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.