-Caveat Lector- an excerpt from: The Squad Michael Milan Rose Ann Levy and Shadow Lawn Press�1989 Shapolsky Publishers, Inc. 136 West 22nd Street New York, NY 1001 ISBN 0-944007-52-X 304 pps. � First edition --[1]� Introduction You can call me Michael Milan. Everybody else does, or something close to it. Milan's not my real name. Officially I have no real name-just the names they called me when they sent me out on jobs. Mike Milan was only one of them. It's the one well use in this story. I've used a hundred names on the job, none of them my own. The people who know me-the people that I once reported to even they didn't want to know my real name. They sent me orders with my serial number in the upper right-hand comer: 80762546. That number was a code, and it always meant that someone who I'd never met was supposed to die. By my hand. The people who gave me these assignments always referred to them as "foreclosing a loan," "delivering a package," or "terminating someone's employment." "Killing" was something the bad guys did. We were supposed to be the good guys. I wasn't the only person executing the contracts. I worked with others and they didn't have real names either. They only had their serial numbers and the names they picked up along the way. My story takes place over the span of forty years when I was a member of an undercover squad�J. Edgar Hoovers private Squad. It was a top-secret operations unit that did jobs so dirty even the other intelligence services were afraid of it. The Squad operated on the fly out of the Departments of Justice and Treasury from 1947 to 1971, and for all that time we were more rumor than fact. We were the boogey men that FBI recruits talked about when they were brought up from Virginia. We were the guys in the black fedoras and behind the sunglasses that made files disappear from locked offices between five in the evening and nine the next morning. The Squad itself no longer exists as a unit. It faded away as the Old Man was falling from power; it died when he died. This story is about the Squad and about the kinds of jobs the Squad specialized in: executions. The Squad was set up by Mr. Hoover personally. He recruited each one of us individually. He picked us out of the Families, out of the OSS, or out of local police forces. He figured us to be specially trained for undercover work because we came from the streets. His own agents, the guys who came out of law school, couldn't do what we did. Besides, the Old Man always said that he would never put regular FBI agents undercover because he was afraid they might get corrupted. We were different. He knew exactly what we were. He pulled us in one by one, told his bodyguards to leave the room, and made his decisions right on the spot. He either liked you or he didn't, but you knew where you stood. He looked us right in the eye, told us to stand up straight and keep our hands out of our pockets. And then he ordered up exactly what he wanted. He knew our backgrounds and he made sure that we knew that he knew. He pulled out these grey file folders and read from them right into our faces like he was reciting chapter and verse: names, AKAs, dates, warrants, convictions, dispositions, time served, warrants outstanding, cases still open. He put the round in the piece and the pieces in our hands. He was the best cop I ever knew. Mr. Hoover had decided that the courts of the United States did not properly administer justice the way he thought they should. Whether he was right or wrong is for history to say. Personally, I know he was right. All that matters now is that there were certain cases that never hit the courts. They never could hit the courts. Maybe the cases were too sensitive or Mr. Hoover felt that the courts would never dispense the justice he wanted. Many times, these were cases that involved national security or that couldn't be prosecuted because there was no evidence. In these cases the guilty people walked away. Mr. Hoover had a way to deal with that. He found ways to make the guilty parties disappear. He devised what could only be called an execution squad made up of no more than ten men at any one time, none of whom ever went to any FBI academy or took a civil-service exam. None of the men were supposed to be seen by regular FBI agents. He called us the Unknowns. We always worked in the background, finding the people the Bureau couldn't and turning them into John Does on hundreds of Medical Examiners' reports for over forty years. Some people we turned into informants�although I hate that word-who were used to pursue cases through regular channels. Sometimes we were there and gone before the regular Bureau agents ever got to the scene. We would do our work and plant the necessary evidence for the FBI to follow. How we got the evidence wasn't important, just so that it held up in court. If it didn't, we'd have to go back to work. Sometimes the regular agents never even got to the scene because there was nothing left for them to do. No blood, no bodies, no questions. People just disappeared. Loans were foreclosed. The packages�as ordered�were delivered. We rarely sat together at meetings. Most of the time we just got our orders directly from Mr. H. We never acted on our own. Mr. Hoover still believed injustice, even though some people might say this was no justice at all. For the ugliest and most difficult of cases, Mr. H. had a special routine. When he was satisfied and had consulted with those he trusted, he would sit down at a table by himself and eat his supper. Then afterwards, by the turning over of glasses, one by one, he would