Last week, USA Today reported a joint effort between Qualcomm
and American Airlines’ to allow passengers to make cellphone calls from aircraft in flight. According
to the story, the satellite-based system employs a "Pico cell" to act as a small cellular tower.

"It worked great," gushed Monte Ford, American Airline’s chief information officer. "I called
the office. I called my wife. I called a friend in Paris. They all heard me great, and I could hear them
loud and clear."

Before this new "Pico cell," it was nigh on impossible to make a call from a passenger aircraft
in flight. Connection is impossible at altitudes over 8000 feet or speeds in excess of 230 mph.

Yet despite this, passengers Todd Beamer, Mark Bingham, Jeremy Glick and Edward Felt all managed
to place calls from Flight 93 on the morning of September 11. Peter Hanson, en route to Disneyland
with his wife and daughter, phoned his dad from Flight 175. Madeline Amy Sweeney, a flight attendant,
made a very dramatic call from Flight 11 as it sped to the North Tower. Barbara Olson made two calls,
collect, to her husband at his government office from Flight 77 as it made its way to the Pentagon.

Each call was initially reported as coming from a cellphone. Later, when skepticism reared
its ugly head and the Grassy Knollers arrived, the narrative became fuzzy; it was suggested that
$10-a-minute Airfones were involved. Olson was an easy candidate for Airfone (one doesn’t call
collect from a cell), but as the stories developed, Olson—and Felt—were said to have
called from inside locked lavatories. No Airfone there.

In the very near future, numerous technological miracles and wonders will rise up out of the
ashes of that terrible day, much the way the space program supposedly gave us Tang and Velcro. Satam
Al-Suqami’s indestructible passport, for one, is currently under the microscope in the Reverse
Engineering Department at Area 51. My old passport was falling apart when I finally replaced it
last year, just from spending 10 years in my pocket. His survived the destruction of the World Trade
Center. I want one of those.

Likewise, professional bowlers could benefit from inquiries into whatever physical force
brought about the collapse of WTC 7. And as a frequent flyer who finds long-term parking difficult
and expensive, I’d like to know by what mechanism Mohammed Atta got to Portland, ME, where he was
videotaped boarding a flight to Logan Airport in Boston. His rental car was found at Logan.

And last but not least, every suburban homeowner will want the miraculous PentaGrass. Whatever
that lawn at the Pentagon is made out of, it sure is amazing stuff—it resists and repels fire,
explosion, skid marks, aircraft debris, jet fuel, luggage and body parts. Shit from your neighbor’s
dog won’t stand a chance!

Who would’ve thought there’d be a silver lining even in the debris cloud made that Tuesday morning?
o

One hundred
and twenty-five claims remain outstanding, but little has been written about
any of these families. Where is the coverage of those insisting on finding out
what really happened on that day before they sign away their "claims?"

First to
stand up were five widows: Kristen Breitweiser, Patty Casazza, Mindy Kleinberg
and Lorie van Auken. Breitweiser’s husband was killed in his office at
Fiduciary Trust on the 94th floor of the South Tower, while Casazza, Kleinberg
and van Auken are Cantor-Fitzgerald widows. They began lobbying for answers
early in 2002, navigating the labyrinth of American bureaucracy and hammering
the bureaucrats for direct answers to direct questions. In September 2002, Breitweiser
testified at the first televised public hearing before the Joint Intelligence
Committee Inquiry (JICI) in DC.

Like many
others, she wanted to know why, on May 16, 2002, National Security Advisor Condoleezza
Rice stated that she didn’t "think anybody could have predicted that
these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center…
That they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as
a missile."

Breitweiser
knows the historical facts say otherwise. She noted the following points in
her statement. In her words:

• In
1993, a $150,000 study was commissioned by the Pentagon to investigate the possibility
of an airplane being used to bomb national landmarks. A draft document of this
was circulated throughout the Pentagon, the Justice Department and to the Federal
Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

• In
1994, a disgruntled Fed Ex employee invaded the cockpit of a DC-10 with plans
to crash it into a company building in Memphis. That same year, a lone pilot
crashed a small plane into a tree on the White House grounds, and an Air France
flight was hijacked by members of the Armed Islamic Group with the intent to
crash the plane into the Eiffel Tower.

• In
January 1995, Philippine authorities investigating Abdul Murad, an Islamic terrorist,
unearthed a plot to blow up 11 airliners over the Pacific, and in the alternative,
several planes were to be hijacked and flown into civilian targets in the U.S.
Among the targets mentioned were CIA headquarters, the World Trade Center, the
Sears Tower and the White House.

• In
September 1999, a report, "The Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism,"
was prepared for U.S. intelligence by the Federal Research Division, an arm
of the Library of Congress. It stated, "Suicide bombers belonging to al
Qaeda’s Martyrdom Battalion could crash-land an aircraft packed with high
explosives (C-4 and Semtex) into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the CIA,
or the White House."

Like many
others, Breitweiser believes that American intelligence had long speculated
that terrorist organizations could and would utilize airplanes as weapons.

She also
included a March 11, 2002 statement by the director of the CIA, George Tenet:
"[The United States] never had the texture–meaning enough information–to
stop what happened." She offered a similar statement by the director of
the FBI, Robert Mueller, from May 8, 2002: "[T]here was nothing the agency
could have done to anticipate and prevent the attacks."

Once again
Breitweiser argued that the facts indicated otherwise. As she said:

• Throughout
the spring and early summer of 2001, intelligence agencies flooded the government
with warnings of possible terrorist attacks against American targets, including
commercial aircraft, by al Qaeda and other groups. The warnings were vague but
sufficiently alarming to prompt the FAA to issue four information circulars,
or ICs, to the commercial airline industry between June 22 and July 31, warning
of possible terrorism.

• On
June 22, the military’s Central and European Commands imposed "Force
Protection Condition Delta," the highest anti-terrorist alert.

• On
June 28, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice said, "It is highly
likely that a significant al Qaeda attack is in the near future, within several
weeks."

• As
of July 31, the FAA urged U.S. airlines to maintain a "high degree of alertness."

• One
FAA circular from late July noted, according to Condoleezza Rice, that there
was "no specific target, no credible info of attack to U.S. civil aviation
interests, but terror groups are known to be planning and training for hijackings,
and we ask you therefore to use caution." Two counter-terrorism officials
described the alerts of the early and mid-summer 2001 as "the most urgent
in decades."

Breitweiser
is resolute in her assertions. Airport security officials, she believes, could
have done much more to prevent the hijackings. Beyond that, however, she wonders
what September 11 would have been like had the government made the public aware
of the threats. How many people, she asks, would have chosen to board planes
that morning? And how many of those in World Trade Center 2 would have remained
in their offices, watching the inferno of Tower 1, had they known of the possibility
of an air attack?

One of
the more compelling passages in Breitweiser’s statement concerns a
July 5, 2001 White House gathering of the FAA, the Coast Guard, the FBI, Secret
Service and INS wherein a top counter-terrorism official, Richard Clarke, stated
that "[s]omething really spectacular is going to happen here, and it’s
going to happen soon." Despite being put on heightened alert, intelligence
agencies ignored–or at least dismissed–what is now widely known as
the "Phoenix Memo."

