Speaker 1: You're listening to Law and Order Criminal Justice System, a
Speaker 1: production of Wolf Entertainment and iHeart podcasts.
Speaker 2: In the criminal justice System, landmark trials transcend the courtroom
Speaker 2: to reshape the law. The brave man and women who
Speaker 2: investigate and prosecute these cases are part of a select
Speaker 2: group that is defined American history. These are their stories.
Speaker 2: December twenty ninth, nineteen seventy five, six thirty three pm,
Speaker 2: LaGuardia airport.
Speaker 1: Ed Longo had come to pick up his brother in law,
Speaker 1: a routine errand the kind of thing you do without thinking.
Speaker 3: When I arrived, I came through the store and I
Speaker 3: came and take a look at the monitor to see
Speaker 3: what time his flight was coming.
Speaker 1: In the TWA terminal buzzed with post holiday chaos, Families clustered, baggage,
Speaker 1: claim couples, reunited children tugged at weary parents ready to
Speaker 1: go home.
Speaker 3: I noticed I had a little time, so I came
Speaker 3: over and I sat down an area over here which
Speaker 3: no longer has the seats.
Speaker 1: The seating area was less than one hundred yards away
Speaker 1: from a row of metal lockers.
Speaker 3: I was sitting there and I decided to have a cigarette,
Speaker 3: so I got up and I walked down towards the
Speaker 3: lock area, which is used to be down there, when
Speaker 3: I noticed I had no matches, so I said that
Speaker 3: would I'm not going to smoke. So I turned around
Speaker 3: and I sat down, and that's when the bomb exploded.
Speaker 1: The floor buckled and ceiling panel snapped, a blast of smoke,
Speaker 1: and glass ripped through the terminal like a shockwave.
Speaker 4: The glass killed eleven people and injured seventy five others.
Speaker 1: Fluorescent lights flickered and vanished. Screams echoed off concrete.
Speaker 3: When I awoke, I was on the ground. My leg
Speaker 3: was bleeding. There was no windows left, nothing ceiling falling down.
Speaker 3: I crawled out.
Speaker 1: In a split second, what had been an ordinary Monday
Speaker 1: night turned into complete devastation.
Speaker 3: The scene was very chaotic, everybody running around, a lot
Speaker 3: of mass confusion and a lot of people in the
Speaker 3: state of shock.
Speaker 1: Where the baggage carousel once stood, there was only ruin,
Speaker 1: twisted aluminum, blood slick tiles, luggage scattered like confetti. At
Speaker 1: the time, it was the deadliest terrorist attack ever carried
Speaker 1: out on US soil.
Speaker 4: A retired police commander who worked on the case from
Speaker 4: the beginning called the LaGuardia bombing the most frustrating case
Speaker 4: of his career because, as he put it, there are
Speaker 4: eleven open graves out there crying for an answer.
Speaker 5: I got a call, get out to La Guardia Airport.
Speaker 5: There's been a bombing.
Speaker 1: There was a thirty two foot crater in front of
Speaker 1: what was left of the building. I was trying to
Speaker 1: figure out, am I dead? Am I alive?
Speaker 6: Where am I?
Speaker 1: I'm Anethega Nicolazzi.
Speaker 7: That's why terrorism works.
Speaker 8: It doesn't care who you are.
Speaker 1: From Wolf Entertainment and iHeart Podcasts, this is law and
Speaker 1: order criminal justice system. Fifty years ago, a bomb tour
Speaker 1: through La Guardia Airport's baggage claim, impacting countless lives. The
Speaker 1: deadly attack on December twenty ninth, nineteen seventy five also
Speaker 1: exposed the need for change. In the aftermath, federal agents
Speaker 1: and the NYPD chased answers through wreckage and silence, trying
Speaker 1: to bring order to a crime scene designed for chaos.
Speaker 8: My name is Neil Moran.
Speaker 5: Back in nineteen seventy one, after graduating from college in May,
Speaker 5: I joined the FBI that August in the Clerical Program
Speaker 5: and assigned to various clerical duties throughout the office, and
Speaker 5: at that point it was a fairly good pathway into
Speaker 5: becoming an FBI agent.
