of the slip. Gardie was glad to se me. He was snoozing under a sun screen rigged with battens across the forward deck. My pals at the Legion house, the same guys who dumped the carcasses of the five killers in the glades, had taken care of the boat and my dog while I was taking care of business in nutter land. Guardie was easily the most disciplined and well trained Sheppard I have ever known.
After a few days of sailing and diving, my gorgeous wife, who was waiting aboard, had some real estate business in Palm Beach and flew home. That was Thursday morning. I was left aboard with the dog and my thoughts- but, as usual, not for long!
The Dock Master came to the pier and said, "Mr. Johnson, you have a call at the office." Inside, the overly air conditioned small CBS building, the gal handed me the receiver on the pay phone. The voice on the other end said "when you comin to the Legion, we have bidness?" That was it- vacation over! Friday morning, I took the dog and headed north in a rented car. The encrypted BB had, of course, been chiming but I had cleverly ignored it. No escaping these guys!
I left the boat with fully charged batteries, topped off diesel tanks, dehumidifiers quietly running on shore power and the pumps and warning bells working. If I couldn't get back to it in a few days the guys would move her to back to Pier 66 and have it looked after until I returned. I never had to worry about things like that. One of the guys was also part of our team and lived on a boat of his own. He knew the drill. I had helped him often enough with the same problems.
Here we go again! A terrorist cell had been detected in Fort Lauderdale. Masjid Al Iman is one of the oldest mosques in South Florida, Its located at 2542 Franklin Park Dr. It's been around since the 70's and generally considered not to be run by radicals. One of the teams had been monitoring phones and photographing vehicles and individual members near by for months. Wednesday evening a twenty something was photographed talking to an Arabic looking guy sitting in a new Mercedes 550 parked close to the mosque's main building.
A long-range, sound enhancing, amplifying listening device overheard and recorded the marks using our own acoustic booster technology. We could hear conversations up to 200 yards away. The set we use has a 12" parabolic dish hidden in the grill works. So what did we hear? The camera clearly showed a brown envelope being passed to the kid by the driver. What was in it? My guess is it was money but then again, I'm a suspicious SOB!
It sounded like some kind of event was scheduled for the following week. We didn't have long to figure this out. We had the car's license and ran the plates. He was a Muslim from Miami named Mohamed Jaweed. He owned a wholesale cement company in Homestead. He had a fleet of cement trucks and had been in business for 20 years. If he was a bad guy, he was likely sleeper who had been planted and told to lie low and live a normal life until called into action. Maybe this was it? There was nothing in our records indicating that he was anything but a legitimate business man. So what was he doing in Fort Lauderdale, fifty miles from home, talking to a 20 year old bearded Arab kid? Jaweed had been recorded saying "are you ready, do you need anything." The kid had nodded but not spoke. Jaweed gave him the envelope and said "when?" "Friday" the kid said and moved away.
A team car tracked the kid to a nearby apartment block. What to do? I decided to have watchers tag them both and keep track for 24 hours. It was Tuesday, we couldn't afford more time. The kid, let's call him 'Abdul,' met up with another similar type at ten that evening. He had made several calls on a 212 area code cell phone. The phone records indicated it had been purchased only a few days before in New York- a throw-away phone? We thought so. So what is he hiding, what is he planning- if anything? We traced the calls. All were in fluent Arabic with what I detected was a Lebanese accent. All were to cell phones in the local area.
The conversations were cryptic- "are you OK, do you need anything? Can you meet at our restaurant tomorrow night at nine?" He had about this same conversation with what we calculated to be eight of his fellow terrorists. Yes, I figured them to be whackos and planning something bad. The cell tower scan placed the eight bad guys at locations scattered around the Pompano and Fort Lauderdale. We sent a team to locate and monitor each one.
We hacked into the cement guys servers on Saturday night and sent a team to have a look at his office records. The computer looked clean- nothing suspicious. We did notice in the company check book that checks had been written to a private account at a TD bank in Boca beginning a few months back. It took us about ten minutes to hack into the bank and we saw that Jaweed had opened the account under his own name and had been depositing money into the account for five months. The total was over $20,000.00 but there was only $3,500 remaining in the account. We saw a string of checks had been written to "cash." The amounts were in the $1500 to $800 range and were dated a few weeks apart. What was he using this money for? Maybe he had a gal hidden away. It wouldn't be the first time! Nah, he was funding the kid and his bastard murderous pals.
It was 0300 Wednesday morning and we were nowhere! There was no more time to waste. I had our guys pick up two of Abdul's pals and bring them to a warehouse we kept in Pompano off Dixie Highway. When I got there both were separated in different rooms and being 'prepped 'for a little "singing time."
Now, here's where it gets a bit down to brass tacks! Here's where we separate the men from the boys and you are free to just skip this bit- your choice. I guess, if you have a year or so to interrogate a suspect, to make pals with him, play nice and appeal to his better nature, you might wind up with some sort of actionable Intel. I won't argue that, who knows, it might work. I can say positively however, that I know of no time in my years in this business when it has ever worked! Once a cell member is taken, or even suspected of being taken, his pals wrap the op up and disappear. Whatever he knows or doesn't know is only good for a few hours or days at best. Stale info is like old fish- it stinks!
If you want someone to tell you something he doesn't want to tell you- you have a problem. You have to ask yourself a couple of questions. One, how bad to you need to know what you need to know and how bad does the suspect not want to tell you what you want to know? Then two; you have to ask yourself what makes you think the suspect knows anything worth knowing in the first place?
If your answer to question two is that- positively, you believe, for a variety of really good reasons, that the rat punk knows some thing valuable then you can proceed to question one? Until you begin to ask question one you have no idea how badly the suspect does not want to tell your what you what to know. So, how does this interrogation business actually work?
First, the suspect has to know that you are very, very serious! There are several ways to impress on him the seriousness of the situation. My favorite with these Arabs is to strip them naked and tie them to a chair sitting on a shower Curtin. I know, old fashioned crude and brutal but, in the end, that's a cultural thing, they are primitive humans and need to be dealt with using primitive methods. Experience has shown me this many times. To treat them as if they were like us produces no results- they are primitives period!
I know already that you all object. I can see it in your faces. You want to believe that Arabs and Muslims are just like you, moral relativity, equality and all that crap. You want to believe that they are feeling, empathetic and normal humans. Of course, then you have to explain how they could point an AK-47 at an infants face and blow his head to bits. You couldn't, so how can he? You've seen it, you know they do it- how can they? Exactly, no normal human could murder an infant like this- how can they? Committed Muslim Jihadists are not normal and certainly not capable of acting human as we would define it. A large part of their minds and psyches have been taken over by 'pure evil'- the devil, if you will, controls them- they are 'purely evil.' The only way to deal with them is to kill them, and let their souls descend into to hell where they belong. From a purely theological perspective that is it!
So, I needed to know if the suspects were Muslim jihadists and then I need to know what they know of a plot or plan to hurt America or Americans. I asked each one
