“Eliot Spitzer is like the good-looking bouncer in a bar, who is secretly dealing drugs,” explained forensic microbiologist Mike Copass. We were in a San Diego bar this July, down near the water in Ocean Beach. Copass had acted as a facilitator of San Diego’s 9/11 Citizen’s Grand Jury, an extra-legal group which mounted a mock trial in April.

Copass has degrees from Stanford and Harvard, and an eager glint in his eye. Despite his preppy appearance, Copass makes some pretty radical allegations: that Eliot Spitzer acted as a firewall, preventing public disclosure of his friends’ roles in the anthrax attacks that occurred shortly after 9/11, in addition to facilitating his associates’ windfall from the bloated insurance pay-outs at the World Trade Center. He even accuses Spitzer of covering up the real perpetrators of the 9/11 attack itself.

Last fall, Eliot Spitzer was swept into the governor’s mansion with 70 per cent of the vote. His public reputation was that of a heroic fighter of white collar crime. Earlier he bragged about being “very close” to Hillary Clinton. He hinted he wouldn’t refuse an invitation to run for vice president, if his friend Hillary got the nomination.

But this summer in Albany, the Spitzer façade cracked. Instead of creating consensus, Spitzer’s team spent its time plotting to unseat Republican rivals in the Legislature sometimes at the ballot box, sometimes using the police. His own attorney general, Andrew Cuomo, is now investigating the governor’s office’s misuse of state troopers to monitor political rival Joe Bruno. To minority leader James Tedisco, Spitzer recently snapped, “I’m a fucking steamroller, and I’ll roll over you.”

No major media outlet has paid attention to the San Diego Citizens Grand Jury’s indictments of Rudy Giuliani, or his former “terror-expert” Jerome Hauer. The Megaphone received documents recently that indicate Eliot Spitzer’s social connections may be preventing him from investigating 9/11. There’s a scandal in Albany, but police spying on Bruno is just the tip of the iceberg.

Spitzer & Silverstein: The Amicus Brief

Prescient New York real estate baron Larry Silverstein became primary lease-holder on the World Trade Center a mere six weeks before 9/11. It had never changed hands before. For a down payment, Silverstein put up only $14 million of his own money, and his friends at the powerful investment bank Blackstone Group kicked in another $111 million. After 9/11, Silverstein demanded a whopping $7 billion insurance payout, in the form of two $3.5 billion payments. He argued the two different plane crashes were two separate “occurrences” of two separate attacks.

The Megaphone has now learned that as attorney general, Spitzer got involved behind the scenes, and in the courts, filing a amicus curiae (“friend of the court”) brief on Silverstein’s behalf on Jan. 15, 2003. For years, this brief languished in the files of the public records room on the 17th floor of the Second Circuit Court in Manhattan, until it was discovered and brought to The New York Megaphone by NYC attorney and author Carl Person. The court ended up agreeing with Spitzer and Silverstein, over-turning the decision of a lower court. Spitzer helped mid-wife a fat compromise and an eventual $4.5 billion payout for Silverstein. The Megaphone’s multiple requests for comment from Governor Spitzer were ignored.

Attorney Carl Person told The Megaphone, “I was surprised to see that Spitzer had used his position as attorney general to support one private litigant over another. Normally, this is not done…Silverstein could well have been someone who destroyed evidence concerning the 9/11 events by apparently ordering or consenting to the tearing (pulling) down of 7 WTC and the removal of the debris from his multiple ground leased premises thereafter.”

Silverstein’s World Trade Center Building 7 collapsed at 5:20 p.m. on 9/11 without being hit by an airplane. Thirty seven eyewitnesses working on the ground as firefighters, EMTs, and reporters, recalled being warned in advance the tower was coming down. The official story however, claims a fire ignited a fuel tank in the building, hastening its sudden collapse.

WTC 7 was the NY headquarters of CIA and the SEC office investigating Enron. 9/11 skeptics believe the building was taken down by controlled demolition. Larry Silverstein himself said in a 2002 episode of PBS’s Frontline that on 9/11 he recalled remarking, "Maybe the smartest thing to do is pull it…they made that decision to pull and we watched the building collapse." Silverstein later claimed that by “pull,” he meant removing firefighters, not pulling the building down. However, all firefighters had been “pulled” from the building three hours earlier.

The Kroll Connection

This past August, another scandal radiated from the Spitzer circle. This time it was Nixon’s arch-strategist Roger Stone leaving a threatening voice mail for Spitzer’s dad, Bernard. Stone allegedly claimed he would subpoena the elder Spitzer for the $5 million in illegal loans Spitzer senior made to his son during his 1998 Attorney General campaign. Stone denied he had made the call. To prove he did, the Spitzer family hired Kroll Associates to trace the call. Why Kroll? Spitzer has a long relationship with this powerful, cryptic security company.

