Adam L Silverman

* I’ll let Ken White explain the problem with the use of person of interest, which law enforcement only started to use after the TV show became popular.

Just a reminder that “person of interest” is an utter bullshit null-content post-9/11 dystopia phrase. https://t.co/zhVLEdQgaH

— ISSUEALLTHEPARDONShat (@Popehat) December 26, 2020

** Christian Identity theology, which is the core of the Church of Jesus Christ Christian’s theology, dogma, and doctrine is a combination of two things. The first is that the 10 lost tribes of Israel were not lost. Rather they sailed out of the Mediterranean, up the coast of Europe, down the Thames, and established the ancient city of Londinium, which is where the modern London is situated. There they reestablished themselves and started the Anglo-Saxon race. As such, Anglo-Saxons (read this as white European people) are the real Chosen People, not the Jews. Christian Identity takes this and adds a racist and anti-Semitic component. Specifically that the Jews are really the children of Satan, which is derived from the Jews being a “synagogue of Satan” mentioned in one of Paul’s epistles. Existence is a fight between the real Chosen People and the Jews and it is hard to distinguish them because only people who can blush – white people – are the real Chosen People and really have souls. Since Jews present as white and can blush, they are able to trick those not in the know. Anyhow, according to Christian Identity the Satanic Jews and their soulless minions – Africans/people of African descent, Asians/people of Asian descent, Hispanics/people of Hispanic descent and people of mixed ethnicities, which the Christian Identity folks call “mud people” seek to take over the world and rule on behalf of Satan. This all departs from traditional Anglo-Israelitism, which included the whole ten lost tribes thing, but recognized Jews as still part of the Chosen People, just not pure blood anymore, leading to a sort of bizarre antagonistic and hostile to Jews philo-Semitism by the English and then American elites who held these views, like Woodrow Wilson. The final component of Christian identity is a racialized, racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic, and nativist/xenophobic version of charismatic evangelicalsim/Pentacostalism. The seminal work on all of this is Michael Barkun’s Religion and the Racist Right: The Origins of the Christian Identity Movement.

*** Van Zandt so screwed this up that in May 2003 he was still blaming Jewell. On the Sunday morning TV talk fests! I was attending the XL Senior Conference at the US Military Academy in May 2003 as an invited guest and participant. It was the kickoff for the newly opened Combatting Terrorism Center, which I had a small involvement with as it was being set up. They had just arrested Rudolph as the conference was starting and we all had some fun talking about Van Zandt’s appearance on one of the Sunday news shows blaming Jewell for the fact that it took seven more years to catch Rudolph because Jewell had made himself such an appealing suspect that just fit every different assumption in Van Zandt’s profile. So it was Jewell’s fault, not Van Zandt’s that Rudolph was at large and active for seven more years. This was then, as it is now, a load of bullshit. Van Zandt is a moron. Behavioral profiling is a scam. It was a scam at its creation:

On November 16, 1940, workers at the Consolidated Edison building on West Sixty-fourth Street in Manhattan found a homemade pipe bomb on a windowsill. Attached was a note: “Con Edison crooks, this is for you.” In September of 1941, a second bomb was found, on Nineteenth Street, just a few blocks from Con Edison’s headquarters, near Union Square. It had been left in the street, wrapped in a sock. A few months later, the New York police received a letter promising to “bring the Con Edison to justice—they will pay for their dastardly deeds.” Sixteen other letters followed, between 1941 and 1946, all written in block letters, many repeating the phrase “dastardly deeds” and all signed with the initials “F.P.” In March of 1950, a third bomb—larger and more powerful than the others—was found on the lower level of Grand Central Terminal. The next was left in a phone booth at the New York Public Library. It exploded, as did one placed in a phone booth in Grand Central. In 1954, the Mad Bomber—as he came to be known—struck four times, once in Radio City Music Hall, sending shrapnel throughout the audience. In 1955, he struck six times. The city was in an uproar. The police were getting nowhere. Late in 1956, in desperation, Inspector Howard Finney, of the New York City Police Department’s crime laboratory, and two plainclothesmen paid a visit to a psychiatrist by the name of James Brussel.

Brussel was a Freudian. He lived on Twelfth Street, in the West Village, and smoked a pipe. In Mexico, early in his career, he had done counter-espionage work for the F.B.I. He wrote many books, including “Instant Shrink: How to Become an Expert Psychiatrist in Ten Easy Lessons.” Finney put a stack of documents on Brussel’s desk: photographs of unexploded bombs, pictures of devastation, photostats of F.P.’s neatly lettered missives. “I didn’t miss the look in the two plainclothesmen’s eyes,” Brussel writes in his memoir, “Casebook of a Crime Psychiatrist.” “I’d seen that look before, most often in the Army, on the faces of hard, old-line, field-grade officers who were sure this newfangled psychiatry business was all nonsense.”

