Author: Brian Voerding

They don’t know what to expect, and why would they, they’re just passing by with dogs or strollers on this sleepy Coon Rapids sidewalk, and out of nowhere a stout bald man wearing nothing but cutoff jeans or tight shorts comes bolting down the side yard, throws his hands forward, leaps toward a padded sawhorse, and, if all goes well, flips up and lands on his feet.

They stop, some of them, cheer him on, call out that he should be in the Olympics. Cars slow down or honk, and more than once they’ve circled the block and stopped to watch some more. Because who can help it, watching this middle-aged man launch himself at homemade gymnastics apparatuses, and actually, as it turns out (if they watch long enough), doing it pretty well?

Not that Mike Geronsin notices. Or at least tries not to. He’ll put on headphones and rest for three minutes and then take off again toward the vault and—assuming, again, that all went well, that he flipped up and over and landed on his feet and held the pose for three seconds—he’ll clap his hands and clamp them on his hips, chuckle to himself, peer into an old VHS camera mounted on a tripod, and announce: "That’s a ten right there." Or, "I stuck it."

Twenty-five repetitions—why twenty-five? It’s always just twenty-five—and then on to the next exercise.

Geronsin, better known to the cult following of his public-access shows as Mikenastics, never tried gymnastics until ten years ago, when he was alone in his home for the first time. (The above 1969 photo is just him goofing around on a clothesline bar in the backyard
of his parent’s house.) "Everyone has voids, feel they were deprived of something in their earlier years," he says. "At forty-three, the youngest of my three kids moved out. I’ve been through two marriages that failed. You get to my age and you start thinking to yourself, ‘now what, where do I go now?’ You start recalling what you enjoyed in your previous life, and for me, that was gymnastics."

It wasn’t so much something he enjoyed as it was an absence he regretted. In high school, after acing routines in gym class, he was asked to join the gymnastics team. But his wrestling coach talked him out of it, and Geronsin never had another chance: He dropped out after his sophomore year.

So there he was, a quarter-century later, with an empty house and that void and the nagging idea that even though he didn’t like change, he needed to try something new.

He briefly considered buying professional equipment, but it was too intimidating, too polished, too expensive. So he built some. The high bar, steel piping attached to his deck. The basement practice floor, a rubber mat on top of plywood on top of 168 regulation foam squares. The rings attached to his garage rafters, first wood until he broke one and now steel from an industrial supply company. The vault, a sawhorse wrapped in Styrofoam, the poleless pole vault, a mini trampoline and a bamboo bar set on sticks anchored by tires, the balance beam, a slab of wood on top of two stools, and so on.

He sized everything for indoors because he couldn’t bear waiting out winter, and besides, he had that space to fill. For the poleless pole vault routine, for instance, Geronsin sprints from an upstairs bedroom down the hallway and into the living room, where he leaps on the trampoline and dives over the bamboo bar.

He developed a personal scoring system. Seven for completing the exercise, and a point for each second, up to three, that he holds the landing. For certain exercises, like rings and the high bar, it’s seven for getting up and ten for holding himself upside down for three seconds. Sometimes he practiced routines a few times a week, sometimes almost daily, rotating them. He loved it. He couldn’t believe he had waited this long to try. He obsessively recorded each routine’s results. The void began to vanish.

Nobody was going to see any of this. Geronsin started recording his practices only so he could critique himself. Then one day his son asked if he could put together a highlight reel and send it off to public access channels, just for fun.

Brother Finbar McMullen entered the Winona Middle School woodshop at just before seven on a recent Monday evening with several door-sized pieces of cardboard balanced on his arms. They were material for the eighty-three-year-old’s community education class on the least commercial, but perhaps most intriguing, of his varied pursuits: building furniture from cardboard.

This is the second year he’s offered the class and the first year he’s taught it (no one signed up last year). McMullen built his first cardboard concoction thirty years ago in a decade of disposability, and continues to hone his technique today in an era of recycling, where the latest buzz-phrase is “carbon neutral.” Still, he often jokes that cardboard furniture construction isn’t widely popular because it hasn’t yet caught up with the times.

