Empire of Lies

  "But only three short months after school began," Patrick Piersall intoned, "Casey's dreams—and his life—began to unravel."

  Cut to commercials. But hey, this was a recording—no need to watch that crap now. I pressed the fast forward button on the remote. Ads for laundry detergent, more of those erection pills, and an extremely fast automobile of some sort raced past in a single blur: Take-your-hard-on-for-a-drive-in-whites-that-are-really-white! Then the story of Casey Diggs continued.

  Casey arrived at school in Manhattan. He applied for a position at the student newspaper, the Clarion. He was told that, because he was a freshman, he would have to prove himself as a stringer before being taken on staff. His first opportunity: a demonstration near the campus, students calling for the university to remove all its investments from Israel.

  "What he saw at that demonstration," said Patrick Piersall, "changed his life."

  Music. Angry faces. Signs with slogans. A banner: STUDENTS FOR JUSTICE.

  They were a strange coalition, these Students for Justice: on the one hand, radical leftists who believed in atheistic socialism, multiculturalism, and gender neutrality; on the other, radical Muslims who believed in theocracy, sharia law, and bagging their women in burqas. You wouldn't think they could agree on anything, would you? Well, you'd be wrong. They were together in this at least: They hated the Jews. Oh, and they hated America, too. Oh, yeah, and they were absolutely certain the one secretly controlled the other.

  Here was Students for Justice Vice President Ahmed Ali during the demonstration, standing at the podium, hammering his fist against the air. There was his recorded voice accompanying the photo, and the sound of the cheering crowd. "Israel is the source of all the violence in the Middle East. How could there be violence in Islam if it weren't for the Zionists? Islam means peace!"

  And here, too, was assistant English Professor Willis Freed-good at the same podium. "Look at the names in the present U.S. administration. Look at the Weintraubs and the Weinbergs and the Schwartzes. It's pretty clear who is forcing America to support the Zionist entity!" More cheering. Protest signs waving in air.

  Cut to Casey's roommate, Brent Withers. Kind of a stick insect of a guy with an adenoidal voice. He spoke carefully. "As far as I know, as far as Casey told me, he didn't write his story with a political agenda or anything. At that point, I think he just wanted to make sure to get his facts straight, you know. He wanted to impress the editor so he could get a job on the newspaper."

  So Casey wrote his story. He reported the speeches: Ali's and Freedgood's and several others by students and faculty both. And then he reported what happened to Vanessa Gerston.

  Vanessa Gerston was a nineteen-year-old student passing by the demonstration on her way to class. She heard Freedgood's speech. She was shocked. She surprised herself by shouting at him, "But that's just bigotry! That's just anti-Semitism!"

  Here was the girl herself on True Crime America, describing what happened next.

  "As soon as I started shouting, I was suddenly surrounded by maybe five or six guys," she said. She was a plain, dark, fat-faced young woman with curly black hair. "They came in really close to me. They backed me up against this wall. And they started screaming right in my face. I was literally terrified."

  "What did they scream at you?" asked Patrick Piersall, his flushed, desiccated features pressing in toward her.

  "They called me a Jewish bitch. And they said—" Vanessa hesitated. Her lower lip trembled as her eyes filled. "They said I was a Jewish whore who should be raped so I could be taught a lesson." She fought down the tremor. She tried to laugh it off. "Which is almost funny, you know? Because I'm Episcopalian."

  "Did you report this to the police?" Patrick Piersall asked her.

  "There were two policemen standing right there!" Vanessa shot back. "I said to them, 'Aren't you going to do anything?' They told me, 'We don't want this to get out of hand.' That's what they said. Those were their exact words. But then they kind of looked at each other, and they sort of cleared a way for me. I just ran out of there as fast as I could."

  Casey reported all this. He quoted the speeches word for word. He described the assault on the coed start to finish. The story ran on page three of the Clarion the next day. There was the issue now, flashed up on the screen with words circled in the text: MUSLIMS. SOCIALISTS. JEWS.

  The reaction on campus was swift and violent. A montage:

  Newspaper boxes smashed.

