“I’m working on that,” came back the response.
Rather frustrated, Vince is just trying to get some answers here. “OK then what can I do to help?”
Sal’s response is, “Give me a couple of days and let me look into what I can come up with.”
Nothing more, nothing less—leaving a still frustrated Vince trying to catch up to Sal’s way of thinking.
Inside the Mississippi Jackson-Evers International Airport, Sal is totally irritated about all the new security procedures in place since 9/11. Even with his City ID card, his Official Police Identification it’s still a pain in the neck getting through this so-called security. Slowly coming to a stop off to one side, he decides to observe all the other folks having to go through the security check-point. In one line there are some other people including two rather young looking pilots. He stops at a bar, grabs a quick drink to kill time and to people watch.
What a joke. The Federal bureaucrats at the TSA—the Transportation Security Administration want to waste time and money screening grandma and checking a baby’s diapers, when they should be looking for the real bad guys.
Not known for being PC or politically correct, Sal is a police detective, a real police detective, a keeper of the peace by profession. He is one of the best at doing his job. Somewhere he even possesses a box locked up deep inside of a storage bin full of accommodations and awards to prove it. He doesn’t give a damn about awards; he works off of results . . . real results with bad guys headed to jail . . . or Hell, for a long, long time.
Speaking to himself, he vents. He sort of plays his own little skewed version of a rather popular game show . . . Jeopardy.
“OK, who are the bad guys who are the terrorists we should be looking out for . . . I’ll take Mass Murderers for 200 bucks”—and answers himself, “The little old lady in line being swept by a security wand or those five white male business men standing in the line to board the plane? Hell, no!”
An astute student of history, a good cop needs to keep up with current events and crime trends, not only here, but which events around the world may affect him here in his city.
He continues, “Who kidnapped and slaughtered the athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics? Uh, was it a white supremacist or a black guy named Leroy? No. Was it an outlaw biker group; were they a group of rough demented soldiers? No.”
“Uh . . . oh yea, Middle Eastern friggin’ male extremists: not regular Muslim folk, but the radical ones.”
Possessing a good mind for history, he asks himself another question. “Who took over the U.S. Embassy in Iran in 1979? Who blew up the Marine Barracks in 1983 killing over 300 US Marines? Who attacked and hijacked the cruise ship the Achille Lauro. Who actually tossed an eighty year old WHEEL CHAIR bound man overboard to drown in the sea? The little old lady in line? Those 5 white guys in business suits trying to make a living so they can feed their kids?”
“No, Hell no! I believe the evil perps were those fuckin’ foreigners . . . those damn male extremist bad guys.”
He’s on a roll and continues his own little quiz show. “Who blew up Pan Am flight 103? Uh, a white guy named Bob, Joe Bob, Billy Bob, Nick, or Leroy, Little Joe? I’ll take who bombed the World Trade Center the first time back in 1993—Who bombed those two overseas US Embassies in Kenya and Uh . . . UH,I think it was Tanzania in 1998. Uh, a Mexican American guy named Juan, Miguel, or Jose? Uh, no. It was those fuckin’ foreigners . . . it was those damn male extremists.”
Taking a long drink and in truth steaming now, he asks, “On September 2001, who hijacked four US airliners and crashed them into the World Trade Centers and the Pentagon, killing over 3,000 unarmed citizens of the United States of America? Well it damn sure wasn’t grandma over there or those four white guys. It was those elusive Muslim male extremists, again—damn it!”
“Hell, we didn’t lose half as many American folks at Pearl Harbor when the entire Japanese Navy attacked us. Damn! What is wrong with our friggin’ government?”
Now presently a bit steamed, his blood pressure surely must be off the scale, he fumes a bit, trying to calm himself down. Taking a sip, he looks about, right and left, just discretely checking everything and everyone out.
His attention is drawn to some jerk, a 6’1” tall white guy in light blue surgical scrubs, yakking on his cell phone. Who does he think he is? Probably an office helper, trying to make everyone think that he’s a real doctor . . . I’d bet ya 20 bucks, he’s not even a fuckin’ veterinarian.