McMullen is short and trim with buzzed hair and the face of an ex-marine, square and etched with wrinkles that disappear into weathered flesh when he laughs. He’s endlessly social with the exuberance of someone half his age, despite an increasing reliance on hearing aids and a wooden cane.

Just before class was to begin, student Marla Markhamarrived, a middle-aged woman with a medical degree from Johns Hopkins University and an unrelenting fear of X-ACTO knives. “Too much time in the ER,” she deadpanned. She wished to build a decorative garbage can, but her husband, also enrolled in the class, was at home studying Greek and unavailable to do the cutting. She decided to stay anyway, partly to draw up blueprints, but mostly to talk McMullen out of some of his cardboard.

Two other women came in, both roughly Markham’s age, and McMullen began the lesson. Building with cardboard is simple, he said, if you plan ahead and use various tried-and-true design tricks (build surfaces with the grain running horizontally so they don’t sag; place reinforcing honeycombs of cardboard between the smooth layers). A barebones toolbox includes an X-ACTO knife, a framing square, a pizza cutter to crease corners for bending, and copious amounts of Elmer’s glue.

In 1940, McMullen joined the Congregation of Christian Brothers, a worldwide Catholic ministry, to get an education of sorts. He enjoyed the life so much that he never left it. The Brothers took a vow of poverty in the 1970s, and McMullen took up building with cardboard. It was around that same time that St. Mary’s University in Winona hired him to manage its dorms. Retired for almost a decade, he still receives free room and board and, most importantly, has full access to the woodshop.

Over the years, McMullen has crafted enough cardboard accoutrements to furnish an entire apartment, including tables, chairs, bookshelves, desks, and dressers. His unpainted designs are boxy and simple, as if a craftsman had cut a frame but never bothered with sanding or making curved edges.

He used to score plum cardboard from computer boxes, which came by the hundreds as St. Mary’s entered the digital age. When that supply dried up, McMullen turned to the dumpsters behind the nearby ShopKo. “If they came out, I would say, ‘Hey, recycling. Conserve resources. Don’t get mad at me,’ ” McMullen recalled. That source evaporated also, when Winona’s city council passed an anti-dumpster-diving ordinance. Now, McMullen collects mostly from the university, though he still occasionally calls on local furniture stores. Their boxes, he said, are the sturdiest.

McMullen’s friends call him an inventor, though he is more modest, claiming only to solve problems, such as with his handmade cane, are placement for a metal one he left in a gas station in Montana. “It’s always something I need,” he said. “It’s not a matter of some bright idea rattling around in my head unrelated to my life.” He invented the Finbar Hood, a piece of insulated camping headgear so popular that Ann Bancroft wore one on a trip to Antarctica. And Finbar’s Fabric Tucker, a corn-skewer-like device that assists in the sewing of hoods, sold thousands in craft stores.

The lesson concluded with McMullen imparting a few rules of construction (cut twice so the cardboard doesn’t tear; always use more glue than seems necessary). Then his class of three was let loose in the shop. One student worked on a desktop organizer. Another drew plans for wall shelves. Markham pulled a Palm Pilot from her purse and scribbled down garbage-can dimensions. “I really want to put it in the bathroom,” she told McMullen.

He nodded, thought for a moment. “If you take long showers it’ll get soggy,” he said. “Just put it outside when you’re showering.”
Markham frowned. “My husband will never remember to do that.”

“I got it,” McMullen said. “Get a can of spray lacquer and the cardboard won’t absorb the moisture.”

“That’s a good idea,” Markham said.

McMullen laughed congenially and then turned to help another student with a different matter: how tall to build her organizer.

In January, when the Winona Pie Lady, aka Mary Zimmerman, baked her one-thousandth pie, she called up Governor Tim Pawlenty to see if he would accept it. She talked to someone in his office but never heard back.

So the seventy-three-year-old great-grandmother phoned Representative Gil Gutknecht, the Republican congressman from Rochester. Gutknecht agreed immediately and showed up on Zimmerman’s doorstep. His much-publicized visit resulted in a fifty-dollar donation for Zimmerman’s landmark caramel apple pie decorated with two tiny American flags and the number “1,000.”