decide whether a man was to live or to die. This became a tradition over the years. We were a kind of necessary evil because our ways were evil. I don't apologize for that because we had to be worse than they were. As a member of the FBI execution squad, and of the OSS before that, I can say today that there was only one way to deal with the people who wanted to cross us and that was to be worse than them. If you ask me what I was�what I have to live with even today�I was a professional killer. I dealt with both sides, the government and the Families, but I didn't cross the line. Most people don't know that in those times when our country was threatened, the Family, La Familia, as we called it after World War II, or the "Good People," which is how they refer to themselves, put aside all their differences with Uncle Sam or even local authorities. In fact, and this is unknown to the government to this day, about twenty years ago when they sent me to find out who was killing migrant workers in California, a button man from the Family out of Chicago came along and assisted me. Mr. H. didn't want to know who assisted me. He didn't care. He was satisfied that the job he asked me to do got done and nobody asked any questions. That was the type of alliance J. Edgar Hoover had with the Families. The government had its ways of doing things and the Family had its ways. In the government offices, it's called "policy." Among the Good People, it's called "the right thing." And we all were taught that the Families' ways aren't the right ways, but even the Families did what was necessary to protect their country. When it comes down to it, we're all still Americans when somebody shoots at us. Whether that person wears a Swastika around his arm and carries a Mauser or smokes a thin cigar and carries an Uzi, he still threatens all of us. What we did on the Squad was right no matter what anyone says. We operated in our own way but we got the job done at a time when the free world was very vulnerable. History will show that we were necessary. If people who read this story want to sit in judgment of me or of the Squad, they should know that what happened in Germany and Europe, what happened in Eastern Europe after the World War, and what's happening today in Cambodia and Iran and other countries where dictators can put a whole population before a firing squad or in prison camps, can happen here. Do you think that before Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass, most Jews in Germany believed that a whole country would turn against them? They knew that the Nazis hated them, but the Jews considered themselves Germans. They owned businesses, they worked in the great banking houses of Europe, they taught in the universities, they fought for the Kaiser's army in the Great War, they had money and influence, and they had friends in the government. When Germany suffered, they suffered. They were as loyal to their country as Jews in America are to this country. And yet, on November 9,1938, their whole world turned against them. All of that can happen here. I've seen it happen again and again with -my own eyes. I was one of the earliest Department of Justice men ever ordered to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan. It was in 1953, and Mr. Hoover sent me down there himself as a deep cover operative because President Eisenhower couldn't afford to step on any Southern senators' toes by having an FBI investigation stirring up the dirty laundry in their states. What I saw, what I did, showed me that it was happening here. We eventually got our men inside the Klan, and eventually people like Martin Luther King, who was a hero and a patriot even though Mr. Hoover didn't like him personally, made sure that the whole world knew what was happening in the South. I saw the same events take place in California ten years years later when the farmers began executing the Mexican labor organizers. It was like the 1930s all over again, only this time the victims were Mexicans instead of American farmers from the Dust Bowl. The big farm owners hired motorcycle gangs to terrorize the workers and kill local police and sheriffs' officers. The gangs years later sociologists began calling them Satanic cults, but they were just a bunch of thugs who only understood violence and murder-bragged that they weren't afraid to die. We caught one of them and performed a "live autopsy" on him. That was our way. That was Mr. Hoover's way. We kept him alive during the autopsy so we could tape-record his screams. Then we sent him back to his friends along with the tape. The killings stopped. The gangs said they weren't afraid to die, but we taught them the way they were going to die if we caught them. Now it's happening all over again with the drug cartels and rival gangs of pushers that shoot kids on street corners. Some people say it's like the syndicates during Prohibition, but I know that it's not. I grew up on the Lower East Side during the Twenties and I worked the neighborhood crap games for Benny Siegel and Meyer Lansky. Meyer and Benny didn't murder women and children. Lucky Luciano didn't push narcotics in school yards and turn children into killers. Maybe they weren't heroes, but when FDR, J. Edgar Hoover, and Tom Dewey realized that the Nazis and Facists had spies all over the New York waterfront, they turned to Lansky, Luciano, and Frank Costello for help. And when the time came to send our boys into Sicily and behind the lines in Europe, General Donovan asked the Families to send their soldiers into the war. That was how the OSS worked, and it