If this is not bad enough, he keeps walking away from his bags in the waiting area. Can’t he hear the overhead speakers advising passengers to stay with their bags and to protect their gear? Sal is on alert as this guy may be up to something besides being stupid. Taking another drink, he pulls out his cell phone to see if it is still charged, really a little covert move in case this idiot is a real bad guy.
Sal holds the I-phone up as if he is trying to check the status of the charge, but if truth be told he’s using the face of it as a mirror to scan the area to see if this fool has any accomplices in the area. Sal is good—in reality sneaky and clever at covert surveillance work.
“If the son of a bitch walks much further down this gate area, I’m gonna’ stick this Colt .45 in his ear,” he says under his breath. “I’m supposed to feel safe because nearby is a bunch of TSA ten dollar an hour security guards up front? Ha!”
“Last time I went on vacation, I forgot my backup .38 rounds in my pants pocket and they didn’t even catch me. Hell, it’s not their fault; those folks are merely trying to earn a living and are required to follow all the TSA rules. If this guy is a terrorist, he’s gonna’ be a dead one—if he walks away from his bags one more time. I’ll blow his brains out all over those nice blue scrubs before he can set off any bomb in front of all these good folks.”
“Finally,” Sal says under his breath as the SOB finally sits down next to his bags. “Ah!” he blurts out. He remembers one more. “And I’ll take who shot and killed Bobby Kennedy for 600 dollars? I forgot about this one . . . a white guy, a Chinese guy, a black guy, some guy named Bill, Joe, or Juan? Hell no! Take a guess,” he asks himself as if he didn’t know.
“It was another one of those fuckin’ Middle Eastern . . . ahhh, friggin’ male terrorists. Even though this type of bad guy wasn’t called by that back in the sixties.”
Now a bit worked up, he takes a sip and tries to calm down. Two deep breaths later and his mind takes off again. He mummers on a bit more . . .“A dark haired, brown eyed guy walks up to the ticket counter and wants a one-way ticket from L. A. to New York on the next flight. Said male times this all out so that there is barely enough time to make the flight. By doing this, he forces the ticket agent to rush, to hurry. She is simply a lady, your basic ticket counter sales person. She’s not a security expert. OK, overall it’s not too bad . . . but uh . . . oh he wants to pay cash for an upfront first class seat; ouch, wow, cash $1,783.00 U.S. Dollars . . . uh, cash. In a flash, the salesperson’s mind tries to deal with this dilemma. What to do, what to do: Tick, tick, tick,” she thinks. Who in the hell carries that kind of cash,” she asks to herself. “What to do, what to do?”
“The clock is ticking and he seems like a business man, he has on a suit and is carrying a small brief case. Tick, tick, tick, she is pressed to issue the ticket, looks around, and no supervisors are there to help her with the decision. Tick, tick, tick. Time is really tight for this gentleman to make the flight, so she decides she has to take the money. Tick, tick, tick. She doesn’t want to be accused of racially profiling anyone. This is Los Angeles and many, many foreigners are living here. Besides, she could lose her job and she’s a single mom. Tick, tick, tick. Pressure. Pressure. With a few touches of her slim fingers on the computer key board she issues him a ticket. He smiles and offers a pleasant, “Thank you.”
She smiles back and asks, “How many bags
to you need to check sir?”
“Uh, none . . . I need to make the flight.”
“Yes sir.” She cringes inside as she remembers something in one of her little 10 minute airline security classes about foreign males paying with cash and traveling without any luggage. Somewhat reluctantly, she hands over the ticket and grapples with the uncertainties of her last transaction.
“Thanks . . . and may God be with you,” he says.
Again, she cringes at his last statement.”Did he say may God be with you or was he trying or meaning to say may Allah be with you? Isn’t that what those terrorist say right before they blow things up or die? Oh shit! Oh shit! Oh damn!” She says inside her mind.
He smiles and eases her pain with a kind smile as he scurries off toward the 9 or 10 dollar an hour TSA security guards. He’s good at his trade—he has beaten the system before and will do so again today. His professional terrorist organization knows everyone on this day shift. There are only civilian TSA Agents on duty. He even knows their names. Today, Bob, Judy, Heidi, Don, Scott, Maryann, and Tim are here. They even know where each one of them lives and the names of their kids and where they attend school,” Sal’s musings continue.
