The Best American Crime Reporting 2008

by Jonathan Kellerman

  A FEW DAYS LATER the phone in my home office rang at eight o’clock in the morning. I didn’t run to get it, though I knew it was Zeke. All that week I’d been on the phone with him, trying to get him to go public with his story, trying to convince him to allow me to use his name. He kept saying that he was going away. He was going back to Afghanistan. He was taking a job with a company that provided security for firms trying to do business in Kabul. He was leaving in January and didn’t know when or if he was going to be back. He hadn’t told Baby Doll, he said, then asked: “Do you think she’s going to be mad?”

  When the phone rang, I knew I’d lost him. And sure enough, when I checked the message, this is what it said: “Hi, Tom, this is Zeke. Hey man, I couldn’t sleep at all last night, thinking about this story and stuff. And I gotta tell you, man, I have nothing to do with Iraq or Afghanistan, I have no operational knowledge of Iraq and Afghanistan, I have no knowledge of any operational plans that have taken place in Iraq or Afghanistan, there’s no record of me ever being in Afghanistan or Iraq, I’m a nonentity, I just don’t exist in any of that kind of thing, I have nothing to do with Iraq or Afghanistan. Anything else is fine, but I have no knowledge of, there’s no witnesses, there’s nothing that ties me to Iraq or Afghanistan, never been to Iraq or Afghanistan, I just don’t have anything to do with that, I can’t have anything to do with that, and I’m sorry, I don’t want to have anything to do with my name at all with Iraq or Afghanistan, I don’t exist in that arena, never have, never will, and I just had a sleepless night last night, so I wanted to call and tell you that I don’t know anything about Iraq or Afghanistan and never have been and never will. I hope you’re okay, your family’s okay. I just had to tell you that. So. Thanks, Tom. Bye-bye.”

  WAS IT A DENIAL or a confirmation? Was it the lie that told the truth or the truth that told the lie? I called Blackwater, and it was exactly as Zeke had foretold: A spokeswoman said there was no such thing as a “designated marksman” for Blackwater: “It’s not a term we would use, because all our missions are defensive.” She confirmed that a William E. Clark had worked for Blackwater in Louisiana in the wake of Katrina, but that he was “never, ever, ever in Iraq or Afghanistan for us. He was never there on a Blackwater contract.” And then she said, “My understanding is also that he is prone to give false information and is not to be considered a trustworthy source.”

  BLACKWATER, OF COURSE, had an interest in proving him a liar, since he’d come home from Louisiana and told his wife and son that he’d killed someone there. Zeke was still married to Linda then. He was still talking to Rick. He pulled both of them aside and told them that some dope addict made a play for the narcotics in storage, and he’d shot him. It wasn’t something he was proud of, because it wasn’t clean. It wasn’t precise. He’d shot him in the dark, and he’d hit him without killing him. The addict died eventually, but still. He was pretty shaken up about it, Rick said—and that’s what gave the story its legitimacy. Rick had grown up with his father’s stories. He’d come to doubt a lot of them, but there were certain ones he believed, because his father wasn’t playing the hero. Ever since Rick was a little boy, his father had told him stories about Vietnam—but the story he believed was the one where the Vietnamese captured and broke him. Why, Rick thought, would someone tell a story like that if it wasn’t true? What kind of man would try to make you believe what he was ashamed of?

  DENNIS COLLINS MET William Clark in El Salvador in the mid-nineties. He will not say what he was doing there; he is, he says, prohibited from saying what he was doing there. All he will say is that he was there, and that when he was there, he met William Clark, who called himself Zeke. They were in El Salvador for different reasons, he says, but they became friends, and when they came home, Collins started getting Zeke work. Collins was associated with Nuclear Security Services Corporation, or NSSC. It provided security training for nuclear facilities, and it employed a lot of former operators. Zeke was a perfect fit, because he was so enthusiastic, such a great motivator and storyteller—when clients gave their evaluations, “the number-one guy they talk about is Zeke,” Collins said. Zeke’s success with NSSC led him to find work with DynCorp, the security company that provided manpower for the Kosovo Diplomatic Observer Mission in 1998. And his success with DynCorp led him to find work with a company that contracted with the Department of Energy to provide assault teams—adversary teams, as they’re known—that would stage mock attacks on nuclear facilities for the purpose of exposing their vulnerabilities. Zeke never would have gotten any of these jobs without Dennis Collins—Collins was a critical reference—nor would he have gotten the security-manager job at Palisades, for it was one of Collins’s associates who recommended Zeke for the position.

  Zeke called Collins “my best friend in the business,” and Collins knew that Zeke was struggling at Palisades. Zeke was a “shooter and operator,” he said, and like a lot of shooters and operators, he was having trouble accepting that he had become “a desk jockey.” That was why Zeke was so desperate to get to Iraq. He and Collins had gone to Camp Pendleton, California, for counterterrorism training about five or six years ago, and Collins had seen how some of the young marines had responded to Zeke’s stories—they were enthralled. A few years later, when they went back, everything had changed. There was a war on. Now there were young marines who had been to Fallujah, and when Zeke told his stories, they were like, You don’t know what you’re talking about, old man. Zeke couldn’t take it. He became obsessed with getting to Iraq, but then, during one of the training exercises, he hit his head against a wall and passed out. People thought he was playing around, but he wasn’t. He had a neck injury that occasionally cut the flow of blood to his brain. And so he washed out. Nobody’s going to hire a guy with an injury like that. “Believe me, he’s not going to Iraq,” Collins said. “Because if he does go, he’s either going to get killed or get somebody else killed. But it’s tough, because he’s having a real hard time. If you ask me, what happened at Camp Pendleton cracked him.”

