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],
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> _Pour la première fois depuis trois mois, elles discernent enfin le sable que leur cachait l’eau lors de la traversée de l’Atlantique, ce fond de l’océan qu’elles ont brièvement aperçu ce matin en débarquant de_La Baleine_. Personne ne leur a expliqué où elles seraient logées ce soir, dans combien de temps elles seraient fiancées. On ne dit pas tout aux femmes._
>
> Paris, 1720. Marguerite Pancatelin, la Supérieure de la Salpêtrière, est mandatée pour sélectionner une centaine de femmes « volontaires » qui seront envoyées en Louisiane afin d’y épouser les colons français.
>
> Parmi elles, trois amies improbables : une orpheline de douze ans à la langue bien pendue, une jeune aristocrate désargentée et rejetée par sa famille ainsi qu’une femme condamnée pour avortement. Comme leurs compagnes à bord de_La Baleine_, Charlotte, Pétronille et Geneviève ignorent tout de ce qui les attend au-delà des mers. Et n’ont pas leur mot à dire sur leur avenir.
>
> Ces étrangères réunies par le destin devront braver l’adversité – maladie, guerre, patriarcat –, traverser une vie faite de chagrins d'amour, de naissances et de deuils, de cruauté et de plaisirs inattendus. Et d’une amitié forgée dans le feu.
>
> Un roman d’une profondeur et d’une émotion saisissantes, qui nous transporte au cœur d’une terre impitoyable, aux côtés d’héroïnes animées d’une extraordinaire soif d’amour et de vie.
# How a Con Man Ended Up in Solitary in Colorado Supermax Federal Prison
They call it The Suites. A little joke, the kind of gallows humor you can’t avoid in a place you can’t leave.
The accommodations in The Suites aren’t any more spacious than those found elsewhere in the U.S. Penitentiary Administrative Maximum — ADX for short. But they are more exclusive. The Suites consist of a special wing at the far end of everything, tucked behind [H Unit](https://www.westword.com/news/h-unit-at-colorados-federal-supermax-is-a-special-sort-of-hell-10496356), the most secure area of the highest-security prison in the country, a prison within a prison. Only two of the four cells in The Suites are occupied, and those two men are not allowed to interact with any other inmate, including each other.
Located a hundred miles southwest of Denver, just outside the high-desert town of Florence, ADX houses more than 300 terrorists, gang leaders, drug lords and other high-risk prisoners in profound isolation; most of its residents are locked in their cells 23 hours a day. Its guest list includes Oklahoma City bombing conspirator Terry Nichols, shoe bomber Richard Reid, Colombian guerrilla leader [Simón Trinidad](https://www.westword.com/news/sim-n-trinidad-could-bring-peace-to-colombia-if-he-can-get-out-of-america-s-toughest-prison-6907210) and Mafia hitman [Fotios Geas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fotios_Geas), currently awaiting trial for the 2018 prison murder of mobster Whitey Bulger. FBI agent turned Soviet spy Robert Hanssen [died in his ADX cell last June](https://www.westword.com/news/spy-richard-hanssen-dead-colorado-supermax-17030444), just a few days before Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, who'd been housed at ADX for decades, committed suicide while undergoing cancer treatment at a U.S. Bureau of Prisons medical center.
Yet even among a rogues’ gallery as infamous as the collection assembled at the federal supermax, there is a well-defined pecking order. Inmates who pose little threat of violence or escape may, over a period of years, move through a “step-down” program that eventually allows them more time out of their cells, communal dining and a shot at transfer to a less harsh prison. At the other end of the scale are the inmates subject to “special administrative measures,” or SAMs — conditions imposed by the U.S. Attorney General that restrict not only their movement, but their ability to communicate with each other and the outside world. H Unit is home to several dozen SAMs cases, jihadists and crime bosses who are considered capable of causing “death or serious bodily injury to persons, or substantial damage to property,” if their contacts aren’t severely restricted and monitored.
And then there are the two guys in The Suites, the most solitary of men. They are each entombed behind double doors in a seven-by-twelve-foot cell in the most silent corner of the supermax. The bed is a concrete slab covered by a thin foam mattress, the view a patch of sky visible from a high, narrow window. Meals are delivered through a slot in the door. There’s a stainless-steel toilet-and-sink combo, a concrete desk and stool, a shower on a timer to prevent flooding.
There’s no one to talk to, but no privacy, either. The men are under scrutiny 24 hours a day, by cameras and listening devices in the cells, by other monitoring equipment during the hour a day they are allowed to exercise alone in a small outdoor cage. FBI agents read their mail and listen in on their phone calls.
One of the men is [Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/el-chapo-guzman-writes-letter-judge-wife-daughters-visitation-supermax-prison-colorado/), the former head of the Sinaloa cartel. Known for forging one of the most powerful and ruthless drug-trafficking networks in the world, as well as for escaping maximum-security custody twice in Mexico, Guzmán is serving a life sentence in the most spartan conditions the federal prison system can provide. But even the restrictions he’s facing are arguably not as severe as those imposed on the other occupant of The Suites.
