Tampa’s kamikaze kid pilot was (pick one): a. A Bin Laden sympathizer b. An American Patriot. c. A British Citizen.
Answer: All of the above. Puzzled? So is everyone else…
In an exclusive investigation the MadCowMorningNews has discovered startling and critical discrepancies in key elements in the official account of the life and death of Charles Bishop, the kamikaze pilot who a week ago flew a Cessna into a Tampa skyscraper.
Taken together, these discrepancies seem designed to deflect public attention away from the boy's father, a man named Charles J Bishara.
Charles Bishop’s wild last ride is the only authenticated episode of terror associated with a sympathizer of Osama Bin Laden since the September 11 attack.
So Bishop's case is important. But a week later the word used most often to describe it in the press is "puzzling."
Why did young Bishop target the Bank of America skyscraper after telling friends that he abhorred the World Trade Center attacks and wanted to go to Afghanistan and "get the SOBs''?
"Pushing the envelope in juvenile delinquency"
Osama Bin Laden had urged his followers to hit banks. Is that why Charles Bishop went out and hit one? Is he really just a troubled kid? Doesn’t flying a plane into a skyscraper somewhat stretch the definition of adolescent "acting out?"
Why would an honor student bellowing out patriotic songs near the top of his lungs and telling teachers he aspires to join the Air Force leave a suicide note praising America’s Public Enemy No.1, Osama bin Laden?
Why would he tell his family that he didn't want his “enemies'' coming to his funeral, a request similar to one made in the last will and testament of suicide pilot Mohamed Atta?
Last Saturday, Charles Bishop crashed a plane into a building, leaving behind a suicide note professing admiration for Osama bin Laden.
Yet by Monday police were saying he wasn’t a terrorist…
On Tuesday, reporters began speculating—in a truly Orwellian double-speak touch, since anyone flying a plane into a building is the very picture of sincerity—on the sincerity of his note.
By Friday, he was being remembered in news stories as, of all things, an American patriot.
At his Saturday funeral, the reputation of this "polite, brilliant, compassionate kid" had been so redeemed (or twisted) that someone placed a stripe off one of his father's Air Force shirts in his casket.
Finally, on Sunday, Charles Bishop's metamorphosis was complete. Now the terrorist act he carried out was no longer even a specific case anymore, and Bishop was reduced to an icon, the poster child, one editorialist imagined, for "what might go down in history as "the terrorism generation."
Perhaps this week he’ll be nominated for a Nobel Prize.
With every important question in the case still-unanswered, the official version of events borders on satire; it is so ridiculous that it reads like a bad spy novel by E. Howard Hunt.
The official explanation for why Charles Bishop killed himself in such spectacular fashion is "suicide by zit."
His actions weren’t political.
They were hormonal.
"This particular kid fits an interesting profile that I think the Secret Service and the FBI have been investigating for some time now," said one ‘expert’ trotted out for a quote in a typical wire story. "Kids who have grown up with an inadequate sense of empathy," said Michael Peck, a Santa Monica psychologist who has specialized in suicides of youths.
"But he's only half-Sicilian."
Might there be a better explanation than this? Might this suppressed explanation offer glimpses of the real identities of some of the people and organizations responsible for murdering 4000 innocent civilians on September 11?
The first hint of trouble came from Katie Hughes, a Tampa police spokeswoman. She said Bishop's father, who they have been unable to contact since his son’s suicide, is of Syrian and Sicilian descent.
"Another mystery to be unraveled," read the Miami Herald. "Where is the boy's father?"
The mystery deepened… Reporters could not find the father of the dead kamikaze kid, but they tracked down his grandfather. Strangely, he didn't seem to know much about Bishara either..Never mind that he's his son. Robert Bishara said, apologetically, "I don't want to say anything that might be wrong."
Aren’t Mobsters noted for omerta–not talking to outsiders? Or is this instead just another example of the breakdown of the nuclear family?
"Heroin, sure. But nobody said 'trafficking.' Yet."
Press accounts referred to Bishara as a "small time crook" from Winchester, Massachusetts. They said that he began a string of mostly petty, occasionally alcohol-fueled crimes that made him familiar to the police in both Malden, and nearby Everett, where he lived.
He was cited for running a stop sign and driving without a license in 1985. Two years later, he was convicted of breaking into a restaurant two blocks from his father's house. The same year, he was convicted of possession of burglary tools and larceny.
He is currently wanted by authorities on heroin charges.
Bishara's list of encounters with the law must be a long one… We discovered this particularly colorful opportunity for Charles to get to know local law enforcement from 1987, that we haven't seen mentioned anywhere…
Turns out, Charles gets stabbed a lot.
First in an unsuccessful and by now famous suicide pact with the woman who is today the grief-stricken Mother, Janis Bishop. A sensitive soul she may be today, but sixteen years ago she plunged a 13-inch knife into poor Charles' liver.