  LAST OCTOBER. Zeke flew to Washington, D.C., and gave a presentation to the Department of Homeland Security. He went with one of his superiors from Palisades, and with Al DiBrito and Mike Moll, the agents from the FBI and the DHS who had become part of Zeke’s Viper team. That’s what the presentation was about: Viper. It was Zeke’s brainchild, and now he was proposing to create Viper teams at every nuclear power plant in the United States. The presentation was attended by Craig Conklin, the head of the DHS’s nuclear-hazards branch, as well as by other representatives from the FBI and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission—“about ten people in all,” Conklin says. Zeke did most of the talking and was impressive enough for some of the participants to consider Viper training as a “best practice,” in which case Zeke would be able to take his program nationwide.

  ZEKE GOT SHOT IN KOSOVO. Everybody knew about it: He told some of the shooters and operators he’d met when he was staging the mock assaults on nuclear plants. It was part of Zeke’s legend. He’d gone to Kosovo for DynCorp, which had contracted to provide personnel for the State Department’s Diplomatic Observer Mission. He had a diplomatic passport. But he says he was also there as a cover. He was an operative whose mission was to determine the war-fighting capacity of the Kosovo Liberation Army. He would hike into KLA camps with not much more than a box of Marlboros and a medical kit. He should have been shot, but people would line up as soon as they saw him. He would spend all day stitching wounds and get the information he needed. Then he did get shot, and the only thing that saved him was his flak jacket. When he got home, he showed Linda the sweater with the hole in it. Did she believe him? Well, she loved him, she said. And besides, she’d seen the sweater; she’d put her finger in the hole.

  THAT WAS THE FIRST THING Linda Clark said to me, the first thing she wanted me to know. They were divorced, but she still loved him. She had known him for so long that being married to him “was almost like raising another child.” He used to ride motorc
ycles with her first husband, and when she was divorced and became a single mother, he protected her. “He always made me feel secure,” she said. They were baptized together before they were married. But around 1984, he lost his job as a policeman in Visalia, California, for having an affair with another officer’s wife, and they struggled. They struggled financially, as he wrote the six novels that never got published and wrote the stack of plays and screenplays that never got produced—well, one did, at a community theater. And he did make a movie. Did I know that he made a movie? He did, he really did, in the early nineties, with a friend’s workmen’s-compensation check. But of course it never went anywhere, and what kept Bill and Linda afloat, she said, was Bill’s job as a chimney sweep. For twelve years, from ’84 to ’96, he worked as a chimney sweep in his hometown of Tulare, down the road from Visalia. “I’ll bet Bill didn’t tell you about that, did he?”

  No, I said, he didn’t. It’s not on his résumé, either, those twelve years representing the gap only his handler could explain. But wait a second—didn’t he go by Zeke?

  “Oh, I don’t know where he got that,” she said. “Everybody I know calls him Bill. But then he went on that trip to El Salvador and everything changed. He was always big into skydiving, and though we didn’t have a lot of money, he wanted to go skydiving with the El Salvadoran army. I let him go, because it was so important to him, and that’s where he met Dennis Collins. And when he came home, he wanted me to call him Zeke. I couldn’t do it. He’s still Billy to me.”

  Their finances got better after that, Linda said, because Bill started doing work for Dennis, and the work for Dennis led to work for the DOE, and the work for the DOE led to work for security companies like Vance and Blackwater. What got worse was Bill’s…well, his problem, Linda said. He has to make himself more interesting than he is. He can’t bear to be just plain old Bill Clark from Tulare, California, because plain old Bill Clark had dyslexia, and really suffered in school….

  “Did he ever play football?” I asked.

  “Junior varsity,” she said. “He was too small for varsity.”

  Well, was he ever in Afghanistan or Iraq? I asked.

  “Oh, heavens no,” Linda said. “He told you that?”

  “He also told me that he was in the Horn of Africa with the French Foreign Legion.”

  “Well, he did go to Nigeria, back in the early eighties. A Nigerian minister came to Tulare, and Bill went to Nigeria with him as a missionary. He didn’t like it very much, though. He came back in about two or three weeks.”

  She said this without malice. Indeed, she was praying for him to see the error of his ways, so that their marriage could be repaired and they could reconcile. She still loved the man. She still spoke to him. As a matter of fact, she had spoken to him just the day before, and he was saying that he wanted to break off his engagement with Terri so that he could remarry Linda.

  “Linda, I hate being the one to tell you this, but he and Terri aren’t engaged. They’re married.”

  “Oh, my God,” Linda Clark said.

