The Anthrax Letters: The Attacks That Shocked America (8 page)

Martha Moffett did not have anthrax. But on Sunday, the day she left the hospital, her suspicions that American Media may have been a target seemed validated. Laboratory tests had confirmed that anthrax was present in several locations in the AMI building. At about 6 p.m., Jean Malecki, director of the Palm Beach County Health Department, ordered the building closed. Neither Martha Moffett nor any of the other 500-odd AMI employees would be allowed back in, perhaps ever again.

That evening, working past midnight from the health department’s emergency operations center in West Palm Beach, Daniel Rotstein phoned the company’s managers. “I woke up a lot of people and asked them to call their staffs.” He also asked them to identify recent visitors to the building, anyone who had been inside since August 1. They were stunned to hear him say: “You need to tell everyone to go to the health department offices in Delray Beach tomorrow morning for testing and antibiotics.”

Martha Warwick, an
Enquirer
associate editor, was jarred out of her sleep by the 1:30 a.m. call. As she heard the news, she thought, “My God, we’ve just become one of our own headlines.” Her heart was pounding. “I was in shock,” she said. She thought of her three youngsters. “I frantically tried to remember when my children had been in the building, but I was having a hard time thinking clearly.” Then she realized the date. They had been clamoring to see her office, and she had taken them over on the last day of their summer vacation, August 13.

Early Monday morning Warwick and her children joined the worried crowd that had begun to gather outside the Delray facility, just north of Boca Raton. In the course of the day, some 1,000 people who were considered at risk had their nostrils swabbed and were given a 10-day supply of antibiotics. Anxiety was rampant, even among the investigators. FBI agent Judy Orihuela, who worked in the bureau’s Miami office, asked one of the health officials what it took to get anthrax. “When he said, ‘Has to be 8,000 to 10,000 spores,’ I was a little nervous.” She knew how tiny that amount actually was. “You never know when you’re going to come in contact with it.”

When Martha Moffett left the JFK Medical Center, she departed through the hospital’s main lobby. On her left she passed two elegant wing chairs on either side of an Early American mahogany chest. Above the chairs and chest hung pictures of tropical flora. Still higher, a prominent gold inscription engraved into the white wall said: The Generoso Pope Jr. Lobby.

Reflecting his first name, Mr. Pope had been the hospital’s most generous benefactor. A contributor to causes ranging from the American Heart Association to the Chamber of Commerce, “Gene” delighted in favoring the JFK center. Beginning in the 1970s until his death in 1988, his cumulative gifts to the hospital approached $10 million. The JFK Medical Center was both his principal community cause and the hospital he himself used. Conveniently located, it was 15 minutes from his home in the posh community of Manalapan and 5 minutes from his office in Lantana. In the end, Pope died of a heart attack on the way from his home to his hospital in an ambulance he had donated.

Gene’s father, Generoso Pope, Sr., had emigrated as a poor boy from Italy to the United States in 1906. He later became the wealthy owner of
Il Progresso
, the largest Italian-language newspaper in the United States. When he died in 1950, Gene, then 23 and a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, became the publisher. But other family members gained control and pushed him aside. Suspicions about the senior Genoroso’s ties to the Mafia trailed his son—for example, Frank Costello, the “John Gotti” of his time, was a family friend. In 1952, Costello lent Gene $25,000 to purchase a struggling weekly broadsheet whose main appeal was its racing tips. Over the next few years, circulation remained stagnant at 17,000. The paper survived only with more help from Mr. Costello and his associates. In turn, Gene obligingly published the winning numbers from the Italian lottery, around which the American Mafia had developed its own numbers racket.

One evening in the late 1950s, while driving home in New Jersey, traffic slowed to a crawl. Gene later realized that the long delay was due less to the accident up ahead than to rubbernecking. He was inspired. Blood, guts, gore—that’s what would sell his paper. The weekly he had bought, the
New York Enquirer
, took on a new focus and before long had a new name: the
National Enquirer
.

The paper’s rebirth began a 10-year period that journalist Jonathan Mahler calls the “gore era.” Typical headlines read: “Violent Criminal Kills Pal and Eats Pieces of His Flesh,” and “I Cut out Her Heart and Stomped on It.” The new incarnation drew a national readership of 1 million. But by the end of the 1960s, circulation was flat, and Pope began searching for a formula with broader appeal. In the mid-1970s he found one: celebrities—their dirty laundry, their successes, their secrets, their joys, their embarrassments. And whatever the written words, nothing would beat the choice, sometimes lurid, photograph.

