From Midnight to Guntown

by Hailman, John

  In July of 1991, Alice let the girls go with Sonny to California to be with their father and his family for the summer. In August, Alice agreed to let them travel on to Montreal to spend five days with their cousins. On August 18, Sonny and the girls called and said they were fine and the girls would fly back to Memphis on August 23. When they did not arrive, Alice called Sonny’s sister-in-law in Montreal. She claimed their family had not seen either Sonny or the girls, but had “heard” they had all flown to Lebanon to visit the girls’ grandparents. Alice called Lebanon. Sonny laughed and gloated over his clever plan, “If you ever see them again, it will be here in my country and only as I say.” He sent Alice a videotape of the girls playing happily in his courtyard with their cousins. For Alice, a long nightmare had begun. She begged Sonny to bring the girls back, to let her visit them, anything. He laughed as he refused. Finally, when the girls realized they were being held there and could not go home, they persuaded their father to let them at least speak to their mother on the phone. At the time, Sarah was nine. Megan was just four years old.

  Alice went to Sheriff David Bryan of Panola County, where she had her custody decree. He took her to court and got an arrest warrant for Sonny for kidnapping children under the age of ten. They took the state arrest warrant to veteran FBI agent John Lavoie, who prepared a federal warrant for unlawful flight to avoid prosecution (UFAP), a device by which the FBI can help state prosecutors catch fleeing felons. It rarely succeeds outside the United States. Lebanon does not extradite its own citizens, so the chances of Alice getting her daughters back looked remote. But she was not about to give up. Alice first tried every possible means to persuade Sonny to let her visit her daughters. Sonny’s father finally made him agree. Alice began to visit the girls in Sidon, sometimes twice a year. They exchanged letters and photos.

  Once Alice saw her daughters in person, she realized what their futures would be. They were virtual prisoners in the El-Sarji compound. They could not go out alone, even to the corner candy store. The girls, especially Sarah, also began to realize their predicament. They developed secret code words to use in their letters and phone calls. But nothing worked. Alice tried the State Department, which basically said they had thousands of such cases and if Lebanon would not help, there was nothing they could do. Alice hired a Lebanese lawyer and paid her well, but she also failed. She tried, but as she said, “Women, especially Muslim women, have few rights here.”

  Alice took a job as a secretary in the Ole Miss Admissions Office. Through her Ole Miss contacts Alice met Dr. Chester Quarles, chairman of the Legal Studies Department. Former head of the Mississippi Bureau of Narcotics, Quarles had written over a dozen books on law enforcement issues, including terrorism. He also had a creative personality, and Alice persuaded him to pull out all the stops. They decided to seduce Sonny into coming back. Whatever his other faults, Sonny had once loved Alice and probably still did. He had remarried and started another family, but his brothers said he was lonely and miserable, a foul-tempered middle-aged man who little resembled the carefree student she had married a dozen years earlier. With Quarles’s help, Alice wrote a series of passionate love letters to Sonny which were some of the hottest I’d ever read in my life. If published, they would have ranked high on the erotic best-seller list. For a moment, it looked as if Sonny might weaken and try to return to her. He really wanted Alice back, but only in Lebanon, and only on his terms. After eight years of mental torture, Alice cracked and became severely depressed. Psychiatrists prescribed the strongest anti-depressants, but they did not solve her problem: her separation from her daughters. She stopped eating and grew emaciated. Her broken-hearted parents finally had her admitted to a hospital for treatment for her depression.

  One day, FBI agent John Lavoie was visiting the Panola County Jail where David Bryan was Sheriff. As he walked through the cells to visit a witness, Lavoie saw a gaunt woman who looked like a meth addict. Lavoie was eating an apple his wife Helen had given him that morning. As he munched on it, the woman, who was wild-eyed and only weighed about 80 pounds on a 5’, 6” frame, put her hands through the bars. “Please,” she said pointing to the apple. John felt sorry for her. “David, could I let her have a bite? She looks like she needs it.” The sheriff agreed. “Go ahead. She’s on her way to Whitfield on a Chancery Court civil commitment. She’s been trying to starve herself to death.”

