At least four months before the FBI says he first arrived in this country, terrorist ringleader Mohamed Atta was living with (and physically abusing) an American girlfriend at an apartment they shared across from the Venice Airport.
According to numerous eyewitnesses, including their next door neighbor and the apartment manager, Atta lived with a girl named Amanda Keller during March and early April of 2000, four months before the FBI says he first entered the U.S.
The two shared an apartment located directly across the street from the Venice Airport at the Sandpiper Apartments, a drab two-story stucco building which was the American home of dozens of foreign pilot trainees from Huffman Aviation and the Florida Flight Training Academy, the two Dutch-owned flight schools that trained three of the four terrorist pilots.
During her year-long sojourn in Venice Amanda Keller was a willowy 20-year old bleached-blond, who met Atta at a bar at the airport, the 44th Aero Squadron), was an out-call 'lingerie model' for an escort service called Fantasies & Lace in nearby Sarasota, not far from Cheetah's, a nearby strip club Atta is known to have frequented .
Another 'disappeared' witness
While Amanda Keller’s present whereabouts are a mystery, what is clear is that the FBI has been inordinately eager to suppress the story of her and Atta’s dalliance… so eager that agents from the Bureau have engaged in a regular and systematic pattern of intimidation of eyewitnesses to the affair.
"The question they asked was always the same," says Stephanie Frederickson, who lived next door to the couple: "You aren’t saying anything to anybody, are you?"
For six months after the Sept 11 attack, Frederickson says she received weekly visits from agents from the FBI’s Sarasota office.
"At first, right after the attack, they told me I must have been mistaken in my identification. Or they would insinuate that I was lying. Finally they stopped trying to get me to change my story, and just stopped by once a week to make sure I hadn’t been talking to anyone. Who was I going to tell?"
She shrugs. "Most everyone around here already knew."
"All the news that's ripped from print."
Curiously, Frederickson says that a New York Times reporter to whom she told the story also accused her of making it up, and urged her to stop talking about it.
What makes this especially strange is that the N.Y. Times reporter need only have read early wire service reports in the days after the attack to learn that the story about Atta’s American girlfriend had already been confirmed by numerous witnesses, even including Amanda Keller herself as well as her mother and the apartment managers where the duo co-habitated.
"Charles Grapentine, the manager of Sandpiper Apartments on Airport Avenue in Venice, said he remembers seeing Atta at the complex for about three weeks in April," read a Sept 15 AP story. " He said Atta was living in the apartment of Amanda Keller."
"In a telephone interview late Friday, Keller said she met Atta through a friend and let him stay in the apartment with her and her then-boyfriend, Garrett Metts, because she felt sorry for him. She said authorities told her not to say anything at all about Atta," the story continued.
"I can't really discuss anything," she said. "I'm afraid I'll get in trouble."
"Real Americans won't be silenced."
Now the duo's next-door neighbor, a 50-year old housewife named Stephanie Frederickson, has stepped forward to testify about the affair, as well as the FBI harassment that has—so far— been successful in preventing the story from surfacing.
"Amanda moved in next door first, saying she had come from Orange Park (near Jacksonville," Frederickson says. "Then one day in the middle of March (of 2000) she brought home Atta.
‘I’d like you to meet my friend Mohamed Atta,’ she said to me. ‘He’s from France.’"
"Later when I saw her alone I asked her if she realized that Mohamed Atta wasn’t really a French name, and he was definitely not French. She looked at me like I was nuts. I didn’t know if she really believed he was French or not, but it was clear to me that he wasn't."
The relationship was troubled. While Atta's cheesy taste for infidel flesh is well-known, he apparently balked at sharing it with others.
Blows Against the Empire?
"There were a couple of time he beat her up that I know about," Frederickson says, "mostly over the slutty way she dressed to go to meet her escort service clients. Her hair was always done up in a half dozen funky colors and she always dressed…well, like a hooker."
Frederickson said that Fantasies & Lace would send a car and driver to get Keller. "And I would hear the driver and Atta arguing out on the balcony. Atta didn’t want her to leave."
"The third time he beat her up she put him out," states Frederickson. "She threw his two suitcases, and a blue Gold’s gym bag which he always carried around with him, over the balcony railing onto the driveway in front of the apartments and called a cab to come get him."
Frederickson was glad to see Atta leave. "He was a really nasty guy," she says. "He had no patience, and seemed mad at the world. One day I remember, it was raining out, and I left the apartment house at the same time he was leaving. He didn’t have a car then, so I offered him a ride."
"He got furious at me. ‘You do not speak to me unless I speak to you first!" he shouted.
"‘Hey bub, you’re in America,' I told him.’
"American women are bitches,’ he told me. I told him the least he could do was thank me for offering him a ride."
What was the attraction between Atta and Amanda Keller?
"Atta and his crew were always flush with lots and lots of money," she says. "These guys were really party animals."
Although they may have been well off, their living accommodations didn’t reflect it.
"I lived next door to Amanda and Atta on the second floor, but then moved downstairs to my father’s apartment to help him, because he had had surgery and couldn’t climb stairs any longer," says Frederickson.
"So Atta’s pals took my old apartment. One time I stuck my head in, and there were at least eight of them living in a small two-bedroom place, with sleeping bags spread out everywhere."
Paging the National Enquirer
Our week-long search for Amanda Keller has failed to locate her current whereabouts. And its raised more questions than it's answered. Questions like:
Why are you reading about it first in the MadCowMorningNews?
A girl who makes her living as a "lingerie model," like Keller, certainly could use the couple hundred thousand the tabloids would seem eager to pay to run a story titled "Terrorist's Girlfriend Bares All!"
So why hasn't she? Is something preventing her? Is she even still alive?
Last Sunday’s Associated Press headline about the approaching 1-year anniversary of the 9/11 attack read: "A year later, the 19 hijackers are still a tangle of mystery and contradiction."
Maybe now we're learning why.
NEXT: THE COMPANY HE KEPT: ATTILA THE HUN, SID, & SARAH THE PHARMACIST.