never stopped working that way even after it became the CIA. You can ask Fidel Castro about that because when the CIA needed some heat to put the hit on him, they turned to button men from the Families to do the job. You look around today and see that the drug syndicates run the cities. Your own kid can go to school one morning and come home in the afternoon with a vial of crack. And one week later he might be robbing money out of your wallet to pay some pusher. And that same pusher will take money from your kid and use it to hire a shooter to blow some rookie cop's brains all over the front seat of his police car. If Mr. Hoover was still alive and giving orders to the Squad none of this would be happening. History was on our side. Now I'm not so sure. If the Squad was working today as we used to, you would see many more dope dealers pushing up flowers instead of pushing crack. When we were a unit, law enforcement agencies all over the country owed us a great debt of gratitude, even though they didn't know it. We saved them the trouble of finding evidence that some million-dollar mouthpiece would get thrown the hell out of court. We saved them from watching while sniveling judges found technicalities to let sex fiends back out on the streets to cut open defenseless women in dark hallways. The Families needed the cops to keep the peace. When a cop was killed, we found the rat who did it and dealt with him in our own way. The cops didn't care. A dead rat is a dead rat no matter who kills him. Mr. Hoover understood that. That's why he sent the Squad in to the the dirty work. Maybe the truth is tough to swallow, but it's still the truth and it bears repeating so it will sink in. There was an execution squad. It was run personally by Mr. Hoover, who set it up without the official knowledge of the FBI. You won't find it anywhere in the records. There were no FBI agents on the Squad. All of us were handpicked individually without the knowledge of anyone else in the Bureau, although through the years, I have come to realize that there were people in the FBI who knew what we were even if they didn't know who we were. If you ask me, I would say look around and you'll see that right now that the FBI execution squad is still needed because there are people and organizations actively working to take away our freedoms. They use drugs to trap our children and turn them into addicts. They are the South American generals who use our fear of Communism to bribe us with phony intelligence so that they can bring drugs into our country. They were the Asian drug importers who blackmailed us with our past deeds because they believed that the American justice system was as corrupt as theirs. I admit that we played into their hands at first. We turned our backs while we let them bring heroin into our cities. We thought we needed them, and maybe at the time we did. But now we know what they are and what they did. And even if it seems as if our regular law enforcement system is going to be overwhelmed in this new war we are fighting, I can assure you that it won't. I believe that somewhere there are people who still remember the Squad, although it's been dormant for almost twenty years. It still exists in the minds of the people who knew what it did. These few people who remember may be very old now, but they have friends and associates. If you read somewhere that a drug dealer has simply disappeared or that a former Nazi war criminal is gone from his house one morning, the chances were that he had learned the painful truth about the Squad. If a cop killer turned himself in at the local police station because he was more afraid of what would happen to him if he didn't than of going to jail for life, maybe he learned the hard way what you're only reading about. I admit that our way wasn't the legal way. But Mr. Hoover told us-and we believed him-that the legal way wasn't always the best way. I'm old now and the years have taken their toll. You can't kill people, one after the other, year after year, the way I've done and not hear the screams or see the faces in your dreams. I'll wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat and hear the click of a hammer in the darkness or the pop of a gunshot through a silencer coming at me out of a nightmare. I tell myself over and over again that I did the right thing. When I have to justify it to myself in the hours before dawn when nobody else in the house is awake, I say that Michael Milan was a professional killer who, with other professional killers and upon the orders and the express approval of the head of the FBI, the chief law enforcement officer in the federal government, defended his country. Maybe Michael Milan is an anachronism, a man after his time right now. But he was very much a man of his time when we started. And so were all the members of the Squad. What we did was good, even though we used the ways of evil. I don't ask anyone to forgive me or the Squad. But I believe that we were in our own way directly responsible for whatever good life Americans lead today. You may not like to hear that, but it's true. Years ago, I told parts of this story to Steve Kendell, a writerproducer in Hollywood. He called it a piece of American history that must be told and asked me to write a book about it. But at that time, there were too many members of the Squad and people from the OSS still alive. I finally began writing my story a few years ago because I believe that Kendell was right, but I put it in my desk drawer and locked it up. Now Bill Casey, one of the last of all the agents in the special