On July
10, an FBI field agent in Phoenix, AZ, named Kenneth Williams reported suspicions
of a hijacking plot. He recommended that the FBI investigate the possibility
that al Qaeda operatives were training at U.S. flight schools, suggesting that
Osama bin Laden’s followers may have been securing jobs as security guards,
pilots and other personnel.

Too many
questions remain, and Breitweiser is very thorough in outlining the possible
failures of not only our government’s communication prior to the attack,
but its response. She wonders why, for instance, the NY/NJ Port Authority didn’t
evacuate the World Trade Center when they knew that a second plane was heading
in? And why weren’t the F-16s and Stealth bombers that tracked on radar
screens at approximately 8:05 a.m. used to prevent tragedy?

Concerning
the attack on the Pentagon, Breitweiser notes that Washington Air Traffic Control
Center was aware of the first plane before it hit the World Trade Center. And
yet, the third plane–American Airlines Flight 77, soon to plunge
into the Pentagon–made a few "loop de loops" over DC one hour
and 45 minutes after Washington Center was made aware of the hijackings.
Why, she asks, was our Air Force so late in its response?

In late
2002, the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States–now
known popularly as the "9/11 Commission"–was reluctantly created,
in large part due to the efforts of the widow Breitweiser. The commission’s
object is not so much to get the facts straight, but to assign blame for "shortcomings"
and "failures" in the bureaucracy. It’s what is known in intelligence
circles as a "limited hang-out."

On September
12, 2003, the widow Ellen Mariani filed a civil RICO suit in the U.S. District
Court, Eastern District of Pennsylvania naming George W. Bush, Richard Cheney,
John Ashcroft, Donald Rumsfeld, George Tenet, Norman Mineta, Peter G. Peterson,
Condoleezza Rice, George H.W. Bush and Kenneth Feinberg, in addition to "Other
unnamed past, present, officials, representatives, agents, and private consultants
of the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA" as defendants. She is demanding a jury
trial.

She also
fired off an open letter to President Bush in which she claims that he "intentionally
allowed 9/11 to happen to gather public support for a ‘war on terrorism.’"
She accuses him of being "fully aware of the unfolding events" yet
"[choosing] to continue on to the Emma E. Booker Elementary School to proceed
with a scheduled event and ‘photo op.’" With America under attack,
she writes, our president "did not appear to blink an eye or shed a tear
[but] continued on as if everything was ‘business as usual.’"

Speaking
for the families of the victims, she poses the following questions to President
Bush:

Her letter
ends ominously: "I will prove this in a court of law!"

So many,
many questions. Why did World Trade Center 7 collapse? No airplane hit that
building, and before September 11, no steel skyscraper had ever collapsed because
of a fire. Yet three fell–very neatly and virtually into their own footprints.

(Even if
one allows the engineers their claims that WTC1 and WTC2 were designed to collapse
in on themselves, what of the perfect collapse of WTC7?)

The firefighters
who were in the two towers were not in the least concerned about a collapse,
as demonstrated in the fire department’s transcript of their radio traffic.
In fact, they stated that the fires were dying out and could be extinguished
with just a couple of lines of hose. Jet fuel burns like kerosene or charcoal
fluid–quickly and completely–yet Ground Zero burned for 100 days.

The idea
of rigging the buildings for a controlled demolition was dismissed as unrealistic
by even the most suspicious types. How to gain access? Well, President Bush’s
other brother, Marvin, had a security company covering the World Trade
Center, Dulles International Airport and United Airlines.

In The
American Reporter (Jan. 20, 2003), Margie Burns raises the question of Marvin
Bush’s role in September 11. She notes that two of the planes involved
that day were United, and another took off from Dulles airport. The firm that
handled security, formerly named Securacom, "listed [Marvin] Bush on its
board of directors and as a significant shareholder. The firm, now named Stratesec,
Inc., is located in Sterling, Va., a suburb of Washington, D.C., and emphasizes
federal clients."

The company,
Burns writes, was never investigated. Rather, it has benefited from increased
security measures instituted in the wake of the attacks.

Some doubt
altogether that a plane hit the Pentagon. On Sept. 12, Arlington County Fire
Chief Ed Plaugher made some revealing statements. When asked about aircraft
wreckage, he responded that "there are some small pieces of aircraft visible
from the interior during this fire-fighting operation…but not large sections.
In other words, there’s no fuselage sections and that sort of thing."
When asked about jet fuel, he referred to a "puddle."

Look at
pictures, however, and it’s hard to believe that a Boeing 757 flew into
the Pentagon. The damage is not in proportion to the claim, especially when
one considers that two Boeing 757s are said to have taken down three skyscrapers.
The Pentagon was dented, the plane evaporated.

Nothing
that has been reported as truth escapes examination. Even the 19 men at the
controls, now infamously known as the 9/11 hijackers, cannot be tied with real
evidence to the event itself. This, according to FBI Director Robert Mueller.
"Mohammed Atta" appears to have been a stolen identity, as per the
real Atta’s father and his passport, which went missing in 1999, and on
Sept. 23, 2001, the BBC reported that at least four other of the 19 men identified
as the hijackers were alive and well–and considerably unsettled.

Why would
seismographs in the NYC area register two tiny quakes at Ground Zero at the
commencement of the collapse of each tower?

Why were
the planes up in the air for so long? And why did they fly over so many military
bases? Was America’s defense team on a crack break, or was it a National
Reconnaissance Office exercise, a wargame that involved hijacked aircraft being
splashed into buildings in New York and DC? The two that took the towers flew
within spitting distance of the Indian Point nuclear reactor facility.

Condoleezza
Rice’s preposterous May 16, 2002, statement that no one could have foreseen
this scenario was particularly ironic given that Pacifica Radio identified her
that day as the source of San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown’s "airport
security" call warning him not to fly on Black Tuesday.

The internet
is boiling with analyses of the 9/11 event. In Europe, a fair number of people
believe the American government was complicit in the attacks. According to recent
polls, one-third of young Germans believe this. Print and broadcast media here
ignore the questions, but it can’t be kept from public view forever. It’s
all out there. It’s been two years, and we still have nothing but questions
and Grassy Knoll theories. The answers lay scattered in shreds and pieces, waiting
to be assembled.

Now come
the widows, asking the right questions. Mariani’s lawyer, Phil Berg, makes
a point to remind people that he is not in the least bit suicidal, or given
to playing with loaded guns. They may not be able to reassemble or reanimate
their loved ones in a literal sense, but these families who are choosing the
hard road, the Narrow Way, will get to the truth.

She had
just enough strength to walk down the driveway to the mailbox, so we spent the
week just hanging out, smoking pot and watching television, going over old times.
The pot counteracted the nausea from the chemo and kept her appetite up. I brought
her a stuffed toy camel from the Hard Rock Cafe in Bahrain and a keffiya from
Beirut, and offered pep talks about spontaneous remissions and her old Lotto
habit.

"The odds
on Lotto are pretty bad," I said, "but you played it twice a week. Your chances
of beating this are much better."

I managed
to hold back the tears until I got back to my apartment in Manhattan. I had
a tricky moment in the airport bar, but then again, I always do in those places.

I first
laid eyes on Bonnie at a bar called the Bells of Hell on 13th St. just west
of 6th Ave. where the Cafe Loup now resides. The Bells of Hell was a hardcore
Irish joint with a bar in the front and a good-sized performance space in the
back. The location and name made the place a natural watering hole for the customer
base of Herman Slater’s Magickal Childe, up in Chelsea at 35 W. 19th St.
The Magickal Childe was ground zero for the occult explosion in New York City
in the 1970s.

