Matt Rees's Blog - Posts Tagged "fbi"

I’ve been called the Dashiell Hammett of Palestine, the John Le Carre of the Middle East, the James Ellroy of…Palestine, the Graham Greene of Jerusalem, and the Georges Simenon of the Palestinian refugee camps. Depends which review you happen to have read.

Until now I’ve published three novels about Omar Yussef, my Palestinian schoolteacher/sleuth. Omar has been described as the Philip Marlowe of the Arab street, the Hercules Poirot of the Near East, Sam Spade fed on hummus, and Miss Marple crossed with Yasser Arafat.

Why then is my new Omar Yussef novel THE FOURTH ASSASSIN,/a> set in New York City? Not in the Middle East, the Near East, Palestine, the Levant, the Fertile Crescent, or any other place where Yasser may be fornicating with dear old Miss Jane Marple.

I lived in New York six years, until I came to Jerusalem in 1996. I know it better than any city outside the Middle East. I had a lot of fun in New York. Maybe too much fun. In no other place in the world can a young man so overindulge in the temptations originally offered in the city of Sodom. Which in reality is close to where I live now in Jerusalem. Though you wouldn’t know it to look at the place.

I know New York with my eyes closed. Literally. In my twenties, after leaving some bar or club, I blacked out on every line on the subway map.

I dated women from every borough of the city, from Westchester and upstate. From the 201 area code (dare I say, New Jersey.)

I married a girl from the North Shore of Long Island, and in my continuing effort to know New York in all its facets, when we divorced, I married a beautiful woman from the South Shore of Long Island.

But each time I returned, no matter how well I thought I knew the place, New York seemed different. The change became most apparent after 9/11. I wanted to understand it through the eyes of Omar Yussef.

That’s why he finds himself in Brooklyn in THE FOURTH ASSASSIN. Visiting the area of Bay Ridge that has become known as “Little Palestine,” for the influx of Palestinian immigrants.

Little Palestine isn’t a community of Palestinian intellectual émigrés, such as sprang up in European capitals in the 1970s. It’s a new wave of young men mostly, saving to bring their families over, working two or more jobs. Theirs is a typical American immigrant story.

Except for the FBI agents going through their trash.

The Bureau didn’t uncover any broad conspiracy in Little Palestine. But it did add to the tensions between the Arab community and other New Yorkers after the attack on the Twin Towers.

That’s the situation into which I wanted to place Omar Yussef. Mutual distrust, after all, makes for good crime fiction.

In Brooklyn, it also happens to be real.

I’m in between drafts of a novel, so I thought I’d look for something to clear my head. Inspired by a BBC broadcast last week in honor of the 80th birthday of Broadway lyricist and composer Stephen Sondheim, I’ve been working on a musical version of my Palestinian crime novels. (Only in the shower, so far…)

I’m thinking of updating the Romeo and Juliet story and setting it in Bethlehem. In tribute to the Sondheim-Bernstein classic “West Side Story,” it’ll be called “West Bank Story,” of course, and will be the tale of the rivalry between two gangs, one Fatah and the other Hamas. I’ve already scored a couple of the numbers (“Aisha, I just met the mother of a girl named Aisha” and “I feel pretty, Oh so pretty, I feel pretty and witty and…I’d best not talk about it because the Hamas guys won’t like it.”)

I'm proud to say I have accrued quite a track record at developing disastrous failed concepts for musicals. I’ve been driving my wife crazy with these ideas for years. This is inspired by the large number of distinguished writers who’ve penned opera librettos and discovered that writer-turned-lyricists have a special graveyard all their own in Hell. Vikram Seth, Russell Hoban and, most recently, Ian McEwan have turned their hand to it. None of them seem to be rivals to Lorenzo da Ponte, Mozart’s greatest librettist, no matter how hard they’ve tried.

Which is why I’ve always thought it’s a better idea to write a failed musical. After all, did you ever see a musical that didn’t seem like it would’ve been better left in the librettist’s bottom draw – or in this case, his blog? Believe me, I know: I saw “Falsettos” on Broadway.

I’ve particularly enjoyed working on failed musicals which fall into the category first popularized by the Buddy Holly biosical (biography-musical, new word all my own) “Buddy” and recently by Green Day’s “American Idiot,” in which music people already love is jammed into a ridiculous storyline. (Ridiculous storylines are de rigeur in the Middle East, so maybe the Palestinian musical isn’t so silly…)

That brought me the following list of future Tony Award Winners:

BLOOD ON THE CHANTILLY LACE: A detective discovers that Buddy Holly and Richie Valens died when their plane came down only because gangsters wanted to rub out the third, largely unremembered passenger, The Big Bopper.

FUGUE! The life of J.S. Bach, fun-loving father of 20 and writer of the scariest piece of music ever (Toccata and Fugure in D minor for organ).

I’M A BELIEVER: The songs of The Monkees performed in Gregorian plainchant by monks.

Read the rest of this post on my blog The Man of Twists and Turns.

Exciting true crime from a top FBI investigator


Jerry Clark is a retired FBI Special Agent who now teaches at Gannon University in Pennsylvania. He was lead investigator on one of the most fascinating FBI cases of recent years. A case which became known as "the Pizza Bomber." With local investigative reporter Ed Palattella, Jerry wrote an account of his biggest case that at once lays out the intricacies of FBI investigative process and reads like a thriller. I asked Jerry to introduce Pizza Bomber: The Untold Story of America's Most Shocking Bank Robbery:

The crime was like none the FBI had ever witnessed. On August 28, 2003, in the suburbs of Erie, Pennsylvania, a pizza deliveryman named Brian Wells had a bomb locked to his neck and was sent off to rob a bank. After taking the money, Wells was supposed to go on a scavenger hunt to collect clues that would allow him to disarm the bomb.

The plot did not go according to plan.

The police stopped Wells shortly after he left the bank, and he never found the clues he needed to survive. The bomb exploded as he sat in front of a squad car, pleading for his life while providing few clues about his assailants. What followed was a bizarre trail of death, including the unexplained overdose of a second delivery driver from the same pizza shop, and a man's dead body found in a freezer inside a garage not far from where Wells made his final delivery.

Questions surrounded the case as it unfolded. I asked many of those questions, as the lead FBI special agent on what the Bureau labelled Major Case #203 -- one of the only bank robbery investigations in the history of the FBI elevated to major case status.

The public came to know it as the “pizza bomber” investigation.

Ten years after the death of Brian Wells, most of the questions can finally be answered. Wells, as my investigation determined, was both a participant and a victim in the diabolical plot, with greed driving the plan. The gang of highly intelligent misfits who built the bomb and locked it to Wells wanted to use the bank robbery proceeds to hire a hit man to kill the wealthy father of one of the conspirators. That way, the conspirator would inherit her father’s fortune.

I speak to law-enforcement groups and others about my experiences in the pizza bomber case, and about the book I co-wrote with Ed Palattella of the Erie Times-News. Many audience members ask if any part of the book is fiction. I remind them that, as weird as it was, the pizza bomber case was real.

And reality is never uncomplicated.