"Just don't point the knife at my liver, okay?"
Just two years later Charles Bishara gets stabbed again.
Though current press reports haven't mentioned it, he was stabbed in the leg, arm, back and shoulder (thank god they missed his probably still-tender liver). His attacker was simultaneously shouting at his girlfriend, "Do you want to see me stab someone?"
Sounds like something right out of Raging Bull. How many other "incidents" like this might there be?
The reason this may be important is that there may be a little problem with the widely-disseminated police and FBI portrayal of Bishara as a small time crook running into minor spats with the law. If the authorities aren't lying to us–and when have we ever known them to do that?–then being a small-time crook must be paying really well in Boston these days.
Charlie's own little place in the sun
Wanted in Massachusetts on heroin charges, Charles Bishara, the MadCowMorningNews has learned, owns a penthouse condominium at the new Ritz-Carlton Golf Resort in Naples Florida, located just a hundred miles down 1-75 from the family he is reputed to have had no contact with for 15 years.
Penthouse condominiums sell for about a million dollars each, said Ritz Carlton sales representative Jeff DeAngelis. He vaguely remembered Charles Bishara purchasing a little over a year ago.
Bishara's million dollar get-away is behind the gates of the "Bolero" neighborhood, which is not as cheesy as it sounds because it sits on a Greg Norman-designed golf course.
It looks to be the very lap of luxury. Perhaps more trained observers in the FBI see something else.
Is half-Syrian and half-Sicilian Charles J Bishara just a small time crook? Or is he in reality some kind of Mob Boss? Take a look at his house: What do you think?
Could young Charles Bishop's violent act of terrorism have been an attempt to impress his absent Mobster Dad with his big cojones?
An even bigger question: why did Charles Bishop praise Osama? No one knows. Maybe he saw something. Or heard something. In America's current war, what might this help explain about the postures of the Sicilian Mafia and the Arab Christian clans of Lebanon from which Charles Bishara sprang–along with another Bishara, Sirhan Bishara Sirhan?
No information at press time on any relationship. But Sirhan worked at race tracks. Is the Mob big on the ponies?
"Only connect."
Could the secretiveness surrounding the entire Bishop/Bishara family be because Bishara is somehow implicated in the currently-controversial scandal involving Bishara's fellow Boston Mobster, Whitey Bulger?
Bulger, it appears, was "whacking" his rivals as well as various and sundry other citizens of Boston with something like impunity because of his "relationship" with the Boston FBI.
The case is made even more explosive by the startling action of President Bush last month. Bush invoked executive privilege. Bush blocked a congressional subpoena exploring abuses in the Boston FBI office after a Congressional committee began to investigate.
Reporters in Boston charge cover up!
Bush's party-mate Dan Burton was so incensed that he lambasted his fellow Republican in the Oval Office.
"You tell the president there's going to be war between the president and this committee," he told a Justice Department official during what was supposed to be a routine prehearing handshake.
Observers said Bush’s invoking executive privilege was triggering what one congressman called "the start of a constitutional confrontation."
"They're all on a motoring safari in Asia."
Could the reason authorities "can't find" Bishara be the same reason they "can't find" Whitey Bulger? Or Osama bin Laden?
Could they all be riding motorbikes across South Asia with Mullah Omar?
These speculations make at least as much sense as the laughable notion that what the citizens of Tampa were subjected to last weekend was acne-medication-induced terror.
Finally we come to the Curiosity of the Week: the case of Charles Bishop's nationality. According to UPI, Charles Bishop was "a British citizen, who did not have a license to fly."
A British citizen? All-American patriot Chuck? (Being born of at least one British parent inside the U.S. means that until he reached 18 he had both British and U.S. citizenship.)
"I say old chap, would you mind awfully giving us the money?"
His mother’s maiden name is deTore, which doesn’t sound English.
So it must be Charles’ Bishop’s father, Charles Bishara, who has the British passport. How many small-time thugs in Boston carry British passports? Probably not too many, right? Does America's Most Wanted Whitey Bulger have a British passport, too?
Someone familiar with Charlie Bishara's home, Winchester, Massachusetts, told us of the town's colorful history with the Mob. And he also told us something else about Winchester, which may shed some light on the Bishop/Bishara business, when we take up the case of Janis Bishop.
And one last item, one we have not even allowed ourselves to think about yet:
Charles Bishara's home in Naples Florida is just a short five-minute drive from flight school owner Rudi Dekkers' headquarters at the Naples Airport.
Of all places.
Small world.
What are the odds?
It must be admitted that Charles Bishara’s many brushes with the ‘wild side’ would be consistent with—fourteen years ago—a low-level career in the Mob.
From the size of Charlie's little getaway home in Naples, Mr. Bishara may have been moving up—just a little—since then.
NEXT: THE CURIOUS CASE OF JANIS BISHOP