He began to leaf through the case materials. For sixteen years, F.P. had been fixated on the notion that Con Ed had done him some terrible injustice. Clearly, he was clinically paranoid. But paranoia takes some time to develop. F.P. had been bombing since 1940, which suggested that he was now middle-aged. Brussel looked closely at the precise lettering of F.P.’s notes to the police. This was an orderly man. He would be cautious. His work record would be exemplary. Further, the language suggested some degree of education. But there was a stilted quality to the word choice and the phrasing. Con Edison was often referred to as “the Con Edison.” And who still used the expression “dastardly deeds”? F.P. seemed to be foreign-born. Brussel looked closer at the letters, and noticed that all the letters were perfect block capitals, except the “W”s. They were misshapen, like two “U”s. To Brussel’s eye, those “W”s looked like a pair of breasts. He flipped to the crime-scene descriptions. When F.P. planted his bombs in movie theatres, he would slit the underside of the seat with a knife and stuff his explosives into the upholstery. Didn’t that seem like a symbolic act of penetrating a woman, or castrating a man—or perhaps both? F.P. had probably never progressed beyond the Oedipal stage. He was unmarried, a loner. Living with a mother figure. Brussel made another leap. F.P. was a Slav. Just as the use of a garrote would have suggested someone of Mediterranean extraction, the bomb-knife combination struck him as Eastern European. Some of the letters had been posted from Westchester County, but F.P. wouldn’t have mailed the letters from his home town. Still, a number of cities in southeastern Connecticut had a large Slavic population. And didn’t you have to pass through Westchester to get to the city from Connecticut?

Brussel waited a moment, and then, in a scene that has become legendary among criminal profilers, he made a prediction:

“One more thing.” I closed my eyes because I didn’t want to see their reaction. I saw the Bomber: impeccably neat, absolutely proper. A man who would avoid the newer styles of clothing until long custom had made them conservative. I saw him clearly—much more clearly than the facts really warranted. I knew I was letting my imagination get the better of me, but I couldn’t help it.

“One more thing,” I said, my eyes closed tight. “When you catch him—and I have no doubt you will—he’ll be wearing a double-breasted suit.”

“Jesus!” one of the detectives whispered.

“And it will be buttoned,” I said. I opened my eyes. Finney and his men were looking at each other.

“A double-breasted suit,” said the Inspector.

“Yes.”

“Buttoned.”

“Yes.”

He nodded. Without another word, they left.

A month later, George Metesky was arrested by police in connection with the New York City bombings. His name had been changed from Milauskas. He lived in Waterbury, Connecticut, with his two older sisters. He was unmarried. He was unfailingly neat. He attended Mass regularly. He had been employed by Con Edison from 1929 to 1931, and claimed to have been injured on the job. When he opened the door to the police officers, he said, “I know why you fellows are here. You think I’m the Mad Bomber.” It was midnight, and he was in his pajamas. The police asked that he get dressed. When he returned, his hair was combed into a pompadour and his shoes were newly shined. He was also wearing a double-breasted suit—buttoned.

And it is a scam now!

James Brussel didn’t really see the Mad Bomber in that pile of pictures and photostats, then. That was an illusion. As the literary scholar Donald Foster pointed out in his 2000 book “Author Unknown,” Brussel cleaned up his predictions for his memoirs. He actually told the police to look for the bomber in White Plains, sending the N.Y.P.D.’s bomb unit on a wild goose chase in Westchester County, sifting through local records. Brussel also told the police to look for a man with a facial scar, which Metesky didn’t have. He told them to look for a man with a night job, and Metesky had been largely unemployed since leaving Con Edison in 1931. He told them to look for someone between forty and fifty, and Metesky was over fifty. He told them to look for someone who was an “expert in civil or military ordnance” and the closest Metesky came to that was a brief stint in a machine shop. And Brussel, despite what he wrote in his memoir, never said that the Bomber would be a Slav. He actually told the police to look for a man “born and educated in Germany,” a prediction so far off the mark that the Mad Bomber himself was moved to object. At the height of the police investigation, when the New York Journal American offered to print any communications from the Mad Bomber, Metesky wrote in huffily to say that “the nearest to my being ‘Teutonic’ is that my father boarded a liner in Hamburg for passage to this country—about sixty-five years ago.”

The true hero of the case wasn’t Brussel; it was a woman named Alice Kelly, who had been assigned to go through Con Edison’s personnel files. In January, 1957, she ran across an employee complaint from the early nineteen-thirties: a generator wiper at the Hell Gate plant had been knocked down by a backdraft of hot gases. The worker said that he was injured. The company said that he wasn’t. And in the flood of angry letters from the ex-employee Kelly spotted a threat—to “take justice in my own hands”—that had appeared in one of the Mad Bomber’s letters. The name on the file was George Metesky.

Brussel did not really understand the mind of the Mad Bomber. He seems to have understood only that, if you make a great number of predictions, the ones that were wrong will soon be forgotten, and the ones that turn out to be true will make you famous. The Hedunit is not a triumph of forensic analysis. It’s a party trick.