were not to be wandering around Aden without a 'minder' from the Ministry of Information. I suggested that this was ridiculous, that I had been interviewing cabinet officials unfettered all week long in Sanaa and that President Saleh's aides had given me their blessings to travel to Aden. Did I have documentation of this, Haydar wanted to know. No, I confessed, I did not, but he was free to call them. Haydar told us not to leave the hotel grounds that evening, shook our hands, and said good night.
The next morning, Haydar was already making himself comfortable in the lobby when I showed up for breakfast. 'Hello, Robert!' he called out in English and sprang to his feet to shake my hand. I had people to see that morning, and Haydar informed me that he would escort me in his pickup truck. The interview subject, a powerful newspaper publisher, was not daunted by Haydar. He closed the door on the PSO agent's nose. When I finished my interview, Haydar was dutifully standing outside, having sweated through his natty blue long-sleeve shirt. He was waiting to hear from the new Aden PSO chief about my visiting the prison. In the meantime, he offered with a shrug, would I like a tour of Aden?
We killed time by driving through the old market in Crater, bumping along the old British-built boulevards past sagging and blistered storefronts and then finally around an immense cistern that had been dug perhaps two thousand years ago and now was dry. At one point, Haydar's pickup truck broke down, and he fretted over the carburetor in the 110-degree heat while Khaled and I tried to control our laughter. He was actually a decent sort, not one of the PSO's musclemen, and though he said he was from the mountains in the north and ill-suited to Aden's stifling humidity, he maintained a kind of futile dignity in his neatly trimmed mustache and his fine sweat-stained clothes.
There wasn't much to see in the raggedy old coastal city, so Hay-dar ferried us back to the hotel. We sat in deck chairs at the water's edge, watching a procession of young Yemeni women stride slowly through the waves in their head-to-toe sharshafs like ebony apparitions. At last Haydar's cell phone rang. He strode off for some privacy, kicking up sand and mopping his brow.
When he returned, I could tell by his face that the news was not good. Khaled translated: The new Aden chief was irate at Haydar. What was this American journalist doing in Aden anyway? And you took him on a tour? No, he cannot see the prison. Do not let him leave the hotel grounds. Escort him to the airport tomorrow morning.
'I am sorry, Robert,' Haydar said. Then he bent down, reached for my neck, and kissed me on both cheeks with his sweaty lips.
The next morning, a few minutes after the mascara-stained Yemen Airways flight attendant welcomed me aboard, I lay my forehead against the aircraft window-a portrait of stupefaction, gaping at the dunes, which swirled like caramel question marks in the almighty nothingness below. Thinking: The prison is not a prison. The little white boat is not just a little white boat. The alliance is not an alliance. Then the plane thrust heavenward, and the question marks melted under the Arabian sun.
Now in his eighth year as GQ writer-at-large, Robert Draper is also the author of the novel Hadrian's Walls (Knopf, 1999) and the biography Rolling Stone Magazine: The Uncensored History (Double-day, 1990). He is at work on a book about the Bush presidency for the Free Press. Draper resides in Asheville, North Carolina.
And then, fully eleven months after their escape, in a single week in March of 2004, all ten suspects were magically recaptured in the mountains of Abyan province dominated by tribal factions. A 'security trial' was staged for five of them in a Sanaa courtroom in early July. At some point during the course of the trial, the defendants were awarded attorneys but were not permitted to speak with them outside of court. The sentences came down in September: five to ten years for four of the defendants, and the death penalty for the plot's on-the-ground coordinator, al-Badawi, who hollered out, 'This is an unjust verdict! This is an American verdict!'
For me, the proceedings were quintessentially Yemeni. But al-Badawi had a point: American diplomats attended the trial and were quick to praise its outcome, and once again it seemed that Yemen's eagerness to please both sides had produced slapstick consequences. I left the country as most Western journalists have, awed and confounded-and oddly reluctant to return to my world of shallow, banal mysteries.