Speaker 1: For four years, Neil Moran worked behind the scenes. It
Speaker 1: was a slow but steady route for him to become
Speaker 1: an agent.
Speaker 5: They started to have a lot of classes and my
Speaker 5: name came up and I went to chronicle. I was
Speaker 5: sworn in on May fifth, nineteen seventy five, and I
Speaker 5: spent four months at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia,
Speaker 5: going through training.
Speaker 1: That August, he got his first assignment New York City.
Speaker 1: Sending a newly minted agent straight to the Big Apple
Speaker 1: was a bold experiment by the Bureau.
Speaker 5: They had never before sent what were referred to as
Speaker 5: first Office agents back to the New York Field Division.
Speaker 8: Basically, he really didn't know what to do with us.
Speaker 5: What they devised was a program whereby they gave you
Speaker 5: six months on the very prestigious criminal squads. Everybody wanted
Speaker 5: to be on a criminal squad. Bank robberies, kidnappings, extortion,
Speaker 5: truck hijackings, organized crime. Everybody wanted to work that stuff.
Speaker 5: Nobody wanted to work at least as people in their twenties,
Speaker 5: like myself kind of the slow moving things, following Russians
Speaker 5: and people from communist countries around spy stuff.
Speaker 1: The timing was no accident. The threats were changing and fast.
Speaker 5: I was fortunate enough to get a signed to a
Speaker 5: squad that, among other things, handled airplane hijackings, which were
Speaker 5: a regular thing in the nineteen seventies, as were bombings.
Speaker 1: By the end of nineteen seventy five, Neil was a
Speaker 1: twenty six year old agent and still learning the ropes.
Speaker 1: But on December twenty ninth, there was no more easing in.
Speaker 5: It was dinner time and I was in my apartment
Speaker 5: in the Bronx having dinner, and I got a call
Speaker 5: from the office. Get out to LaGuardia Airport. There's been
Speaker 5: a bombing. Members of the squad will meet you out there.
Speaker 1: There wasn't time for questions.
Speaker 5: I recalled the switchboard saying there's been a bombing at
Speaker 5: the TWA terminal. That's exactly where I responded to baggage
Speaker 5: claim area.
Speaker 1: Specifically, the blast had ripped through LaGuardia nearly ninety minutes earlier,
Speaker 1: but when Neil arrived at Transworld Airlines Terminal known as TWA,
Speaker 1: it still felt like it had just.
Speaker 5: Happened when I got out there, New York City Fire Department,
Speaker 5: New York City Police Department, cast of thousands, just a
Speaker 5: chaotic scene, all kinds of layers of entry to try
Speaker 5: and get into the inner sanctum there where the terminal
Speaker 5: was a twa.
Speaker 1: Marked entrances, were no more sirens, barricades and debris.
Speaker 5: I just recalled dumping my car someplace and making my
Speaker 5: way as close as I could to hook up with
Speaker 5: the senior people on the squad.
Speaker 1: What he found was a crime scene still in motion.
Speaker 5: There's still a lot of moving parts here, There's bodies inside.
Speaker 5: There was an extensive fire, smoke everywhere where, being very
Speaker 5: restricted as to where we could actually go.
Speaker 1: There was no clear vantage point or full picture, only
Speaker 1: glimpses from the edge of the scene and guesses about
Speaker 1: what was unfolding inside.
Speaker 5: We would see ambulances pulling away, continuing, lights flashing. They
Speaker 5: said that there were fatalities, that the injured were being
Speaker 5: loaded into ambulances, the deceased were being loaded into the ambulances.
Speaker 5: You know, it's important for the investigators to do their investigation,
Speaker 5: but the first priorities to get the deceased and injured
Speaker 5: out of there.
Speaker 1: Outside, NYPD officers and federal agents gathered near the perimeter. Inside,
Speaker 1: firefighters were still leading the effort, cooling hotspots, searching for survivors,
Speaker 1: and clearing a path through devastation.
Speaker 8: I see a lot of debris being moved. It was
Speaker 8: a mess. It was a mess.
Speaker 1: What was left of the TWA baggage claim was unrecognizable.
Speaker 1: And outside of the police barriers, another kind of chaos
Speaker 1: was building.