group of the OSS, is dead. General "Wild Bill" Donovan, the man who ran the OSS and who I worked for personally, died years ago; Lyndon Johnson, who played a part in this story, is dead, and, of course, the Old Man has been gone for about seventeen years. And on the other side of the line, it's the same thing. Mr. "F.C.," Frank Costello, who knew Hoover well and worked with him on many occasions, is dead. Meyer Lansky, who I worked for and who played a major role in helping to win the World War, died about ten years ago. It's now OK to tell the story. I've still played it safe by changing the names of the ordinary people who are still alive. I used the real names for people like Mr. Hoover, Mr. Costello, Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, Sam Koenig, and Tommy Ryan. They're all public people and a lot has been written about them already. I also used the real names of Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford. I worked for all of them and even helped keep President Ford alive so I might as well use their real names. But other names, names like Johnny Santos, who has hung onto life for all these years; Gerard Brinkman, whose family is still in Texas; Augie Russo, who I think might still live in the old neighborhood; the Rosario brothers and "Four Eyes" Littman, who couldn't be satisfied with the money they were getting and had to grab for more, are not real names. These people are real-the names are not. I should begin by telling you about myself so that this story makes some sense. First of all, I'm Jewish. I was born on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1924. All I heard about when I was growing up was that the Jews all over Europe were getting beaten up and killed. Why didn't they fight back, we asked ourselves? Kill a few of them. Kill all of them. Even as a kid you get to thinking it's me against them, and the only way to stay alive is to be meaner, tougher, and faster than everybody else. I never lost that attitude even though it got me into as many scrapes as it got me out of. Because I was a Jew, it also meant that I could never be a made member of the Family even though I did Family business. That's important because the story I'm telling is about a guy who has to walk along a tightrope between the dons on the one side and the federal government on the other without compromising either side's information. If I was a made man or a sworn police officer, I couldn't have done it without winding up stashed into the back of a car trunk with my head stuffed down into the middle of my intestines. But I was neither and that's what kept them guessing and me alive. I didn't understand all of that when I was a kid, but I followed the rules that Mr. Costello and Mr. Hoover laid down. When I got older and couldn't scrub the blood I'd spilled off my hands anymore, only then did I understand how dangerous the game had been. I had learned that neither side ever really trusted the other, but they worked together so that each could do its own business. The Families want to keep on making money from things the government should allow them to do but is too stupid to figure out. The cops, who are more afraid of nuts than of crooks, just want to stay alive. When I understood that, I knew I should've been scared more times than I was. The Lower East Side was a pretty rough neighborhood when I was growing up, and you learned when you were very young to use your hands to defend yourself or you didn't go out of your house much. I was getting into fights with other kids as early as I can remember. Maybe I had a chip on my shoulder, I don't know. I do know that I got a lot of bloody noses and black eyes from kids much bigger than -myself, but I gave them as good as they gave me. My father finally told me, "If you like to fight so much, get into the ring." So I did. I boxed amateur over at Grand Street when I was twelve and won my weight division. When I went into the Navy, which was where the OSS put me, I won the U.S. Navy welterweight championship. I had to knock out three palookas in the same night to do that. Maybe I took to fighting too easily. Maybe people would say that Mike Milan used his hands too much. But when you're a kid and you splatter somebody's nose, you figure, what the hell, it'll grow back. When you fight a guy in the ring, It's business as well as blood. He's in there for the same reason you are, and after the two of you slug it out until you can't stand up anymore, you understand you've been through the same thing together. You both faced your fears and tried to beat the other guy's brains out to make the fear stop eating at you. At the end of it, you and him wind up being pals for life. I also didn't take seriously the time in the drunk tank down at the Williamsburg Police precinct when I cut open a singing canary's belly for the Lucchese Family. I was a pug with a nasty attitude back then. I could use my hands and I wasn't afraid of spilling blood. After the hit, I acted like a real tough guy about it. I'd made my bones. I was in it as deep as any of Tommy Lucchese's button men and I felt like a big shot. I got my start in the rackets early by running the skim for Meyer Lansky and Benny Siegel off the local crap games. It was Mr. Lansky who bankrolled my first fight even though it didn't make my father too happy. But what could he say? Mr. Lansky was one of his biggest customers at the clothing store. I learned pretty quick from Meyer Lansky that the secret to doing business was making the right connections and keeping your word. If you said you were going to do