  John Lavoie handed the woman the apple. She turned it over in her hands slowly, then began to eat it. The sheriff said, “Don’t go too fast, Alice. You’ll make yourself sick. Your stomach is totally empty.” When John heard the name “Alice” he looked back at the woman. “Who is that?” he asked. Sheriff Bryan told him, “I thought she was your case? You know, the woman whose girls were kidnapped to Lebanon by their father? That’s Alice Livingston.” John Lavoie later told me it was like someone had kicked him in the stomach. He went over and talked to Alice. She didn’t seem crazy to him at all, just totally devastated by the loss of her daughters. There was little he could do then, but he made up his mind to make another run at the case.

  The next day I got a phone call from John, who told me about the case and said he’d like me to meet Bill Livingston, Alice’s father. Al More-ton, who had the case, had been named U.S. Attorney by the judges and was not able to handle cases anymore. As the office’s international security officer, I was a logical choice to take over. Besides, John and I had worked a lot together, and he knew I loved kidnapping cases, and as Criminal Chief would probably assign the case to myself anyway. When I got to work the next morning at 7:30, Bill Livingston was already there, not at the front door where the public comes in, but at the back gate to the parking lot where the prosecutors enter. “I didn’t want to take any chance of missing you,” he said. A tall, lean man with a resemblance to Gary Cooper in both his looks and demeanor, Bill told me the story from the top. His daughter Alice was doing much better with medication and was coming home the next weekend. He asked if we would try again on the case. I told him frankly it looked next to impossible, but we’d pull out all the stops.

  Bill Livingston had spent his savings and the girls’ college funds flying Alice and her mother to Lebanon. Alice had also, at weak moments, fallen for con artists who promised dramatic rescues of the girls. Bill said he thought there was an outside chance Sonny was weakening some. The girls were miserable and wanted to come home. Much as they loved the little cousins they lived with, they knew they were little more than prisoners and had begun to dread what would happen to them when they reached the age to be married off. Alice, having watched the film Not without My Daughter with Sally Field, had been talking about getting the girls back herself. Bill feared she would try that if all else failed.

  John Lavoie joined us. We came up with a scheme to persuade Sonny. I prepared an official-looking legal document with a gold seal, red ribbons, and a blue back, signed personally by me and the state DA, guaranteeing Sonny El-Sarji that if he let the girls come back to the United States to visit, perhaps go to school, he would not be prosecuted for kidnapping nor would any other legal action be taken against him. We communicated the offer by phone to his father and brothers. Sonny called Alice and told her he was seriously considering it. Would making love with her still be part of the visits? Of course. We heard nothing more from Sonny for several weeks, then came a letter saying he wished he could accept our offer, but he had talked to lawyers, and they thought it was a trick, that once the girls were in the United States, we would never let them go back to Lebanon and would probably put him in prison for years. He was half right. We would never have let the girls go back to Lebanon. But we would probably not have put him in prison because we had legal problems.

  The sheriff had gotten only a Justice Court arrest warrant for kidnapping, not an indictment, and the state statute of limitations for kidnapping had run out. Worse, at the time Sonny took the girls, parental kidnapping was not yet a federal crime: Only recently had Congress made it a federal crime to kidnap your own ch
ild in violation of a U.S. custody order, and that law did not apply retroactively to Alice’s case. Under the Ex Post Facto Clause of the U.S. Constitution, you cannot be prosecuted for acts that were not crimes when they were committed.