James Sabatino is 47 years old. He has a rap sheet of financial crimes stretching back to his adolescence. He is currently serving a twenty-year sentence for running a criminal enterprise that engaged in mail fraud, wire fraud, and the receiving and selling of stolen goods. Despite his alleged ties to the Gambino crime family, a few assault charges in his youth and some admitted loose talk about wanting to blow up a courthouse and “clip” certain people who might be inclined to testify against him, he is not serving time for any violent crimes. He’s a con man, not a mad bomber or a drug kingpin. Outside of Florida, hardly anyone has ever heard of him.
[click to enlarge ](https://media2.westword.com/den/imager/u/original/18851998/feature_jimmy_sabatino.jpg "James Sabatino says the severe isolation he demanded "has saved lives." - Department of Justice")
James Sabatino says the severe isolation he demanded "has saved lives."
Department of Justice
Yet Sabatino may be the most locked-down, buried-in-oblivion prisoner in the entire federal system. The “special measures” in his case are special indeed. He is prohibited from communicating with anyone on the entire planet, inside or outside of prison, except for two people: his 75-year-old stepmother, with whom he can have fifteen-minute monitored phone conversations twice a month, and his attorney. That’s an even more limited circle of approved contacts than El Chapo is allowed.
Such measures are deemed necessary because Sabatino has demonstrated an amazing talent for engineering multi-million-dollar scams even from the confines of prison. At an [appeals court hearing](https://www.ca11.uscourts.gov/oral-argument-recordings?title=&field_oar_case_name_value=sabatino&field_oral_argument_date_value%5Bvalue%5D%5Byear%5D=&field_oral_argument_date_value%5Bvalue%5D%5Bmonth%5D=) in Atlanta last year, a federal prosecutor maintained that Sabatino’s flimflam skills provide more than enough justification for keeping him in the cone of silence he’s inhabited for the past six years.
“The problem in this case is that the defendant’s criminal history is so severe,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Scott Dion told an 11th Circuit Court of Appeals panel, “and he shows such ability to corrupt anybody he came into contact with.”
The appeals panel puzzled over a motion by Sabatino’s attorney to modify the restrictions on his client. It was a simple request, but one that raised uncomfortable questions about the process by which the government imposes an almost-total ban on an inmate’s access to the outside world, and how SAMs prisoners can ever “prove” they are no longer a security threat. Sabatino’s situation is more complex than that of other SAMs cases because the communications restrictions he faces are imposed not simply by prison authorities, but also by the terms of his sentence. In 2017, as part of his guilty plea in his most recent scam, Sabatino agreed to the court-ordered restrictions. In fact, he demanded them, stating repeatedly that he would commit more crimes if the restrictions weren’t in place.
“These restrictions benefit the public, NOT ME!!” Sabatino wrote in a letter to his trial judge in 2022. “I hate these restrictions. They are terrible, but it is the ONLY thing that stops me. I wonder if you people have any idea of how many crimes \[the restrictions\] have prevented. Literally it has saved lives!! I don’t get NOTHING from this!”
Because he’s represented by an attorney, Sabatino isn’t supposed to send letters directly to the judge. But his angry, frustrated venting to the court is the only form of communication his keepers can’t muzzle, and the swaggering tone underscores the central paradox of his plight: The more isolated he becomes, the more notoriety he achieves — at least in his own mind.
Jimmy Sabatino may be stuck in The Suites, but he’s finally hit the big time.
[click to enlarge ](https://media2.westword.com/den/imager/u/original/18851993/feature_supermax.jpg "The U.S. Penitentiary Administrative Maximum, or ADX, outside of Florence. - BOP.gov")
The U.S. Penitentiary Administrative Maximum, or ADX, outside of Florence.
BOP.gov
**January 29, 1995, was a black day** for San Diego Chargers fans, who watched their team get blown out by the San Francisco 49ers in Super Bowl XXIX. It was an even bigger bummer for hundreds of would-be attendees who showed up at Joe Robbie Stadium in Miami, clutching tickets for which they’d paid a small fortune, only to be denied entrance.
The tickets were hot. They had been boosted by an eighteen-year-old high school dropout named James Sabatino, who’d obtained inside information about when a shipment of 262 tickets would arrive at a Federal Express distribution center in Florida. [Posing as the president of the Miami Dolphins](https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/sports/1995/12/07/super-bowl-ticket-scam-lands-teenager-in-prison/ea5f972e-a1c5-4315-a905-326bc844e96c/), Sabatino had called FedEx and insisted that the tickets be held for pickup. An associate collected the precious ducats, which were then parceled out to online ticket brokers for up to a thousand dollars each.
The brazen scheme landed Sabatino in prison for two years. It was hardly his first brush with trouble. Born in 1976, he’d been raised in Brooklyn, primarily by his father, who reputedly had connections to the Gambino and Colombo crime families. According to [articles about him](https://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/hip-hop-poseur-jimmy-sabatino-cant-stop-scamming-even-from-prison-6393917) published in *Miami New Times*, young Jimmy spent time in a psychiatric hospital for anger issues, then in juvenile detention facilities on weapons charges and other violations, before moving to Florida in his teens.
> [
>
> “The problem in this case is that the defendant’s criminal history is so severe, and he shows such ability to corrupt anybody he came into contact with.”
