The Best American Crime Writing (8 page)

With his remaining $3,000, Itzler bought around 4,000 ecstasy tablets. By the time he was ready to go home, several days later, he says, he had 3,869 left, which had a street value back in New York of more than $116,000. He put the pills in a plastic bag, strapped the bag to his body, and boarded a flight bound for Newark International Airport. When he landed in Newark on August 1, Itzler was
fidgeting and sweating profusely. Drug-sniffing dogs and steely-eyed Customs police were everywhere. Itzler was arrested during a routine search. “I must have looked nervous,” he says.

Itzler was charged with possession of narcotics and possession with intent to distribute. Shortly after his arrest, he was swearing “on his mother’s memory” that his only intent was to kill himself by blending the 3,869 ecstasy pills in an extra-large chocolate milk shake. “I already tried it with 100 pills, and all that happened was that I woke up groggy. I wanted to make sure this time.” Although the story is not quite as implausible as it sounds—after all, he had once tried to commit suicide by stabbing himself in the chest with a steak knife—he’s apparently had second thoughts about it. He now says that he was an ecstasy addict, and that the pills were for his “personal consumption.”

According to Glasser, Baum Multimedia was essentially out of business by September 2001, although it limped along until December, when the computers and equipment were stolen. Unable to raise the $25,000 bail, Itzler has been locked up in Essex County Jail in Newark since August, enjoying the company of some of New Jersey’s finest gang members. “It’s been terrible,” he says. “I’ve been beaten up by Bloods and Crips five times. Once a Crip punched me really hard in the kidneys. I was pissing blood.”

Itzler has no regrets about his brief but memorable excursion through the fashion world. “When I was running the agency, I’d never had more fun in my life,” he says. “I was meeting thirty new gorgeous girls a day. It’s just paradise. It’s like being Hugh Hefner, with the girls warming themselves up all day.”

And he knows what he’ll do when he’s paid his debt to society: head back to Manhattan and reopen SoHo Models. He might even find some old friends willing to give him a second chance. Peter Beard, for one. “Modeling agencies are horrible bussinesses with
dykes that demand sexual favors from the girls,” Beard says. “This is the cheap-shit industry that you’ve seen exposed over and over. Amongst all this bullshit, I’d just as soon listen to good old Jason.”

Itzler’s time in jail has not been completely wasted: He has been writing a memoir. So far, he has twenty-seven chapters and a title:
Ecstasy
. “I think I’m going to sell two million copies and get enough money to start life over again,” he says. “Although my story isn’t a positive one with a hero emerging at the end, I’ve never read anything more interesting than the shit I’ve been through. It’s action, action. Up, down. Kill myself, live. My shit’s cool.”

He adds that anyone interested in buying the film rights should contact him through his lawyer. Then, a few days later, he reports that he has fired his lawyer and is trying to persuade Lenny Sylk to hire “the Johnny Cochran and Bruce Cutler of Newark.” He’s confident he will be back in action before long.

The State of New Jersey apparently has other ideas. When prosecutors presented Jason’s case to a grand jury earlier this year, they added a third count: possession with intent to manufacture, distribute, and dispense. A first-degree felony usually levied against drug kingpins, this new charge carries a mandatory minimum sentence of ten years.

In some ways, jail has changed Jason Itzler. His street swagger is virtually gone, replaced by the first inklings of a sense of responsibility. “I did something stupid,” he says, “and now I have to pay the price.”

He is stunned when he learns of the new charge and the prosecutor’s assertion that he is looking at “significant time,” even with parole. There is a long silence while he considers this. The seconds tick by on his collect call. For a moment, it almost seems that he is chastened, humbled by the news. And then:

“Is this going to be a cover story?”

Like all great journalism, “Sex, Lies, and Video Cameras” started out as a Page Six item. I remember the salacious headline vividly:
“MODELS ATOP A PORNO PARLOR.”
The gossip item told the heartwarming tale of a millionaire entrepreneur from Miami, known as the Phone-Sex King, who had come to New York to open up a combination modeling agency/porn website. What’s not to like about this story? I thought to myself between chuckles. I immediately clipped the item from the
New York Post
and pinned it to the wall
.

The pitch was money: Johnny Casablancas meets Larry Flynt with a gritty Elmore Leonard vibe. The fact that a hustler from South Beach was hawking this rather unorthodox business model around town wasn’t that interesting to me. Far more intriguing was that Mr. Itzler had evidently managed to wrangle a top photographer as a business partner and was taking meetings with some of the key players within the fashion industry. I reread the item: fashion models, online sex, a gorgeous SoHo loft where all of this seductive commerce was to take place. Something didn’t smell right This is a good thing. As any journalist will tell you, the best stories are the ones that smell slightly gamy at the start. This one was still fresh and already it was stinking up the town like a runny wedge of Limburger. That’s when I decided to do the story
.