During a twenty-minute conversation—“I thought he would talk all afternoon, but whoever drives him around said, ‘We’d better get going,’ ” she recently recalled— Gutknecht even told Zimmerman that he would eschew his previous plan to pack chocolate-chip cookies for an upcoming trip to Iraq, instead taking some of her pies. She never did get his order, though she was too busy filling other requests to notice.

Zimmerman began baking pies and selling them for charity (at a cost of six or seven dollars each, depending on the filling) after the tsunami struck Southeast Asia in December 2004. The conservative Christian spent a week praying for a way that she could help; meanwhile, she kept thinking about how popular her pies were at church bake sales. “I don’t have many talents, but making pies came to mind,” she said. Zimmerman, a slight woman with brown curly hair, has been periodically hospitalized with depression and found that baking pies kept her mind occupied. She hoped to make five hundred dollars to donate to a missionary priest she knows in Sri Lanka. But after she was featured in the Winona Daily News, her phone began “ringing off the hook,” she said. “I’d bake into the evenings sometimes, and sometimes I would get up at 4:30 in the morning.” One anonymous local paid $250 for a pie. Someone else sent her a hundred-dollar bill in an envelope with no return address. A local orchard donated several bushels of apples. People began to recognize her in public, nicknaming her the Pie Lady. She raised $7,500 in nine months—enough to build three houses and support a shelter for homeless youth.

Zimmerman bakes all her pies in a small, 1970s-style kitchen dominated by a wooden dining-room table the size of a twin bed. The table allows her to lay out ingredients for an entire day’s worth of baking the night before. She started off making apple and cherry pies (the latter is her favorite; the former, the most popular request) and later expanded her repertoire to include caramel apple, blueberry, and pumpkin. At a customer’s request, she even added sour cream pies.

When it comes to the baking process, Zimmerman has two tips, both of which she’s more than willing to share. The first: canola and vegetable oils. “I would never use lard,” she said. “It makes good pie crusts and people used it years ago, but it has more cholesterol.”

The second: “When my granddaughter helps me, we put lemonade Kool-Aid in the apple pies to make them more tart.”

Zimmerman was initially uncomfortable in the spotlight but soon learned the value of publicity. When she baked her five-hundredth pie, she aimed straight for the top: In a letter to President Bush, she made it clear that she was willing to mail him the pie if he couldn’t make it to Winona to receive it personally. Some time later, she received a letter with the presidential seal at the top and Bush’s signature stamped at the bottom. “Thank you for taking the time to write and for the enclosed material,” the letter said. “Our nation faces great tasks and we’re meeting them with courage and resolve … Thank you for taking the time to share your views.”

Zimmerman interpreted the note as Bush’s rejection of her invitation—this being the era of Homeland Security and six-week presidential vacations—so she sold the pie to the local bishop instead.

In August of 2005, Zimmerman burned out. Then Hurricane Katrina struck, and she knew she couldn’t stop. She raised two thousand dollars from pie sales for Catholic Charities, and another six hundred dollars went to a local girl who suffers from spina bifida, bringing total donations to over ten thousand dollars.

This past summer, however, her depression returned, and Zimmerman stopped baking after selling around eleven-hundred pies. She thought briefly about abandoning her pies altogether, then thought again.

“I was very happy about being able to do what I did,” she said, looking longingly at her spotless kitchen. “I don’t know what to do with myself right now. When my health gets better, I would like very much to continue making pies.”

She paused. “I would like to bake pies right now. People liked them a lot. They said they’d never had a pie like that.”

On a recent Thursday evening, Courtney Tucker—a tall, blonde twenty-two-year-old art major at the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse—stood behind a twenty-four-channel effects console in the school’s darkened planetarium, her face reflecting colored shadows from a baffling array of buttons and knobs.

