said to him, 'I wear 6-inch stilettos, and I'll kick you right in your head."' "Page had a crush on me," Amanda explained, "they were all lesbians that worked there, and she was the one that picked up my dead cats." We heard another anecdote casting Mohamed Atta in a less than manly light. "We went to a club called "In Extremis" one night in Sarasota," Amanda explained. "They have a fight night on Wednesday night with a wet T-shirt contest afterwards, which I had talked my friend Tania into joining." While waiting around for the T-shirt competition, someone in the ring pointed to Atta. "Some guy called him up to fight, they were in the same weight category, and Mohamed wouldn't do it." This was not considered good form at 'fight night.' "The dude totally punked him out," Amanda said disgustedly. "Right in the middle of the club, with 1,400 people in it, the dude punked him out. It was awful. My trainer was in there, and all these people that I knew, and I just sort of walked off to the side, because I didn't want to be seen with him." *** We heard more about the social set in Venice. "Angelina knew Mohamed too, through Olivia, who knew the big Dutch guy that lived in the apartment at the Sentinel," she said. "Angelina was a nanny, and Olivia was working at Publix, then Denny's. She designed lingerie on the side, that was her passion." "Me and Angelina were looking for new jobs; I was sick of working at the nursing home. I didn't like the way they treated the patients. We looked in the paper. Saw an ad: 'Lingerie models wanted.' I said 'Coo.'" By way of explanation, she says, "My hair was hot pink at the time." Life at 'Fantasies & Lingerie' provided Amanda an education into the colorful strains of 'elite deviance' which flourish in southwest Florida. Amanda told of Nick, a bald former N.Y. City cop who worked security, and protected them. She said all the girls had stage names: Alexis, Harley, Faith ... "Joy was my stage name," she explained. "Richard (the owner) named me Joy. They made me keep my hair hot pink, down to my ass. He owns Extremis boat racing. Extreme boat racing. Owns the boat racing franchise." "For a half-hour session I made $600, that was just my money. In the dungeon it was $1000 a session." There was even a whiff of blackmail wafting over the scandalous proceedings. *** There was one politician in Florida who came in there, Lexi told me about it. He liked his penis to be downgraded, got off on us telling him how small it is and stuff. That's how Richard made his money," Amanda alleged. "They have cameras and monitors set up in those rooms, and they blackmail people. When I left, Richard threatened to blackmail me. He was pissed, 'cause a lot of customers would ask for me, and I was embarrassed about having worked there and he knew it, and he threatened to give pictures of me to people that knew me." Blackmailing politicians in Florida appeared to be a growth industry. Presumably the FBI is on top of the situation. Although they've released nothing to the public which pays for all their long lunches, the FBI must know that Atta frequented places like 'Fantasies & Lingerie.' In fact, it was the last place Amanda Keller ever saw him, when he stumbled in late one night after they had broken up, shouting her name. "I was in a session one day and Mohamed and a bunch of his cronies, drunk and stoned out of their minds, came in screaming his head off. 'Where's Amanda! I want to see Amanda!"' "And none of the people I worked with knew my real name, because it was all supposed to be confidential. And he was throwing a fit. They had to get security to throw him out. Security stuck around and walked me out to my car at 5 a.m.," she said. "I was in a session, and Bobbie wouldn't let me come out, cause they were drunk and hopped up on whatever, and she wouldn't let me come out. She chased them out as quickly as possible. But I had to pay a fine for that cause they thought it was my fault. And that pissed me off even more." "And that was the last time I saw him." Did he have any good points? "He was somewhat decent at some point. He had a gold necklace with a figure on it, and I asked him what it was. He told me it was Palestine he wore around his neck. He called it the home country. He told me his father was a pilot, he wanted to be like his father, he'd gone to private school in Lebanon, he spoke highly of his mom, cause she was obedient," Amanda explained. Here's a newsflash we don't know what to do with: Atta listened to the Beastie boys, non-stop. "One time I got mad cause he broke one of my knick-knacks, so I snapped his CD's in half," said Amanda. "I broke all of his CD's, cause they drove me crazy, he played the 'Beastie Boys' nonstop." In the aftermath of the argument, Atta told her why he was such a big Beastie Boys fan. "He told me about this girl he'd dated in France, that had his son. He didn't tell anyone else about that, for some reason he felt he could spill his guts to me. His son was like nine, he said. He said his son was the reason he liked the Beastie Boys so much, cause they were his son's favorite band." Did Mohamed Atta have a nine-year-old son in France? Or was this just part of Atta's 'cover story?' We didn't, and still don't, know. But consider: we can imagine a spy making up a nine-year-old son as part of a cover story for 'civilians.' But we have a harder time envisioning that spook going to the trouble of inventing for his phantom son a favorite band, which then becomes his own. Amanda confirmed that the story we'd heard from Stephanie Frederickson about beatings, and her throwing his clothes out was true. "Mohamed hit me, threw stuff at me, hard, left bruises. We had three very nasty arguments. The first was over the way he talked to me, the second over religion, and the third one ... that