After the great Super Bowl ticket heist, Sabatino moved on to more elaborate capers. They were not just about money; sometimes they were a way of advancing Sabatino’s dreams of becoming a major player in the music industry. He represented himself as a hip-hop promoter. He claimed to be the nephew of Sony Music president Tommy Mottola and scored backstage face time with Julio Iglesias. Using fraudulently obtained corporate letterhead and billing codes, he impersonated record company or movie studio executives and checked into luxury hotels, entourage in tow, running up huge tabs: $16,000 at New York’s Waldorf Astoria, $16,000 at the Los Angeles Ritz-Carlton, thousands more at the Four Seasons in London, a whopping $174,000 in charges at a Hilton in Miami.
He scammed airline tickets, jewelry from Tiffany’s and other luxury goods, insisting “the company” would handle the bill. By claiming to be working on big-budget movie or music projects involving various film stars and celebrated rappers, he persuaded wide-eyed vendors to supply him with vast quantities of computers, pagers and cell phones, no money down.
[click to enlarge ](https://media1.westword.com/den/imager/u/original/18851991/feature_el_chapo.jpg "Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzmán is the only other resident of The Suites at ADX. - Department of Justice")
Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzmán is the only other resident of The Suites at ADX.
Department of Justice
Sabatino had a singular gift for connecting with marks and charming the pants off them. He dangled a world of possibilities, including the possibility that a short, doughy, tough-talking hustler like himself could be a legitimate dealmaker in the glittery groves of showbiz. “The easiest scam to pull off,” he explained to one reporter, “is to tell someone something they already wanted to believe.” Yet he also had a gift for conning himself. Several of his splashier impersonations seemed to be more about craving the spotlight than getting away with a score.
In many cases, the law quickly caught up with Sabatino. But landing back behind bars did little to deter him. In 1998, unhappy with prison conditions in Great Britain, where he had been arrested for multiple unpaid hotel bills, he made a series of phone calls to the FBI and the Secret Service, threatening to kill President Bill Clinton and blow up a courthouse.
As he hoped, the threats got him extradited. They also got him more charges, sending him to federal prison for four years.
In 2002, operating out of a jail cell in New York, Sabatino made several phone calls to Nextel Communications (a wireless company later absorbed by Sprint), claiming to be a Sony Pictures mogul in need of cell phones for a humongous flick. He managed to persuade Nextel to ship more than a thousand phones to his “office,” a FedEx outlet, ready for pickup by Jimmy’s friends, who resold them on the street. Prosecutors estimated that the scam bilked Nextel out of $3 million in equipment and service charges.
> [
>
> “I don’t apologize to nobody. As far as the government is concerned, they allowed this case to happen…they should be embarrassed.”
Sabatino reportedly saw little of the gravy from that grift, but that didn’t deter the judge from handing him another eleven years. While serving that sentence, he filed a lawsuit against rapper Sean Combs (stage names Puff Daddy, Diddy, etc.), asserting that he’d been cheated out of millions owed him for recording tracks of Combs’s protégé, the Notorious B.I.G., way back in 1994. To shore up his claims, Sabatino produced what appeared to be pages from hush-hush FBI files. The documents mention various intrigues surrounding Tupac Shakur prior to his 1996 murder and refer to Sabatino as a mobbed-up shakedown artist, prominent in “the Hip Hop world.”
The documents caused a sensation. The *Los Angeles Times* made extensive use of the materials in its own investigative reporting on Shakur’s murder. But in 2008 the documents were [exposed on the Smoking Gun website](https://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/crime/big-phat-liar) as a complete fraud. They were written on a typewriter, a tool the FBI had abandoned years earlier, and contained spelling errors consistent with those found in Sabatino’s typewritten jailhouse pleadings. The website slammed Sabatino as “a wildly impulsive, overweight white kid from Florida whose own father once described him in a letter to a federal judge as ‘a disturbed young man who needed attention like a drug.’”
Sabatino denied he was the author of the hoax, but his lawsuit and his claims of being a hip-hop impresario soon went up in puffs of smoke. Still, he had managed to punk one of the nation’s most powerful newspapers. And his most audacious swindle was still to come.
Shortly after his arrival at a federal prison in Miami in 2014, Sabatino wheedled a burner cell phone from a pliable corrections officer. He created fake e-mail addresses and began reaching out to jewelry and luxury goods stores in South Florida. He introduced himself as a Sony or Roc Nation executive, or a top honcho at Creative Artists Agency or Universal Music, and his emails had the right logos to prove it. He was looking for certain goods — designer handbags, high-end apparel, shoes and bling — that could be “loaned” and featured in music videos starring performers he supposedly represented, including Beyoncé, Jennifer Lopez, Justin Timberlake and Jessica Biel. Eager luxury store owners and brand reps delivered the items to Sabatino confederates on the outside, who took the goods to pawn shops and funneled some of the proceeds back to Sabatino’s prison commissary account.
Although a mid-2015 search turned up the contraband phone in Sabatino’s cell, the operation continued for another two years, during which Sabatino corrupted more guards, obtained more burner phones and plotted with co-conspirators about how to intimidate or permanently silence associates who might testify against them. On April 5, 2017, officers entered Sabatino’s cell for a surprise search and found him on the phone with one of his minions, in the process of negotiating an $800,000 sale of stolen jewelry. They seized the phone and three others.
The fraudulently obtained goods and services were [valued at more than $10 million](https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdfl/pr/inmate-sentenced-twenty-years-imprisonment-connection-racketeering-offenses-committed). Sabatino pleaded guilty to a single racketeering count and got twenty years. At his sentencing hearing, he readily agreed to the severe communications restrictions that were being imposed as part of his deal, conditions he requested. But that didn’t mean he was feeling remorseful.
