Dennis Wheatley's Crime Dossiers. Publishers around the world seized upon the novelty. In America, William Morrow published 'Murder Off Miami' as 'Crimefile Number.Gruesome Aryan gang story involves meth, murder, missing body. This article contains graphic descriptions of violence. FORT WORTH — Meth sent Bryan Childers to prison. Attaching himself to a gang, he thought, would help him survive. But his decision to join the Aryan Circle, an often- violent bunch of white supremacists, was one he would come to regret. Beginning as early as 1981, for a select group called his "Death Angels," that dedication included torture and murder. A follower named Aston Green who argued with. First Blood: Was Meir Kahane’s murder al Qaeda’s earliest attack on U.S. soil? Fancy yourself as a real-life Inspector Morse? Scotland Yard is hiring detectives straight into the CID for the first time to fill 600 empty jobs – with a starting. After getting out of prison in 2. Aryan Brotherhood member left Childers certain of one thing — he was going to be killed.“I was trying to get him out and get him into a different life,” said Carrie Childers, Bryan’s sister. He kept saying there was no way he could get out. They were going to kill him. He kept saying this over and over and over. Terrified. I’ve never seen my brother scared, ever, in my life.”On April 1. Summerfields, a middle- class neighborhood in north Fort Worth, Childers’ premonition would come true. In a vicious and deadly attack by four Aryan Brotherhood members, Childers was beaten, strangled and bound with an extension cord, and stabbed. Days later, his body was dismembered with a reciprocating saw inside a Hurst dog- grooming business; his body parts were tucked inside cement- filled buckets and tossed into the Trinity River. His remains have never been recovered, but seven Aryan Brotherhood members and associates were charged in connection with the case on charges ranging from murder to tampering with evidence, providing a glimpse into the dark and dangerous world of white supremacist gangs and the rules by which they live — and die.“My son did not deserve to die like that,” said June Smallwood, Childers’ mother. He was not a great person but the man had a heart.”The cases were prosecuted earlier this year: Five members received prison sentences ranging from 1. One had his case dismissed after cooperating with investigators. The only female defendant received two years’ deferred adjudication probation.“I felt like they did the best they could,” Carrie Childers said. I wasn’t satisfied with a lot of the sentencing but it’s something I’ll have to live with and I’ll always have to worry about because they’re always going to be out there.”Riley Odom and June Smallwood hold a picture of their son, Bryan Childers, a 3. Aryan Brotherhood but whose body has never been found. Rodger Mallison - Star- Telegram ‘All based on protection’A teen when she had Childers, Smallwood said she sent her son to live with his father, Riley Odom, in Keller when he was 2 as she recovered from a wreck. But the temporary plan eventually became permanent.“I was young and dumb,” Smallwood said. I got into the partying scene and became a weekend mom.”Living in the rural area of Keller, Childers liked to ride horses and was often left to fend for himself while his father and stepmother worked. A student at Keller High School, he began getting in trouble — partying, smoking pot and eventually quitting school, his father said. His father, Riley Odom, bought his son a class ring before he quit school, which he discovered was later hocked by Childers for cash.“I found a ticket on it and went and got it out of the pawnshop,” Odom said. I’ve still got it in my desk drawer today. I’m thinking about giving it to his daughter. That class ring might as well belong to that girl.”By 1. Childers had served small stints in jail for evading arrest and assault with bodily injury. But a relationship with methamphetamine would lead to his downfall. In 2. 00. 1, he received probation for possessing more than 4 ounces of methamphetamine. That probation was revoked a year later after Childers picked up a new charge of unlawful possession of a firearm. A few months after his girlfriend gave birth to their daughter, Childers was sentenced to two years in prison. From his prison cell at the Stevenson Unit in Cuero, Childers wrote letters to his mom and sister but never mentioned he was joining the Aryan Circle, though with hindsight the signs were there. There were the drawings of lightning bolts — symbols embraced by white supremacist groups. And the time he wrote about being placed in solitary confinement for fighting — a fight his mother now believes stemmed from his initiation into Aryan Circle.“I read these letters all the time. They’re my lifeline to him,” Smallwood said. It’s as plain as day. The way he talks about things, and getting in trouble. I just didn’t see it then because I didn’t know anything about gangs.”An offshoot of the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas, the Aryan Circle was formed in the mid- 1. The gang has grown to more than 1,4. Texas, and is the second- largest gang in the Texas prison system, according to the Anti- Defamation League.“A lot of them were former ABT members that just didn’t like the direction of how the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas was operating so they decided to form their own prison gang,” said Steve Lair, a task force officer with Homeland Security Investigation’s National Gang Unit. Both gangs have constitutions — or rules of conduct — in place and operate under a paramilitary structure. Lair said that like other race- based prison gangs, “it’s all based on protection in the beginning.