  Newspapers burning in wastebaskets with angry students gathered around.

  Protesters outside the Clarion's office. Raised fists, bared teeth, angry signs:

  RACISM!

  ISLAMO-PHOBIA!

  FASCIST PIGS!

  WE WILL NOT BE SILENCED BY NAZI CLARION.

  Professor Freedgood accused the Clarion of violating the university's code forbidding hate speech against minorities—Muslims, in this case. Multiculturalists throughout the various humanities departments accused the paper of misrepresenting the understandable rage of the oppressed Palestinian people. Leftists—who made up 85 percent of the faculty—simply called the story "reactionary."

  So far, this was all contained within the university. It wasn't reported in the local media. There was nothing on TV about it. Nothing in the papers. But then...

  Ah, then, Arthur Rashid issued a statement to the press.

  Now Rashid, of course, was a star in the intellectual world. Among his fellow academics, he was considered a great man. A hugely popular professor of multicultural studies, he was credited with formulating the very concept of multiculturalism in his best-selling book, Eastern Mind, Western Eyes. He was also a frequent contributor to the Times's op-ed page. The Times Sunday Book Review loved everything he wrote.

  Here was his photo: a handsome, elegant-looking fellow with a Middle Easterner's olive skin and an Englishman's classic, chiseled features. His statement appeared over his face and Patrick Piersall read the words: "It is the nature of culture that it directs our words and actions even when we are not aware of its influence. I fully trust and believe that Mr. Diggs and the Clarion editors did not intend their story as an offshoot of the West's imperialist project. But equally, from my perspective, from the perspective of anyone with roots in the Middle East, how else can it be read? When any protest against Israeli actions is deemed anti-Semitic, when any attempt to give voice to the West's former colonies is cast in an ugly light, what is it but an attempt to reconquer intellectually what has been lost militarily, to crush the fragile identities of these reemergent peoples under the so-called 'civilizing' worldview of the West? I invite Mr. Diggs and his collaborators to a dialogue in the hopes of raising their awareness of the sources of their Islamo-phobic assumptions."

  Well, that did it. Now the Times weighed in, too.

  "A story in a school newspaper that was deemed offensive by some students of Middle Eastern descent has been denounced by one of the university's most famous professors."

  It was typical Times stuff, as I now have reason to know. There were no quotes from Diggs's article. Nothing about the anti-Jewish tirades at the demonstration. Nothing about the nineteen-year-old girl terrorized and insulted and threatened with rape. They just described the Clarion piece as "controversial," and ran a lot of patient, conciliatory, reasonable-sounding quotes from their man Rashid. The overall effect was to make the reader assume that Casey Diggs must be some kind of hothead white supremacist.

  It was only a small piece on page 3 of the Metro section, but it was enough to move the university to action.

  Casey Diggs and his editor, Miriam Bach, were both called before the dean. Ms. Bach, a frog-faced woman with a Prince Valiant haircut, apologized at once. "I ran the story without reading it carefully enough," she told Patrick Piersall. "I didn't see how insensitive it was, and I have to take responsibility for that." She escaped punishment by printing a front-page apology. She also agreed to have the Clarion run a series of stories "celebrating the diverse cultures that make up
our university." The articles included "Chador—A Source of Pride for Muslim Women" and "The Faithful Find Commercialism, Materialism Mar a Secular World."

  Casey Diggs, however, did not get off so easily.

  "Casey refused to apologize for telling the truth and so he was put on six months' academic probation," Piersall explained, standing before the university's bronze gates. "He was also barred from working on the paper ever again. From that point on, his life went into a downward spiral that would end ... in mystery."

  I zipped through the next batch of commercials: lower-your-cholesterol-while-eating-Cheese-Spray-on-your-crackers-and-watching-back-to-back-reruns-of-Truth-and-Justice-every-week-night. Back to the show.

  Interviews. The stick-insect roommate again. Casey's disapproving older sister. His tearful mother. His square-jawed dad. All said the same: Casey changed after he was barred from the newspaper. He began drinking heavily. He frequently missed classes.