Speaker 5: There's just hundreds and hundreds of people. Cars are parked everywhere.
Speaker 5: Lights are illuminating the whole area. That trying to keep
Speaker 5: the press out of there. They're trying to keep onlookers
Speaker 5: out of there, and this is not an easy task
Speaker 5: when you're trying to rope off such a big area.
Speaker 1: With the barricades barely holding and responders packed shoulder to shoulder.
Speaker 1: The question wasn't just what happened, but who was in charge.
Speaker 5: It's really waiting to see bosses from our job. Bosses
Speaker 5: from the police department, bosses from the port authority, police
Speaker 5: bosses from alcohol, tobacco on firearms, bosses everywhere, And no
Speaker 5: secret that a lot of bosses from law enforcement don't
Speaker 5: get along.
Speaker 1: So and every one of them wants to get inside first,
Speaker 1: exactly exactly. While different commands jockeyed for control, the facts
Speaker 1: on the ground were only just beginning to surface. No
Speaker 1: one knew how many people were dead, No one knew
Speaker 1: who did it. All they had was a war zone
Speaker 1: at baggage Claim and a thousand unanswered questions. What little
Speaker 1: information did make it out was catastrophic.
Speaker 5: As a result of the metal which was later determined
Speaker 5: to be a bomb inside a locker, the shrapnel flying
Speaker 5: shrapnel had injured a lot of people. In addition to that,
Speaker 5: there were multiple fatalities.
Speaker 1: By dawn, LaGuardia airp Or it was still on lockdown,
Speaker 1: the scent of smoke lingered, the baggage claim was in ruins,
Speaker 1: the fire was out, but for agents like Neil, the
Speaker 1: real work was just beginning.
Speaker 8: Key thing with.
Speaker 5: Any kind of a crime scene, obviously, is to try
Speaker 5: and preserve the crime scene.
Speaker 8: As cleanly as possible.
Speaker 5: We already realized that with the fire and the number
Speaker 5: of personnel trampling on one thing or another, that the
Speaker 5: crime scene had been significantly compromised.
Speaker 8: Everything is soaking wet.
Speaker 5: Would have an uphill battle in trying to search for
Speaker 5: things like wires, battery wires, timers, things of that nature.
Speaker 1: In a bombing investigation, every inch of ground matters. The
Speaker 1: goal is always the same, locate the point of origin,
Speaker 1: recover blast components, and if possible, reconstruct the device. But
Speaker 1: that process depends on one critical factor, preservation, and at
Speaker 1: La Guardia that was already slipping away.
Speaker 5: Any kind of a foreign substance. You want this crime
Speaker 5: scene preserved in its most pristine condition as opposed to
Speaker 5: having it doused with water. I mean, and plus it's
Speaker 5: very cold, and I remember being there the next day
Speaker 5: and a lot of the stuff was frozen from the
Speaker 5: water and just a mess.
Speaker 8: I mean, I have to say, the messiest set of.
Speaker 5: Circumstances that I ever had to sift through debris for
Speaker 5: an extensive period.
Speaker 8: It made our job, obviously that much more difficult.
Speaker 1: With the additional damage and conditions of worsening. The area
Speaker 1: was fortified to protect whatever potential evidence still remained.
Speaker 5: People were going to be standing there throughout the night
Speaker 5: to try and preserve it is as much as possible
Speaker 5: and wait for the next morning, which we all got
Speaker 5: out there fairly early and began the task of trying
Speaker 5: to sift through degree organizing morning.
Speaker 1: The focus had shifted from search and rescue to evidence collection.
Speaker 1: Investigators from the NYPD, FBI, and port authority combed through
Speaker 1: the debris looking for anything that could tell them how
Speaker 1: this happened.
Speaker 5: Ourselves in the police department set up like a staging area,
Speaker 5: if you will, in the body of the baggage area.
Speaker 8: We all had gloves on.
Speaker 5: It was freezing cold, dressed in layers and hats and
Speaker 5: bringing stuff up and then just meticulously sifting through things
Speaker 5: to look for evidence. There's clothes, remnants of suitcases, debris,
Speaker 5: shrapnel from the lockers, concrete from pillars inside. It was
Speaker 5: fairly significant blast debris everywhere.