  When we met with Alice, she reacted more quietly and stoically than I expected. She’d been deceived so many times. “I never thought he’d go for it anyway,” she said, thanking me for our efforts and leaving my office. Two weeks later, I got another early morning visit from Bill Livingston. “Alice has disappeared. We think she’s gone to Lebanon to get the girls. They’ve been talking a lot on the phone, sometimes using strange words that don’t make sense to me. What can we do?” I called the State Department office responsible for international parental kidnapping cases. They were not encouraging. Inside their honeyed words, the message was basically, “Forget it. We can’t help you.” I did not tell Bill at that time that Alice had called me a week earlier and asked me if we could have a little secret between us without telling anyone, especially not her parents. I knew what it had to be, and figured knowing her plans and keeping her trust was worth it, even if it meant deceiving her parents by my silence. Alice was severely distraught, and my job was to look out for her as my crime victim, whatever it took. “John, I’m going to get my girls. It’s all planned. We’ve talked about it. I just need you as backup in case anything goes wrong.” Knowing it was useless to argue with her, I went over the risks with her again. She had strong answers for all of them. “Sonny has just contracted to marry off Sarah, who is turning eighteen, to a hideous old rich man next month. Sarah plans to run off with her school bus driver unless I can get her out. Without Sarah’s support—she is so smart and tough—I don’t think Megan can survive alone. She is much worse off than Sarah. I’m afraid she might take her own life.” I stressed to Alice what could happen to her. She didn’t care: “My life here is a prison already. If I get caught, they can rape me, torture me, kill me, it doesn’t matter, but I’ve got to try to get them out. And I don’t think they will treat the girls any worse if I fail.” I told Alice goodbye for what I feared was the last time.

  A couple of days after Bill’s visit, the receptionist called, “Mr. Hailman, this call has to be for you. It’s some foreigner. I think they’re trying to speak English, but I can’t understand her.” A Lebanese operator came on, ascertained my identity in French, then Alice came on the line. “John, I’ve got the girls. I’m well hidden in a cave in some mountains in Syria. Christians here are bringing us food and water, and I’ve paid a man to get us out. I’ve got a cell phone, but every telephone call here is intercepted, so I don’t dare tell you any more. I didn’t have the heart to talk to my parents. Please call them and tell them we’re ok, and to tell the El-Sarjis when they call that I went away on vacation.”

  Unbelievably, that story worked. The El-Sarjis thought the girls had run away on their own. They called the Lebanese police, but never put out any wanted posters or missing children alerts like we would have, which was a great break for us. And they never suspected Alice or reported her to the police. For a couple of weeks, Alice called me every day on her cell phone. The man she’d paid to take her out of Beirut harbor by boat after dark had taken her money and never showed up. Another who took a payment to drive them out by car via Turkey did the same. All along, I’d been talking to John Lavoie, dreaming up schemes to get her out. Alice somehow made it to the American embassy in Beirut to ask for asylum. They refused to take her. They said that under Lebanese law, she had kidnapped the girls. One embassy officer, however, was courageous and sympathetic. “Washington leans on us hard not to get involved in these cases. There are so many of them and our relations with the Lebanese are at a very sensitive stage so we really can’t afford to destabilize things. But my heart goes out to this lady. If you really need something, call me at home. Here’s my private number.” We made up some code words to use, and I thanked him.

  Alice made it back to her cave. She later told me that she and the girls had slipped into Syria and back without incident. Their worst problem happened when they tried to enter Israel, thinking it would be a safe haven. But with her foreign accent and the girls with their native Arab accents, all of them veiled and covered in Islamic robes but unaccompanied by a male relative, the Israelis were suspicious. With Lebanese border guards watching and listening, she could not tell the Israelis her real situation, and dared not speak English or say much even in Arabic for fear there were warrants out for their arrest. She finally gave up on Israel as her escape route. Her latest call was not as clear as the earlier ones. “My batteries are going, John, and I’m losing my grip. We’re totally broke, and I don’t know what to do.” I didn’t either, but we had to do something.

  First we scratched up a little cash, went to Walmart and got the right cell-phone batteries. With John Lavoie, I went to the local mental health center in Oxford and talked to the sympathetic psychiatrist on duty. After showing him our IDs and making him swear that what we told him would be privileged doctor-patient information, we told him Alice’s history and in vague terms her current predicament. He gave me without further question 3 large anti-anxiety prescriptions for Alice, which she had run out of. My own pharmacist quietly filled them. I called the helpful Embassy employee in Beirut and he agreed to receive the money, batteries, and medicines by diplomatic pouch and somehow get them to Alice. John Lavoie got the package out and, as if by miracle, within three days Alice called back from her cave on a strong cell phone in a much more hopeful mood. Now we just had to get her out.

