Amerithrax (9 page)
The anthrax was probably not mailed by Al Qaeda. It did not fit their style. “Sources,” said the FBI, “suggest Al Qaeda may favor spectacular attacks that meet several cri- teria: High symbolic value, mass casualties, severe damage to the U.S. economy and maximum psychological trauma.” The strain of mailed anthrax had been sensitive to every oral antibiotic—penicillins, tetracyclines, and quinolones such as Cipro. A terrorist set to do the maximum damage would have employed a more advanced strain, a virulent, engineered anthrax that would be impervious to antibiotics and cause greater casualties. It was rumored that the Russians had such a strain at their secret Siberian bio-
installation—Vector.
But the anthrax letters had been mailed after the terrorists died in the plane crashes. Were they sent by a confederate? Law enforcement emphasized that the anthrax cases had not
The FBI pursued the 9-11 terrorist-anthrax connection doggedly, but Atta and his terrorists weren’t the only ones toying with the idea of buying up crop dusters and sprayers that could be outfitted to spray invisible clouds of anthrax over U.S. cities. The investigators had no shortage of sus- pects in the bio-attack against America. One of America’s greatest foreign enemies had a biological warfare stockpile, much of it kept in secret, and had actually modified crop dusters to spray liquid anthrax.
One week after the terrorists died and more than two weeks before Bob Stevens’s death, someone mailed a hand- ful of anthrax letters to some of the most famous and trusted names in America.
“A lunatic. With the killer of all times. It gives me the creeps. This whole operation gives me the creeps.”
—
A character in
The Satan Bug
IT
was one envelope, then two, a handful inserted very care- fully into a mail slot. The letters all fluttered into the belly of the same mailbox, but their paths would soon separate. The plastic bin used to catch the mail deposited into the box
It was quieter here on Nassau Street, except for the busy hum of traffic in the business district around the trio of cor- ner boxes. The envelopes lay atop others, alike, yet unalike. These letters were the most unique ever mailed in America. The envelopes, though, were plain and white and of the thirty-four-cent prestamped metered variety. By using me- tered envelopes, the mailer avoided any possibility of being traced back through the stamps. Saliva might give away the identity of the mailer through DNA, the molecular code upon which so much modern biotechnology research de- pends. They can be bought directly from post office vending machines (without creating much notice) in sets of five. The killer’s first mailing probably used all five. The main Prince- ton post office stood only a couple of blocks away, one of four New Jersey post offices that would be contaminated by anthrax spores.
The envelopes, of an extraordinarily cheap, porous paper, were a smaller size than traditional business-size envelopes— measuring approximately 6
1
⁄
4
inches by 3
1
⁄
2
inches. The hand-printing on the envelope slanted down to the right. The writer had trouble keeping words in a straight line on un- lined paper. He clumped them together as if he were afraid he would run out of room by the time he got to the right edge of the small envelope. He almost did.
Were the letters neatly taped? It was hard to tell in the darkness of the box. A ray of light as another letter fell. Yes, taped, but not as securely as later letters. It was as if the killer came to have second thoughts about hurting any- one except the addressee. The anthrax mailer had not yet realized how porous the envelopes were. Their wide pores allowed even the crude, less-refined anthrax spores he was
Amerithrax’s own name had a harsh sound, like that of a James Bond villain like Drax or a real-life killer like Zo- diac. Though Amerithrax was just as fantastic and as much a supercriminal as they, he had not named himself. The FBI had christened him. Their code name for the anthrax mailer was a combination of “America” and “anthrax.”
The latex-gloved hand of Amerithrax was crawling with bacteria. He would have to dispose of the glove as soon as possible. He took one last look at the center mailbox of three stout curbside boxes on the corner in the business district of Princeton, New Jersey. The boxes were lined up on Nassau Street near the intersection of Bank Street across from the Princeton University campus. Nassau Street was New Jersey Route 27, which stretched northeastward through the town of Franklin Park (which would later appear in the return address on more anthrax letters). Wills, O’Neill & Mellk, a law firm, lay directly behind the mailboxes. On Nassau Street was a gift store, Go for Baroque, and around the cor- ner was a fabric store, Pins and Needles. If the slots of the boxes had faced toward the traffic, he could have mailed them from a vehicle. Was it raining in the Ivy League town when the letters were mailed? Some of the letters would arrive wet.
Later, the FBI would create a model of the letters’ route. From mailboxes to entry post offices to regional sorting cen- ters to destination post offices and final destinations, anthrax flowed like a river, a twisting trail of spores spreading death as they went and branching off into lethal tributaries. When officials said Stevens became infected from a stream, it had never in their wildest dreams occurred to them this might have been a mail stream.
Mail drop boxes in New Jersey were later tested based on postal coding that designates when items enter the mail system. Utilizing processing codes imprinted on some en- velopes and packages, inspectors later traced the paths of three letters known to have contained anthrax spores, pin- pointing how their passages through the system contami-
The mailbox that was used to send the poison letters into the system was technically not a storage box. However, on occasion it was used as such by carriers who walk the route carrying mail in a shoulder bag. This saved them a back- breaking second trip to the post office.