Herman Slater
and his lover Ed Buczynski had a little occult emporium on Henry St. in Brooklyn,
just off Atlantic Ave., back in the early 1970s. They mainly sold herbs, candles
and oils, but they also carried a modest selection of books. The Warlock Shop
was just a hole in the wall, but despite its humble appearance, it was a true
cash cow. In 1976, the duo pulled up stakes and moved the operation to Chelsea.

At the Magickal
Childe, there was enough space to dramatically increase the merchandise offered,
and since Herman had the cash and the connections, the new store became, in
effect, the one-stop-shop for any and all conjuring needs. In addition to herbs,
oils, candles, books, robes, swords and other accoutrements of the Art, one
could find human skulls, dried bats, mummified cat’s paws and a wide variety
of unusual jewelry, a large portion of which was created by Bonnie, my ex-wife-to-be.
A room in the back of the store served as a temple and classroom for the various
strains of wicca that began to gravitate to the place.

That temple
also served as the launching pad for the explosive growth of Aleister Crowley’s
Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO) in the city in the late 70s and early 80s.

Herman had
vigorously encouraged and supported the creation of the Schlangekraft Necronomicon,
edited by "Simon." No doubt he’d grown weary of explaining to customers
that H.P. Lovecraft’s fabled forbidden tome was a fiction, a plot device
for great horror stories and nothing more. He was savvy enough to sell leftover
chicken bones as human finger bones to wannabe necromancers, so he surely knew
that the market for a "genuine" Necronomicon could be huge–with
the right packaging. In 1977, the book made its debut in the window of Herman’s
little shop of horrors in Chelsea. It generated a scene of its own, a scene
bursting with mad, unfocused creativity and slapstick mayhem.

Robert Anton
Wilson and Robert Shea had just published their Illuminatus trilogy,
and interest in secret societies and occult lore was sweeping through counterculture
circuits. Grady McMurtry was attempting to jumpstart the long-dormant OTO in
California and had just succeeded in having Aleister Crowley’s Thoth tarot deck published. Punks and proto-goth/industrial types searched out
obscure Satanic treatises and rare tracts from the seemingly defunct Process
Church of the Final Judgement. Unrepentant hippies and uber-feminists found
common ground in the gentle, woodsy eco-cult of the wicca, available in enough
variant "traditions" to suit any palate with an appetite for sweets.

None of
the wiccan "traditions" were any older than the electric light bulb, and the
OTO had its origins in a very dubious Masonic lineage of no greater antiquity
than aniline dyes, but that didn’t stop any of us from having a good time.
The Necronomicon was not merely the icing on the cake: It was the hideous
formless mass that squatted gibbering and piping where the bride and groom should
be.

This was
the 1970s, and the whole scene was awash in drugs and crazy sex. Herman had
an appetite for rough trade and kept a steady stream of dope-crazed street hustlers
flowing down from the Haymarket Saloon up on 8th Ave. above Port Authority.
He’d keep them around until they ripped him off, then give them the boot
and move on to the next one. He liked them big and stupid, a total contrast
with Eddie’s graceful and intelligent demeanor.

The differing
wicca groups were squabbling over the supposed validity of lineage, and there
were no fewer than four established OTO groups internationally, each claiming
exclusive dominion over the brand and trademarks. As a lifelong student of what
Crowley termed "magick" (the "k" inserted to distinguish the practice from prestidigitation),
I have never been a big fan of what I call the "booga-booga" school of magick.
I tend to see the practice more as a form of radical self-help and advanced
covert sales technique than any kind of actual traffic with disembodied critters
and goblins. That said, between the copious amounts of hallucinogens ingested
and the spells and counterspells hurled around, there were times when the vibes
around the store congealed and quivered like a great Waldorf Salad.

Into this
bubbling swamp of spiritual fecundity stepped Peter Levenda, aka "Simon." Charming,
soft-spoken and aloof, well-versed in all aspects of occult theory and practice,
he eased his way to the center of the scene. The Necronomicon was a team
effort. Herman provided the sponsorship, while the design and layout were the
work of Jim Wasserman of the OTO, a raving cokehead from Jersey named Larry
Barnes whose daddy had the production facilities and a fellow who called himself
Khem Set Rising (who also designed the sigils). The text itself was Levenda’s
creation, a synthesis of Sumerian and later Babylonian myths and texts peppered
with names of entities from H.P. Lovecraft’s notorious and enormously popular
Cthulhu stories. Levenda seems to have drawn heavily on the works of Samuel
Noah Kramer for the Sumerian, and almost certainly spent a great deal of time
at the University of Pennsylvania library researching the thing. Structurally,
the text was modeled on the wiccan Book of Shadows and the Goetia,
a grimoire of doubtful authenticity itself dating from the late Middle Ages.

"Simon"
was also Levenda’s creation. He cultivated an elusive, secretive persona,
giving him a fantastic and blatantly implausible line of bullshit to cover the
book’s origins. He had no telephone. He always wore business suits, in
stark contrast to the flamboyant Renaissance fair, proto-goth costuming that
dominated the scene. He never got high in public.

In short,
he knew the signifiers and emblems of authority, and played them to the hilt.
He hinted broadly of dealings with intelligence agencies and secret societies
operating at global levels of social influence. He began teaching classes in
the back room, and showed a genuine knack for clarifying and elucidating such
baroque encrypted arcana as John Dee’s Enochian magick system in such a
way as to make it understandable even to a novice. He also lacked the guts to
let a woman know when he was through with her, or so Bonnie said. She was positioned
to know at the time, despite her failing marriage to Chris Claremont, the comic
book author who put the X-Men on the map. Chris was her third husband.
I was her fourth, and last.

As Simon,
Levenda threw parties with various forms of live entertainment and staged rituals
presented by the various groups that swarmed around the shop. He had no political
enemies on the scene, owing to his adamantine and resolute refusal to affiliate
with any one group. There has always been a very heavy crossover factor between
the Renaissance fair/Society for Creative Anachronisms crowd, the science-fiction
fan circuit and the occult/wicca scenes. Simon had friends throughout all of
these arenas, and they all showed up to support this effort at unity.

The house
band for these affairs was Turner and Kirwan of Wexford, whose sound was primarily
influenced by Irish traditional folk music, Pink Floyd and the esoteric "Canterbury
School" of so-called "progressive" rock inspired by the band the Soft Machine,
which school included Mike Oldfield; Hatfield and the North; McDonald; Giles,
Giles and Fripp. Connor Freff Cochran (known then simply as "Freff") was nearly
always in attendance, juggling and entertaining, ornamental and always a hit
with the women.

Copernicus–second
only perhaps to G.G. Allin on the obnoxious meter–had his performance debut
at one of these events, and occasionally even Norman Mailer would pop in, with
his assistant Judith McNally in tow. Judith and Simon were rumored to be an
item, and it was also rumored that she had done the bulk of the work on Mailer’s
big hit, The Executioner’s Song. She’s listed in the acknowledgements
of the Necronomicon.

