Picking up a trail seemingly gone cold, the Associated Press broke a story that needed to be told today, authoritatively reporting — using “[o]nce-secret documents” — that “a disaster supply management company went unpunished for Sept. 11 thefts after the government discovered FBI agents and other government officials had stolen artifacts from New York’s ground zero.”
Citing government records and interviews, the AP’s Margaret Ebrahim and Pat Milton reported that Kieger Enterprises, a now-defunct company out of Minnesota, “dispatched trucks to a Long Island warehouse and loaded hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of donated bottled water, clothes, tools and generators to be moved to Minnesota in a plot to sell some for profit”:
Dan L’Allier said he witnessed 45 tons of the New York loot being unloaded in Minnesota at his company’s headquarters. He and disaster specialist Chris Christopherson complained to a company executive, but were ordered to keep quiet. They persisted, going instead to the FBI.
The two whistleblowers eventually lost their jobs, received death threats and were blackballed in the disaster relief industry. But they remained convinced their sacrifice was worth seeing justice done.
They were wrong.
Instead, as the AP goes on to explain, “Federal prosecutors eventually charged KEI and some executives with fraud, including overbilling the government in several disasters, but excluded the Sept. 11 thefts” — and now “the government can’t fully explain why.”
Lead investigators for the FBI and FEMA told the AP “that the plan to prosecute KEI for those thefts stopped as soon as it became clear in late summer 2002 that an FBI agent in Minnesota had stolen a crystal globe from ground zero.” An ensuing broader review found that “16 government employees, including a top FBI executive and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, had such artifacts from New York or the Pentagon.”
According to then-lead FBI agent Jane Turner, prosecutors “and the FBI were very conscious of the fact that if they proceeded in one direction, they would have to proceed in the other, which meant prosecuting FBI agents.”
And so, though prosecutors had drafted charges accusing KEI of stealing the ground zero supplies as the one-year anniversary of 9/11 approached, Turner’s August 2002 discovery of “a cracked Tiffany & Co. globe” on a colleague’s desk meant that “The theft case against KEI sputtered.” (Later, Turner “became a whistleblower alleging the bureau tried to fire her for bringing the stolen artifacts to light,” retiring in 2003.)
E. Lawrence Barcella, a former top official in the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, said “It’s illogical” not to prosecute KEI due to the stolen artifacts: “The fact that FBI agents stole trinkets is an order of magnitude different than a company selling things they steal.”
The discovery of the globe “had been widely reported,” as the AP says, but “its impact on the Sept. 11 thefts had remained mostly unknown.” Our search of the archives found two related articles on KEI’s thefts: several paragraphs deep into a New York Post story from March 2004, and an April 2002 St. Paul Pioneer Press piece (reporting on a just-conducted raid of KEI) which was largely devoted to lawyer Joe Friedberg’s defense of the company.
But the AP takes the story much farther, giving a definitive account in tight, well-written, and comprehensive fashion. In fact, Friedberg reappears here, dismissing the 9/11 thefts as “much ado about nothing.” “Friedberg said KEI took a few pallets of water and T-shirts because they had authorization from a FEMA official to take surplus items,” reports the AP, pointing out that the “FEMA official, Kathy McCoy, said she never gave Kieger such permission.” (The AP estimates that “at least 15,000 T-shirts and 18,000 bottles of water” were recovered in the 2002 raid.)
But the story is most powerful as the three whistleblowers tell of their regret for having come forward.
“We all experienced the death threats,” said L’Allier, who along with Christopherson couldn’t speak publicly for years “because their whistleblower case remained under seal.”
“We all experienced the phone ringing at three in the morning and no one being there,” L’Allier added. “I’d come home and the house would be wide open.”
“I paid a big price,” said Christopherson.
“They felt they had to come forward about the theft because it was so wrong,” said Turner. “I’ve lost my career. They’ve lost their jobs. The price is so high for telling the truth.”
Edward B. Colby was a writer at CJR Daily.