“I don’t apologize to nobody,” Sabatino told U.S. Senior District Judge Joan Lenard. “As far as the government is concerned, they allowed this case to happen…they should be embarrassed.”
[click to enlarge ](https://media1.westword.com/den/imager/u/original/18851995/feature_unibomber.jpg "Notorious residents of the federal supermax include Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber, who died last year. - FBI")
Notorious residents of the federal supermax include Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber, who died last year.
FBI
**A case could be made that there are** many prisoners in solitary housing at ADX whose conditions of confinement are tougher, on a daily basis, than those facing Jimmy Sabatino. Muslim prisoners, who make up the majority of the SAMs cases in H Unit, have complained repeatedly of being unable to conduct group prayer, of other interference with religious rituals, of forced feedings to break hunger strikes, and lack of mental health resources. According to court documents, the position of contract imam, a non-BOP employee who is supposed to minister to the Muslim population, has been vacant at ADX for at least seven years.
One of the longest-running and most revealing lawsuits filed by an ADX prisoner was brought in 2020 by [Mostafa Kamel Mostafa](https://www.fbi.gov/contact-us/field-offices/newyork/news/press-releases/mustafa-kamel-mustafa-a-k-a-abu-hamza-sentenced-in-manhattan-federal-court-to-life-in-prison), the former imam of London’s Finsbury Park mosque, which was shut down by U.K. authorities in 2003 because of its ties to jihadists. Charged with aiding in terrorist plots, Mostafa fought extradition to the United States for more than eight years. Extradition was finally granted after U.S. officials assured the European Court of Human Rights that he would not be sent to ADX. In fact, his medical conditions and physical disabilities were so severe — Mostafa is missing both of his forearms and is nearly blind, the result of a chemical explosion in 1993 — that the European court concluded “there was no real risk of his spending anything more than a short period of time at ADX.”
But after he was convicted in New York in 2014 and sentenced to life in prison, Mostafa was sent to H Unit in ADX, where he’s been housed ever since, in a cell that offers few concessions to his disabilities. His claims touch on a wide range of constitutional issues, from religious freedom and disability rights to access to medical care and basic hygiene materials, and whether he can have phone conversations with his grandchildren.
Two weeks ago, a federal judge ruled that [several of the lawsuit’s claims can proceed](https://www.coloradopolitics.com/courts/federal-judge-allows-supermax-prisoners-limited-religious-freedom-claims-to-proceed/article_712ec544-af48-11ee-a1e3-876f3d51de11.html) while dismissing others.
Compared to Mostafa’s raft of grievances, Sabatino’s return to court last year, seeking a change in his communication restrictions, seems like a modest request. All he was asking was that one name be added to his list of approved contacts, that of his stepmother’s fiancé, so he would have someone to contact about his stepmother’s condition while she was hospitalized. But the request had confounding implications for SAMs protocol. Does the burden of proof fall on the government, to establish that a prisoner’s requested social contact poses a security threat, or can it ban the prisoner from talking to anybody in the world until the prisoner somehow proves there is no threat?
“The way the statute reads, they have to prove probable cause,” says Israel Encinosa, Sabatino’s attorney. “That is the argument we were making. All we were asking is that they be reasonable.”
> [
>
> Sabatino's father once described him as "a disturbed young man who needed attention like a drug."
Ultimately, Encinosa says, his client decided to drop the issue for now, without precluding other court actions in the future. Although he can’t share any details of his own communications with Sabatino because of the SAMs restrictions, Encinosa says he has had “good conversations” with him.
“I don’t think too many people could do well under these conditions,” he says. “I don’t know which is worse — to be alone or to be with other inmates. I don’t know which I would choose in Jimmy’s situation.”
If he had his druthers, Sabatino knows what he would choose. A prosecutor’s suggestion that Sabatino actually preferred “having a cell all to myself” prompted an outraged response in one of the inmate’s long-winded letters to Judge Lenard.
“Think about it a minute,” Sabatino wrote. “I am in the harshest prison in the country. I have no contact (physical contact) with anyone. I hardly ever leave my cell, and when I do, I am in chains, black box over my cuffs, shackles and surrounded by three officers with black clubs. He thinks that is a luxury? Tell him to try it. He wouldn’t last a week.”
He went on to boast that, before his move to The Suites, he lived “like a king” in prison, surrounded by admiring inmates who were happy to clean his cell, do his laundry and cook for him: “I am actually quite well known throughout the BOP. You can put me in any penitentiary in the country and there will be people I know personally, and even more who know of me.... All of them know that I can change their lives. That I can make them more money than they ever dreamed of.”
Being the most isolated prisoner in the federal system may add an aura of menace to the legend of Jimmy Sabatino; at the same time, it makes it more difficult for him to promote his brand. A docuseries about his exploits is said to be in development by Billy Corben, director of *Cocaine Cowboys* and several subsequent spinoffs. Corben’s production company did not respond to a request for comment, but gaining access to Sabatino in his current digs would be no mean feat. Not only is he prohibited from speaking to the media because of his SAMs status, but it appears that prison officials [haven’t granted any journalist a face-to-face interview](https://www.westword.com/news/inside-adx-the-federal-supermax-locks-inmates-down-and-shuts-reporters-out-6908944) with *any* inmate at ADX since 9/11, except for a well-orchestrated tour or two. (An ADX spokesperson could not provide any specific instance of media access to individual inmates over the past twenty years, but insisted that “all interview requests are reviewed for consideration on a case-by-case basis.”)