Certain
theories have it that even a bogus (or, to be kind, synthetic) grimoire will
work if it is internally consistent, but that means following the rules to the
letter. Simon’s Necronomicon contains a manual of self-initiation
in the form of a series of "gates" that are to be "walked." Following the instructions
given in the book, walking these gates should take just shy of a year. One certain
Martin Mensch–an adepti who had received the book in manuscript form for
examination, as had Bonnie due to her status as a Gardnerian wiccan high priestess
of some repute–decided to accelerate the process, and ran the gates in
a matter of weeks. Shortly after completing the final gate, he stepped out of
a cab at 10th St. and 1st Ave. and got capped in the head in one of those random
acts of mindless violence that were coming into vogue at that time.

Simon decided
to start a group of his own, one that would span the different traditions and
merge the gentle current of the wicca with the rigorous scholarship of the Golden
Dawn/OTO trend under the umbrella of the Necronomicon. Heavily inspired
by the Illuminatus books and Timothy Leary’s exopsychology theory
of the eight-circuit brain, he launched Stargroup-1 at these parties.

As the 80s
dawned and the Reagan era began, the Berkeley-based Caliphate OTO swelled to
become the dominant force among the Crowley crowd, and the internal politics
of that group morphed into a drug-soaked, sex-crazed caricature of I, Claudius.
The wicca continued their ongoing disputes regarding the validity or lack thereof
of the various "traditions," and Stargroup-1 issued the New York Tarot, a genuinely
cute endeavor to replace the traditional tarot card images with photographs
of New York City and certain members of the group. People were having mad sex
of every conceivable variety in every imaginable combination. Turner and Kirwan
of Wexford streamlined their sound and turned into a new-wave effort called
the Major Thinkers.

Simon was
finding Larry Barnes increasingly difficult to tolerate, an understandable position
given the man’s outrageous level of cocaine consumption. Simon refused
to attend a book signing, so Wasserman recruited me to impersonate him and forge
his signature on a run of hardcover reprints. Barnes kept laying out rails of
blow until I simply had to refuse any more; I thought I was going to have a
stroke. His skin had that bluish tinge one usually associates with corpses;
he couldn’t shut up and made no sense at all. He was completely obsessed
with numerology, a classic symptom of incipient paranoia. Shortly thereafter,
Larry snitched out his suppliers and entered the Federal Witness Protection
Program, never to be seen again. In 1980, Avon released the paperback version
of the Necronomicon, which remains in print and has been selling very
steadily ever since.

For me,
the scene peaked at a reception thrown by a prominent tax attorney from DC at
the Plaza Hotel honoring Grady McMurtry, filmmaker Kenneth Anger and Simon.
There was a screening of Anger’s film, Lucifer Rising, a splendid
buffet, rivers of free booze and a full range of sense-deranging substances.
It was the last time that particular crowd got together on friendly terms.

Not all
of us took Simon’s hints of dabblings in intelligence work all that seriously,
but apparently the Feds did. An agent infiltrated the OTO with the apparent
intent of getting close to Simon, who was doing a great deal of consulting for
the local lodge and seemed to be flirting with affiliation. As the noose tightened,
Simon became more and more critical of the OTO, finally denouncing it as "fascist"
and vanishing, some said to Singapore. Other reports placed him in Hong Kong
or Shanghai. The truth is, no one knew.

Bonnie and
I headed out to San Francisco, where we were married by a Justice of the Peace
on October 6, 1983. Grady McMurtry led the Caliphate OTO through a series of
court battles aimed at establishing it as the one true OTO and died of congestive
heart failure on the day the judge granted his victory. Stargroup-1 quietly
disintegrated, and the wicca made peace with one another as fundamentalist Christians
took control of the White House. The Major Thinkers broke up. Pierce Turner
went solo, and Larry Kirwan formed Black 47.

Herman Slater
sailed his little pirate ship through it all, indomitable and ornery, the very
fairy godmother of the entire scene. Every now and then the issue of unpaid
sales taxes would pop up and he’d threaten to sell the shop, but he never
did. The books, such as they were, consisted mainly of scraps of paper stuffed
into shopping bags. There was no earthly way anyone but Herman could make any
sense of it. The cranky old fucker fired me no fewer than three times in the
course of my tenure there, but Bonnie’s jewelry sold, and he eventually
bought the line from her. She never had much business sense, not that I consider
that a flaw. She was an artist, first and foremost, and a damned fine one at
that.

In 1989,
Ed Buczynski died of complications from AIDS. On July 9, 1992, Herman followed
him into the Western Lands. He left the shop to a handful of employees who had
managed to avoid pissing him off. Unfortunately, he also left an incredible
tax debt. The shop limped along for a few years, deteriorating gradually and
finally closing its doors for good in 1999. The space remains vacant as of this
writing.

During the
last ten years of her life, my wife embraced Tibetan Buddhism, specifically
the variant known as Dzogchen. In our last conversation, she mentioned that
my picture was sitting next to the Dalai Lama in her makeshift shrine in the
hospice where she was spending her final days.

"I am honored
by the gesture," I told her, "but I’m not so sure I belong there. It might
give His Holiness weird dreams."

She left
me her Necronomicon, number 141 of the first edition of 666 hardcover
copies, inscribed by Simon: "To Greymalkin, As per the missing page of the Nec…
‘Blessed Is, Blessed Was, Blessed Will Be…’"

She was
a wonderful woman. It was a very colorful scene, a very colorful time. We were
all naive and completely insane, but we had a good time together. It was, in
a word, magick.

Peter Gatien
is arguably the most unjustly maligned New York City nightlife entrepreneur
since the Volstead Act was repealed. City, state and federal law enforcement
agencies wasted countless man-hours and other resources in their desperate and
ultimately futile attempt to nail him as some kind of drug kingpin. Ultimately,
all they could get him on was tax evasion, a charge that would probably stick
to half the business owners in the city if they were pursued with the ferocity
with which Gatien’s adversaries pursued him. The rampant drug use at Gatien’s
clubs was in no way distinct or unique, but part of a continuum stretching back
to the days of the speakeasies. People go out, they want to get high. What was
distinct and unique was the incredible effort to frame Peter Gatien.

This effort
was assisted by the lurid media coverage, particularly the vicious slanders
perpetrated by Jack Newfield at the New York Post. Frank Owen at the
Village Voice took a more moderate approach, using innuendo and snapshots
of Gatien’s private life to depict the club owner as some latter-day Caligula
who lorded over an empire of drugs and depravity. Now Owen has written an excellent,
if somewhat biased, account of the rise and fall of Peter Gatien’s empire,
replete with a subplot detailing the much faster parabola of Mafia-wannabe Chris
Paciello’s erstwhile stint as a club owner in Miami. The gist of it is
that club owners should avoid making decisions in the midst of a binge, be the
binge on steroids or crack.

Owen’s
research is impeccable. He details the players, the venues and the history that
led to Gatien’s monumentally stupid decision to recruit Michael Alig and
his followers to pull Limelight out of a 1989-1990 slump. The sidebar effort
is an excellent account of Paciello’s meteoric career track in Miami, where
his club Liquid was briefly the hottest thing in town.

What’s
really impressive is the fantastic level of gross stupidity demonstrated by
everyone in this story: the club owners, the club kids, the narcs, even the
author. At one point, Owen recounts copping a hit of ketamine from Angel Melendez,
the kid Alig murdered and dismembered over a lousy few thousand dollars. Rather
than take the alleged ketamine off to be analyzed by a reputable chemist, Owen
ingests it, in the interest of research. That is insane. One hard and fast rule
that has kept me out of a world of shit is that I buy only from sources I know
and trust. Anybody who would buy drugs from a stranger deserves whatever they
get. Darwin in action.