  AN OFFICIAL at one of Zeke’s former employers confirmed that he did have a Q clearance with the DOE, which gave him access to top-secret information at nuclear plants. But when two officials with access to Department of Defense databases—one in the DOD, the other a screener for a private security company—checked Zeke’s TS/SCI clearance, they found no record of William E. Clark having DOD “eligibility or access.” That is, they found no record of William E. Clark holding the high-level DOD security clearance he included on his résumé at Palisades Nuclear.

  HE HAD NEVER TALKED about his life before, Zeke said, and he was always disdainful of people who did. He was always disdainful of both the “cowboys” who liked to brag and the “wannabes” who were endemic to the world of covert operations. Real operators, he said, never talked about their exploits when they got together. They talked about their wives, they talked about their families, they talked about how much they missed home. It was strange, then, that about seven years ago he held the ultimate wannabe job—he was an auxiliary cop in Kingsburg, California, an unpaid position that called on him only to “assist officers on duty.” And it was even stranger when, last year, he called a cop he knew from Kingsburg named Kevin Pendley. “He tried to recruit me to go to Iraq,” Pendley says. “He called out of the blue. He said he’d been over there for Blackwater and that he’d just gotten back. He said he killed sixty-nine people.”

  RICK CLARK KNEW instinctively that his father had remarried. He had, in fact, warned his mother that his father had remarried, although he hadn’t spoken to his father in a year and a half. It was just something he felt, from a lifetime of experience—the familiar vibrations of his father’s falsehoods. “He’s living a movie in which he’s the flawed but sympathetic central character, a really deeply interesting central character,” Rick said. “He’s smart enough to show his flaws, because when he does, he becomes believable, and you become an accomplice in the movie of his life.”

  Was Rick one of Bill Clark’s accomplices? “I grew up with the mythology and to some extent defined myself by it,” he said. “One of the reasons I went into the military was to carry on the tradition.” Rick is thirty-five now, about to leave the Air Force, and he doesn’t consider himself an accomplice anymore. “If my father told me the sun was shining, I wouldn’t believe him—even if I lived in the next town over, for God’s sake.” But he did want to know one thing. He wanted me to find out the truth of one story, because he’d been hearing it since he could remember and had built his life around it. He wanted to know if Bill Clark had been a Ranger and had been in Vietnam. “I really need to know that, Tom,” he said. “Because I need to know whether everything has been a lie.”

  THERE WAS NO INCIDENT on Zeke’s first day at Palisades; no threat to throw his boss out the window. That’s what the senior manager said, the same one who had told me that Zeke had gone to Afghanistan looking for a high-velocity round between the eyes. When I told him that Zeke had never actually been to Afghanistan or Iraq, he said, “He wasn’t?” And then he said, “You know, I’m really glad you called, because he’s been trying to get me to quit my job and go into business with him. He said that I had the know-how, and he had all the contacts from his years in covert operations.”

  THE MOVIE WAS CALLED Team Dragon. Bill Clark got the idea for it when a B-movie company came to Tulare to reshoot some footage on the cheap, and he went out to get some stunt work. He thought it looked pretty easy, making a movie, so he started watching movies obsessively on his VCR, with a notebook in his lap. When he felt ready to direct, he began shooting bits of a script he’d written, featuring guys he knew from Tulare. One of them, Ken Washman, was bothered by the suspicion that if what Clark was shooting ever did become a movie, he wouldn’t get paid a dime, and so he began asking Clark what it would cost to get cut in—to make a real movie whose profits he could share. Clark came up with a figure, which happened to be the amount of the check Washman had recently received in compensation for a workplace accident. And so, in 1990 and 1991, Bill Clark shot Team Dragon in and around Tulare, with Ken Washman as his star. It was about a Vietnam veteran who had to face his demons when he found out that the NVA was selling opium in California, and it cost $25,000 to make. “My wife wasn’t real happy about it,” Washman says now. “She didn’t really like me spending that much time with Bill Clark, and she wanted me to put the money in a piece of property or something. I guess I would have had a better return on my investment if I did, but I wouldn’t have had as much fun as I did running around and shooting guns out there in Tulare. And it was a real movie, you know. We had a premiere at the Elks club in Tulare. Bill showed it and said, ‘Well, Ken, what do you think?’

  “I said, ‘Well, Bill—it’s a movie.’ There was not a whole lot much more you could say about it, other than that.”

  ZEKE DIDN’T KILL anyone in Louisiana. A former marine who was on Zeke’s Blackwater team said that no one even discharged
his weapon, because it was well known that if you did, Blackwater would fire your ass. Besides, they were in the sticks. They weren’t in New Orleans. It was quiet where they were, really sort of boring, except when Zeke told the story that a gang was coming to get at the narcotics. Even then, the former marine listened with half an ear. That guy was always telling stories.

  THE VOLUNTEER FROM the shelter in Louisiana received a call one day from Linda Clark. Linda told the volunteer that she’d been speaking to the Lord, and the Lord had instructed her to forgive the volunteer for breaking up her marriage to Bill. By this time, the volunteer was living in fear of the man she knew as Zeke, and so she asked Linda the one thing she really wanted to know: Is he dangerous?