Jason Itzler didn’t disappoint. He is a flimflam man from the old school: charismatic, earnest, and always working a new scam. There’s no telling how far he would have gone if he had decided to peddle, say, California real estate instead of desperate girls and ecstasy tablets. Groupies will be pleased to know that Mr. Itzler was released from the New Jersey State Correctional System in January 2003 after serving seventeen months and one week of a five-year stretch. Collection agencies, cuckolds, and IRS agents can reach the former Phone-Sex King through the New Jersey Parole Board. He is currently looking for venture capital funds and is available for interviews
.

T
he legend of John P. O’Neill, who lost his life at the World Trade Center on September 11, begins with a story by Richard A. Clarke, the national coordinator for counterterrorism in the White House from the first Bush administration until last year. On a Sunday morning in February 1995, Clarke went to his office to review intelligence cables that had come in over the weekend. One of the cables reported that Ramzi Yousef, the suspected mastermind behind the first World Trade Center bombing, two years earlier, had been spotted in Pakistan. Clarke immediately called the FBI. A man whose voice was unfamiliar to him answered the phone. “O’Neill,” he growled.

“Who are you?” Clarke said.

“I’m John O’Neill,” the man replied. “Who the hell are you?”

O’Neill had just been appointed chief of the FBI’s counterterrorism section, in Washington. He was 42 years old, and had been transferred from the bureau’s Chicago office. After driving all night, he had gone directly to headquarters that Sunday morning without dropping off his bags. When he heard Clarke’s report about Yousef, O’Neill entered the FBI’s Strategic Information Operations Center (SIOC) and telephoned Thomas Pickard, the head of the bureau’s National Security Division in New York. Pickard then called Mary Jo White, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, who had indicted Yousef in the bombing case.

One of O’Neill’s new responsibilities was to put together a team
to bring the suspect home. It was composed of agents who were working on the case, a State Department representative, a medical doctor, a hostage-rescue team, and a fingerprint expert whose job was to make sure that the suspect was in fact Ramzi Yousef. Under ordinary circumstances, the host country would be asked to detain the suspect until extradition paperwork had been signed and the FBI could place the man in custody. There was no time for that. Yousef was reportedly preparing to board a bus for Peshawar. Unless he was apprehended, he would soon cross the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan, where he would be out of reach. There was only one FBI agent in Pakistan at the time, along with several agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration and the State Department’s diplomatic security bureau. “Our ambassador had to get in his car and go ripping across town to get the head of the local military intelligence,” Clarke recalled. “The chief gave him his own personal aides, and this ragtag bunch of American law enforcement officials and a couple of Pakistani soldiers set off to catch Yousef before he got on the bus.” O’Neill, working around the clock for the next three days, coordinated the entire effort. At 10:00
A.M.
Pakistan time, on Tuesday, February 7, SIOC was informed that the World Trade Center bomber was in custody.

During the next six years, O’Neill became the bureau’s most committed tracker of Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda network of terrorists as they struck against American interests around the world. Brash, ambitious, often full of himself, O’Neill had a confrontational personality that brought him powerful enemies. Even so, he was too valuable to ignore. He was the point man in the investigation of the terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia, East Africa, and Yemen. At a time when the Clinton administration was struggling to decide how to respond to the terrorist threat, O’Neill, along with others in the FBI and the CIA, realized that Al Qaeda was relentless and resourceful and that its ultimate target was America itself. In the last
days of his life, after he had taken a new job as the chief of security for the World Trade Center, he was warning friends, “We’re due.”

“I
am
the FBI,” John O’Neill liked to boast. He had wanted to work for the bureau since boyhood, when he watched Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., as the buttoned-down Inspector Lewis Erskine in the TV series
The FBI
. O’Neill was born in 1952 and brought up in Atlantic City, where his mother drove a cab for a small taxi business that she and his father owned. After graduating from Holy Spirit High School, he got a job as a fingerprint clerk with the FBI. During his first semester in college, he married his high school sweetheart, Christine, and when he was 20 their son, John P. O’Neill, Jr., was born. O’Neill put himself through a master’s program in forensics at George Washington University by serving as a tour guide at the FBI headquarters. In 1976, he became a full-time agent in the bureau’s office in Baltimore; ten years later, he returned to headquarters and served as an inspector. In 1991, he was named assistant special agent in charge in the Chicago office. In 1994, he received the additional assignment of supervising VAPCON, a national investigation into violence against abortion providers. The following year, he transferred to headquarters to become the counterterrorism chief.