I was out
of town when Gatien opened Limelight in November 1983, and I missed the celebration
of William S. Burroughs’ 70th birthday there three months later. I hated
techno, and I hated the so-called "club kids" on sight. Self-conscious decadence
is not pretty, especially when it comes packaged in that anything-for-attention
"fabulous" pose. One moment they’re snorting God-knows-what in the bathroom
stalls and fucking goats and dogs for sport at parties, next they’re crying
for charity to deal with some horrifying disease they’ve contracted. I’m
a professional; I can’t abide amateurs, and I hate whiners.

This book
is about fin-de-siecle America and the sick pursuit of notoriety at any cost.
Peter Gatien is the small-town boy come to the big city to strike it rich who
gets in over his head with whores and crack until he makes one unbelievably
dumb mistake. Michael Alig is that mistake. He’s a needy little psychopath
determined to be the center of attention. Michael Caruso is the snitch, the
glue that holds the Paciello-Gatien threads together. Paciello is the steroid-laden
guido from Staten Island, a no-necked atavism with more balls than brains who’ll
kill to be seen with Madonna. The narcs are the Keystone Kops, useless bureaucrats
forever finding new ways of squandering the taxpayers’ money in the pointless
and futile "War on Drugs" which in this case appears to have been a "War on
Nightlife."

Owen does
a terrific job of recreating the scene and providing the background on the various
personae as they make their entrances and exits. His innuendo regarding Gatien’s
knowledge of and/or control over the huge drug market at his clubs, however,
seems out of line to me. I find it highly unlikely that the man was in any way
complicit. Certainly, he went through a period of depravity, which Owen recounts
in true tabloid fashion with great relish.

Owen is
a bit more guarded about his own depravity, although he does drop hints. I find
it difficult to believe that Gatien was in control of the drug trade at Limelight,
Tunnel, or any of his other establishments. The evidence presented clearly indicates
that no one was in control. One has to wonder what exactly drew the authorities
to Peter Gatien. They never showed that much interest in Bill Graham, Ian Schrager
or Steve Rubell.

Their interest
in Chris Paciello made much more sense. Paciello (nee Christian Ludwigsen) is
one of those pretty-boy steroid queens you see hanging around places like Scores
sucking up to the Made Men in a desperate attempt to become Sonny Corleone.
With no wits to speak of, he let his fists do the talking as he clawed his way
to notoriety in Miami as that scene was peaking prior to Andrew Cunanan’s
turning out the lights. That Paciello was so lionized by the vapid crowd of
celebrities and celebrity hangers-on speaks volumes about the moral void at
the center of that world. His club, Liquid, was a magnet for the needy and the
greedy, big wheels like Madonna and Sly Stallone, who produce nothing, not even
art. It’s just a shame it took Cunanan so long to get there, and his work
doesn’t even rate a mention in Owen’s book, despite its lasting importance
to the Miami scene. Ultimately it was the ghost of a middle-aged, middle-class
housewife from Staten Island that brought down Paciello. There is no statute
of limitations on murder.

Owen writes
with a certain nostalgia, and repeatedly implies that there was something innately
noble in the origins of the club scene. Again and again he refers to the idea
that MDMA was some kind of unique social glue bringing together the different
races and genders in some blissninny orgy of serotonin-fueled agape. I’ve
taken ecstasy a few times. It’s a remarkably stupid drug. It induces a
state best described as the opposite of paranoia. A better street name for it
would be "chump," because only a chump would take it in a public venue. Trust
is a valuable commodity and shouldn’t be given lightly. Any drug that induces
trust is a drug to be avoided.

It’s
not a new story. The same scenario has been played out before, at Bill Graham’s
Fillmore East and the gay club The Saint that came to occupy that space, at
Max’s Kansas City, at Studio 54, and doubtless at many other less famous
venues around town. The major difference isn’t Michael Alig’s savage
murder of Angel Melendez or the sheer quantity of drugs available. There were
certainly more drugs at the Fillmore East, and arguably more drugs at Studio
54. I’m quite certain that there were murders associated with the trade
at 54, if not the Fillmore. Roy Radin’s name comes to mind here. The big
difference was the fantastic amount of heat that came down on Peter Gatien.
Why this man became the target of such an enormous and expensive investigation
remains a mystery that Owen, alas, does not truly address.

Clubland: The Fabulous
Rise and Murderous Fall of Club Culture
By Frank Owen
St. Martin’s Press, 320 pages, $24.95

Whenever
I pass into a foreign country and have to fill out a visa form listing my occupation,
I invariably have to resist the impulse to write "serial killer."
I abandoned the idea of serial murder as a career option some number of years
ago, opting instead for a lifetime of pranks, but I understand the appeal.

Life is
full of paths not taken. My mother wanted me to stay with her in a little house
in Camden, NJ. She wanted me to work for the U.S. Postal Service, which I actually
did for a while. It was stifling. If I’d stayed there and not run off to
New York, I would have become a completely different person. I would have worn
different clothes, maybe white dress shirts with heavily starched collars and
khakis, and black horn-rimmed glasses. I’d probably have stuck with the
canvas Chuck Taylors. I would have started driving at an earlier age. I would
have used a lot more crystal meth and studied taxidermy.

I love the
smell of human blood. I think I would have started killing people for sport.
I think I would have done it out of loneliness and boredom.

Most of
them do. Forget Hannibal Lecter. He’s not out there. There is no erudite
and suave Prince of Darkness prowling around in the shadows slicing and dicing
people for sport and art. Someone like that would be capable of getting a real
life. These serial killer characters are generally a pack of real losers, socially
inept bedwetters too frightened of other people to take out a personal ad.

Public romance
with the serial killer has nothing to do with actual serial killers. They are
a distinctly unromantic bunch, except for the unsolved cases. The unsolved cases
allow us to project what J.G. Ballard called "the veronicas of our perversions"
upon them. The innumerable theories regarding Jack the Ripper are an index of
public dread; the Texarkana Moonlight Murderer inspired countless fictions reflecting
adolescent sexual tension; and the original Zodiac case has the unique distinction
of having hatched actual real-life sequels.

There was
something of the taint of authentic genius, however warped, in the Delphic utterances
issued by the Zodiac killer via mail and telephone to the press, the police,
even celebrity attorney Melvin Belli. The Zodiac, who terrorized Northern California
1966-1974 and has never been apprehended, offered brief critiques of films and
quoted Gilbert & Sullivan. He devised a cipher that defied the best efforts
of NSA analysts. There may be Lewis Carroll references. He was certainly the
most verbose and daring of the unsolved cases.

I became
interested in the case on reading an article in the November 1981 issue of California
magazine. The article, "Portrait of the Artist As a Mass Murderer,"
by George Oakes, presented a novel theory regarding the Zodiac. Oakes posited
that the killings and subsequent communications were in the nature of a conscious
artistic expression: "Other artists had sought to remove their work from
the ordinary human perspective. Zodiac trumped them all." Oakes also clearly
had a particular individual in mind as a suspect. An epilogue by the editor
identified "George Oakes" as an alias, and mentioned that he had been
"identified in a San Francisco Chronicle story about amateur Zodiac
sleuths."