Skip Hollandsworth
The FamilyMan
from Texas Monthly
When mothers saw Todd Becker in the carpool line at the elementary school in Stonebridge Ranch, an upscale bedroom community in McKinney, north of Dallas, they'd occasionally stop chatting on their cell phones and do a double take. Becker was a good-looking young guy in his early thirties, with neatly cut hair and brown eyes. He wore khaki pants and crisp T-shirts. He had a pleasant smile, his teeth very white and straight.
But it wasn't his looks, the mothers later said, that were the most attractive part about him. Around Stonebridge Ranch, Todd Becker was known as the family man, a devoted husband who always took the time to eat lunch with his sweet blond wife, Cathy, and a doting father who coached his children's soccer teams and took them to their ballet lessons. Some of the mothers were impressed that he liked to go to the school and read stories to his children's classes. Others noted that he was happy to let the neighborhood kids swim in his backyard pool or jump on the trampoline. He was pleasant and soft-spoken, never one to talk too much about himself. He rarely had more than a beer or two at parties. He took his family to
Sunday services at the Lutheran church not far from his home, and at the Stonebridge Country Club, where he was one of the top tennis players, he never threw his racket when he was losing. 'Let's face it,' one mother would later say. 'A lot of women around Stonebridge Ranch wished their own husbands were more like
Todd.'
At his $280,000 two-story custom-built home on Fallen Leaf Lane, in Stonebridge's Autumn Ridge neighborhood, where he had turned the living room into an extra playroom for the kids, Becker always led the family in a prayer at dinner. At bedtime, he would kiss his children good-night and tell them to sleep well. Then, he would kiss his wife good-night and tell her to sleep well too. Then, he would get into his minivan or his Ford Expedition, back out of the driveway, and head off to commit some of the most daring, professionally executed burglaries that law enforcement authorities have ever seen.
Todd Becker made his living by stealing the cash out of safes from stores, restaurants, and businesses throughout Texas and Florida, where he had lived before moving to Texas. He and his small band of employees would pry the safes open with crowbars, slam them apart with sledgehammers, hack into them with concrete saws, or cut them open with torches. Many times they'd yank the entire safe out of the floor and carry it away to be opened at a more discreet location, occasionally inside Becker's own garage. Becker would split up the loot with his team and then take his cut to his bedroom, hiding the money under some clothes in his closet. He'd shower, comb his hair, and be downstairs by the time his kids awakened, ready to fix them pancakes and drive them to school. When a torrent of gun-wielding police officers arrived at his house one morning in late 2002, bursting through his front door and stepping over children's toys to arrest him, his neighbors stood in their front yards, cups of coffee in their hands, their mouths open. A few of them later told the cops that they had made a terrible mistake.
'We said there is no way he could be a thief,' one neighbor recalled. 'He's just like the rest of us.'
A few months ago, while the thirty-three-year-old Becker was still out on bond, he allowed me to come see him. When I walked up to his house, he greeted me at the door, gave me a friendly handshake, and said with a half-smile, 'Well, here's my crime den.' He led me to his dining room table, made of burnished cherry, while his youngest daughter, aged two, watched Barney in the family room and Cathy, who's thirty-five, made coffee. It was a couple of weeks before Halloween, and Cathy had decorated the front of their house, as she did every year, with pumpkins and plastic skeletons hanging from a tree and a sign on the front door that read: autumn greetings from the beckers. Next to the sewing machine in the kitchen were Halloween costumes that she was making for their four children. 'Usually, I'm in charge of the neighborhood Halloween parade,' she told me with a slight shrug of her shoulders. 'But this year I thought someone else should do it.' As she talked, Becker flipped through a scrapbook to a page that showed pictures of his wife and children in costumes from a previous Halloween parade, cheerfully marching down the street with their neighbors. Then he turned the page and showed me photos of birthday parties that he and Cathy had thrown for their kids. 'Not what you were expecting, huh?' Becker asked me.