For a man with Sabatino’s can-do attitude, such challenges are meant to be overcome. Or, as he put it in a letter to the judge: “The only reason I am ok is because 1) my father raised a man! I am strong and will \[not\] be broken, 2) I have Allah in my heart, and 3) I live for the day that I can really achieve my goals.”
Just before dawn on September 10, 1944,the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS *Enterprise* came to life, as ground crews readied a line of airplanes for battle. The day’s mission was critical: to hit Japanese positions and ships in advance of an amphibious invasion of Peleliu, an island in the archipelago of Palau some 50 miles to the west. At approximately 5:30 a.m., the first contingent of planes taxied and took flight. Then crews moved the next group into position on deck: 12 fighter planes known as Hellcats, five heavy bombers called Helldivers and seven even larger bombers known as [Avengers](https://airandspace.si.edu/air-and-space-quarterly/spring-2022/avenger).
The Avenger, nicknamed the Pregnant Beast, was the heaviest single-engine aircraft produced by any nation during World War II. Its crew members grimly joked that it weighed so much that it could fall faster than it flew. But what it lacked in speed it made up for in destructive power: Its bomb bay held a one-ton torpedo or four 500-pound bombs, enough ordnance to sink a Japanese aircraft carrier.
Avenger No. 17018 was among the second wave. Its pilot, Lieutenant Jay Ross Manown Jr., was later described in a postwar account as a “bold and intrepid” aviator. Born and raised in West Virginia, Manown had worked as a flight instructor for the Navy Air Reserve before entering combat service after the attack on Pearl Harbor. A decorated pilot, he’d already flown combat missions throughout the Pacific for more than two years. Now, at age 26, he served as his squadron’s second-in-command.
As Manown clambered onto the wing and wedged his thin frame into the cockpit, his two crew members entered a door on the side of the plane. Anthony Di Petta, the gunner, went first, squeezing into a tiny glass turret toward the rear that housed a .50-caliber machine gun. Wilbur Mitts, the radioman and navigator, went last, closing the door behind him and taking up his perch in the dark belly of the beast. Though they could not see each other, the three men probably chattered on the intercom system while running through their final pre-flight checks.
The planes took off at approximately 7:30 a.m. local time. Once airborne, they fell into formation and headed west. Visibility was reasonably good, a mix of sun and clouds. As the planes approached their targets—ground installations on Malakal Island and ships in the nearby harbor—a Japanese freighter came clearly into view.
Clockwise from above: Manown’s mission was to attack Japanese positions on the island of Malakal in advance of an amphibious assault to take a critical airfield on nearby Peleliu Island. The crew of the bomber, known as an Avenger, from left to right: turret gunner Anthony Di Petta; Manown; radioman and navigator Wilbur Mitts; when the plane was shot down, the crewmen were deemed missing and soon presumed dead. A telegram informing Wilbur Mitts’ family of his disappearance. LOC; Courtesy of the Mitts and Di Petta Families; Brian Frank
Manown and three other Avengers began to descend, intending to hit the ship. Suddenly, antiaircraft fire erupted from multiple emplacements in the hills around the harbor. Moments later, a fiery blast tore through the underside of Manown’s plane. A wing and rudder snapped off, sending the plane into what a pilot aboard a nearby aircraft later described as a violent spin. Within perhaps 10 or 12 seconds, Manown’s plane—now a meteor trailing fire, smoke and metal—hit the water.
And then it disappeared, swallowed by the sea.
---
When Manown’s plane went down that morning, it was traveling at least 300 miles an hour. If anybody inside had survived the initial hit, they would have had little time to react, much less to escape. Moreover, nobody aboard the other planes nearby had seen parachutes. Without evidence that the crew might have survived, the Navy declared Manown and his crew “missing” and “presumed dead”—three men among upward of 80,000 American service members listed as missing in action after the war was over. Like others consigned to this category, Manown and his crew were understood not to be alive, but they were not declared dead, either. And unless their remains were somehow found, there would be no formal recognition of their demise—no bodies to prepare for burial, no funerals to attend, no graves to visit.
But the United States has long been exceptional in the resources it devotes to locating the remains of fallen soldiers. The practice dates to the Civil War, when the War Department instructed the office of the quartermaster general of the Union Army to mark temporary resting places of the fallen in anticipation of a formal burial. By the time the United States entered World War I, in 1917, forensic investigative methods had advanced, and dog tags had been introduced to help with identification. The same year, the federal government created the Graves Registration Service, dedicated to finding, identifying and, in some cases, repatriating those who had died far from home.
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A U.S. military map included in a declassified after-action report describing the Battle of Peleliu. Ike Skelton Combined Arms Research Library
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A ceremony in Palau honoring the Avenger’s crew. A flyover of F-35s followed the route of Manown’s final flight, symbolically completing the mission. Christopher Perez
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The aircraft carrier USS *Enterprise*. The ship and its planes, including Manown’s, downed 911 enemy planes, sank 71 ships and damaged 192 more. Niday Pictures Library / Alamy
The service accompanied soldiers on the front lines during World War II, burying the dead and marking their graves so they might be identified and reburied at a later date. It continued its work after the war, sending platoons of mortuary specialists to battlefields around the world, including Palau. For months, teams canvassed the islands. Though most of their efforts focused on exhuming documented graves for reburial at home or abroad, they also searched for service members who went missing, including crews from dozens of downed planes. Most remained at large, however, and the military ultimately concluded that many of the missing—including Manown, Di Petta and Mitts—were “non-recoverable.”