Speaker 1: And then amid the wreckage something unmistakable the remnants of
Speaker 1: twenty five sticks of dynamite along with.
Speaker 5: Copper wire but encased in plastic, common component used in
Speaker 5: constructing a bomb with a timer.
Speaker 1: And it worked.
Speaker 3: A bomb went off with such force that it ripped
Speaker 3: apart the ground level locker room and baggage area of
Speaker 3: the main terminal. Eleven people lost their lives and seventy
Speaker 3: five others were injured.
Speaker 1: People were burned, lost limbs, some thrown across the terminal
Speaker 1: by the sheer force of the blast. Others were left unrecognizable.
Speaker 2: One of the natures of their wounds, their injuries from shrapnel, wongs.
Speaker 7: Apparently the explosion actually impelled building material, metal, glass.
Speaker 2: That kind of thing.
Speaker 1: This wasn't a message, It was a massacre. Fifty years
Speaker 1: is a long time fact, and witnesses age, memory shift,
Speaker 1: and paper records disappear. Finding first hand accounts became a
Speaker 1: race against time.
Speaker 5: And then you're trying to get eyewitness accounts. And I
Speaker 5: also played a role, as did dozens and dozens of
Speaker 5: other agents in interviewing witnesses.
Speaker 8: People were calling the office.
Speaker 1: It was a flood of tips, names, and rumors.
Speaker 5: We had a roster of twa employees and anybody who
Speaker 5: was on duty at that point, or people that had
Speaker 5: called in and said they were there or saw something
Speaker 5: when they were there.
Speaker 8: All those leads are run down.
Speaker 1: In the days after the attack, investigators were chasing leads
Speaker 1: in every direction for any definitive answers for this unprecedented violence.
Speaker 1: Bomb fragments were recovered from the blast center, mangled yards
Speaker 1: of a suitcase, pieces of a triggering mechanism, and chemical
Speaker 1: residue from the explosive experts at a nearby army base
Speaker 1: helped analyze it. It was clear this wasn't crude, It
Speaker 1: was powerful and designed to kill, but the forensic evidence
Speaker 1: stopped short of pointing to a suspect. There were no fingerprints,
Speaker 1: no traceable serial numbers, just the signature of someone who
Speaker 1: knew what they were doing. The bomb had been placed
Speaker 1: inside a coin operated locker in the TWA baggage clean
Speaker 1: The person who planted it understood the timing. It was
Speaker 1: two days after Christmas, the busiest travel week of the year.
Speaker 1: The bomb had been positioned for maximum impact. Both physical
Speaker 1: and psychological agents then turned to the locker system itself,
Speaker 1: but in nineteen seventy five, those lockers didn't require a
Speaker 1: name or ID, just a coin, no way to trace
Speaker 1: who had used it. There were no surveillance cameras to
Speaker 1: turn to, at least none that captured the locker area,
Speaker 1: no high tech for rents tools to lift microscopic DNA.
Speaker 1: The trail, if there ever was one, was going cold fast.
Speaker 1: Whoever planned it didn't publicly claim responsibility, as was sometimes
Speaker 1: the case with terrorist attacks.
Speaker 5: There were some theories. There was no clear cut group
Speaker 5: that emerged that may have been responsible. The Croatians were
Speaker 5: also a very active group back then, committing a lot
Speaker 5: of bombings. They were of interest.
Speaker 1: Here again is FBI historian John Fox.
Speaker 9: There have been a couple of major accusations, some suspected
Speaker 9: fal and others suspected Croatian nationalists. There was a lot
Speaker 9: of back and forth in Yugoslavia at the time, and
Speaker 9: there was a group of Croatian separatists who were engaged
Speaker 9: in terrorist type activities.
Speaker 1: Croatian separatists were one possibility, but terrorism expert Michael Jensen
Speaker 1: recalls they were just one piece of a much larger puzzle.
Speaker 10: This really was the era of mass bombing campaigns in
Speaker 10: the United States, and the FBI had a very very
Speaker 10: long list of usual suspects to go through to try
Speaker 10: to figure out who did this, including the FALN, the
Speaker 10: Jewish Defense League, the Palestine Liberation Organization, you name it.