“Later it expands inside the state and federal prisons to the outside and it becomes for- profit, a criminal organization,” he said. What skill sets do you have that can benefit, as they call it, the family?”And while groups like the Ku Klux Klan and skinheads are focused on hate crimes, Lair said often it’s money that drives the Aryan Brotherhood and the Aryan Circle, both of which have a strong presence in Dallas- Fort Worth.“They use that fear factor that’s associated with Nazi- era symbology. They sell that because they know that scares people and that’s a good recruiting tool for disenfranchised white kids,” Lair said. But while they’ll use it to their benefit, a lot of times their main motivation is criminal profit.”Oftentimes, they make and deal meth. Bryan Childers and his daughter riding horses after he was released from prison. Courtesy of Childers family‘They’re going to kill me’Childers was a full- fledged member of the Aryan Circle when he got out of prison in July 2. Both disapproved, they said. Carrie Childers told her brother it was a “stupid” move and refused to talk about it.“We all blew it off,” Carrie Childers said. Nine years later, a battered Bryan Childers would share more information about the gang, telling his mother and sister that he’d been jumped by seven Aryan Brotherhood members.“He said, ‘Mama, I whipped four of them but I was too tired. I couldn’t whip the other three,’ ” Smallwood said. Fort Worth police said the encounter left bad blood between Childers and one of the Brotherhood members, Nicholas Acree. At a game room, the two men would cross paths again. This time, Childers wrapped the chain from his wallet around Acree’s neck. By most accounts, Childers won that fight. But he soon realized he would likely pay for that victory with his life.“I was like, what are we going to do about this? Let me give them some money. Whatever we need to do. Let me call a friend that can go down to prison and talk to one of the members and have this called off. I know I can help,” Carrie Childers recalled telling her brother.“He was like, ‘Sis, there’s nothing you can do.. They’re going to kill me.”About a year later, he was dead. Carrie Childers said she last talked to her brother in April 2. May, when rumors reached her that her brother had been killed, she was determined to find out what happened. Gun in hand, she and her husband visited the house in the 7. Crosswicks Circle — just a few blocks from Fossil Hill Middle School — where Childers had been staying in exchange for helping out the bedridden, paraplegic owner. Two Aryan Brotherhood members emerged from the house — Charles “C. J.” Garrett and Justin Hunsaker.“We asked where Bryan was. They said they didn’t know who he was at first,” Carrie Childers recalled. I was like, ‘No. Where’s Bryan?’ Then they said, ‘Well, he was here but he left.’ ”Hunsaker asked if Carrie Childers wanted to come inside to talk to the owner.“My husband forbade me to go in there because of the rumors we’d already heard and we knew this was a pretty serious gang,” Childers said. The next day, on May 2. Carrie Childers reported her brother missing, telling Fort Worth police that she suspected foul play. Smallwood, however, clung to the belief that her son was still alive.“I was holding out hope that Bryan had finally decided to go underground and get away so he would live,” said Smallwood, her face showing her pain. First Blood: Was Meir Kahane’s murder al Qaeda’s earliest attack on U. S. soil? By Peter Lance. Tablet Magazine. In the fall of 2. I received a cryptic email from Emad Salem, the ex- Egyptian Army major who was the FBI’s first undercover asset in what would become known as the war on terror. I’d told Salem’s remarkable story in my last three books, which were critical of the bureau’s counterterrorism record. Because I had treated him fairly, Salem reached out to me after years in the Federal Witness Protection Program. We made plans to meet in early November, after a lecture I was giving at New York University. But Salem didn’t show. I went back to my hotel that night and had chalked it up as a lost opportunity. The phone rang at 2 in the morning. It was Salem, summoning me to a meeting outside 2. Federal Plaza, the building that houses the FBI’s New York office. Very cloak and dagger, but that’s how this man rolls. You don’t infiltrate the cell responsible for the 1. World Trade Center bombing without practicing a little tradecraft. Anyway, when my cab pulled in to Foley Square a few minutes later, Salem was standing in the shadows. That was the start of a series of interviews that led to some astonishing revelations about two of the most infamous al- Qaida murders since Osama Bin Laden formed his terror network. The first one—in fact, arguably the first blood spilled by al- Qaida on U. S. soil—occurred on the night of November 5, 1. Rabbi Meir Kahane, the founder of the ultra- nationalist Jewish Defense League, finished a speech at the Marriott East Side in New York. Kahane, a volatile figure who had been expelled from the Israeli Knesset in the mid- 1. United States to warn American Jews about what he believed to be a “second holocaust” at the hands of radical Islam, was gunned down by El Sayyid Nosair, an Egyptian émigré. The New York Police Department initially labeled him a lone gunman. I have argued that it was much more than that: an unsolved murder with dire implications for the war on terror. Now, as a result of new intelligence I’ve learned from Salem, it’s clear for the first time that the rabbi’s death was directly linked to Osama Bin Laden. More surprising, there was a second gunman on the night of Kahane’s murder: a young Jordanian cab driver named Bilal Alkaisi. Alkaisi was also identified in FBI files I’ve obtained as the “emir” of a hit team in a second grisly al- Qaida- related homicide months after the assassination—the 1. Egyptian immigrant Mustafa Shalabi. The identities of the