one came after I had slept with Garret. After the last one, I threw his shit over the railing onto the parking lot below. He was gone at the time." "We argued a lot over how I dressed when I went to work or to go out to a club," she said. "I was thin, I wore little bitty clothes, And I was gonna wear what I wanted to wear." Amanda described the arc of the relationship as not having a favorable trajectory. But it had had it's moments. "He did have some good points. When I first met him, he knew exactly what to say to me, 'cause I guess he could see. He talked in French all the time, saying little sweet things ... But then he turned into a wicked monster. After that he was an asshole, always downgrading me." "After I met Garret, I guess I did flaunt Garret in his face," she admitted. "I used to have Garret spend the night with me, and I'd make Mohamed sleep on the couch, for the last week before I kicked him out." They fought over Garret, not surprisingly. "And Mohamed said, 'You are a typical American bitch, fickle and an infidel.' He also called me infantile. 'You American women are all alike, all you want is money."' "And I said, 'What the hell else do you have to offer?"' Things were going more than slightly downhill. Amanda called her sister Tammy for advice. "I told my sister he had called me an infidel, and she said you must mean 'infidelity,' and I said, no, that's not it." We asked Amanda: What was he like in bed? We didn't have to, but we did. And when we did, Amanda's sister Tammy giggled and went into convulsions, and then held up her pinky finger and wiggled it in the universal symbol for the under-endowed. "His dick was like, almost invisible, it made my skin crawl," said Amanda. Her sister interrupted excitedly. "What did you tell me about him?" she asked. Amanda remembered: "God gave me hands for a reason, so I could do it better myself ... Seriously, sex with Mohamed was terrible. He wasn't passionate. The most passionate thing he did was when he molested my foot while I was sleeping." This was 'sticky wicket' territory. We scolded ourself for asking such a shameless question. Then we motioned to Amanda to -- please, by all means -- go on ... "I was sleeping, and I had already met Garret," she began, "and I sleep on my stomach, and I can't stand my feet to be covered, and I woke up from a nap one day because my leg was shaking, and I'm all, what the hell?" "And I looked down, and he was standing at the foot of my bed with my left foot in his hand, and rubbing it against himself. And I kicked him as hard as I could -- just reared my leg back and just clocked him right in his stuff. I just got him. Right there. And I said 'What the hell are you doing?"' If Atta had a ready answer, Amanda didn't tell us what it was. But for a guy with a foot fetish, he prayed a lot, Amanda said. He prayed in the morning, and later in the afternoon, and then after he got back from flying. One of their three big fights had been (ostensibly) about religion ... "He would make fun of how we believe in God. He said 'What do you people do for your god? You don't do anything for him.' And I just looked at him." "I pray sometimes, too. I was sitting at the table reading my bible and he came in and snatched it out of my hands, and tore it in half. And he broke the crosses I had on my walls. He was mad cause I had interrupted his prayer session ... he had two candles around a little gold something, had his head down and was praying." "I lived with him almost two months. He was gone for two weeks in the middle, to New Orleans, he said. When he got back, he was more moody than before." "I don't remember him saying anything about Mardi Gras when he got back, though. I figure if they would have gone to Mardi Gras, they'd have come back with beads. But he didn't." This would have been the early April time frame, when Atta is reputed to have gone to Europe, and met in the south of Spain with fellow conspirators. *** Amanda had noticed discrepancies in Atta's 'flight student' cover story. Mohamed wanted his commercial license really bad, she said. But that never made any sense to her. "It doesn't make any sense because he was allowed to fly students at that airport ... He was allowed to fly new students. He flew to Tampa with Timothy. But Timothy was flying and Mohamed was in the co-pilot's seat, telling Timothy what to do, just like an instructor." 'Timothy,' we later discovered, is Timothy Hupfeld, a German friend of Atta's from Hamburg, about whom we have heard nothing from the major media. Timothy had a sister, Sabrina, who was close to Atta as well. Amanda had a nickname for Timothy Hupfeld. She called him the 'Ice Man,' she said. He reminded her of Val Kilmer in Top Gun. All of Atta's friends already had pilot licenses from other countries, she said. "This is what I don't understand," she continued. "He (Mohamed) said he was a student, yet he was allowed to fly other students, he was allowed to go off on his own, and he had the privileges of an instructor, which is why Mohamed didn't fly the plane when I went up (to Tampa) with him, he just sat there and told (Timothy) what to do." This is crucial information. It clearly indicates that the government and media have not come anywhere close to clean about the status of Mohamed Atta in the United States. *** And then Amanda started to tell us about the drugs. Atta's one-time girlfriend had a ringside seat to the debauchery. "In Key West, they were doing drugs, but not in front of me," she explained. "They would go into the locked-down room where no one slept, saying they needed to look at their manuals, and when they came out you can tell their jaws were locked, and they started chewing gum like there was no tomorrow. They would go brush their teeth, wash their faces." "They didn't do drugs in