John Lipka, an agent who met O’Neill during the VAPCON probe, marvelled at his ability to move so easily from investigating organized crime and official corruption to the thornier field of counterterrorism. “He was a very quick study,” Lipka told me. “I’d been working terrorism since ‘86, but he’d walk out of the Hoover building, flag a cab, and I’d brief him on the way to the White House. Then he’d give a presentation, and I’d be shocked that he grasped everything I had been working on for weeks.”

O’Neill entered the bureau in the J. Edgar Hoover era, and throughout his career he had something of the old-time G-man
about him. He talked tough, in a New Jersey accent that many loved to imitate. He was darkly handsome, with black eyes and slicked-back hair. In a culture that favors discreet anonymity, he cut a memorable figure. He favored fine cigars and Chivas Regal and water with a twist, and carried a 9-millimeter automatic strapped to his ankle. His manner was bluff and dominating, but he was always immaculately, even fussily, dressed. One of his colleagues in Washington took note of O’Neill’s “nightclub wardrobe”—black double-breasted suits, semitransparent black socks, and ballet-slipper shoes. “He had very delicate feet and hands, and with his polished fingernails, he made quite an impression.”

In Washington, O’Neill became part of a close-knit group of counterterrorism experts which formed around Richard Clarke. In the web of federal agencies concerned with terrorism, Clarke was the spider. Everything that touched the web eventually came to his attention. The members of this inner circle, which was known as the Counterterrorism Security Group (CSG), were drawn mainly from the CIA, the National Security Council, and the upper tiers of the Defense Department, the Justice Department, and the State Department. They met every week in the White House Situation Room. “John could lead a discussion at that level,” R. P. Eddy, who was an NSC director at the time, told me. “He was not just the guy you turned to for a situation report. He was the guy who would say the thing that everybody in the room wishes he had said.”

In July of 1996, when TWA Flight 800 crashed off the coast of Long Island, there was widespread speculation in the CSG that it had been shot down by a shoulder-fired missile from the shore. Dozens of witnesses reported having seen an ascending flare that culminated in an explosion. According to Clarke, O’Neill, working with the Defense Department, determined the height of the aircraft and its distance from shore at the time of the explosion, and demonstrated that it was out of the range of a Stinger missile. He proposed that the flare could have been caused by the ignition of leaking fuel
from the aircraft, and he persuaded the CIA to do a video simulation of this scenario, which proved to be strikingly similar to the witnesses’ accounts. It is now generally agreed that mechanical failure, not terrorism, caused the explosion of TWA Flight 800.

Clarke immediately spotted in O’Neill an obsessiveness about the dangers of terrorism which mirrored his own. “John had the same problems with the bureaucracy that I had,” Clarke told me. “Prior to September eleventh, a lot of people who were working full-time on terrorism thought it was no more than a nuisance. They didn’t understand that Al Qaeda was enormously powerful and insidious and that it was not going to stop until it really hurt us. John and some other senior officials knew that. The impatience really grew in us as we dealt with the dolts who didn’t understand.”

Osama bin Laden had been linked to terrorism since the first World Trade Center bombing, in 1993. His name had turned up on a list of donors to an Islamic charity that helped finance the bombing, and defendants in the case referred to a “Sheikh Osama” in a recorded conversation. “We started looking at who was involved in these events, and it seemed like an odd group of people getting together,” Clarke recalled. “They clearly had money. We’d see CIA reports that referred to ‘financier Osama bin Laden,’ and we’d ask ourselves, ‘Who the hell is he?’ The more we drilled down, the more we realized that he was not just a financier—he was the leader. John said, ‘We’ve got to get this guy. He’s building a network. Everything leads back to him.’ Gradually the CIA came along with us.”

O’Neill worked with Clarke to establish clear lines of responsibility among the intelligence agencies, and in 1995 their efforts resulted in a presidential directive giving the FBI the lead authority both in investigating and in preventing acts of terrorism wherever Americans or American interests were threatened. After the April 1995 bombing in Oklahoma City, O’Neill formed a separate section for domestic terrorism, but he concentrated on redesigning and expanding the foreign-terrorism branch. He organized a swap
of deputies between his office and the CIA’s counterterrorism center, despite resistance from both agencies.