alleged killers in that second slaying have now become known as a result of information from Salem that prompted the New York Police Department to reopen the Shalabi case. But the real news is that Alkaisi, originally indicted in the 1. World Trade Center bombing, was cut loose by the feds in 1. This new intelligence, about a pair of historic terror- related homicides in New York City, lay buried for years in the files of the Joint Terrorism Task Force—until I obtained them from a government source. As I tell it in “The Spy Who Came in for the Heat,” an investigative piece I wrote for Playboy’s September issue, Emad Salem was arguably the most important asset in the U. S. war with al- Qaida. But my interviews with him and the intel they have kicked loose provide shocking new insights into the ongoing failure of the FBI to reform its counterterrorism capabilities almost a decade after the Sept. In order to fully appreciate the significance of these two murders in the history of the war on terror, we need to go back to the summer of 1. George Bush was in the White House and terrorism was considered a backwater assignment at the FBI. The First Shots Fired in Bin Laden’s War Against America. The story begins a year and half before El Sayyid Nosair, wearing a yarmulke, walked into the Morgan D Room at the New York Marriott and killed Kahane. On four successive weekends in July 1. FBI’s Special Operations Group followed a group of “ME’s”—FBI- speak for “Middle Eastern Men”—from the al Farooq Mosque on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn to the Calverton shooting range, a large outdoor sand pit located at the end of Long Island. Firing a series of weapons, including AK- 4. ME’s” at the Calverton range included Nosair, then a 3. Port Said, Egypt, who reportedly popped Prozac and worked in the basement of the Civil Courthouse on Centre Street in Manhattan; Mahmoud Abouhalima, aka “The Red,” a 6- foot- 2- inch Egyptian cab and limo driver; Mohammed Salameh, a diminutive Palestinian; and Nidal Ayyad, a Kuwaiti who had graduated from Rutgers University. According to interviews with former FBI agent Jack Cloonan, each of them had been instructed by Ali Aboelseoud Mohamed, an ex- Egyptian Army commando from the unit that assassinated Anwar Sadat in 1. Mohamed was the focus of my last book, Triple Cross. In the early 1. 98. Egyptian Army for his radical views, Mohamed came under the influence of Ayman al- Zawahiri, the Cairo surgeon who had been jailed for a time for the Sadat murder and went on to form the Egyptian Islamic Jihad. By the end of the decade, after al- Zawahiri met Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan and merged his Egyptian Islamic Jihad group into what would become al- Qaida, Ali Mohamed became the terror network’s principal espionage agent. In 1. 98. 4, Mohamed succeeded in infiltrating the CIA briefly in Hamburg, Germany, got past a watch list to enter the United States a year later, enlisted in the U. S. Army and, astonishingly, managed to get posted to the JFK Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, where elite Green Beret officers study. From there, he traveled to New York City on weekends to train the Calverton shooters. Mohamed was so trusted by Bin Laden that he moved the Saudi billionaire’s entire entourage from Afghanistan to Sudan in 1. Qaida’s training camps there, and trained Bin Laden’s personal body guards. He was also one of the principal planners in the simultaneous truck bomb attacks on the U. S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1. Three of Mohamed’s Calverton trainees were convicted in the 1. World Trade Center bombing plot. Nosair was convicted in the Kahane killing. A U. S.- born Muslim named Clement Hampton- El was convicted with Nosair in the 1. Day of Terror” plot to blow up the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, the George Washington Bridge, the United Nations, and 2. Federal Plaza, the building that houses the FBI’s New York office. At the time of the Calverton surveillance, the FBI’s Special Operations Group clearly knew that these men were terrorists in training. New York Police Det. Tommy Corrigan, a former senior member of the NYPD- FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force, told me in an interview for Triple Cross that the surveillance stemmed from a tip that PLO terrorists were threatening to blow up casinos in Atlantic City. But for unknown reasons the FBI shut down the surveillance. By the end of that summer of 1. ME’s” and their Green Beret- linked leader faded back into the shadows.***In July 1. Ali Mohamed’s, Sheikh Omar Abdel- Rahman, the spiritual “emir” of al- Qaida who became known as “the blind sheikh,” got a visa, slipped past the same State Department watch list, and landed at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. He was met at the airport by Mustafa Shalabi, a big, burly 3. Egypt who ran the Alkifah Center at the al Farooq Mosque in Brooklyn. The Alkifah was the principal U. S. office for the Makhtab al- Kidimat, often referred to as the MAK, a worldwide center of storefronts through which millions of dollars in cash was collected to support the Afghan Mujahadeen war against the Soviets, as Steven Emerson documents in American Jihad. By 1. 98. 9, a year before Abdel- Rahman arrived in New York, Bin Laden and al- Zawahiri had merged their new terror network with the MAK. Its leader, Abdullah Azzam, had been killed in a car bomb in Pakistan in November of that year. Once al- Qaida’s takeover of the financing network was complete, Bin Laden’s group had what amounted to a New York clubhouse at the Alkifah Center.“Prior to that time—1. United States,” says Corrigan, the retired Joint Terrorism Task Force investigator. But Abdel- Rahman’s arrival in 1.
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