Speaker 10: There was any number of groups that could have been
Speaker 10: responsible for this attack.
Speaker 1: And for many of them, the logic behind targeting the
Speaker 1: US followed a familiar pattern.
Speaker 10: That's a fairly common story in the history of terrorism
Speaker 10: is that ethno nationalists organizations that are seeking independence will
Speaker 10: launch attacks not only in their own countries, where they're
Speaker 10: trying to separate from, but also in the countries that
Speaker 10: they feel are supporting the authoritarian rulers that are denying
Speaker 10: them their independence and their freedom.
Speaker 1: If this was political, like so many bombings of the time,
Speaker 1: one would expect some group, some one to be taking credit.
Speaker 1: But without a name, without a message, there was nothing
Speaker 1: to hold onto. For weeks, investigators had little more than
Speaker 1: debris and speculation. No group stepped forward, and no hard
Speaker 1: evidence surfaced. Back in New York City's FBI Field office,
Speaker 1: leads were still being chased and coming up cold.
Speaker 5: It's chaotic in the office. Bosses tearing his hair out.
Speaker 5: People are assigning leads. What do you have going on?
Speaker 5: I need you to run out to Queen's. I need
Speaker 5: you to run up to the Bronx. I need you
Speaker 5: to run to Manhattan. I need you to run to
Speaker 5: Jersey to interview this twa employee.
Speaker 8: So we're just plugging holes.
Speaker 1: Witnesses were interviewed. A few thought they saw someone leave
Speaker 1: a suitcase unattended. Others said it was a man moving quickly,
Speaker 1: but the descriptions were vague and inconsistent. No composite sketch, ever,
Speaker 1: led to a break and then came the silence. Days
Speaker 1: turned to weeks and then months. No manifestos, no phone calls.
Speaker 1: The silence became its own kind of clue and its
Speaker 1: own dead end. But then something unexpected happened.
Speaker 5: There was a call into CBS News Radio eight eighty
Speaker 5: and there was a claim of responsibility and my boss,
Speaker 5: he wanted me to go up to fifty seventh Street.
Speaker 8: They had a tape.
Speaker 5: They said that they would be happy to provide the
Speaker 5: FBI with the tape with no subpoena, So they were
Speaker 5: going to make a copy and turn it over to me.
Speaker 5: So my boss said, get up there and get that tape.
Speaker 1: Would this be it? They pressed play on the recorder,
Speaker 1: kind of.
Speaker 8: Like a muffled voice, and you heard words.
Speaker 5: To the effect that we weren't home or a bombing
Speaker 5: at the KWA and terminal. They were claiming to be
Speaker 5: an offshoot of the Palestine Liberation Organization the PLO, which
Speaker 5: was very active at the time and in the news
Speaker 5: all the time.
Speaker 1: For a moment, it seemed like a break, a name,
Speaker 1: and a possible direction, but a strong disclaimer from the
Speaker 1: PLO soon followed.
Speaker 7: The allegation that the PLO was connected to this crime
Speaker 7: did not reach until about four hours after the explosion,
Speaker 7: which means that somebody was there watching and then planning
Speaker 7: and came out with this allegation. So, whoever or whatever
Speaker 7: group was responsible, you categorically denied that has any connection
Speaker 7: with the PLO. We not only categorically deny, but we
Speaker 7: condemned the act.
Speaker 1: Like all leads before it, this one collapsed almost as
Speaker 1: soon as it surfaced. But this was the seventies. There
Speaker 1: were no digital trails, no advanced forensics, and no proven
Speaker 1: algorithm to connect the.
Speaker 5: Dots, no voice recognition back in nineteen seventy five.
Speaker 1: And tracing the tape back to a verifiable source was
Speaker 1: just one more task in an already frantic rotation.
Speaker 5: The more time that goes by from December twenty ninth,
Speaker 5: the more the investigation trail gets stale. Other than that
Speaker 5: claim of responsibility, there was no clear cut group that
Speaker 5: emerged that may have been responsible.
Speaker 1: And without hard evidence, investigators were left chasing theories. One
Speaker 1: that had come up earlier began to gain more traction.
Speaker 10: Some believe that this attack was committed by a Croatian
Speaker 10: nationalists because the US was supporting Yugoslavia and was denying
Speaker 10: them that are access to their freedom.