Kroll’s CEO on 9/11 was one of Spitzer’s old mentors from the Manhattan DA’s office, Michael Cherkasky. Cherkasky investigated bank BCCI (which had links to both Islamic terror and the CIA), and the mysterious 1993 World Trade Center (WTC) bombing. Cherkasky’s 2002 book Forewarned: Why the Government is Failing to Protect Us, and What We Must Do to Protect Ourselves is a confused mix of fear-mongering and insider’s analysis. He sheepishly admits that the CIA was in part culpable for the 1993 WTC bombing, since they helped pull known terrorist “Blind Sheikh” Abdel bin-Rahman into the country. Cherkasky admits the FBI had a mole inside Rahman’s 1993 WTC bombing cell, and lays blame for the bombing on the FBI.

After observing the 1993 WTC bombing as an operation penetrated by CIA and FBI, Cherkasky he became head of Kroll, the “the CIA of Wall Street.” Kroll took on the management of WTC after the 1993 bombing. Blackstone Group, the same financiers who backed the Larry Silverstein, have also been involved with Kroll, owning big chunks of Kroll stock on occasion, according to SEC reports.

Cherkasky has donated $14,500 to Eliot Spitzer's political campaigns.

The Anthrax Connection

Eliot Spitzer’s connection to key 9/11 players extends to fellow life-long Democrat, Jerome Hauer, managing director of Kroll on 9/11. Only Jerome Hauer and his former boss, Rudolph Giuliani, were indicted by the San Diego Citizens Grand Jury.

According to Bay Area News (a San Francisco-bay based publication) and Wikipedia, Jerome Hauer warned the Bush White House to go on Cipro, the anti-anthrax drug, on 9/11/01. Hauer denied this allegation to The Megaphone. The White House did go on Cipro. Six days later, the anthrax attacks started, and sent the country back into paroxysms of terror.

Government watchdog group Judicial Watch demanded to know who warned the Bush White House, but not the public, about anthrax. The White House stonewalled their Freedom of Information Act requests.

“I read that the White House did know, and they went on the anti-biotics,” says Judicial Watch founder Larry Klayman. He got involved because, “African American employees at Brentwood [US Postal Facility] were basically left out there to twist in the wind when the white guys up on Capitol Hill got immediate treatment.”

Post-9/11, Jerome Hauer went on to be Coordinator of the National Institute of Health's investigation of anthrax deaths. His report blamed Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. That assertion has been widely discredited, since the five deaths in 2001 were from a fine, “weaponized” form of anthrax, the “Ames Strain” that only the U.S. military and U.S. federal government possessed.

On 9/11, Jerome Hauer appeared on television with Dan Rather. Rather posited that the 9/11 attacks must have had state sponsorship. Hauer urged Rather to blame Bin Laden only. When Rather voiced suspicions about the way the buildings fell, Hauer offered that they simply came down because they were hit by a plane. Without an investigation, Hauer somehow knew two major parts of 9/11’s official story before it emerged.

Hauer is biological terrorism expert whose resume includes time at Science Applications International Corp (SAIC), a military contractor doing work in nuclear issues and psy-ops, and Bioport, manufacturer of the controversial anthrax vaccine.

Jerry Hauer and anthrax go way back. In May of 1998, he spoke at the Council on Foreign Relations on the topic of "Building a 'Biobomb': Terrorist Challenge." That evening Hauer co-presented on the topic Steven Hatfill. Yes, that Steven Hatfill, the one who later became the FBI’s prime suspect in the anthrax mailings. A year after their CFR presentations, Hatfill and Hauer would become coworkers at SAIC's Center for Counterterrorism Technology and Analysis.

Hatfill had worked at Ft. Detrick, the U.S. Army’s bio-weapons lab in Maryland. Hatfill was never convicted, nor even prosecuted, for anything. Today he’s suing reporters for defamation. On Aug. 15, a judge ruled that five top national reporters would have to reveal confidential government sources who fingered Hatfill.

In his interview with The Megaphone, Hauer repeatedly referred to the Grand Jury as “a bunch of nutjobs” and he defended Steven Hatfill. But when asked directly if Hatfill was innocent, Hauer was less than clear:
“I think that the FBI should not have said anything about Hatfill until they knew more. I do not believe Hatfill is a murderer. And I think Steve Hatfill is very passionate, but I don’t think he’s a murderer, and I don’t believe he did it.”

Hauer was not willing to conclusively say that Hatfill was uninvolved in the anthrax attacks, stating, “I’m not going to get into those details.”

Of the five people who died from anthrax exposure, one was a New Yorker. Kathy Nguyen, a hospital worker in the Bronx, was a victim of inhalation anthrax. She died alone in a hospital on October 31, 2001.

A 2004 petition gathered 100,000 signatures begging then-Attorney General Eliot Spitzer to investigate the real source of the 2001 attacks. A Zogby poll that year likewise found that 66 per cent of voters wanted Eliot Spitzer, to tackle these tough questions. What those poll respondents didn’t know is that Spitzer can’t investigate 9/11 or anthrax. He would have to indict his friends from Kroll, Jerry Hauer and Michael Cherkasky. That’s the real scandal.

To listen to Sander Hicks’s interview with Jerry Hauer, or see the Spitzer/Silverstein Amicus Brief in full, log onto the new www.nymegaphone.com. Your comments are welcome.