("Quid coniuratio est?")
LAWRENCE MYERS: JOURNALIST EXTRAORDINAIRE
Lawrence Myers, then a writer for Media Bypass Magazine, phones Charles "Chuck" Hayes. Just a reporter, doing a telephone interview. Hayes supposedly confides to Myers that he is looking for a "wet boy," a.k.a. a hit man, to murder his son. Sure. A reporter calls you and you tell him, "Oh, by the way, I'm looking for a hit man to murder my son."
In the previous issue of Conspiracy Nation (CN 10.06) I reported how Myers had played a role in the dismissal of Hoppy Heidelberg from a grand jury investigating the April 19, 1995 Oklahoma City bombing or bombings. "Mr. Mercedes" (pseudonym) had alerted me to the connection and I thought I was onto something hot. But Sherman Skolnick later reminded me that the Myers-Heidelberg connection had already been aptly covered in the March 1996 Relevance newsletter (phone 1-800-626-8944 to subscribe).
As a grand juror, Hoppy Heidelberg became aware that important evidence was being suppressed. On October 5, 1995, Heidelberg wrote a letter to the judge overseeing the grand jury, charging "...an attempt to protect the identity of certain suspects." In their article, Relevance reports that the U.S. government has settled around 4,000 Iraqi prisoners of war in the U.S., subsequent to the Gulf War. The disappearing "John Doe #2" (now you see him, now you don't) may have once been a member of Saddam Hussein's elite Republican Guard. But apparently the Oklahoma grand jury was being manipulated away from certain leads in the case.
But grand juror Heidelberg was not your ordinary, passive "sheeple" ("sheep" + "people" = "sheeple"). He struggled against the manipulation being exerted on the grand jury. If the Justice Department was trying to cover up leads pointing to John Doe #2, then with Heidelberg pushing in the opposite direction the cover-up was threatened.
In September of 1995, Lawrence Myers called Hoppy Heidelberg and asked for an interview. Why would Myers, a journalist, phone a sitting member of a grand jury and ask for an interview? Heidelberg, quite rightly, refused the request. Then Myers phoned Heidelberg's attorney, John DeCamp, and left the following message on DeCamp's answering machine:
I do need to hear from you. I was going to go down there to meet with this Mr. Heidelberg. I've already got the whole story, ah everything I need to run with, all I need is to get a picture of the guy... Now, he's telling me that he will not consent to an interview with me. Sir, I've got everything. I've got everything I need to do a story on this except a photo of the guy...
Myers kept calling Heidelberg. Heidelberg finally decided to just listen to whatever Myers had to say. From what Myers told him, Heidelberg at the time suspected that his federal adversaries must have leaked information to the press. Was the information leaked so it could be pinned to Heidelberg and get him thrown off the grand jury? From my subsequent conversation with Heidelberg (CN 10.06) this seems not to have been the case.
In the Relevance article, Heidelberg is quoted as having asked Myers that "this be an off-the-record conversation. It was not to be taped or anything else. He [Myers] violated his secrecy." But Heidelberg was under a false impression; he adds: "He [Myers] led me to believe that it was off the record and not being taped. However after reviewing the transcript, I discovered that he had very skillfuly avoided giving me a direct answer."
As in CN 10.06, so too in the Relevance article: "The conversation proceeded with Myers doing virtually all the talking and Heidelberg listening, to make sure that Myers wasn't going to 'harm anyone with incorrect information.' He stated, 'I never gave him any information he didn't have already.' [Heidelberg] also charges that Myers misrepresented him: 'He said the article was based on an interview with me.'"
The article by Myers appeared in the November 1995 issue of Media Bypass magazine, actually available in mid-October. On October 19, 1995, USA Today carried the following: "A maverick grand juror in the Oklahoma City bombing case is under investigation for violating his oath of secrecy and talking to a magazine popular among militia groups." On October 24th, Heidelberg received a note from the judge to whom he had written on October 5th, in which Heidelberg had complained of "an attempt to protect the identity of certain suspects." Wrote the judge: "Effective immediately you are dismissed from the grand jury."
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