  John Lavoie asked me, “Have you ever heard of Kroll Associates?” I had heard of them. Kroll was a private company made up of retired FBI agents and former CIA case officers. People in the Arab countries and especially in France thought they did “black bag” jobs outside of U.S. law. French prosecutors with whom I had worked on terrorism cases called them “assassins.” Lavoie was outraged. “That’s bullshit. Several friends of mine work for them. They’re the good guys.” Thinking ahead to retirement, I asked John what their legal department was like. He laughed, “That’s one of the best things about them. No lawyers are allowed at Kroll. If they get sued, they hire private lawyers. They are pure investigators. No lawyers are invited to their party.” John got me a guy on the Kroll desk for the Middle East, and I told him our problem. He was remarkably sympathetic, not at all the kind of soldier of fortune the French had led me to believe. He said he regretted it, but he doubted they could risk any of their “assets” in the region, but said he’d check into it. The very next day he called back.

  “There are no warrants for your lady, just a missing persons report on the girls as runaways. If you don’t mind giving me her cell phone number, we just might be able to help them.” I gave him the number, but felt I needed to add: “This is a very strange deal. This lady is broke, the State Department won’t touch it, and I doubt that Justice or the FBI will agree to pay you, and I know you guys are expensive.” His answer was simple: “There will be no charge. This woman needs help. Consider it what you lawyers call professional courtesy.”

  The operation went smoothly. I will never tell how, but local people helped Alice and the girls to an airport in the Middle East in the middle of the night, and they flew right out straight to Memphis. “Daddy Billy” Livingston and his wife and a crowd of friends were all there with John Lavoie and me to meet them. Alice looked radiant. The girls were a sight. Megan, at fourteen, was tall, dark, and beautiful and looked about twenty-five. Sarah, at nineteen, was blonde, round-faced, and a full head shorter than Megan, barely five feet tall. Most amazing were their clothes. They had somehow gotten full western dress: no head scarves, no long dresses. Around each one’s neck hung huge Christian crosses, almost down to their waists. Each was holding a tiny American flag. But their ordeal was not over.

  The girls’ adjustment to American life was as difficult as we’d been warned. They missed their cousins, their only friends during their captivity. Without Alice’s knowledge, th
ey called their cousins and even talked to their father and grandfather. Alice was convinced Sonny and his brothers would come back to the United States, using their fluent English and considerable financial resources, and re-kidnap the girls and drug them and somehow get them back to Lebanon via Mexico. She especially feared Sonny’s contacts in California. She and the girls were living on an isolated farm where someone could conceivably slip in and snatch them.

  Mostly to reassure Alice, I carefully reread the law to see what we could do. Hidden in the gobbledygook of the international parental kidnapping statute was a provision I’d overlooked. Not only was it now a crime to take children out of the United States in violation of a U.S. custody order, it was also an offense to “retain them outside the United States with intent to obstruct lawful parental rights.” Retaining was a continuing offense not barred by the five-year statute of limitations. It was a crime they were still committing. A gleeful John Lavoie joined me in reinterviewing the girls about their treatment in Lebanon. I drafted an indictment charging not only the father, Hassan “Sonny” El-Sarji, but also his father (who came to California twice a year for free medical treatment as a dependent relative of a U.S. citizen) and various brothers and sisters-in-law who were actively assisting in holding the girls in bondage. The girls were careful to describe which relatives were kind and encouraging to them and those people were not charged. During the testimony of Alice and the girls, grand jurors wept openly, men as well as women. They wanted the kidnappers and their accomplices to experience an American prison—all of them. We had the indictment sealed but put it into the National Crime Information Computer (NCIC) system so if any El-Sarji tried to enter the United States anywhere they would be arrested and in custody before they could get to the girls. The Memphis International Airport is, after all, only thirty minutes from where the girls were living with Alice and their grandparents.