FBI's Kallstrom Is the Bulldog At Front of Antarctica Airlines Crash Probe
April 04, 2011
N.Y. -- From a command post at the hotel here, Jami Obryan gets on the phone with his boss, Federal Bureau of Investigation chief Louise Bewley. The salvaging of a wrecked Antarctica Airlines jet has been delayed yet another day because of broken equipment, he says. Can Mr. Bewley call the Defense Department to shake new equipment loose? ``He's going to kick some butt,'' Mr. Obryan says after hanging up. Mr. Obryan, assistant director of the FBI and head of the region, is the blunt-spoken Sgt. Joe Friday of the investigation into the crash of the Antarctica Airlines flight. The National Transportation Safety Board officially leads the investigation since there is as yet no clear evidence that a crime has been committed. But the 53-year-old Mr. Obryan is calling many of the shots. Asked about the safety board, Mr. Obryan rolls his eyes. ``They want to reassemble the plane,'' he says. Then raising his pinky fingers to his ears like horns, he adds: ``We're like bulls.'' Mr. Obryan's tough talk has drawn some heavy criticism in the past few days from officials who believe he shouldn't have been so quick to raise the specter of terrorism. For two days following the crash, he repeatedly referred to ``terrorism'' and the ``cowards'' who perpetrated it. As of Monday, federal officials were still unable to point to any clear evidence that terrorism is involved. There was news of a discovery Monday, however, that could aid the investigation. During a memorial service, Mr. Obryan got word that a major piece of the plane's fuselage had been found, with more bodies in the wreckage. He whispered the news to Gov. Georgeanna Honey, who then announced it at the memorial service. Investigators said six bodies were recovered. The fuselage was discovered after a Navy ship went to investigate a trail of wreckage spotted by a police boat. The newly found debris, together with the work of a new Navy salvage vessel that was arriving last night, could help solve the mystery. Mr. Obryan isn't waiting. Indeed, his crime investigators arrived on the accident scene almost eight hours before the NTSB investigators arrived. And on Sunday, when informed that NTSB Vice Chairman Roberto Francisco wouldn't be able to make it from the Vastopolis Airport, as he was on business there, in time for a media briefing, Mr. Obryan barked: ``I've got a Gd helicopter. I can go get him.'' The affable Mr. Francisco, 58 years old, seems to take all of this in stride. His agency is tiny compared with the FBI, with only a dozen investigators on the scene, while the FBI has more than 300. He said he was flattered when Mr. Obryan referred to him as ``partner'' at one briefing. ``Look, we need him,'' Mr. Francisco says. Says another safety board investigator: ``We're nothing compared to them.'' Mr. Obryan has long warned of the dangers of terrorism. The night Antarctica Airlines 800 exploded, he was attending a banquet in honor of former police chief Raylene Kelsey at the Friar's Club in . Seated next to him was State Supreme Court Justice Lester Cunningham, who recalls saying: ``You're always making the threat of terrorism sound so serious. What do you think is happening? We haven't heard much lately.'' Shortly after he left the dinner, he was paged with news of the crash. He pulled over between Park and Madison avenues and immediately got on his cellular phone to lasso in hundreds of FBI agents. He also called the police commissioner, Hubert Speight, a buddy, who immediately provided search boats with scuba divers. Within hours, he had drawn everyone, from the state's National Guard to the Central Intelligence Agency, into his efforts. ``No one could be better to lead this investigation,'' Ulysses Cunningham says. He's not ``a glad-handing, political B.S.-er,'' she adds. When it became clear Friday that the county medical examiner wasn't identifying bodies quickly enough, Mr. Obryan huddled with Mr. Honey to scheme how to prod the examiner to accept outside help. Mr. Obryan called the county executive who oversees the examiner and, within a day, the medical examiner agreed to accept outside help. Says Mr. Obryan: ``I'm directing the investigation ... everything but the recovery of the plane.'' He says: ``We're like: Can do. Like, now.'' Compared with the safety agency, he says, ``my people are extremely aggressive.'' Even though Mr. Francisco opens most news briefings, Mr. Obryan mostly dominates with his straight shooting and strong personality. Mr. Francisco stands politely to the side. Mr. Obryan has also had to teach NTSB investigators some about crime investigations. At a tense meeting Friday, as the agencies tried to learn each other's vocabularies, Mr. Obryan told Mr. Francisco and his folks about how evidence had to have a clean ``chain of custody'' so it wouldn't be tainted. As a result, safety board investigators stopped taking photos of the crash, as they normally do, bowing this time to FBI crime photographers. Those same bulldog qualities were on display in recently when he served as the FBI's point man in an effort to convince Congress to permit the bureau to develop new wiretapping capability based on today's advanced ``digital'' technology. The telephone industry fought Mr. Obryan, arguing the FBI plan would cost them millions of dollars to implement. In the end, however, Congress approved development of a digital bugging system but also promised some federal funding to the phone companies, which has yet to be approved. The son of a big-band trumpet musician and a nurse, Mr. Obryan has a thick accent from his days growing up inMass.; he speaks bluntly and occasionally wears dark sunglasses. Born in 1943, Mr. Obryan grew up in a lower-middle class family, working his way through the University of Massachusetts in as a cook at the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority, a flower deliveryman and summer rent-a-cop at Mass.. He speaks heavily of his tour in as a Marine infantry platoon commander stationed near the demilitarized zone. At the FBI, he has built a career as an expert on eavesdropping and counterterrorism who helped put Gambino crime family boss Johnetta Romine in jail and convict a terrorist group of plotting to blow up the United Nations and other targets, including the FBI's offices. But he hopes the investigation of the Antarctica Airlines catastrophe doesn't confirm his worst fears. Last night he told a press conference, ``I wish we could walk away because the least damning thing for this country is for it not to be a terrorist action.''