Nor the authorities. According to police detectives, burglars are typically impoverished young males looking for money to buy drugs. Wearing sweatshirts with hoods, they amateurishly smash through store windows and grab what they can while the alarms are blaring. 'You don't find these guys meticulously planning out their crimes so that they can live an all-American lifestyle in a nice neighborhood with a nice family,' said Bill Hardman, a detective from Fort Pierce, Florida, one of the many cities plagued by Becker. 'They want crack or guns. But Todd Becker was one of a kind-a clean-cut yuppie daddy who bought dolls for his children.'
What especially intrigued the cops about Becker was the way he chose his accomplices. Like the Old West outlaw Jesse James, who also had a love of snatching money out of safes and strongboxes, Becker relied mostly on kinfolk to help him: his two half brothers, his brother-in-law, a step-nephew, and a childhood friend. Unlike Jesse James, however, he didn't choose them because they were experienced criminals or good with guns. (Becker didn't allow weapons of any kind to be used during his burglaries. He didn't even allow guns in his home, fearing that his children might find them and accidentally shoot themselves.) He picked relatives and friends who happened to be down on their luck, involved in unhappy relationships, or stuck in dead-end jobs, if they had jobs at all. One brother who worked for Becker had a job on the side performing as an 'entertainer' on a subscription Internet sex site, and another worked part-time as a Santa's helper at a mall. His childhood friend was battling a weight problem. Becker even used his own sister Kim, who was dancing at a strip club in Florida, to work as a lookout on one of his burglaries, telling her that he hoped the money she made on the venture would encourage her to quit stripping and lead a more stable life. 'Maybe to someone else, none of this makes any sense, but you've got to understand Todd,' said Kim, a perky single mother of five. 'He had created this really happy life for himself in the suburbs, with church and soccer and good schools and all that. And I think he wanted all the rest of us in his family to experience what he had.'
Indeed, Becker was a new kind of American criminal, so intent on improving his life and the lives of his fellow family members that he would often tune the radio in his vehicle to the nationally syndicated show of self-help counselor Dr. Laura Schlessinger as he drove through various shopping centers with his team, scouting out potential businesses to rob. He talked to his accomplices about the dangers of drinking and drug abuse. He encouraged them to save their money for the future. 'I really thought I was helping out everyone who went to work for me, helping them put some money together and get a new start with their lives,' Becker told me, staring out his dining room window. 'It's still hard to believe just how it all turned out.'
Hewas literally an altar boy at a Lutheran church in Port St. Lu-cie, the small city on Florida's east coast where he was raised. When he signed up for junior tennis tournaments, he would inform the tournament directors that he could not play matches on Sunday mornings because he had to attend church. 'Todd never smoked cigarettes, and he would have only one beer at high school parties,' recalled one of his Florida friends; Jeff Drock. 'And he wouldn't even drink that.' What amazed almost everyone who got to know Todd Becker during his teenage years was that he never tried to have sex with girls. He said that he wanted to save himself for marriage.
If he had gone into the ministry, none of his childhood friends would have been surprised. But during Becker's adolescence, his father, William Becker, began having run-ins with the law. A former police officer from Detroit, the elder Becker had quit the force in the sixties to sell encyclopedias door-to-door, then moved to Florida to sell video games during the era when Pac-Man and Donkey Kong were the biggest sellers. Although he had been decorated as a cop for fighting crime, he apparently went the other way when it came to making money as a salesman. He spent some time in jail for business fraud during Becker's youth, and when he got out, he had trouble finding steady employment.
While Becker's father went through his legal problems, Becker's mother worked at Domino's delivering pizzas, but her income was hardly adequate to support herself and her three children, of whom Becker was the eldest. 'I think the family was evicted out of a couple of houses,' said Todd's half brother Dwayne Becker, one of four sons from William Becker's first marriage who were raised