front of me until after I had met everyone at the apartment," she said. "The Sentinel Apartments. After we got back from Key West, Mohamed introduced me to everyone in the apartment, the first time I went over there." On the FBI's Suspects List, 400 E. Base Avenue in Venice, the address of the Sentinel Apartments, is given as the address for a number of the terrorists, but not Atta. "I met Angelina and Olivia and a big Dutch guy who was like almost seven feet tall. Peter, Stephan, Timothy, and Juergen were there too. And a guy with dark hair who looked kind of like Mohamed but had real long hair, moody, said he was from France." "Frank said he was from France, he and Mohamed acted like they knew each other for a long time," she said. "I drove Frank to Tampa. He was dressed in a pilot's uniform, looked like a pilot, said he had a job interview there. He was one of the top flight instructors (at Huffman)." This would be Francois Nicolai, a French flight instructor, who we heard was today flying for a living in Saudi Arabia. "They were always drinking. Beer or wine, or liquor. Always. Once I met everyone there (at the Sentinel condominium) they felt comfortable with me and they pulled out the coke." The first time we heard this we'd been flabbergasted. We made her repeat it: "You saw Mohamed Atta do coke?" She nodded. "The first time I saw him use it, he borrowed a dollar from me to roll up as a straw, and then asked me if I wanted to do a line laid out on a glass table in the living room they used to cut it on. I said no. To me it was like something you'd see in a movie. It was the first time I'd ever even seen cocaine." "These guys had money flowing out their ass," she said. "They never seemed to run out of money. And they had massive supplies of cocaine. Whenever they'd run out, they'd go over to the flight school." "I followed them one day with Sabrina (Timothy's sister, from Hamburg) to see where they were going, and saw them go into Florida Flight Training." That's the Florida Flight Training Center, owned by Arne Kruithof, which also maintained a condo at the Sentinel, right across the hall from that used by Atta and his crew, which belonged to Rudi Dekkers. *** Amanda described a typical night out with Atta when nothing much seemed to happen at all. "Area 51 club was another place we went, sink or swim night," she said. "Mohamed didn't like the music, which was all rap. And Juergen had to take Sabrina home, cause she was epileptic, and there were strobe lights, and it was causing her to have a seizure." "Me and Olivia stayed, and also Timothy (Hupfeld), the outgoing one of the bunch, a real nice guy, younger than the others. We met more pilots, from Africa, Germany, and Arabs." "Marwan was in the reggae room drinking with a bunch of women at the bar, there were a lot of women around him, and he was just flaunting money." It's one thing to hear Atta described as living it up with wine, women and song. But Marwan flaunting money at the bar pretty much puts the lie to the 'Islamic fundamentalist' tag. In conversation with Amanda we were amazed at the number of associates of Atta's whose names didn't sound Arab. "Him and Wolfgang drove around in the red convertible a lot," she said. "Their favorite place to eat was Hooters in Sarasota. They got kicked out of Hooters for grabbing their boobs." "He spoke German with Wolfgang, who was in his thirties. Wolfgang was with Mohamed when he came by the nursing home to see me one time. They told me he was here. When I saw him I said: 'What are you doing here?' He said 'I wanted to make sure you were at work.'" Not a very trusting soul, apparently. More puzzling was learning of Atta's deep ties with a number of Germans. "Mohamed called certain people -- Arabic people -- 'my brother.' And I was wondering how he had so many family members. Like gang members do, 'this is my brother,"' she said. "But not all Arabs. So it wasn't like anyone Muslim was his brother. He called Wolfgang and Juergen 'my brother,' too. He and Wolfgang were very tight, they went everywhere together. When he came into the picture they were together all the time." "Him and Juergen acted like they had known each other forever. He told me he went back and forth to Germany, but lived in France." "Juergen was a pervert, straight out," she said. "Every woman that walked by, he had something to say to them, commenting on their butt or whatever. He would go up to a woman, say I'm from Germany, and I want to touch an American woman's butt. He was a lush, mid-30's." Who was this 'Wolfgang?' Who was this 'Juergen?' Why have they not stepped forward to explain themselves? Even as these questions rolled around in our head, Amanda plunged forward with her narrative, to the all-time low moment in her romance with Mohamed Atta. "I made him cry one time," she said, with some satisfaction. "So he obviously thought more of me than I did of him. He asked me how come I wouldn't sleep with him anymore, and I said, you don't want to know. And he was like, 'yes I do,' and I said leave it alone, you don't want to know." "And he kept picking and picking at it, and so I finally looked at him and said, "because my pinky is bigger than your penis." Well into the last year of his life, Atta may well have been reaching out for a little human comfort. That he so clearly picked the wrong girl is small compensation. But small compensation is better than none. For Amanda Keller, summing up her brief brush with a terrorist -- with a terrorist ringleader -- will always be difficult. It would be hard to remember the good times, even if there'd been any. "There were moments he'd be laughing and joking, then the next minute angry and violent, in 2.5 seconds. Then, as soon as you'd blink your eye, he'd change." she said. "Although he did like pork chops." |