She tapped several of the buttons, and shooting stars showered down from the white dome, illuminating the room—a mere twenty-four feet in diameter, with two rows of padded red benches lining the perimeter. “Time Warp,” Tucker said. “That’s my favorite.” She turned a knob. The stars slowed, then shot upward. She scribbled a few notes on a sheet of paper.

This was Tucker’s second time running Album Encounters, where a record (alternately classic and modern rock) is spun to a choreographed light show each Thursday night during the school year. She had already spent eight hours preparing Pink Floyd’s Meddle, and the show was scheduled to start in an hour. She was visibly nervous.
Tucker is the successor to astronomy professor Bob Allen, who ran Album Encounters from 1974 or 1975 (he forgets the exact year) until last spring, when he retired. And although she had three shows under her belt, this was Tucker’s first time playing the music through the planetarium’s computer system, which has the nasty habit of freezing. One of the lighting effects had stopped working earlier in the week, and one of the two speakers had sputtered and crackled during Tucker’s preshow run-through. Allen, who hand-wired most of the system, had kindly sat through the previous week’s show to offer occasional assistance. On this evening, however, he’d stayed home.

In a telephone conversation, Allen described himself as an admitted astronomy and music junkie who is “into space” and “fell head over heels for synthesizers.” He first saw Led Zeppelin (favorite band) play at the Met Center in Bloomington back in 1970 and later saw Pink Floyd play the Milwaukee County Stadium (favorite concert). He started Album Encounters to entertain friends and touring rock bands, and eventually opened it up to students.

When Allen finally retired, he feared the program would disappear, but Tucker, formerly his assistant, enthusiastically offered to take the reins. “How could you not love it?” she said. “It’s music under the stars.” Her nineteen-year-old assistant, Brian White, showed up around seven p.m. wearing torn jeans and toting a skateboard. He offered a similar story: “I came to a few of the shows freshman year and really liked it, and at the end of the year I was, like, pretty motivated to keep it going. I emailed Bob to see if there was anything I could do to help, and here I am.”

Besides the main board (offering fifty-five effects) and the sky-projection equipment, the planetarium has a hodgepodge of other bells and whistles added by Allen over the years, including several strings of Christmas lights, a strobe light, a disco ball, and a light-up alien that Allen refers to as the Big Green Man. Tucker and White have taken to waving laser pointers through ornamented thrift-store glassware. “Bob liked rapid transitions and mixing different-colored lights,” Tucker said. “I like the heavy, slower stuff that kind of consumes you.” She paused. “But I still like the strobe light for big moments.”

The first arrivals, showing up fifteen minutes early, were two girls in sweatshirts and jeans who entered reverently and, after a bit of deliberation, sat in the back row. They gazed up at the lighted dome, then leaned back in the familiar planetarium posture: a deep slouch, with feet extended and head nestled on the top of the seat. The shows are promoted through flyers and word-of-mouth, and attendance varies, though certain bands (Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin) tend to draw larger crowds than others (Dandy Warhols, Bright Eyes). Only seventeen people had showed up the previous week for the year’s first show, featuring the music of Mason Jennings (Allen had never heard of him). But by eight o’clock on this evening, the planetarium, which comfortably holds about sixty people, was filled with seventy-five students sitting knee-to-knee, whispering about parties and David Gilmour solos.

At 8:05 p.m., Tucker dimmed the lights and pressed play. The second speaker crackled and fell silent. She turned up the volume. The song skipped briefly but recovered. Five minutes into it, the music climaxed, and Tucker, whose head swung furiously between her written notes and the control panel, layered Star Field Clouds (spinning stars) over Color Organ (colored lightning above a cloud cover), transitioned into Time Warp, and punctuated the combination with a single flash of the strobe light.

“Wow!” one girl exclaimed from the back row, and was promptly shushed by a boy sitting in front of her.

