Thursday, September 28, 2006

Rosebud #21

Who Anthraxed the National Enquirer?

There’s an item on Page Six today about the strange case of the anthrax letter that wound up at the offices of American Media (AMI) in Boca Raton, Florida, in 2001. I’ll just reprint it here:

Page Six: “Katie’s anthrax omission:
American Media chief David Pecker was shocked when he caught the Sept. 18 edition of the ‘CBS Evening News with Katie Couric,’ which covered the fifth anniversary of the 2001 anthrax attacks. While Couric mentioned that the lethal powder was sent to The Post and NBC, she failed to mention American Media—the first company attacked and the only one to have an employee die (photo editor Bob Stevens). A sad and confused Pecker told us, ‘My company was the first victim of a bio-chemical attack ever, and a valued employee who was a great family man lost his life. How could CBS not pick this up in their research of a news story of this magnitude?’ Some suggest that it had to do with Couric’s ire toward AMI’s National Enquirer, Star and Globe, which have reported unflatteringly on her in the past. A rep for CBS said, ‘It’s always a good idea to check the facts before complaining. Only letters addressed to NBC and the New York Post were actually found, which is why AMI and CBS were not mentioned.”

I’ve long been intrigued by this unsolved anthrax episode, and a couple of years ago, in late 2004, did some poking around, with the idea of doing a story. I came up against so many dead ends that I never did one. But I’ll tell you what I was able to find out:

In brief, the offices of AMI in Boca Raton were laced with anthrax; several people got sick and one person, Bob Stevens, a photo editor, died. The Justice Department did an investigation but never shared its findings with anyone, not even executives at AMI. The case remains unsolved.

After anthrax was discovered, AMI was forced to move out of the building. The clean-up was done by a bio-chemical clean-up company called BioONE, which was co-founded and is co-owned by former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani.

In 2004, BioONE leased the building from a new owner, Broken Sound LLC, and moved its offices into the former AMI offices. As of 2004, Giuliani himself was installed in David Pecker’s former office, according to a highly-placed AMI executive I spoke to. (I’m going to run the entire transcript of my conversation with this person below.)

More strange notes: The offices of AMI were in possession of a vast, decades-old archive belonging to the National Enquirer and the other gossip publications it had acquired. One can only imagine what was in that archive. The archive was deemed contaminated and seized when AMI left the building. An AMI executive told me that they were told it was destroyed.

Prior to the anthraxing of AMI, the National Enquirer had been relentlessly reporting on the partying of the Bush twins. I am not suggesting that this has anything to do with any of this; it’s simply a fact in the background of this story. As of September 10, 2001, remember, George W. Bush was being portrayed by the media in general as a sort of benign buffoon with two rather wild daughters. The Enquirer had run at least nine stories covering, among other things, Jenna Bush's bust for trying to order drinks with a fake i.d., and Barbara's bust for being a minor in possession of alcohol, both stories in 2001. The Enquirer had also run a picture of Jenna on its cover, a drink and a cigarette in her hand, toppling to the floor with another girl at a University of Texas frat party. (Again, I am not suggesting that this has anything to do with the offices of AMI receiving an anthrax letter.)

An AMI executive told me on the phone in 2004: “There was a Justice Department investigation about the building—where it came, from who done it. None of that was ever shared with AMI. We cooperated with them, did what they wanted us to do, but they didn’t give us a run-down of what they’ve found so far; it was a one-way street. They asked questions, we gave answers. It was being conducted by the U.S. Attorney in South Florida. AMI eventually sold the building and it’s something they have put behind them.

"There are a lot of strange things about it. As far as I know, there’s never been a public explanation of who done it. It came in through the mails. That’s how it was agreed it got in there. As far as I know it was ultimately decided it was introduced in the mail. There’s a gestation period, it has to cook for a while; by the time they realized they had an anthrax problem, that was when Bob Stevens died, he was a photo editor for the Sun. They were all in the same building together. AMI opened the building in 2001, and they moved all of their production side in there. It was renovated to do that very thing—everything in one location, they decided. They acquired the building when they acquired the titles. The Sun, Globe, Star, Enquirer, had just opened, around the end of September.

"Bob Stevens went on vacation and when he was on vacation he became very ill. They brought him back and he died on Thursday, October 4. Bob was the only one who died. [Another employee], a tough old guy who worked there for years, got very sick, but he recovered. There was also [another employee] who had a mild case. Bob Stevens dies of anthrax—it’s very weird—and on the following Sunday, October 8, the FBI shows up. The three big mags, the Enquirer, Sun and Globe go to bed Monday. On Sunday, the FBI shows up and says everybody out, that’s it, everybody out. That’s when it all started, and they never got back in.

"They had determined there had been an exposure. There was this uproar when the agents showed up and cleared everybody out. They were seizing the property of a very large business. Once AMI walked out of there, they never walked back in. They intended if possible to return there. They didn’t. First of all, after the building was shut down, the FBI agents were in there, people from the Center for Disease Control. Anthrax is a very rare kind of thing. They didn’t know what to do about it. They determined that it came in through the mails and then it started to show up elsewhere.

"AMI had a backup plan, a hurricane plan for where to go [an office park in Boca; and they eventually relocated to New York]. They sold the building to a guy who bought properties [David Rustine of Broken Sound, LLC]. The archives of the Enquirer have been destroyed. There was no way to clean them up. We asked a lot of questions but they didn’t tell us too much. You’d think the media would want to know.”

From the CBS News web site:
Giuliani Co. Cleaning Up Anthrax
BOCA RATON, Florida July 12, 2004
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The American Media building In Boc Raton in October, 2001
(AP (file))
The arrival of anthrax in the mail at the building was the first in a series of still-unsolved attacks that killed five people, among them tabloid photo editor Bob Stevens.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
(AP) Workers began pumping a potent chemical into the former headquarters of a supermarket tabloid Sunday to clean up the first target in a series of deadly anthrax attacks in 2001.

The cleanup is being led by BioONE, a company established by former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Sabre Technical Services, which decontaminated other buildings hit by anthrax attacks.

"It will be a symbol that we can deal with these new risks that we live with in our new world," Giuliani said.

After a call of "Let's go" from Giuliani, workers started the flow of chlorine dioxide, a chemical used to disinfect drinking water, into the American Media Inc. building to kill the spores. A high concentration of the chemical is kept in the sealed building for 12 hours to be effective.

The cleanup is set to last 24 to 36 hours, to be followed by repeated tests to determine the safety of the building before a quarantine is lifted.

BioONE then plans to occupy the space as the headquarters for its new crisis management venture. The company hopes to move in by the end of the year.

The arrival of anthrax in the mail at the building was the first in a series of still-unsolved attacks that killed five people, among them photo editor Bob Stevens of AMI's tabloid the Sun. The attacks emptied Senate offices and a major mail processing center in the Washington area, rattling a nation shaken by the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks a month earlier.

AMI, which also publishes The National Enquirer, hurriedly abandoned the three-story office after the anthrax was found.

A real estate investor bought the building for a paltry $40,000 and then made plans to lease it to BioONE. The financial terms of the agreement have not been disclosed, though the decontamination at the larger Brentwood Post Office in Washington cost $130 million.
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