Working
through back issues of the Chronicle in The New York Times
morgue facility, I gained a fairly encyclopedic knowledge of the case, inasmuch
as the facts were available, and I identified "George Oakes" as one
Gareth Penn, of Napa. I initiated a correspondence with him in the autumn of
1982, and in our first phone conversation he provided me with his suspect’s
name, date and place of birth, mother’s name, her d.o.b., verifiable address,
telephone number, place of employment and fields of study. This guy had the
feel of some sort of zealot. I learned a long time ago that even wackos occasionally
spout truths, and I do not dismiss information simply because the source is
a crackpot.

I arranged
to meet with Penn at the Hyatt Regency in San Francisco in January of 1983.
I figured the venue would provide its own security, by virtue of my proto-Goth
drag of black Chippewas, black Levi’s and black thermal shirt complemented
by an olive drab U.S. Army trenchcoat and a DI haircut. In 1983, in San Francisco,
this shit was unusual, especially in a four-star hotel. Hotel security would
be watching. I planned on taking him up for drinks at the Equinox, a rotating
bar perched atop the Hyatt. I had him pegged for a drunk.

That evening
turned into an authentic run down the rabbit hole of Northern California weirdness,
all ambiguity and coded references as we roamed from the Embarcadero to North
Beach to Los Gatos. The fellow I met turned out to be an impostor, a shill.
It was all a bizarre head game, and I felt compelled to do Gareth Penn a turn.
His theory was based on an elaborate gematria system that he called "binary
Morse," involving a transposition of English into Morse code into a binary
construct in which dots equal zeroes and dashes equal ones. This is further
complicated in his theory by the use of geometric codes involving the overlap
of analog time measurements and binary Morse codes. Like any system of gematria,
it is tremendously ambiguous.

Over a period
of years I subjected Penn to a series of carefully timed hang-up telephone calls
designed to give him the impression of an elaborate communication from his suspect.
It worked. His extrapolation of my systematic pranking forms the basis of his
projected "chess game" in his self-published work on the Zodiac, Times
17 (Foxglove Press, 1987, out of print).

Penn’s
interpretation of the calls is about as accurate as his account of his meeting
with me. Interestingly, his suspect declines to sue him. His suspect is a very
interesting guy, with an odd sense of humor.

Robert Graysmith,
a former cartoonist and illustrator with the Chronicle, wrote the definitive
overview of the case, Zodiac (St. Martin’s, 1986). There are flaws
in it, as there are in every examination of the case so far. But Graysmith keeps
his agenda clean, and whatever mistakes he might make seem to be honest mistakes.

A whole
cult has sprung up around this case, best exemplified by Tom Voigt’s excellent
website, www.zodiackiller.com. Most of the brightest and the best examining
this fascinating case are posting on Voigt’s message board, and all of
the serious wackos are there, except Penn.

The consensus
among aficionados has for some time now been leaning toward the late Arthur
Leigh Allen as the prime suspect. He was by no means the evil genius proposed
by Penn. Allen was a great fat lumbering socially inept diabetic who lived in
his mother’s basement and toiled at menial jobs after losing his teaching
credentials on the heels of a child abuse scandal that landed him in Atascadero
State Hospital for a couple of years. He kept a bunch of trailers around, tucked
away in various back corners of the Bay Area, and flaunted his identification
with Zodiac to nearly everyone he came in contact with. He was the very essence
of a loser. William Burroughs once opined that "anyone who can pick up
a frying pan owns death," and if serial murder is art, it is art on the
cheap, art brut of the most brutal sort. It ain’t Vermeer, for sure.

•Robert
Graysmith has come forth with a sequel to his original Zodiac, entitled
Zodiac Unmasked (Berkley, 576 pages, $24.95). This new book is a meticulous
reconstruction of the way the case evolved, and it clearly illustrates that
the elusive quality of the Zodiac had little to do with his cunning and everything
to do with law enforcement ineptitude. The case against Arthur Leigh Allen is
as nearly cut and dried as one could ask for. Had the local authorities shared
the information they had with one another freely, he almost certainly would
have been apprehended and charged in the case. Instead, the various agencies
involved competed against one another, each hoping to be the one to crack the
case and get the glory. The only winner in that game was the Zodiac.

Zodiac
Unmasked also deals with the fans and wannabes in fine detail. The case
has always been a magnet for weirdos; Heriberto Seda took it all the way, terrorizing
New York City in the early 90s with his clumsy impersonation and attacking nine
people before his arrest in 1996. In Japan, a 15-year-old boy perpetrated a
series of brutal attacks in Kobe, quoting from the original Zodiac literature
in a note he left stuffed into the mouth of a decapitated child. Graysmith gives
these cases all of the attention they deserve, recounting the lurid details
even as he expresses his horror at the thought that these crimes might have
been inspired by his first book.

Zodiac
Unmasked is by far the best book on the subject of the Zodiac murders. Graysmith
has managed to make his way through the minefield of quirky personalities involved
without ruffling too many feathers, and his access is as good as it gets. Of
course, there will always be true believers like Penn and others who continue
to insist on the viability of their own pet suspects in the face of the enormous
body of evidence implicating Allen, but Allen is the most obvious candidate
for the perpetrator of the original Northern California Zodiac crimes.

The bigger
question is this: having witnessed Zodiac II and Zodiac III, how long will it
be before we see Zodiac IV? Or is he already at work, out there in the darkness?
It is a case that seems to have no end.

A certain
mad hubris seems to have gripped the Power Elite lately, what with the state
of Illinois confiscating legally registered guns from law-abiding citizens and
Posse Comitatus safeguards tossed down the old memory hole in the name of Homeland
Security. It’s like the opening of The Turner Diaries. The radical
right is bubbling with conspiracy theories and stockpiling guns, ammo, MREs
and water filtration systems. The right doesn’t march or demonstrate, which
is sad, because they tend to be a colorful bunch and all the earliest warnings
on groups like the IMF, WTO, CFR, the Trilats and the Bilderbergers came
from the right. Lyndon LaRouche was the first to identify the IMF as a public
menace, and the John Birch Society was warning us about the CFR 40 years ago.
The most fascinating development in American politics recently has got to be
the unprecedented convergence of left and right in identifying as the enemy
the corporate sovereigns of the self-proclaimed New World Order.

The 15,000
or so people who marched against the World Economic Forum meeting at the Waldorf-Astoria
last Saturday looked a lot more diverse than I’d expected. I didn’t
anticipate running into a grizzled union man from Youngstown, OH, or a farmer
from Livingston, MT, marching with their wives and looking for all the world
like rural folk on their way to church. I found that quite surprising, and I
suspect there will be many more surprises ahead.

I headed
up to Columbia University on Friday to check out the atmosphere surrounding
the workshops and planning sessions there. There were no surprises. The college
crowd fits very neatly into the stereotype of the current state of the left:
a lot of kneejerk racist blather about the plight of cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal;
economic utopians with grand schemes for redistribution of wealth; the hopelessly
tenacious Greens; various communist atavisms; and the holier-than-thou posturing
of the atrociously flatulent vegans. If I can’t smoke in enclosed spaces,
the least the authorities can do is force vegans to take Beano or something,
just to level the playing field.