“This is for real. He and his cronies are doing their research . . . their dry runs for when their call to act is received. These men are what security experts call a sleeper cell of bad guys. They are a team of some 20 foreign men, posing as college students waiting for their call to duty—their call to duty and honor.”
“The only TSA person with a military background is the supervisor, but he’s conveniently being distracted by another cohort. Today’s dry run will be a success—a, middle eastern man wearing an ill-fitting suit will be allowed into the so-called security area if he doesn’t set off the metal detector. He’ll obtain entry—The group did their home work and have brand new off the rack shoes and belts with exceptionally little metal content in them. Their mission at this check point is to not draw any extra attention to themselves.”
Sal regresses and chuckles. He surprises himself sometimes as he tears cases apart and puts the pieces back together. By hanging around the airport, he also found an overlooked little breech in the so-called TSA security web. Oh, it’s not a gun, a knife or a bomb type of breech. This breech is much simpler than one might imagine. It is a Bud Light or a Miller Lite . . . in a glass beer bottle.
Working big city streets for 10 years in a police squad car before he was ever promoted to detective you learn a lot . . . a hell of a lot about police work. In the ghetto, the barrio, or the slum housing projects, street cops witness loads of crime each and every day. They see plenty of hurt, dead, or dying people out there in the real world, sort of like the rookie doctors or interns who work the Chicago’s Cook County Memorial Hospital or the Houston/Harris County’s Ben Taub General Hospital who are exposed to the hurt, dying or dead people in their emergency rooms. These doctors are able to get 10 years of bona fide medical experience all crammed into 2 years of intensive hard . . . dreadfully hard work.
When every weekend drops 10 to 20 gunshot victims on your doorstep, along with another 20 to 30 car wreck victims, bleeding, broken bodies, psycho-crazy patients into the crowded emergency rooms, you better be a quick learner or you won’t cut it as a rookie doctor or rookie policemen either.
Sal’s record on the street is somewhere around responding to and working on 11 dead bodies in one hot summer weekend. Half those tough guys died in your average corner beer joint. They died in plain ol’ beer joint fist-fights that turned into broken beer-bottle—slash your chest and neck to shreds bar fights, gun fights, knife fights; almost two dead humans per hour—a south side record which still as a record stands until today.
Salvatore has been around tough guys all of his too-full life. His dad was a Police Lieutenant, a real tough street cop. Talk about one tough man to grow up with—one of his uncles was a Sergeant with the County Sheriff’s Office and another was a Captain in the Fire Department. His older brother was a high school football and baseball star before he joined the Air Force to become a Jet Fighter Pilot. He’s been around men, tough men, real men all his life.
Today he knows tough cops and tough crooks. Taking another drink and scratching his nose, he reverts to the terrorist strategy session he’s been playing out in his mind. Get four to five bad guys, four or five fuckin’ crazy ready to die commando types through the so-called TSA security and have them simply purchase a beer and a sandwich or two apiece.
In today’s hectic, hurry, hurry, rush, rush, no frills airline world, it isn’t uncommon to witness passengers boarding an airliner with food and drink in hand. Don’t try to hide your weapon—the beer bottle; place the beer in your hand. In other words, what we are talking about is simply . . . hide in plain sight.
Sal smiles once again as he tries to relax. Under his breath, he asks, “Who in the world allows beer bottles, glass beer bottles to be sold in the so called . . . safe area? Haven’t those idiots ever been to a public beach or a public swimming pool?” Everywhere posted are signs stating no glass containers allowed. Geeze! No glass containers allowed! Why? Because they can break and fuckin’ cut you—uuuh and make you bleed.”
“Haven’t those TSA pukes ever seen an old Western or bar fight movie on TV? How many bar fights had Sal seen on TV as a kid where people are breaking beer bottles or whiskey bottles over the heads of each other. A slash this way, then a slash that way, a slice across the neck and the cut person bleeds like crazy. Hell even the Old Three Stooges characters routinely smashed bottles over each other’s head.”
