The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [136]
By then it seemed as if he had lived in New York his entire life. The city was a great stage upon which O’Neill claimed a title role. He stood with John Cardinal O’Connor, the archbishop of New York, on the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral during the Saint Patrick’s Day parade. He prayed with imams in Brooklyn. Sports figures and movie stars, such as Robert De Niro, consulted him and called him their friend. “John, you’ve got this town wired,” one of his buddies said after a late night when it seemed that everyone had bowed in O’Neill’s direction. O’Neill replied, “What’s the point of being sheriff if you can’t act like one?”
O’Neill was now in charge of counterterrorism and counterintelligence in a city that was full of émigrés, spies, and shady diplomats. The particular squad responsible for the Middle East was called, in the noncommittal bureaucratic vernacular, I-49. Its personnel spent the bulk of their time covering the Sudanese, Egyptians, and Israelis, all of whom were actively recruiting in New York.
Most members of the squad were native New Yorkers who had stayed close to home. They included Louis Napoli, an NYPD detective, who had been assigned to I-49 through the Joint Terrorism Task Force. Napoli still lived in the same house in Brooklyn that he had grown up in. The Anticev brothers, John and Mike, also from Brooklyn, were the children of Croatian immigrants. Richard Karniewicz was a Brooklyn son of Polish immigrants who played polkas on his accordion. Jack Cloonan grew up in Waltham, Massachusetts, and it was not only his accent that set him apart: He was an English and Latin major who joined the bureau in 1972 on the day its director, J. Edgar Hoover, died. Carl Summerlin was a black New York State trooper and former tennis champion. Kevin Cruise was a West Point graduate and former captain in the Eighty-second Airborne. Mary Deborah Doran was the daughter of an FBI agent; she had worked for the Council on Foreign Relations before going to Northern Ireland for graduate work in Irish history. Their supervisor was Tom Lang, a blunt, profane, and quick-tempered Irishman from Queens who had known O’Neill from the days when they both served as tour guides at headquarters. Some members of the squad, like Lang and the Anticev brothers, had been working on terrorism for years. Others, like Debbie Doran, were new to the squad; she had joined the bureau in 1996 and was assigned to New York the month before O’Neill took over. This squad would soon grow much larger, but the nucleus was these seven agents, one state trooper, and a city police detective. The other member of the squad was Dan Coleman, who was assigned to Alec Station and who had been laboring alone on the bin Laden case.
When O’Neill arrived, however, most of the I-49 squad had been diverted to work on the crash of TWA Flight 800, which occurred off the coast of Long Island in July 1996. Dozens of witnesses reported having seen an ascending flare that culminated in a midair explosion. It appeared to have been one of the worst acts of terror in American history, and the bureau mobilized all its impressive resources to solve the crime as quickly as possible. The Khobar Towers bombing and TWA 800 investigations were absorbing all the bureau’s available manpower without any resolution in sight.
At the outset, investigators believed that the plane had been bombed or shot down in retaliation by followers of Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman, who was on trial in New York at the time. But after three months they came to the conclusion that the aircraft had suffered