  And he became obsessed with taking vengeance on Arthur Rashid.

  Danger Music. A Tragic Chord. Rapid shots of the headlines on a Web site Casey founded, The Diggs Memo:

  RASHID'S BOOK: INSIDIOUS ANTI-AMERICAN PROPAGANDA.

  RASHID: FREEDOM, BEAUTY AND REASON A WESTERN PLOT AGAINST "THE OTHER"

  RASHID: PALESTINIAN ATROCITIES "JUSTIFIED."

  Casey received hate mail calling him a racist. Hackers brought the Web site down more than once. Students for Justice called for his expulsion.

  "The university warned Casey that his Web site violated campus speech codes," Piersall told us, "but for a time they took no other action. Soon, however, the nature of Casey's accusations against Rashid changed dramatically."

  More shots of the Web site:

  RASHID HAS LINKS TO TERRORIST GROUP

  GROUP CALLED "UNIVERSAL SHARIA LAW" PLANS ATTACK ON NEW YORK

  SOURCES: RASHID CONTROLS USL KILLERS

  "In calling Rashid a terrorist," Piersall intoned, "Casey had gone too far."

  The university asked Casey to leave. There was the dean's letter to his parents: "We strongly suggest that this troubled young man be convinced to seek psychiatric care."

  Now here was Piersall, back on camera, his tubby torso and dissolute features filling the wall across from me. "With his dreams in ashes, Casey's descent into alcoholism and paranoia continued. He became a shadow of his former self, drifting from place to place, relationship to relationship, bar to bar until one day ... he just wasn't there at all."

  Final commercial break: beer-will-get-you-laid-pills-will-help-you-sleep-and-you-can-wake-up-to-some-really-scrumptious-potato-chips.

  During which, I was thinking: This isn't right. I must be getting drunk and crazy here. This can't be the same guy—the guy Serena was talking about. It can't be. I mean, if he is—if he's the guy Serena danced with—if he really was murdered in the Great Swamp—then that might mean that all these paranoid things he said about Rashid might not've been paranoid at...

  But then the show started again.

  The rest of the story was quickly told.

  Here was Brad Faulkner, a law student and party guy. Casey stayed with him for a month after he was expelled. "Dude was seriously putting it away. I'm talking martinis before lunch. Clubbing every night. Dumping major E. Some days, three in the morning, he'd be sitting here on the sofa going on and on at me about how this Rashid guy was running some massive conspiracy to blow up New York. After a while I was, like, 'Dude, let him blow it up already, I gotta get some sleep.'"

  FBI Special Agent Mark Sarkell: "We had several contacts from Mr. Diggs, and our investigators listened to his scenario very carefully. But after thoroughly checking the facts we were satisfied there was no credible substance to his accusations. We have no reason to believe that Mr. Rashid is a terrorist."

  Casey's tearful mother: "He called me that last day. He said he didn't think he could take it anymore. He said no one believed him and the city was going to be blown up, and he couldn't stand to just sit by and watch it happen."

  That was the last anyone ever heard of Casey Diggs. By then, he was living alone in a run-down railroad flat on the Lower East Side. No one saw him go out that last night. No one knew until almost a week later that he had not returned. In fact, it wasn't entirely certain what date he actually disappeared. When his mother finally called the landlord and asked him to check the apartment, there was nothing there but a fold-out futon, a table, a chair, and some milk gone bad. Even Casey's laptop computer was, like Casey himself, nowhere to be found.

  More interviews. A glamour-puss private-detective lady hired by Casey's parents: "My own theory is that Casey was suffering from the beginnings of schizophrenia. He's probably living on the streets somewhere now. Worst case: Maybe he committed suicide and his body hasn't been found yet. But I still have hope."

  That seemed to be the consensus. The cops, the feds, even Casey's parents seemed to believe their son had gone mad and was wandering homeless somewhere. There was only one dissenter from that point of view, in fact: the stick-insect roommate, Brent Withers.

  "I think we can all agree that Casey was out of control," he told us. "He was abusing any number of substances. Acting in an erratic, irrational way. But it wasn't my impression he was delusional or anything like that. I'm not a doctor, but he didn't seem that way to me."