“Enough, enough,” says Sal to stop his over wildly active mind. “Enough.” Now is the time to stand up, to stretch, and maybe take a bit of a walk about.
“What is our sorry Federal Government up to? If truth be told, he doesn’t have a clue on how to protect us, if this is the best they can do. Whatever happened to good ol’ basic investigation work?”
“Like the High Court ruled in the now famous 4th Amendment case, uh, uh, in the mid 60s, Terry vs. Ohio about the 1968 landmark case—there was this landmark case about the three punk liquor store hijackers. These pricks were waiting to enter the corner liquor store so they could commit a First Degree Felony. They were waiting for a customer, a witness to leave so they could point a loaded weapon at the clerk’s head and commit the felony crime of aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon.”
Sal continues this train of thought, “The high court ruled in the majority that an experienced police detective or officer could make an arrest, based upon his real world experience. Based upon his/her expertise in street crime and robberies, whereby he did, in fact, have a right to detain and conduct a pat down search for weapons. Furthermore and therefore, said peace officer could make an arrest if such weapons are found. The street punks got hooked up with some bleeding heart liberal lawyers who argued they were simply minding their own business, blah, blah, blah—even though weapons were found on the bad guys.”
“Oh, yeah,” thinks Sal . . .“Did the lawyers ever bother to mention all three of these pricks had or possessed extensive criminal records including weapons and assault charges?”
In Sal’s world, he is just doing his job. The liberal bleeding heart lawyers along with the liberal news media calls this racial profiling; Sal calls it just doing your job. Let ol’ Detective Sal here run the TSA in these trying times . . . and by golly this county would be a heck of a lot safer. Hell, we are at war, a real war. The friggin’ media doesn’t want to admit it, but we are. We didn’t start it, we didn’t fire the first shot, but by golly we will finish it.
He would do the task like the security services over in Israel do it. They are, literally, under attack every day. They had to step up their methods in order to simply survive. The Israeli Security Services examine each person trying to board a plane—they watch them like a hawk. They look each passenger in the eye. Sort of like
. . . understand mind you . . . like the Gestapo did in Nazi Germany during WW II or the KGB did or do over in Russia. You need to be suspicious of everyone, but at the same time, you have to be good enough to know the real or potential threats . . . the real bad guys from the potential bad guys. You cannot afford to waste your energy and check everyone the same way, over and over like the current TSA is presently doing.
Given enough time and we’re talking a mere couple of weeks here and the bad guys can figure out a way to beat the system. Sal’s best example is how the terrorists now know that the largest and busiest airports in the U. S. have all the latest and best metal detectors installed. They even possess the hi-tech bomb sniffing handy-wipes that the TSA guards swipe over your carryon luggage. Hell, this information is all over the news and internet.
However, these bad guys are not completely stupid and can simply board a flight from a third world county and land at Boston, Logan or Chicago O’Hare. Once you were cleared into the secure area, even from an out-of-date third world worn out metal detector, you are in the secure area. These guys are our enemy and they are simply not stupid!
Even way back in World War II, the German Gestapo Agents let everyone, including the suspected bad guys, know they were being tailed and watched . . . being watched by a professional security specialist . . . not some off the rack, rent a cop security guard. These guys were world renowned for flushing out the bad guys. Take a page out of the KGB’s play book. Follow them. Follow the Middle Eastern elusive male extremists, stalk them, if you even think of any reason to believe they are guilty of something, anything, keep the heat up . . . they will break. Hell, they are at war with us even if we don’t want to admit that we are at war with these terrorists. If this was World War II and we were just attacked by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor, we would be watching out for the Japanese bad guys, not the Middle East guys. However, since this is not December 1941, we simply need to adapt.
It’s sort of like the basic Interrogation-101 classes Sal teaches at the city’s Police Academy three times a year; stare at a bad guy and tell him you don’t believe his bullshit story. Ask him over and over again: turn the heat up. Stare at him—make him squirm in his seat. Tell him about all the joys of going to prison . . . the big house. Act tough. Talk tough.
Con Trails/200 Sky Obscured Page 10