Patrick Scannon was born in 1947, the same year the military abandoned its search for Manown’s plane. A soft-spoken, bespectacled, bearded man who could easily pass for a minister or professor, Scannon is the founder of [Project Recover](https://www.projectrecover.org/), a California-based nonprofit devoted to locating and recovering the remains of America’s MIAs.
Patrick Scannon, founder of Project Recover. Christopher Perez
Scannon’s quest for missing pilots has its roots in his childhood as an Army brat, when he would spend afternoons and weekends in military base libraries, devouring books about aviation. “I would sit there for hours studying the planes,” he recalls.
Adrift after high school, he enrolled at the University of Georgia to study chemistry. He quickly distinguished himself, and he went on to earn a doctorate in organic chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, and a doctor of medicine from the Medical College of Georgia. Then he returned to California, where in 1981 he founded Xoma, an early biotech firm.
As the company prospered, Scannon took up adventurous hobbies, including scuba diving and later skydiving. In 1993, he and his wife tagged along on a dive trip to Palau organized by a co-worker. Near the end of the trip, a local diving guide brought the couple to see the wing of an airplane in shallow water. “I saw the rounded tip and realized the only thing it could be was a B-24,” he said, referring to the famed American bomber. “From the time I saw the wing and jumped into the water, my life was different. I knew I had to do something about this. Where’s the rest of the plane? Where’s the crew?”
Though he dutifully returned to work—he retired as Xoma’s chief scientific officer in 2016—he became obsessed with finding planes and missing airmen, dedicating his spare time to the effort. He decided to focus his efforts where he had that life-changing experience: Palau. “There was something about the place that went beyond the natural beauty,” he says. “I couldn’t believe a place so beautiful had been the subject of such violence.”
Scannon began visiting government archives, pulling military action reports and other documents about lost aircraft. Then he returned to Palau, only to get lost in a mangrove swamp looking for a missing plane. Chastened, he sought out local guides, eventually hiring Joe Maldangesang. The pair became close friends, with Maldangesang playing the role of translator and ambassador, setting up interviews with eyewitnesses who had seen planes go down decades earlier.
As Scannon’s trips to Palau continued, he began to attract a group of like-minded volunteers, many of them fellow skydivers who came to share his passion for finding MIAs. One was Dan O’Brien, a hard-driving champion skydiver and former stuntman who now serves as Project Recover’s chief financial officer and logistics guru. “The people who are drawn to this kind of work tend to be a bit obsessive,” O’Brien told me.
Scannon, O’Brien and a small circle of friends soon formed a nonprofit called the BentProp Project, the precursor to Project Recover, and began sending detailed reports of their field expeditions to the Graves Registration Service’s successor agency, now known as the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, or DPAA. BentProp teams found upward of 50 foreign and American planes on land and underwater, accounting for 26 American service members missing in action, but Scannon’s archival research revealed many more planes at large. He was coming to understand that tracking down MIAs takes time. “It’s a long game,” he says. “It’s a game of perseverance more than anything else.”
In 2003, an American expat who spent his days diving in Palau offhandedly mentioned to Scannon that he’d seen an aircraft wing in a small lagoon north of Malakal Harbor. Excited, Scannon and other team members dove to the site, where they found the largely intact wing of an Avenger. But which Avenger? Four such planes were known to have gone down in that general area, including Manown’s.
During the next few years, BentProp teams surveyed the jungle-covered islands surrounding the lagoon. As they expanded their search, they began finding other airplane parts: a tail section, a rudder and swatches of the plane’s aluminum skin. None of the pieces pointed to a specific plane, but as the team plotted the parts on a topographical map, they began to form a distinctive debris field just east of Malakal Harbor that increasingly pointed to only one plane: Manown’s. Still, the plane proved extraordinarily elusive, even after BentProp divers scoured the harbor. Stymied by low visibility, they turned up nothing. “It was like diving in milk,” Scannon recalls.
One day, in 2012, while visiting Palau’s Coral Reef Research Foundation, a frequent Scannon hangout, he and other team members struck up a conversation with two other visitors, marine scientists named Mark Moline, now at the University of Delaware, and Eric Terrill, of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The group quickly agreed to collaborate. “They fell in love with our mission,” Scannon says. “We fell in love with their tools”—namely, autonomous underwater vehicles.
On the morning of March 17, 2015, the BentProp team and the two scientists eased a yellow-and-black torpedo-shaped drone into the water. Programmed to cross back and forth across the harbor, as if mowing an underwater lawn, it soon vanished into the depths. A single light pulsed at regular intervals as a sonar system scanned the seafloor.
Nearly half a mile from the lagoon that held the plane’s missing wing, at a depth of 116 feet, the sonar captured the shadowy but unmistakable image of a bent propeller. Then it found tangled piles of metal: landing gear, a crumpled fuselage, an engine block.
After 70 years, Manown’s plane had finally been found.