I noted
with interest that the Spartacists had their little information booth staffed
by a couple of really butch women. These women had that weird, kind of speedy
intensity that you get from hardcore religious fanatics and communists, and
I consider it an indicator of some sort of social progress that such a notoriously
patriarchal group as the Spartacists now has women in positions of public authority.
It is an endless source of wonder to me how people can still believe in the
viability of communism, but people have been waiting for Jesus to come back
for close to 2000 years, so it shouldn’t really surprise me.

I found
a fairly witty and clever bunch offering cool swag from www.securethehomeland.com.
They have t-shirts with the Office of Homeland Security logo on the front and
"Real patriots turn each other in" written on the back, and I got
a bunch of cool bogus OHS stickers with "We have always suspected you"
next to the logo. Their website is both funny and informative. The Office of
Homeland Security is a creepy bureaucracy, and it isn’t going to go away.
I’m dubious about giving the government any additional funds or authority
to "protect" me without any sign of any kind of accountability for
what went wrong on 9/11. A lot of heads should have rolled. I’m not inclined
to believe that this government is any more effective in protecting me now than
it was when 19 towelheads with boxcutters changed history, and I don’t
think that the palliative of pouring money on the problem is going to solve
it.

The government
does, however, exhibit considerable skill when it comes to protecting our billionaires.
The NYPD was out in force in the days leading up to the march. Thursday it seemed
like there was a cop on every corner. I got down to 53rd and Park at 11 a.m.
on Saturday, forced into using an indirect and circuitous route by the numerous
street closures imposed by the cops. There was a rally of maybe 1200 people
penned uncomfortably into temporary enclosures on the west side of Park from
54th down to 50th. I couldn’t get a precise figure out of anyone, but it’s
safe to say that there were thousands of cops in the area. There were cheap,
awful loudspeakers blaring speeches into the crowd. The sound was so horrible
it was painful. It was impossible to pick out any more than a few words from
any given speaker, and it sounded very much like they were auditioning Hitler
imitators. I reached my threshold of endurance when some half-witted minstrel-show
Mumia groupie started into some kind of mutant left-wing Southern Baptist rhyming
rant, whereupon I strolled off to find a drink.

On my way
to the bar I ran into a small group of counter-demonstrators waving the flag
at 51st and Lexington. It turned out that they were participants in the online
forum at www.freerepublic.com, a site dedicated to the idea of running our government
according to the Constitution, a once-popular notion that has fallen into disrepute
of late. I was stumped by their opposition to a rally against the WEF. The Free
Republic website has numerous threads discussing the WEF, and the participants
seem fairly unanimous in their appraisal of the WEF as a major threat to our
Constitutional Republic. I guess they just couldn’t get past the show of
support for a cold-blooded cop-killer evinced by the vegan antiwar crowd. They
looked like meat-eaters to me.

As I rounded
a corner onto Lexington Ave. I was swept up by the head of a line of some 15,000
people marching on the Waldorf. It was great. I was amazed at the range of types
in the crowd and the focus on the WEF. The march was a snapshot of America,
and it reminded me of the later phase of the Vietnam protest era, when it began
to seem like the whole country opposed the war. Sure, there were self-righteous
vegans and Mumia yahoos, but there were also veterans and union guys with their
families–mainstream Americans. The cops were great, totally professional
and scrupulously polite. I saw three separate demonstrators carrying signs calling
for more pay for the NYPD, and the interactions between the demonstrators and
the cops were almost uniformly friendly. There were a couple of incidents involving
a small band of anarchist wannabes, but it only amounted to a couple dozen arrests
that day (there were more later), which is pretty good for a crowd that large.

The farmer
from Montana wouldn’t give his name. "You media people have a way
with twisting up what a fella says," he explained. He and his wife appeared
to be in their early 60s, and they most definitely didn’t look like any
kind of left-wing types. I asked them why they were marching. "We voted
for Pat Buchanan," the lady told me. "And Ross Perot. We think American
companies ought to keep American jobs in America. We elect our leaders here,
we don’t need the WEF or the IMF or the UN dictating policy. And we sure
don’t need cheap flimsy clothes from sweatshops in China, which is just
about all you see in the stores these days." Her husband interjected, "Look,
a lot of these kids out here are just plain confused about some things, like
this open-borders nonsense, but they are absolutely correct about this forum
and these corporations. A nation with no borders isn’t a nation at all.
We have too many people out of work here, we’re losing the family farms
to big business, and our manufacturing base up and took a slow boat to China.
If we ever have to fight a real war, we’re in some serious trouble."

I stuck
around until the sun went down. The event was enormously uplifting, a very pleasant
surprise. It was a glimpse of an open, democratic society. The possibility that
a consensus among the working and middle classes of this country could form
and mobilize against the various rapacious corporate conspiracies currently
looting the world’s economies is a very exciting idea. It seems like an
idea whose time has definitely come.

Every hero
eventually becomes a bore. I’m not sure what happens to villains. Some
of them write books.

Ian Brady
is certainly a villain, and he has written a book that is bound to cause quite
a stir: The Gates Of Janus (Feral House, 306 pages, $24.95). This exceptionally
creepy little tome is subtitled "Serial Killing and its Analysis By the
‘Moors Murderer,’ Ian Brady," and it’s a definite must-have
item for the legions of true crime buffs so enamored of the serial-killer phenomenon.

Brady was
a clerk with a string of petty crimes on his record and a bad booze habit when
he met Myra Hindley, a typist, in 1961. They were just a couple of working-class
English drabs with no redeemable qualities. She was a timid little cow and he
was a braggart and a bully. They made a failed attempt to break into the s&m
porn business and an equally ineffectual stab at petty larceny before hitting
their stride as child murderers, a practice that brought them the notoriety
they felt they deserved upon their arrest in 1965.

Back when
I had a real interest in this sort of thing, the "Moors Murderers"
(as the pair came to be called) held no fascination for me at all. I was interested
in the flamboyant and the elusive: Jack the Ripper, the Texarkana Moonlight
Murderer, the incomparable Zodiac Killer of San Francisco. These were interesting
criminals. Ian Brady and Myra Hindley were as mediocre and unimaginative in
their crimes as they were in all the other aspects of their insignificant little
lives. There’s no challenge in killing children, and if the purpose is
merely to inflict emotional pain and terror on society at large, there are vastly
better ways to accomplish that, as we have seen.

This book
of Brady’s consists of two parts: the first is a seven-chapter manifesto
of sorts, in which he rambles on about the serial-killer phenomenon and how
it relates to society in general, his take on the human condition, and his own
lofty and exalted status in the general scheme of things. The second consists
of Brady’s analysis of 11 cases of serial murder, including two unsolveds.

The first
part contains no surprises. Brady’s view of humanity is entirely bleak.
He views the species as a race of "liars, lunatics, and journalists,"
and repeatedly belabors the obvious point that psychopaths occupy positions
of power in respectable social circles as if it were some great revelation he’d
just uncovered. Here’s a good quote: "The most salient traits of the
psychopath are coldness, calculation, manipulation, lack of sensitivity, natural
deviousness, facile mendacity, amorality presented as moral flexibility, pathological
anger and envy rationalised as altruism or logic, all-encompassing greed, assumption
of personal superiority over all others, a dictatorial and bullying attitude
relying on power and authority rather than intelligence, suspicion and lack
of trust to a paranoid degree, inexorable ruthlessness, an egocentric conviction
that they are always right, sexual promiscuousness, complete lack of remorse.

