Free The Anthrax Letters: The Attacks That Shocked America by Leonard A. Cole

lot of people and asked them to call their staffs.” He also asked them to identify recent visitors to the building, anyone who had been inside since August 1. They were stunned to hear him say: “You need to tell everyone to go to the health department offices in Delray Beach tomorrow morning for testing and antibiotics.”
    Martha Warwick, an Enquirer associate editor, was jarred out of her sleep by the 1:30 a.m. call. As she heard the news, she thought, “My God, we’ve just become one of our own headlines.” Her heart was pounding. “I was in shock,” she said. She thought of her three youngsters. “I frantically tried to remember when my children had been in the building, but I was having a hard time thinking clearly.” Then she realized the date. They had been clamoring to see her office, and she had taken them over on the last day of their summer vacation, August 13.
    Early Monday morning Warwick and her children joined the worried crowd that had begun to gather outside the Delray facility, just north of Boca Raton. In the course of the day, some 1,000 people who were considered at risk had their nostrils swabbed and were given a 10-day supply of antibiotics. Anxiety was rampant, even among the investigators. FBI agent Judy Orihuela, who worked in the bureau’s Miami office, asked one of the health officials what it took to get anthrax. “When he said, ‘Has to be 8,000 to 10,000 spores,’ I was a little nervous.” She knew how tiny that amount actually was. “You never know when you’re going to come in contact with it.”

     
    When Martha Moffett left the JFK Medical Center, she departed through the hospital’s main lobby. On her left she passed two elegant wing chairs on either side of an Early American mahogany chest. Above the chairs and chest hung pictures of tropical flora. Still higher, a prominent gold inscription engraved into the white wall said: The Generoso Pope Jr. Lobby.
    Reflecting his first name, Mr. Pope had been the hospital’s most generous benefactor. A contributor to causes ranging from the American Heart Association to the Chamber of Commerce, “Gene” delighted in favoring the JFK center. Beginning in the 1970s until his death in 1988, his cumulative gifts to the hospital approached $10 million. The JFK Medical Center was both his principal community cause and the hospital he himself used. Conveniently located, it was 15 minutes from his home in the posh community of Manalapan and 5 minutes from his office in Lantana. In the end, Pope died of a heart attack on the way from his home to his hospital in an ambulance he had donated.
    Gene’s father, Generoso Pope, Sr., had emigrated as a poor boy from Italy to the United States in 1906. He later became the wealthy owner of Il Progresso , the largest Italian-language newspaper in the United States. When he died in 1950, Gene, then 23 and a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, became the publisher. But other family members gained control and pushed him aside. Suspicions about the senior Genoroso’s ties to the Mafia trailed his son—for example, Frank Costello, the “John Gotti” of his time, was a family friend. In 1952, Costello lent Gene $25,000 to purchase a struggling weekly broadsheet whose main appeal was its racing tips. Over the next few years, circulation remained stagnant at 17,000. The paper survived only with more help from Mr. Costello and his associates. In turn, Gene obligingly published the winning numbers from the Italian lottery, around which the American Mafia had developed its own numbers racket.
    One evening in the late 1950s, while driving home in New Jersey, traffic slowed to a crawl. Gene later realized that the long delay was due less to the accident up ahead than to rubbernecking. He was inspired. Blood, guts, gore—that’s what would sell his paper. The weekly he had bought, the New York Enquirer , took on a new focus and before long had a new name: the National Enquirer .
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