Speaker 1: It was still just a theory, but a name started surfacing,
Speaker 1: whispered in FBI field offices, scribbled in margins of case files,
Speaker 1: the name that made their Croatian angle suddenly feel more plausible.
Speaker 1: Zvonko Busich. On September tenth, nineteen seventy six, twa flight
Speaker 1: three point fifty five out of LaGuardia bound for Chicago
Speaker 1: lifted off from the very same airport a bomb had
Speaker 1: struck just nine months earlier. On board were more than
Speaker 1: eighty passengers, business travelers, families, civilians headed into the weekend.
Speaker 1: What none of them knew was that among them sat
Speaker 1: a man with a radical plan, a suitcase, and a
Speaker 1: deadly message. Busich was a Croatian nationalist. At thirty years old,
Speaker 1: he'd come to the United States in the nineteen seventies
Speaker 1: with a mission to fight for an independent Croatia free
Speaker 1: from Yugoslav rule. And that morning, Busich, along with his
Speaker 1: American born wife Julienne, and three co conspirators, stood up
Speaker 1: midhas flight and hijacked the plane. He claimed they had
Speaker 1: a bomb on board, and more chillingly, he warned that
Speaker 1: a second device had already been planted in the heart
Speaker 1: of New York City at Grand Central Terminal. Their demand
Speaker 1: published a political manifesto in major American newspapers outlining Croatia's
Speaker 1: suffering under the Yugoslav regime. NYPD bomb Squad officers raced
Speaker 1: to Grand Central to investigate the claim. They found the device.
Speaker 1: It was real and it was lethal. When the bomb
Speaker 1: was moved to a firing range in the Bronx to
Speaker 1: be diffused, it detonated.
Speaker 5: And I just remember going to bed that night and
Speaker 5: waking up the next morning and heard that a police
Speaker 5: officer was killed, and it happened to be Brian Murray.
Speaker 1: Neil couldn't believe it. He just met Brian a few
Speaker 1: months earlier. Brian Murray was only twenty seven years old
Speaker 1: when he died. A member of the New York City
Speaker 1: Police Department's Elite Bomb Squad unit, he was killed as
Speaker 1: he worked to deactivate the bomb. He left behind a
Speaker 1: wife and two children, two and four years old. Another
Speaker 1: officer was also seriously wounded. Back on the plane, Busage
Speaker 1: and his team diverted the aircraft to Paris, ultimately releasing
Speaker 1: passengers and stages. When they finally surrendered, it was on
Speaker 1: French soil.
Speaker 10: There were strong efforts to try to connect him to
Speaker 10: the LaGuardia pot after his arrest. In these other two cases.
Speaker 1: The similarities were clear, the use of a locker in
Speaker 1: a busy transit hub. Here was someone with the motive,
Speaker 1: the ideology, and the operational know how. So investigators started
Speaker 1: to look closer, but the evidence they'd need for an
Speaker 1: arrest never materialized.
Speaker 10: He always denied having any knowledge or the involvement in
Speaker 10: the LaGuardia bomb plot, and federal authorities were never able
Speaker 10: to prove a connection.
Speaker 1: And then came an even stranger theory.
Speaker 10: There have been some arguments that in fact, it wasn't
Speaker 10: Croatian nationalists at all. It might have actually been Yugoslavian
Speaker 10: authorities that orchestrated that attack.
Speaker 1: In that version, the bombing wasn't the work of separatists.
Speaker 10: There are some that believe that Yugoslavia was ultimately behind
Speaker 10: this attack, that it was a false flag operation meant
Speaker 10: to generate a lot of hostility and anger towards Croatian nationalists.
Speaker 1: Meaning it would have been staged by Yugoslav intelligence in
Speaker 1: an effort to discredit the very movement usage was fighting for.
Speaker 10: So in terms of his actual involvement. That remains a
Speaker 10: mystery to this day.
Speaker 1: And just like that, the trail split and eventually turned
Speaker 1: to dust, from one a nationalist willing to hijack a
Speaker 1: plane for his cause, to the other an unsolved bombing
Speaker 1: that still has no claim perpetrator, no indictment, and no closure.