Wabasha is a mighty fine place to see an eagle. The city is a ninety-minute drive south of Minneapolis on U.S. Highway 61—yes, Dylan’s Highway 61—one of several old settlements wedged between the five-hundred-foot bluffs and the Mississippi River, built in deference to the commanding geography. Originally established as a fur-trading post in the 1820s, Wabasha was platted as a town in 1854, four years before Minnesota was incorporated, and named after Wapashaw, a Dakota Indian chief. The same scenery that drew early settlers—the montage of backwaters, the tall prairie grass and diverse wildlife, the steamboats docking along the river, and, of course, the eagle’s nests—is what keeps tourism and consequently the city’s economic base stable today.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, the national bird also became Wabasha’s mascot, and it’s hard to imagine it featured more prominently around town. Eagles are painted on park benches, on storefront windows and shelves; they glower from the bumpers of trucks and are carved into tree trunks set by the river. The city’s annual festival is named Eagle Days. The local java hut is called Eagle’s Nest Coffee House.

If you aren’t fortunate enough to spot live eagles against nature’s backdrop, three of them reside at the National Eagle Center downtown, which is staffed by tour guides who teem with facts and trivia related to the birds. On a recent Saturday afternoon, as a tattooed Eagle Center guide led a small group through the museum’s exhibits, one visitor asked about the best time to view eagles.

“Winter is good,” replied the guide, standing next to a wall-sized photograph of nearly fifty eagles perched in a single area, among a few trees. “But you know, it seems like they’re always around.”

Still, there’s more to Wabasha than eagles, as the locals like to say. At a kimono shop called Wind Whisper West, one can peruse more than two thousand kimonos for sale and tour a private collection of wedding kimonos. There’s Book Cliffs, a used bookstore with an extensive selection of local histories as well as an amiable live-in mutt named Greta, who relishes her role as browsing companion. There’s the Arrowhead Bluffs Museum, with thousands of relics on display from the period when the Dakota Indians lived on the land, cultivating wild rice and hunting buffalo.

Food options include the upscale Nosh, with Mediterranean and French-influenced cuisine; a greasy spoon called the River Town Café; Chinese from the Fresh Wok; or sandwiches from the Little Jo Flour Mill and Bakery, which has back-porch seating on the river. If you’re planning an overnight visit, you can reserve one of five cats (Ginger and Arnold are popular choices) with your room at the Historic Anderson House, the oldest continually running hotel in the state. Or try the swanky, extended-stay lofts downtown—named, of course, Eagles on the River.

A disheveled man paced the intersection of Snelling and University avenues, waving his arms as he described to passersby how his car had broken down and he’d been sleeping at the nearby Catholic church. If somebody would spare some change, he promised, he’d be on his way. The man had plenty of pedestrians to talk to, as the Midway is an area of the city where people walk, whether to Ragstock or the Safarii coffee shop or Big Top Liquor. The panhandler finally approached an older woman leaning on a cane. She listened to the man’s story, and then scoffed, “That’s a Baptist church,” and hobbled away.

In the 1890s, University Avenue was a streetcar line and Snelling was a bumpy path leading to the fort of the same name. The intersection was largely populated by military men waiting for various streetcars. Both routes were soon paved and the Midway became St. Paul’s industrial epicenter. Workers here fixed streetcars, shoveled coal, loaded trains, and filled orders for old-style department stores like Montgomery Ward. With the workers came houses and shops and bars, like the now-hip Turf Club, which once served doughboys on leave from overseas, and has since been dubbed University Avenue’s “best remnant of the 1940s.” A half block away sits Big V’s Saloon, the Turf’s main competition for local rock shows. Some of the drums hammered on both stages come from Ellis Drum Shop on Snelling, which outfits the Bad Plus’ Dave King, for one.

The Midway is lousy with old-style, one-of-a-kind places, like the somewhat claustrophobic Midway Used and Rare Books, which opened its doors in 1965. It has since supplemented its collection of pulp novels and other pop culture ephemera with an impressive selection of literature and books on art and photography. And, while you can’t buy the hulking iron lung at Ax-Man Surplus on University, you can pick up a bucket of glass beads, a gas mask, or a wagonload of old wooden fruit crates.