Soon after Pope’s 1970s epiphany, he moved the
National Enquirer’s
offices from New York to a one-story building in Lantana. Working 7 days a week, he nourished his new focus on celebrity foibles, and before long circulation mushroomed to 6 million. The driving aim was to get the scoop, and the
Enquirer
would do whatever was necessary to get it. In 1982, for example, $15,000 bought an exclusive from a gardener who had been within earshot of Princess Grace’s last words after her fatal car accident in Monaco. For $60,000 the
Enquirer
obtained the photograph that derailed Gary Hart’s 1988 presidential candidacy. After Hart denied he was having an extra-marital affair, the paper printed the famous shot of Donna Rice sitting on his lap aboard a yacht named “Monkey Business.” Despite the paper’s flamboyance and sensationalism and its payments to people for interviews, its stories essentially were built on facts.

In 1989, the year after Pope died, his family sold the
Enquirer
for $418 million. Circulation, which had begun to decline before his death, continued to fall. But several exclusives in the mid-1990s helped bring stability to the tabloid. It was the staff of the
Enquirer
who found pictures of O. J. Simpson wearing the Bruno Magli shoes he denied owning during his 1995 murder trial. It was on the cover of the
Enquire
r that viewers may have first seen the picture of President Clinton greeting Monica Lewinsky in a crowd. The paper had purchased the rights from
Time
(yes,
Time
) magazine to publish the picture. The picture also appeared on the cover of
Time
. The mainstream media were now covering subjects that previously had been left to the tabloids. But some tabloids had also changed. Stories in the
Enquirer
, if gossipy, were no longer just fanciful.

Loyalty among AMI employees is widespread. “We take our journalism very seriously,” Ed Sigall has said. Now a senior editor, he joined the
Enquirer s
taff in 1974 as an assistant editor. “We don’t write about ‘Elvis,’ or things like that.” Similarly, Martha Moffett, who retired in early 2002, believes that people who think poorly of the tabloid press are misguided. “It’s interesting that within publishing the reputation is fine. The reputation is of a successful particular brand of publishing that is not outside the pale of the publishing industry.”

Over the years other tabloids, such as the
Globe
and the
Star,
gained substantial readerships in their own right. But in 1999, David Pecker and Evercore Capital Partners brought them all under one management. For $835 million they acquired American Media, Inc., which already was publishing the
Enquirer
and the
Star
and now added Globe Communications, which owned the
Globe
, the
Sun
, and the
National Examiner
. The new owners also decided to move the company’s headquarters from Lantana to the Globe building in Boca Raton. In January 2001, after a $12 million renovation, the spanking new insides were ready for occupancy. The refurbished three-story building, with 67,000 square feet of floor space, had become tabloid heaven. Displayed in the lobby were the current issues of virtually every tabloid weekly published in America. Ten months later, because of anthrax, the building was sealed shut; but by using other facilities, the papers were able to remain in print, and AMI could still proclaim that it “publishes seven of the top 15 weekly publications in North America.”

According to Daniel Rotstein, each AMI weekly occupies a distinctive niche. But when he explains this, some don’t sound very different from others: “The
Enquirer
is celebrity and human interest,” he says. “The
Star
is mostly celebrity. The
Globe
is celebrity and some human interest but with a harder edge.” In the
Sun
“you see more things about religion, horoscopes, prophesies, more unusual types of things.”

Every AMI tabloid masthead begins with the same listing: David Pecker, chairman, president & chief executive officer. Next come the names of the paper’s own staff. In the
Sun
, after Pecker’s listing, that means Mike Irish, editor-in-chief. Farther down the masthead, in issues printed before AMI was visited with anthrax, were the names of the
Sun’s
two photo assistant editors: Bob Stevens and Roz Suss.

Suss began working for the
Sun
in 1988, two years after she moved to Boca Raton from Miami. Although she had first arrived in Florida as a young bride in the 1960s, her Baltimore twang still rings clear. Now a graying grandmother, her small face turns mournful as she speaks of Bob Stevens. They had sat little more than arm’s length from each other. “He was a kind, generous, funny man. Absolutely the sweetest.” Nodding in agreement, Joan Berkley, the
Sun’s
office manager, adds: “Everybody liked him. Everybody.”

Suss and Berkley offered their observations in a room off to the side of the large, open space that AMI has been renting since the end of 2001. It was April 2002, and hundreds of employees were tapping out tabloid stories in a newsroom the size of a football field. Unlike in the three-story building that had to be abandoned in October, all the new offices are on the ground floor. No one is sure yet whether the company’s own building will be decontaminated before the 2-year lease here ends. The current quarters, on Communications Avenue, are a half mile down the road from the AMI building on Broken Sound Boulevard. Though the working area is large, the floor space is less than half the 67,000 square feet of the old building.

For 2 months, before the rental arrangements for the new space were completed, the AMI tabloids were produced at scattered AMI facilities. Some were processed in the former
Enquirer
building in Lantana, others in offices in New York. The
Sun
and the
Weekly World News
were assigned space in the Miami building that produces
Mira!
, an AMI Spanish-language tabloid. A few days after the main building was closed, FBI agents visited the
Sun’s
office in Miami. “They interviewed each of us individually for perhaps 30 or 45 minutes,” said Roz Suss. She was interviewed by two agents and later received calls from other agents “to go over parts of what I said.”