Speaker 1: There are no documentaries, no public memorial for the eleven
Speaker 1: people who never got to finish their trip home. And
Speaker 1: I can tell you from having worked on many unsolved
Speaker 1: cases over the years, that for the families, the investigators,
Speaker 1: it wasn't just the violence that lingered, it was the
Speaker 1: silence that followed it. Here's social psychologist Ari Kruglansky explaining
Speaker 1: what those open cases leave behind.
Speaker 11: People call it in psychology lack of cognitive closure. You
Speaker 11: have lack of closure, or you have an uncertainty something
Speaker 11: is unresolved. It's a very very difficult experience to have
Speaker 11: this lack of closure, to have this idea that you
Speaker 11: were diminished. Random event has happened to you, and it
Speaker 11: can happen again, and there is nothing you can do
Speaker 11: about it.
Speaker 1: Some wounds begin to heal with time. This one can't
Speaker 1: until there are answers.
Speaker 11: These are people that suffer a lot, and presumably they
Speaker 11: would be also more vulnerable to all kinds of narratives
Speaker 11: that tell them what to do to alleviate their suffering.
Speaker 1: The Leguardia bombing didn't just leave behind wreckage and grief.
Speaker 1: It exposed a response that wasn't as unified as it
Speaker 1: could have been. Each agency had a piece of the story,
Speaker 1: but no one could see the full picture. Terrorsts were evolving,
Speaker 1: they were more coordinated and more lethal. Law enforcement needed
Speaker 1: to adapt and respond accordingly. Bureau had resources, but in
Speaker 1: the absence of federal statues specific to this kind of attack,
Speaker 1: the local authorities, the NYPD often took the lead. Here's
Speaker 1: FBI historian John Fox again.
Speaker 9: The New York Police Department actually led to task force
Speaker 9: investigating that bombing at the time because it was largely
Speaker 9: a local matter. Federal law would eventually expand, and of course,
Speaker 9: bombings of planes and things like that would fall to
Speaker 9: the FBI, but it took some time for that change
Speaker 9: to happen.
Speaker 1: The Laguardian investigation exposed the limits of working together without
Speaker 1: a clear framework, especially across overlapping jurisdictions that began to change, interestingly,
Speaker 1: with a different kind of crime.
Speaker 9: On a somewhat separate but interrelated matter, there were also
Speaker 9: a lot of bank robberies going on, and in nineteen
Speaker 9: seventy nine, the FBI and the New York Police Department
Speaker 9: agreed to work even more closely together to try and
Speaker 9: solve especially serial bank robberies, because some of these even
Speaker 9: were being traced to some of these radical groups. You know,
Speaker 9: they would rob banks to fund their other activities, And
Speaker 9: in nineteen seventy nine we created a bank Robbery task Force.
Speaker 1: That task force became a testing ground and within a
Speaker 1: year it led to something even bigger.
Speaker 9: It proved so successful that the next year, in April
Speaker 9: of nineteen eighty, we decided to formalize a memorandum of
Speaker 9: understanding between the FBI and the NYPD about investigating terrorism
Speaker 9: cases together, creating what becomes our first Joint Terrorism Task Force.
Speaker 1: At its core, the Joint Terrorism Task Force, or the
Speaker 1: JTTF as it's known, was built on a simple yet
Speaker 1: powerful premise combine the bureau's resources and reach with NYPD's
Speaker 1: street level experience and knowledge.
Speaker 9: We the FBI agreed to provide space, it and certain
Speaker 9: things nypds supplied people and their own expertise. We worked
Speaker 9: by co locating NYPD detectives with FBI agents, and these
Speaker 9: detectives were provided access to FBI intelligence, and it became
Speaker 9: very successful because we could truly pool together our expertise
Speaker 9: and access.
Speaker 1: That access made all the difference. For the first time,
Speaker 1: federal intelligence and local law enforcement operated not just in parallel,
Speaker 1: but worked together in sync.
Speaker 9: And we worked out how we would handle the information,
Speaker 9: how we would handle do you prosecute this in a
Speaker 9: state or local level, do you prosecute this at a
Speaker 9: federal level? How do we deal with sharp inform and information?