  "You think he might've been telling the truth?" This was Patrick Piersall's voice coming from offscreen. "You think there might've actually been some kind of conspiracy?"

  There was a long silence, and Withers's eyes closed and opened once in slow motion. Then he lifted his hands from his lap and let them slowly, slowly sink down again. "I wouldn't say that. I wouldn't want to say that."

  Then there was Piersall for the finale, walking toward us again down that same street in Anytown True Crime USA. He came right up to the camera this time, right into our living rooms practically, his veiny nose practically protruding from the screen. His right eyebrow was jacked to the max. His syncopated delivery was amped to the point where every phrase was delivered like a punch to the head.

  "Is. Casey Diggs. Still alive? Did he. Commit suicide? Run away? Or. Is there. A darker possibility? Is it possible that this troubled young man—uncovered—a conspiracy of terror? That the—threat—that everyone claimed he imagined—was, in fact, real? Is it possible—that Casey Diggs's—paranoia—wasn't—paranoia at all? And that his—attempts—to expose a—deadly—plot against the city of New York—finally—brought vengeance down—upon his own head?"

  Good questions, I thought, stretching my eye sockets, trying to clear the wine out of my brain. They were damn good questions. I mean, weren't they? I mean, if Casey Diggs really was Serena's mystery man, wasn't it at least possible that her story was true? And if her story was true, wasn't it possible that Diggs was murdered out in the Great Swamp because of what he found out about this Professor Rashid?

  A phone number came up on the screen.

  "If you have any information concerning the whereabouts of Casey Diggs—call this toll-free number," said Patrick Piersall. "Police investigators are standing by. Your call is completely confidential."

  Without thinking, I sat up straight and swept my phone off the coffee table. I called the number on the screen. Instantly, I heard a busy signal. Boop boop boop. It happened so fast, it sounded as if the line had been disconnected. I tried again. Got the busy signal again. Right away: Boop boop boop.

  I ended the call. I set the phone back down on the table. I considered it there. Did I even want to do this? I wondered. Did I want to call these people? Set the police on Serena? Set the media on her? Just because Casey Diggs reminded me of the guy in a story she told me that probably wasn't even true in the first place? I mean, sure, if there really was a terrorist plot ... If there'd really been a murder ... If Diggs really was the right person ... But was that the truth? Or was I just drunk? Just tired and unfocused after a long, emotional day. Seeing connections where none existed. Like my mother before me.

/>   I picked up the remote and turned the TV off. I dropped back against the couch with a weary sigh. I pinched the bridge of my nose and closed my eyes. I had to think about this, pray about it. What was real here? What wasn't? What the hell should I do? What the hell was the right thing to do?

  I was asleep in seconds.

  WEDNESDAY

  You Don't Say

  Let me say here, as I've said at least a dozen times in at least a dozen places, that contrary to what you may have heard on CBS News and read in the Times, I never "decided to take matters into my own hands." I never set out to "investigate Diggs's allegations on my own." And I certainly never thought to make any kind of end run around the police or the FBI or Homeland Security or anyone. Trust me on this. I'm trying to portray myself as honestly as I can, all my flaws and failings on parade. But I'm not an idiot. If you're dealing with serious bad guys, the people you want to call are professional anti-bad-guy good guys—I know that. In real life, mysteries are not going to be solved by some small-city land developer, a former journalist who hadn't done any street reporting for over a decade and a half.

  No. I went to the university the next morning because I simply didn't know what to think and, not knowing what to think, I didn't know what I should do. By the light of day, all my fears and suspicions of the night before seemed ridiculously implausible. What on earth made me believe that Casey Diggs was the man Serena met at The Den? What were the odds I had fresh information about a terrorist plot the FBI had already investigated and dismissed? And also, what kind of unbelievable coincidence would it be if I discovered all this because of Patrick Piersall, this ghost of a former actor who had been weirdly haunting my TV the last couple of days? The whole scenario was creepy and preposterous, like something out of my mother's notebooks. In fact, it was scary how much it was like that.