In recent years, the Midway has evolved. Mainstays have been supplemented by stores and restaurants opened by newcomers to the neighborhood—Hmong, Latinos, and African-Americans. Now you’ll find the tasty Mirror of Korea, the Black Sea Turkish restaurant, and a host of ethnic groceries and gyros joints. The streetcar garage that used to anchor the intersection’s southeast corner has become a mall that stretches across two blocks, where locals can have their nails done, buy groceries, bowl, and play bingo.

But one thing remains stubbornly the same. The Midway still bleeds blue-collar frugality: Whatever is here must be cheap and it must be good. The Turf Club’s prices, for example, have hardly risen in six decades. A person can still get a pint for little more than bus fare, though it’s always wise to have both, lest you be forced to beg from old locals leaning on canes.—Brian Voerding

The other day, customers entering the Office Max in St. Paul’s Midway
were greeted by bold signs bearing an urgent message: “Avoid Identity
Theft. Protect Personal Information.” Next to them were sprawling
displays of home paper shredders, all bearing names intended to invoke
fear, awe, and consumerism: The Sentinel. The PowerShred. The Paper
Monster.

Lynne, a short, bespectacled Office Max employee, shuffled by and
offered packets of coupons to customers. Mail-in rebates on shredders
were among the deals. Sales were brisk last month, she said. And for
good reason: A section of the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act
that went into effect June 1 requires all employers to shred the
redundant personal information of all employees. This law isn’t just
for haughty CEOs, however, or even neighborhood record stores—it’s for
you, if you hire anyone for any purpose, like a babysitter, lawnmower,
or housecleaner.

Lynne doesn’t own a shredder. She tosses bills and credit-card receipts
in the trash, without even tearing them up. She’s not losing sleep over
it, either. But others are, and shredding companies, concerned
businesses, and advertisers have capitalized on this. Consider
Citibank’s ad blitz that features victims speaking with voices of
identity thieves, describing the merriment of truly risk-free spending.
Couple the new law with these rising fears, and you find a booming $350
million shredding industry prospering both in offices and at home,
where the paper trail, despite the wonders of online billing and
communication, continues to grow.

No technology seems able to render paper obsolete. There’s been a ten
percent increase in the volume of workplace paper during the last
decade, in defiance of “experts” who expected its use to drop
dramatically with the rise of networked computers. Ironically, email is
the main culprit. The irrational impulse to send much of your inbox to
the printer has been the biggest boon to the pulping industry. As a
result, the average cubicle farmer uses ten thousand sheets of copy
paper each year. Print. Read. Repeat.

All those reams generally end up in two places, trash or recycling,
which creates security headaches for business espionage experts (yes,
people have this job). Similar headaches exist for individuals, with
dumpster diving celebrating several years of legalization. Thus
shredding, once limited to the paranoid, the neurotic, the
ultra-responsible, and the occasional chief executive scoundrel, is
becoming wildly popular.

Now that the shredder is destined to acquire a domestic status
somewhere between the refrigerator and the waffle iron, drab just won’t
do, and on the consumer level, there are hip home alternatives. Michael
Graves has designed a lustrous, smiling basket that is sold at Target,
and there are handheld personal shredders for on-the-fly jobs. But even
the most expensive consumer-level shredder can handle only a dozen
sheets at once, and this causes difficulties, since paper must be fed
manually, with all paper clips removed.

For the really epic, corporate scandal-level jobs, there are the
professional shredders. Shred-N-Go, a company in Plymouth, owns
specialized mobile shredding units—trucks—that can demolish three
hundred pounds of paper in less than four minutes. That’s about two and
a half tons of confetti in an hour.

There are several other local companies with equally fanciful names
(could you think of a better one?), including Document Destruction in
Lakeville and Minnesota Shredding in Edina. As they are happy to point
out, their services are inexpensive, considering the estimated cost of
identity theft for a typical individual is around fifteen hundred
dollars. Plus, according to Document Destruction’s testimonials, the
“professional, yet fun” employees leave everyone “totally pleased.”