Speaker 9: Because protecting their identities of your sources of information is
Speaker 9: incredibly important. The Joint Terrorism Task Force Agreement enabled us
Speaker 9: to do this so successfully that it became the model
Speaker 9: for creating these kinds of organizations and other jurisdictions as well.
Speaker 1: For agents like Neil, who had worked side by side
Speaker 1: with the NYPD in the Mayhem of LaGuardia, the JTTF
Speaker 1: wasn't just a good idea, It was long overdue.
Speaker 8: It was huge. I worked on a task force with
Speaker 8: the police Department.
Speaker 5: To me, it was the best thing that happened to
Speaker 5: the FBI to have the new York City Police Department
Speaker 5: and other agencies eventually come over and be housed in
Speaker 5: FBI space. It's a group effort, and the FBI has
Speaker 5: good sources. The police department has good sources. Two heads
Speaker 5: of better than one. Police department has a different way
Speaker 5: of doing things. The FDI's got a different way of
Speaker 5: doing things. When you're out there, it's really a breath
Speaker 5: of fresh air to work with people from other agencies.
Speaker 1: Out of frustration came a new kind of force, unified, relentless,
Speaker 1: and built to fight a new kind of war, and
Speaker 1: American law enforcement assembled a new kind of machine to
Speaker 1: fight it, the Joint Terrorism Task Force. But just as
Speaker 1: that machine was finding its rhythm.
Speaker 10: New movements were really starting to emerge in the United States.
Speaker 10: One was the modern white power movement.
Speaker 9: The FBI is now saying there was a nationwide white
Speaker 9: supremacist terror group called the Order, using spectacular robberies to
Speaker 9: bankroll a campaign of hate and assassination.
Speaker 1: The next wave wasn't about independence, it was about dehumanization
Speaker 1: and domination, and the face of domestic terrorism was about
Speaker 1: to change again. Not New York, but in backwards armories,
Speaker 1: gun shows and extremist newsletters.
Speaker 12: And police in Denver believe the June murder of a
Speaker 12: popular radio personality there may have been a racially motivated assassination.
Speaker 12: Talk show host Alan Berg was shot twelve times while
Speaker 12: he was standing in the driveway of his home six
Speaker 12: months ago. Berg, who was Jewish, was an outspoken critic
Speaker 12: of racism and anti Semitism, calling himself the man you
Speaker 12: love to hate to receive numerous death threats on his
Speaker 12: talk show.
Speaker 2: Next Time on Law and Order, Criminal Justice System.
Speaker 10: White power, white supremacist organizations. These were much more violent
Speaker 10: organizations than their left wing predecessors.
Speaker 6: Four of them get together, they hit a cash career
Speaker 6: from a Continental armored truck and on this one they
Speaker 6: get about forty thousand dollars. They've just robbed an armored truck.
Speaker 3: David Lane was a klansman, a supremacist, so Burg takes
Speaker 3: him on. He doesn't intellectualize the guy. He just ripsel
Speaker 3: and I believe that was the night that they decide
Speaker 3: they're going to kill him.
Speaker 2: Law and Order Criminal Justice System is a production of
Speaker 2: Wolf Entertainment and iHeart Podcasts. Our host is Anna Sega Nicolaze.
Speaker 2: The show was written by Cooper Mall, executive produced by
Speaker 2: Dick Wolf, Elliot Wolf and Stephen Michael at Wolf Entertainment
Speaker 2: on behalf of iHeart Podcasts. Executive producers Trevor Young and
Speaker 2: Matt Frederick, with supervising producer Chandler Mays and producer Jesse Funk.
Speaker 2: This season is executive produced by Anna Sega Nicolazi. Our
Speaker 2: researchers are Luke Stantz and Carolyn Tolmidge. Editing and sound
Speaker 2: designed by Trevor Young and Jesse Funk. Original music by
Speaker 2: John O'Hara, original theme by Mike Post with additional music
Speaker 2: by Steve Moore and additional voice over by me Steve Zarnkelton.
Speaker 2: Special thanks to Fox five in New York for providing
Speaker 2: archival material for the show. For more podcasts from iHeart
Speaker 2: in Wolf Entertainment, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
Speaker 2: wherever you get your favorite shows. Thanks for listening.