"These
traits and characteristics are most likely to surface unwittingly when the psychopath
is contradicted, frustrated, or blocked.

"Does
any combination of these salient features of the psychopathic personality remind
you of someone in your household, a relative or friend, a person at your place
of work, a politician, a bureaucrat, some minor official, a judge, a teacher,
an author or journalist, a member of the armed forces or the police, some person
with practically everything they could possibly need but who always wants more?
Or even yourself?"

Clearly,
the "Mail" column of this newspaper is completely dominated by psychopaths.

Brady’s
rantings in this first portion of the book merely retrace the ground covered
by Charles Manson decades ago, except that Brady’s without Charlie’s
wit and brevity, not to mention his lack of pretense. Brady’s prose reads
as if he’s been spending too much time reading psychiatric literature;
it’s full of run-on sentences and lofty citations. He’s a shrink wannabe,
is what he is, which is almost as perverse as being a child-killer.

The second
half of the book is marginally more interesting. Brady offers us his analysis
of 11 cases, taken individually: Henry Lee Lucas, John Wayne Gacy, Graham Young,
Dean Corll, Peter Sutcliffe, Ricky Ramirez, the "Mad Butcher" of Cleveland,
Ted Bundy, the Green River Killer, Carl Panzram and the Hillside Stranglers.
The "Mad Butcher" case and the Green River case are particularly interesting,
as they are both unsolved. Brady has some original ideas regarding them and
actually manages to be fairly concise in his analysis. He is particularly insightful
in his examination of the Green River Killer. If the police had taken his approach
at the outset, the case might not be unsolved.

His take
on Bundy offers nothing new at all. The best work on Ted Bundy was Stephen Michaud
and Hugh Aynesworth’s magnificent 1983 work, The Only Living Witness
(Simon & Schuster). Bundy was an interesting character, and it’s
disappointing that Brady has no original insights to offer on his case. Carl
Panzram’s own confessions to Henry Lesser lay bare the agony of Panzram’s
murderous passion, and there are no mysteries there. Brady seems to include
him only as an object of worship, and his "analysis" of the case is
more like a hymn to the sheer relentless brutality of the man and his iron will
than any kind of attempt to uncover occulted aspects of the case.

In Panzram’s
case, nothing was hidden, so what’s the point of "analyzing"
him? What you saw was what you got, usually right upside the head with a crowbar.

All in all,
a mediocre work from a mediocre man. Brady is probably of above average intelligence,
but he’s a lazy thinker, as is evidenced by his crimes and the fact that
he got caught. The introduction by Colin Wilson is typically self-serving and
not particularly inspired, and the afterword by Peter Sotos is merely appalling.
This book is a necessary addition to any collection related to the phenomenon
of serial murder, but don’t expect any great insights or original thinking
from the likes of Ian Brady.

I have many
vices, but the easiest and the cheapest to indulge is my endless appetite for
bullshit. I can get a quick cheap fix anywhere, anytime, just by picking up
a daily newspaper, but the true mother lode is to be found in the darker recesses
of UFOlogy, conspiracy research and religion.

I burned
out on the UFO nuts back in the summer of ’97, the Roswell Summer, when
I spent two solid weeks holed up in my apartment with a pile of fresh tomes
on the subject. Alien-obsessed gazoonies of every shape, size and description
were descending on Roswell that July to commemorate their cherished extraterrestrial
DUI fantasy. It was just too goddamned much, total oversaturation, and I completely
lost interest in the UFO bullshit after that.

The conspiracy
research is a marvelous source of ever-changing and ever-expanding material
that I will never lose interest in, primarily because some of these conspiracies
really do exist, and the ones that don’t tend to be outlandish enough to
provide a perpetually renewable source of merriment. The advent of the Internet
and the forum it provides for fringe types who could never get their ideas into
actual print has been a boon to this particular branch of entertainment. I suspect
we’re in for a real bull market for this stuff in light of what we’ve
all come to refer to euphemistically as "recent events." Some of it
will no doubt be true. The World Trade Center event is Dallas writ large. The
lines go everywhere and nowhere.

Religion
is endlessly fascinating. Where did the magnificent epic novel we call "the
Bible" come from? Certainly not from historical fact. How did an illiterate
shepherd happen to write the Koran? What in the hell was H.P. Blavatsky going
on about? The neat thing about religion is that all the great lines of bullshit
converge there: aliens, conspiracies, alien conspiracies, fantastic and dazzling
leaps of imagination, a real testimonial to human creativity run amok.

The E-ticket
attraction for sheer amusement value in this field of inquiry is Satanism. No
religion, including Judaism and Scientology, has ever generated more fevered
conspiracy-mongering and sheer paranoia than Satanism. It could be argued that
Satanism in fact manifested as an authentic religion directly out of the paranoid
fantasies of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic axis.

Gareth Medway,
a student of comparative religion and occasional contributor to such publications
as Fortean Studies, Magonia and Pagan News, has written
a wonderful history of the phenomenon of Satanism and the unique level of hysteria
attending its emergence in the 20th century: Lure of the Sinister: The Unnatural
History of Satanism (NYU Press, 432 pages, $32.95). This is the first truly
authoritative book on the subject, and Medway methodically cuts through the
copious heaps of bovine fecal matter that have accumulated around the subject
over the centuries.

He begins
by giving us a quick glimpse into contemporary Satanic and quasi-Satanic groups
and adherents. He fully grasps and manages effectively to illustrate the premise
that contemporary Satanism is nothing more or less than a rough version of Ayn
Rand’s Objectivist philosophy in Goth drag. He does not fail to point out
the presence of the occasional drug casualty or certified loony on the scene,
but rightfully notes that those types are the exception rather than the rule
and tend to be, by their nature, solitary dabblers rather than affiliates of
the mainstream groups.

Where Medway
really hits his stride is in his exhaustively researched and brilliantly presented
history of the blind hysteria attending the subject. For most of its history
Christianity has been utterly fixated on the notion of a secret network of heretics
working in league with the devil to undermine the work of God. Confessions obtained
under torture served to buttress this fantasy, never mind that when someone
is crushing your shins with an iron rod you’ll tell him whatever you think
he wants to hear to get him to stop. Religious fanatics tend to be a few grams
shy of a full count when it comes to reasoning prowess, as history continually
demonstrates.

The Satanic
ritual-abuse panic of the 1980s gets the full treatment, and Medway delivers
a scathing indictment of the crackpot "therapists" responsible for
that unfortunate wave of persecution and the despicable methods they used. He
manages to skewer crackpot journalist Maury Terry’s addle-headed notion
of a Grand Unified Satanic Conspiracy behind the Son of Sam murders in just
a few choice paragraphs.

The real
point of Medway’s book is that Satan-hunters are a much greater threat
to society than the Satanists themselves, a point that anyone with six firing
synapses who has spent any time at all among the two groups can see plainly.
Satanism is and has always been a handy straw man for demagogues looking to
build careers by stirring the pot of hatred and mistrust. In the absence of
a clear external enemy, the hunt for Satan and his minions is a convenient method
for keeping an ignorant population in a state of war fever.

Of course,
in times like these, Satan is hardly necessary for that.