---
It took four more years, but the first shot at recovering Manown and his crew went to a contractor called Ships of Discovery, which dove to the site in 2019—a qualified success, as the expedition turned up some human remains and personal effects. Two years later, DPAA hired Scannon and his organization—now renamed Project Recover, reflecting its growing ambitions and new scientific partnerships—to return to the wreck site. That mission also yielded human remains. Remarkably, DNA testing of bones and teeth gathered to that point conclusively identified two of the plane’s crew members: Anthony Di Petta and Wilbur Mitts, whose families were notified of their discovery in early 2023. But still there was no trace of Manown. Some areas of the underwater debris field remained untouched, however, so this past summer Project Recover returned to the site for a three-week operation in the hopes of finding the pilot and bringing him home.
The weather on the morning of July 9, 2023, is hot, sticky and sunny, the sky speckled with scattered clouds. The sheltered expanse of Malakal Harbor is ringed by the Chelbacheb, or Rock Islands, dozens of small limestone and coral mounds topped with dense jungle foliage. Small lagoons, some quite deep, are scattered in the interstices of these formations. There is little evidence of human habitation, though the ruins of Japanese defenses and fortifications are still visible on some of the larger islands, a common sight in Palau.
The barge used by Project Recover and its affiliated team members, anchored precisely above the wreckage. Christopher Perez
More than a dozen expedition team members board a giant rusty steel barge, which is then towed along the coast, eventually stopping precisely above the wreckage of Manown’s Avenger out in the harbor. As the tug crews lay cables anchoring the barge in place, Project Recover members get to work in the morning sun. The hulking vessel, the width of a basketball court and one-and-a-half times as long, has an enormous metal ramp at one end where a stream of motorboats come and go, loaded with members of the recovery team, equipment and food.
The mission’s divers work for Legion Undersea Services, a commercial outfit that often collaborates with Project Recover; indeed, many of Legion’s divers are longtime members of Project Recover, including its founders, Nick Zaborski and John Marsack. Both are former chief Navy divers who worked in Special Operations. Their team of six younger men, mostly ex-Navy as well, bring particular skills. One has extensive experience disarming unexploded ordnance; another, a competitive free diver, can hold his breath for over seven minutes, a handy talent if something goes wrong.
Each of the ex-Navy divers confirms the stereotype about swearing sailors, but Marsack shines in this department, knitting expletives into a kind of profane poetry as he merrily directs the divers handling the electrical cables, air hoses, oxygen cylinders and video monitors that make up the team’s version of mission control. A decompression chamber, peeking out of a nearby shipping container, serves as a reminder that putting in long days at depths of more than 100 feet is not without risks.
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John Marsack, of Legion Undersea Services, holding newly recovered plane parts, including Manown’s control stick—a significant discovery. Christopher Perez
Divers bound for the bottom don heavy work pants, thick shirts or coats, plus boots and gloves to protect them from the jagged tangles of metal below. They look as though they’re ready for serious yardwork—until they’re fitted with the helmet. The contraption, which weighs more than 30 pounds, requires two men to lower it carefully onto the diver’s head. When the fitting is complete, only a diver’s eyes, cheeks and a bit of forehead are visible. A pair of antennae-like protuberances—a light and a video camera—create a bug-like effect, as do the air supply lines and communication cables that sprout from the helmet.
The divers go through their final safety checks under the direction of Zaborski, a laconic man whose self-effacing demeanor belies years spent as a Navy diver. When the divers are ready, Zaborski walks to the top of the ramp and signals to a man stationed on a dock floating in the water below. This is Mike Raible, who runs the pump system used to vacuum debris off the seafloor in the hopes of collecting pertinent artifacts—parts of the plane, personal effects, human remains. Raible, nodding, fires up two generators, and the pumps come online, filling what look like fire hoses that run to the seafloor below.
Though Raible is pushing 70, has four missing fingers and appears to subsist on cigarettes and coffee, he nimbly navigates the piles of equipment with the grace of a much younger man. He has lived an active life, working as a gold dredger, skydiving instructor and parachute tester; he’s jumped out of so many planes that he’s spent the cumulative equivalent of nine full days in free-fall. He is used to things going wrong, but the opening days of the mission left him scrambling after he discovered that saltwater corrosion had taken a toll on the pumps. This morning, though, he’s kludged together a workaround after temporarily plugging up the pump’s discharge port. As the machines roar to life, he holds up a clenched fist in victory, revealing a tattoo that reads “Death Before Dishonor.” He gives the thumbs up, shouting, “We’re live!” Then, sotto voce: “I need a cigarette.”
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Manown’s plane was finally located in 2015. Two subsequent expeditions failed to recover the pilot’s remains. In July 2023, the nonprofit Project Recover returned for a third attempt. Clockwise from top: the wreckage of the plane on the seafloor, at a depth of 116 feet; a diver with contractor Legion Undersea Services after recovery operations at the bottom; at the end of a dive, a participant ascends to a decompression stop 30 feet from the surface. Christopher Perez
Back on deck, Zaborski gives the go-ahead, and two divers jump into the water and begin rappelling down a cable to the wreck below. They proceed under the supervision of Mickaila “M.J.” Johnston, an active-duty Navy doctor who specializes in dive medicine. Johnston, who describes himself as “the second-best doctor on this mission”—a winking nod to Scannon’s elder-statesman status—remains at his station, sentinel-like, for the duration of the dive, periodically inspecting the air hoses and other equipment.