Collection time varied, depending on the amount of mail and traffic. The time listed on the collection box suggested that somewhere between 10:00 and 11:00 a.m. the mail would be picked up. But these boxes were normally picked up later in the day, closer to 3:00 p.m. The mail dropped in the box was collected by mail carrier Cleveland Stevenson,
45. Amerithrax’s envelopes joined the others in one of the plastic tubs that were shuttled around to the central proc- essing center and other post offices. Amerithrax’s letters went into a sack, and into a system that went to the Route 130 post office and five other local post offices such as Pal- mer Square in Princeton Borough two blocks from the con- taminated box.
The thousands of drop boxes and forty-eight post offices all fed into the Hamilton Processing Center, the main postal distribution center. The sorting station lay in Hamilton Township near Trenton and about fifteen miles from Prince- ton. Trenton, which lies along the wide Delaware River, had been the national capital for little over a month at the end of 1784.
At Hamilton that evening, Amerithrax’s letters were col- lected with other mail in trays. The trays were emptied onto moving conveyor belts that brought them to an edger-feeder, which separates envelopes by size. The edger-feeder ad- vanced the deadly letters to a facer-canceler, a sensing device that processes thirty-five thousand pieces per hour. The facer-canceler located the stamps in the upper right- hand corners, arranged the envelopes so they all faced in the same direction, then canceled and postmarked each. Within three hours of each other, two of the terrorist letters
Next an optical character reader read the addresses on the letters and sprayed a bar code across the bottoms of the envelopes. A computerized zip (zoning improvement plan) code translator sorted the letters according to their destina- tion. High-speed sorting machines handling hundreds of let- ters per minute propelled the letters on a conveyor belt into one of hundreds of bins, each designated for a different post office. Parcels going in both directions may have been con- taminated by the tainted letters. Amerithrax’s letters raced outbound to NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw, the editor of the
New York Post
, and others.
On their way, the media letters sickened Teresa Heller, thirty-two, a mail carrier in the West Trenton Post Office. Heller was a prompt, friendly, ponytailed woman that West Trenton residents knew as “Terry.” How she came into con- tact with “hot mail” has never been fully explained. She might have become infected by mail that had picked up spores at Hamilton before being sent to the West Trenton Post Office. Heller picked up the letters and packages for her route there.
Amerithrax’s onslaught against the media left behind a traceable path of poison as it moved through the system. At one point the letters separated. Traces were later found at the Morgan Central Postal Facility in Manhattan, where spore samples on five sorting machines tested positive. The government later responded with a statement that the facility was safe and should remain open. Morgan fed Radio City Post Office and a letter from Amerithrax to CBS passed through. When it arrived at CBS it would infect another victim and a create a hot spot that was later traceable by field testing.
Along the way from Morgan, the letters to NBC and the
New York Post
went through Rockefeller Center Post Office, but left it unscathed. Subsequently, at the
Post
there would be a confirmed case, two suspected cases, and a positive sample. At NBC–New York there would be a confirmed case, a hot spot, and another suspected case. From Morgan out, a letter from Amerithrax to ABC traveled through the Ansonia Post Office, which was not contaminated. However, at ABC searchers would later discover a positive sample and a confirmed case of anthrax. From Morgan outward, not one bit of cross-contamination occurred, unless the mysterious source that killed a woman in the Bronx was in fact a cross- contaminated letter (investigation would not reveal how she became infected).
Before the mailings, Amerithrax surely had had anthrax in his possession for some weeks. And he already had equip- ment available to refine airborne spores and make them tiny enough to reach the depths of the lungs. However, only a group with access to advanced biotechnology seemed ca- pable of manufacturing such a lethal anthrax aerosol. Had Amerithrax cultivated and weaponized the powder or stolen it from somewhere else? Weaponization, in the case of an- thrax, meant genetic modification of the spores to alter their incubation period, milling to refine their particle size, and the addition of stabilizing agents. Finally, it meant the load- ing of a biological weapon into a delivery system, in this instance an envelope. If he already had anthrax, he must have had a motive before that. Were the mailings his way of striking back? Was he a discharged scientist who took weaponized anthrax on a last day of work? Or was his in- tention something altogether different? Media communica- tions were the killer’s first choice and maybe his true target. Amerithrax either wanted publicity or wanted to sway public or official opinion.
On Friday, September 21, Ernie Blanco was just deliv- ering a lethal letter to the
Sun
in Boca Raton. Elsewhere in the nation, it was a typical, horrible day after 9-11. In New York dozens of fires as high as a thousand degrees Fahren- heit raged under the twisted rubble of the mammoth Trade Center. They were still burning and would smolder for an- other four months. Almost two hundred thousand gallons of