“John told me that if you put the resources and talents of the CIA’s counterterrorism center and the FBI’s counterterrorism section together on any issue, we can solve it—but we need both,” Lipka recalled. In January 1996, O’Neill helped create a CIA station, code-named Alec, with a single-minded purpose. “Its mission was not just tracking down bin Laden but focusing on his infrastructure, his capabilities, where he got his funding, where were his bases of operation and his training centers,” Lipka said. “Many of the same things we are doing now, that station was already doing then.”

The cooperation that O’Neill achieved between the bureau and the CIA was all the more remarkable because opinions about him were sharply polarized. O’Neill could be brutal, not only with underlings but also with superiors when they failed to meet his expectations. An agent in the Chicago office who felt his disapproval told me, “He was smarter than everybody else, and he would use that fine mind to absolutely humiliate people.”

In Washington, there was one terrorist-related crisis after another. “We worked a bomb a month,” Lipka recalled. Often O’Neill would break for dinner and be back in the office at ten. “Most people couldn’t keep up with his passion and intensity,” Lipka said. “He was able to identify those people who shared his work ethic, and then he tasked the living shit out of them, with e-mails and status briefings and phones and pagers going off all the time, to the point that I asked him, ‘When do you sleep?’” O’Neill began acquiring nicknames that testified to his relentlessness, among them the Count, the Prince of Darkness, and Satan.

But many in the bureau who disliked O’Neill eventually became devoted followers. He went to extraordinary lengths to help when they faced health problems or financial difficulty. “He was our Elvis—you knew when he was in the house,” Kevin Giblin, the FBI’s head of terrorist warning, recalled.

O’Neill’s tenure in the FBI coincided with the internationalization of crime and law enforcement. Prior to his appointment as the bureau’s counterterrorism chief, the FBI had limited its involvement to operations in which Americans had been killed. “O’Neill came in with a much more global approach,” Lipka told me. One of his innovations was to catalogue all the explosives used by terrorists worldwide. “He thought, ‘When a bomb goes off in the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad, even though no Americans were killed, why don’t we offer our assistance, so that we can put that information on a global forensic database,’” Lipka said. Since 1984, the FBI had had the authority to investigate crimes against Americans abroad, but that mandate had been handicapped by a lack of cooperation with foreign police agencies. O’Neill made a habit of entertaining every foreign cop or intelligence agent who entered his orbit. He called it his “night job.”

“John’s approach to law enforcement was that of the old Irish ward boss to governance: you collect friendships and debts and obligations, because you never know when you’re going to need them,” Clarke told me. He was constantly on the phone, doing favors, massaging contacts. By the time he died, he had become one of the best-known policemen in the world. “You’d be in Moscow at some bilateral exchange,” Giblin recalled, “and you’d see three or four men approach and say, in broken English, ‘Do you know John O’Neill?’”

The need to improve relationships with foreign police agencies became apparent in November 1995, when five Americans and two Indians died in the bombing of an American-run military training center in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The FBI sent over a small squad to investigate, but the agents had scarcely arrived when the Saudis arrested four suspects and beheaded them, foreclosing any opportunity to learn who was behind the operation.

In the spring of 1996, Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl, who had supported a plot by Al Qaeda against American soldiers in Somalia four years
earlier, arrived at the American embassy in Asmara, Eritrea. The CIA debriefed him for six months, then turned him over to the FBI, which put him in the witness protection program. Fadl provided the first extensive road map of the bin Laden terrorist empire. “Fadl was a gold mine,” an intelligence source who was present during some of the interviews told me. “He described the network, bin Laden’s companies, his farms, his operations in the ports.” Fadl also talked about bin Laden’s desire to attack Americans, including his ambition to obtain uranium. The news was widely circulated among members of the intelligence community, including O’Neill, and yet the State Department refused to list Al Qaeda as a terrorist organization.

On June 25, 1996, O’Neill arranged a retreat for FBI and CIA agents at the bureau’s training center in Quantico, Virginia. “We had hot dogs and hamburgers, and John let the CIA guys on the firing range, because they never get to shoot,” Giblin recalled. “Then everyone’s beeper went off.” Another explosion in Saudi Arabia, at the Khobar Towers, a military housing complex in Dhahran, had killed nineteen American soldiers and injured more than five hundred other people, including Saudis. O’Neill assembled a team of nearly a hundred agents, support personnel, and members of various police agencies. The next day, they were on an Air Force transport plane to Saudi Arabia. A few weeks later, they were joined by O’Neill and the FBI director, Louis Freeh.