something, you did it and you took the rap for it if things didn't go right. That was called being "stand-up." If the other guy fucked you, then you fucked him. Only you fucked him worse. That's called being smart. But just going around fucking everybody is not how to do business. Mr. Lansky taught me that you had to reach accommodations with people. You had sitdowns and worked out your differences. If money had to change hands, then so much the better because most people will do anything for money. Mr. Lansky had away of figuring out what the other guy really wanted out of a deal-he liked to say if you could make the other guy think he was getting what he wanted, then you could take anything for yourself. Whenever he came to a sitdown, Mr. Lansky always had his percentage figured out in advance. He kept it all in his head, too. "Never put anything on paper, "he said to me once. "That way they never know what you got." Now that he's dead, I'm putting it on paper. After all these years, the truth about the Squad can be told because Mr. Lansky, Mr. Costello, and Mr. Hoover were all heroes in their own ways. I don't claim to be a hero. I only claim to have walked with heroes. I already told you that I made my bones in the Lucchese family in 1944 just before I went into the Navy. They were holding this rat in the drunk tank down at the old Lower East Side precinct house beneath the Williamsburg Bridge. We always called it the Williamsburg Precinct. The cops tossed me into the lockup with the rest of the drunks, slapped me around a little just to make it all look like it was on the up-and-up, slipped a knife into my pocket, and then disappeared. I pulled out this flask of booze that was really one of the most powerful Mickies you ever saw and passed it around. It worked fast. It had to because Mr. Lucchese and some of his associates dropped into see how I did the job. I woke the rat up first, so he would know what he was getting. When he saw Lucchese staring at him through the bars, he pissed down his leg. Then I cut him. They let me out of the lockup, packed me into a car, and we ditched the knife in the East River. The drunks slept through the whole thing. It was the same story during the war when I had to rub out people for Captain Roscoe McCall. I'd make the hit and walk away like I hadn't really been there in the first place. But after I went down to Atlanta for Mr. Hoover to turn up informants who'd testify against the Ku Klux Man, I saw a different kind of fighting. I met up with lugs who hated people in the same way the Nazis did. These were Americans, people who's parents had come over on the boat just like mine did, but people who would look at a black or a Jew and say, "You don't have a right to be alive." It makes you sick inside to see how deep-down ugly people can be. Mr. Hoover wanted me to get an informant from the Man who would turn state's evidence against his buddies. I had to join them, fight alongside them, carry a baseball bat and bust windows in little wooden Baptist churches and unprotected synagogues. I had to beat up a rabbi. Atlanta changed me. It made me see things in a different way. For the first time, I understood that innocent people could be hurt. For the first time I saw how weak and defenseless people really were on the inside, even the biggest and toughest of them. After Atlanta, I could feel pain in myself and others, and hitting people was no longer a street pug's game. I've worked as a fight manager and promoter. I used to put together exhibition cards for local arenas and match up some of the old timers with kids trying to break in. I can tell you a lot about the prize-fight racket, but that's not what this book is about. I've also been a car dealer, selling limos to the foreign embassies. That was my cover for the Squad and what helped to pay my bills. Whenever Mr. H. asked me, I could recite to him which country's UN mission bought what car and where he could find it parked if he wanted to plant a bug on it. Sometimes we even put the bugs on right in the shop. Free-of-charge, compliments of the Squad. There was a time when I really needed the dough to start a family, and selling cars was the only steady work I had. The most lucrative work I had was as a kind of private investigator for the boys high up in the Fortune 500s who wanted jobs done but couldn't get the police to do them on the up-and-up. I can't mention their names or talk about them much in this story because most of them are still alive and don't like it when people talk about them out of school. But I can tell you this: put aside your fairy tales when you read the financial pages. The real news never hits the Wall Street Journal. You'll read about some of it in this story. Here's the main thing you should know about me: I always wanted to be an actor like Jimmy Cagney. I had the looks, I had the attitude, and I could think on my feet. I used my wits to figure out what I had to do to get through any situation, and I knew I had the talent because I could act out the part. I could pretend to be brave when my knees were shaking; pretend I wanted some girl to like me when I only wanted to get some information out of her; pretend I was a homicide dick when I was really going over the police intelligence files to make secret bits for Mr. Hoover. Lots of guys stood away from me because they thought I was tougher and meaner than I actually was. It was always a performance. Acting helped me get what I wanted when I was a kid, and it saved my life when I worked on the Squad. I wanted to go to Hollywood and be in the movies. I had the