The law is clearly on the side of the shredders. A few weeks ago, the
U.S. Supreme Court overturned the conviction of Enron’s accounting
firm, Arthur Andersen, whose shredding spree was thought to be an
obstruction of justice. It turns out that it’s completely lawful for
higher-ups to instruct employees to regularly shred or otherwise
destroy incriminating documents. This holds perhaps the most important
lesson for novice shredding enthusiasts. If you’re shredding documents
because you know they could be deleterious to you, then just lie—and
make sure you’re shredding something valuable every day.—Brian Voerding

SHEIK OMAR ABDEL RAHMAN—THE BLIND SHEIK
One of fundamentalist Islam’s most exalted spiritual leaders; resided in Rochester between 1998 and 2002 at the Federal Medical Center prison. He was sentenced to life in prison in 1996 for conspiring to blow up the United Nations, New York’s FBI office, and all the bridges and tunnels going into New York City. After September 11th, Osama bin Laden threatened to free Rahman, using whatever force necessary. Rep. Gil Gutknecht began raising questions regarding the city’s (and state’s) security, and Rahman was soon moved to another federal prison.

JANE TURNER—DID NOT ADMIRE THE FINE CRYSTAL
Jane Turner, a twenty-five-year special agent, noticed a Tiffany globe on a secretary’s desk in the Minneapolis FBI office in August 2002. After learning it came from the World Trade Center, she brought the globe to the attention of the inspector general. No FBI agents were reprimanded or indicted. Instead, Turner received a “notice of proposed removal,” according to her attorney, Stephen Kohn. She retired on November 21, 2002.

COLLEEN ROWLEY—CELEBRATED BLOWER OF THE WHISTLE
In May of 2002, Minneapolis FBI agent Colleen Rowley sent a caustic, thirteen-page email to FBI director Robert Mueller, claiming that certain facts regarding the investigation of Moussaoui were omitted and downplayed. Minneapolis agents in August 2001 had taken Moussaoui into custody and wanted to search his computer. However, personnel at FBI headquarters disputed with the Minneapolis agents the existence of probable cause to believe that a criminal violation had occurred or was occurring. However, agents were given a warrant after September 11th.

MOHAND ALSHEHRI—MUSCLE MAN IN ROCHESTER
Was on United Airlines flight 175, the plane that hit the south tower on September 11th. He was a “muscle hijacker” who apparently had flight training (though his training was never documented) but was designated to help take control of the cockpit and keep it. Nancy Hanlon, a cardiac ward secretary at St. Mary’s Hospital in Rochester, claimed she met him at a local bar in August of 2001. He called himself Khalid, and they had a lengthy conversation where he informed her that he was going to die soon, and it was predetermined.

ABDEL-ILAH ELMARDOUDI—DR. DOCUMENT
A Moroccan who lived in Minneapolis. In August 2002, was indicted and later convicted of conspiring to provide material support or resources to terrorists, of fraud, and of misusing documents. Convicted last year in a Michigan court of conspiring to provide material support (including forged identity documents) to terrorists.

ILYAS ALI—DRUGS, GUNS, AND TALIBAN
In November 2002, indictment unsealed against him. Born in India and lived in St. Paul. He pleaded guilty to charges that he conspired to supply weapons to terrorists through the sale of drugs. Apparently planned to sell five tons of hashish and a half-ton of Pakistani heroin in exchange for cash and four shoulder-fired Stinger missiles, which he intended to sell to the Taliban.

MOHAMMED A. WARSAME—THE UNBANK?
A Canadian man born in Somalia who lived in Minneapolis. Warsame was arrested in the Twin Cities in December 2003. He has been charged with conspiring to provide aid to al-Qaida, and federal prosecutors allege he fought with the Taliban in Afghanistan. Was charged in January 2004 with wiring money to Pakistan for alleged al-Qaida conspirators.

MOHAMAD ELZAHABI—COMMUNICATION BREAKDOWN
In April 2004, agents began questioning Mohamad Elzahabi, a Lebanese man living in Minneapolis. Later charged with lying to federal agents after saying he didn’t send walkie-talkies to Pakistan. Also charged with lying about his role in helping a man fraudulently obtain a Massachusetts driver’s license. An FBI affidavit says he admitted to participating in an al-Qaida training camp.—Brian Voerding