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

still proclaim that it “publishes seven of the top 15 weekly publications in North America.”
    According to Daniel Rotstein, each AMI weekly occupies a distinctive niche. But when he explains this, some don’t sound very different from others: “The Enquirer is celebrity and human interest,” he says. “The Star is mostly celebrity. The Globe is celebrity and some human interest but with a harder edge.” In the Sun “you see more things about religion, horoscopes, prophesies, more unusual types of things.”

     
    Every AMI tabloid masthead begins with the same listing: David Pecker, chairman, president & chief executive officer. Next come the names of the paper’s own staff. In the Sun , after Pecker’s listing, that means Mike Irish, editor-in-chief. Farther down the masthead, in issues printed before AMI was visited with anthrax, were the names of the Sun’s two photo assistant editors: Bob Stevens and Roz Suss.
    Suss began working for the Sun in 1988, two years after she moved to Boca Raton from Miami. Although she had first arrived in Florida as a young bride in the 1960s, her Baltimore twang still rings clear. Now a graying grandmother, her small face turns mournful as she speaks of Bob Stevens. They had sat little more than arm’s length from each other. “He was a kind, generous, funny man. Absolutely the sweetest.” Nodding in agreement, Joan Berkley, the Sun’s office manager, adds: “Everybody liked him. Everybody.”
    Suss and Berkley offered their observations in a room off to the side of the large, open space that AMI has been renting since the end of 2001. It was April 2002, and hundreds of employees were tapping out tabloid stories in a newsroom the size of a football field. Unlike in the three-story building that had to be abandoned in October, all the new offices are on the ground floor. No one is sure yet whether the company’s own building will be decontaminated before the 2-year lease here ends. The current quarters, on Communications Avenue, are a half mile down the road from the AMI building on Broken Sound Boulevard. Though the working area is large, the floor space is less than half the 67,000 square feet of the old building.
    For 2 months, before the rental arrangements for the new space were completed, the AMI tabloids were produced at scattered AMI facilities. Some were processed in the former Enquirer building in Lantana, others in offices in New York. The Sun and the Weekly World News were assigned space in the Miami building that produces Mira! , an AMI Spanish-language tabloid. A few days after the main building was closed, FBI agents visited the Sun’s office in Miami. “They interviewed each of us individually for perhaps 30 or 45 minutes,” said Roz Suss. She was interviewed by two agents and later received calls from other agents “to go over parts of what I said.”
    By late 2001 the FBI was consumed with the issue of terrorism. Special agent Judy Orihuela, who had spent most of her 11 years with the bureau working on bank fraud, recalled that soon after the anthrax diagnosis, “nobody was sure of anything.” Now the media spokeswoman for the bureau’s Miami division, she said, “At that point, in October, it was like 100 percent of our agents were doing either 9/11 or anthrax, one of the two.” The division’s 400 agents were reinforced by scores more sent from Washington and other offices. About a hundred agents alone were combing through the AMI building. Others were conducting interviews, and still others were planning and analyzing information back in the office.
    Located in an industrial area near Interstate 95, the FBI’s Miami building is ringed by dozens of 4-foot-tall cement planters. The bulky gray objects stand as sturdy barriers against any unwanted vehicle. Orihuela’s third-floor office is adjacent to a long conference room, where in April 2002 she reviewed with me the events that took place 6 months earlier. Dressed in a red jacket and black