chance, too, but Mr. Hoover put the kaybosh on it. Jack Warner himself said to me, "Mike, stay out here and work on the lot. You'll make it. I can always pick �em." Mr. Hoover must have felt that he couldn't cut me loose. He said, "Mike, this is not for you," and that was that. He called Mr. Warner and I was back selling cars in Brooklyn. I don't squawk about it anymore. I acted for real just to stay alive. So when you read in this story where I can handle myself pretty good, you should not think I'm just bragging or that I'm Superman. I learned what to do on the streets. I'm a prize fighter. I know how to hit somebody the right way so that every punch hurts. I was fast on my feet in those days and I was a body puncher. I could bring down guys who were much bigger than me because while they were swinging roundhouse punches at my head, I was ducking and putting everything I had behind uppercuts right under their rib cages. If you think that won't take the breath out of somebody fast then you've never felt a good body shot. Besides, if you know how to throw a jab the right way, you can break somebody's nose and have him seeing stars before he even sees you move. I'll start my story at Mitchell Field out on Long Island. It's an old military base where I've been going these past few years to work out at the gym, punch the bag, and shoot baskets. But the story really began many years ago on the Lower East Side, during the time of the Great Depression when I was twelve and made a bet with Meyer Lansky on a Yankee game. I won a buck off Meyer that day, but he shoved a twensky in my pocket. I wanted that twensky. Who wouldn't? Money meant everything during the Depression. But I handed it right back to Mr. Lansky and bought his respect with his own money. I figured that it was smarter to impress the most important man in the neighborhood than to pocket a twensky. The money would soon be gone, but first impressions can last forever. By impressing Mr. Lansky, I caught the attention of Sam Koenig, the local ward leader. Mr. Lansky and Mr. Koenig walked together. Between them they shared great power. I know they picked me out of the gang when I was only a kid. It wasn't because of who I was but what I did. I knew who Mr. Lansky was, even though I pretended to my papa that I didn't, and I showed him I wouldn't grab for the short money. That told Meyer Lansky that here was another person who, like him, could figure out a percentage and give up the short odds to play the long ones. I have stayed alive for all these years in the Families and on the Squad by playing by that same rule. Many years after that day, just before Sam Koenig died, he cried in my arms. He was only a skeleton clinging to the tail edge of his life. His gaunt, dying man's head was propped up on the pillow�yellow skin against white cotton�his mouth was wide open and gasping for air. He told me how he had offered my name to the Lucchese Family. He had offered my name to the officers in the OSS who needed triggermen to work military bases on the East Coast. He told me how he had gone to Frank Costello after the War and asked him to extend his protection and friendship to me. And he told me about Mr. Hoover and how he had intervened with the Old Man on my behalf. With his own honor at stake he had put my name forward. He asked me, "Was it wrong, Mendel, for me to have played God with your life?" I told him that I was the wrong person to ask. Now I look at the end of my years and I want to ask the same question about the lives of others. Maybe Sam Koenig will tell me the answer when I see him again. But I'm getting ahead of myself. My story will probably shock you. I haven't pulled any punches except for changing some of the names as you already know. But, I'm telling the story as it was and why it was. You and history can be my judges. If you ask me whether I killed people, I would say yes. If you asked me how many, I would say more than I can even remember. If you ask me whether I killed anybody in the name of the Squad without express orders from the top, I would say that after I made my bones, only one. Even then I received my orders to kill him after the fact. That was just to make it right with the Old Man who gave me his judgment before he died. What I did for the other side, for the Families? That doesn't matter. This story isn't about the Families�it's about the Squad. And, besides, nobody ever got nothing from the Families that they weren't supposed to get. That's all I'm going to say about that. What matters is that I never crossed the line. The line was there-both sides knew it was there-both sides respected it. What we did was for our country, and that stands above all lines. I figure it this way: God knew what we were doing. He let us attend to His business in our own way while He looked in the other direction. Now, in my sleep I see the faces of those who's hands I've taken and held. I see the faces of people who's hands I still want to take, but know now that I never will. I now accept one thing I couldn't understand when I started: each person's life has a weight, no matter how small. When you take that life, you take that weight upon yourself. You alter your balance sheet in the Book of Life. That's what Cain learned when he took the life of Abel, his brother. That's what I learned too late. I have to settle my accounts now. God will settle up His accounts with me soon enough. pps. 1-14 --[cont]-- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance�not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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