The divers soon vanish from sight, but Zaborski tracks their movements on video feeds that play on a pair of monitors. One is set up in the dive station, where Zaborski, seated at two folding tables covered with equipment that looks like a music studio mix deck, monitors the air supply and power, periodically issuing updates over the intercom system. Thanks to a microphone and headset inside each helmet, the divers can communicate with everyone up on the surface. They can even listen to music.
The other video monitor is located in a shipping container set amidships. This is the makeshift office of Svenja Weise and Anthony Burgess, Project Recover team members who run the actual excavation. Weise, a German-born forensics specialist, began her career as an archaeologist, but early work on an Iron Age site containing cremated skeletal remains changed her life. “After that,” she tells me, “I was hooked on bones.” That even small skeletal fragments could be used to reconstruct an individual’s life and death awed her. After researching medieval-era skeletons, Weise went to work for the Danish government, serving as a kind of forensics first responder any time archaeological excavations turned up human remains. She met Scannon in 2022, when Project Recover excavated a World War II crash site off the Danish coast. When Scannon asked her to join the Manown mission, she couldn’t resist.
Burgess, also from Europe, speaks with a charming if unplaceable accent, having grown up in both England and Malta. He met Scannon when Project Recover came to excavate another World War II crash site in the Mediterranean. At the time, Burgess was working on his doctorate in archaeology—fittingly specializing in the underwater excavation of plane crashes. Much as Weise can see a bone fragment and immediately identify it, Burgess can look at a twisted bit of metal brought up from the bottom and give a good guess as to its original placement and function.
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Archaeologist Anthony Burgess examines parts of the wreck. Christopher Perez
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Archaeologist and forensic anthropologist Svenja Weise, an expert in identifying skeletal remains. Christopher Perez
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A diver with the expedition prepares to descend to the seafloor for excavations. Although the water at bottom is a balmy 83 degrees, divers must wear heavy suits to protect themselves from the jagged metal of the wreckage. Their helmets alone weigh more than 30 pounds.
Christopher Perez
Now the pair sits at a folding table covered in diagrams of the debris field, alongside an Avenger operating manual and a hot plate for making coffee. A large photograph of Manown and his crew, mounted on posterboard, leans against the wall. Weise and Burgess, joined by Scannon, sit quietly watching the video monitor as the divers reach bottom. The sound of heavy breathing, captured by the microphones in each helmet, fills the office, occasionally punctuated by complaints about the visibility. The divers pick up the nozzles of large hoses powered by the pump and begin vacuuming the sand, shells and other small items, which are sucked up and deposited into an enormous metal mesh basket sitting nearby on the ocean floor. Anything that won’t fit into the hose gets put into another basket. Occasionally, Weise instructs the divers to examine something she sees on the display.
On the seafloor, the water is a comfortable 83 degrees. Up above, the barge bakes in the sun, radiating heat and raising temperatures to dangerous levels. Dehydration is a constant threat, and Scannon, dressed in lightweight pants, a long-sleeved shirt and a baseball cap, with a red bandana tied around his neck, walks around the barge, gently reminding people to drink plenty from coolers filled with water and Gatorade.
Long periods of tedium are interrupted by fleeting moments of excitement. This is true for the divers no less than for anyone else. After spending time on the bottom, they ascend in stages to minimize the risk of getting the bends. At 30 feet below the surface, they stop and hang on to the cable for a five-minute decompression stop. Then they ascend to 20 feet and take a seat on a yellow metal platform that hangs off the barge. They’ll sit there for more than half an hour. They pass the time chatting with each other and listening to hard rock. As the divers sit on the platform, their legs dangling over the edge, the unmistakable opening guitar riff of AC/DC’s “Back in Black” blasts from the monitor speakers. The video feed confirms that the divers are rocking out at the second decompression stop, nodding in time with the music.
---
One afternoon a week later, toward day’s end, a large crane reels up the first recovery basket of the mission, steering it to a soft landing on the back of the barge. The team members swarm around it, peering intently at the contents: large, twisted pieces of metal, some scorched and warped by fire, and several mysterious sections of black rubber.
One by one, the artifacts come out, gently cradled and placed on a tarp. The black rubber turns out to be swaths of the fuel bladder, its white stenciled serial numbers still bright and legible. Then comes a piece of the bomb bay door, its hydraulics still attached; skeins of electrical wires; and a handful of indignant crabs, which are promptly returned to the sea.
The most evocative items are the smallest: a piece of Bakelite, likely from a radio; a strand of silk parachute cord, still intact; and, most haunting of all, spent rounds from a .50-caliber machine gun that turret gunner Di Petta fired as the plane came under attack. “They went down fighting,” a younger diver murmurs, turning the relic over in his hand.
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The crew unloads a component of the airplane’s internal structure from a basket recently brought up from the ocean floor. Christopher Perez
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Pieces of the plane’s rubber fuel bladder, with white stenciled markings indicating serial numbers still clear and legible, recently brought up from the ocean floor. Christopher Perez
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A piece of the cockpit identified as part of a rudder pedal assembly, recently brought up from the ocean floor. Christopher Perez
The next day, another basket comes up. This one contains pieces of the cockpit, including Manown’s rudder pedals and his control stick. The most revealing artifact, though, is a half-inch-thick armor plate the size and shape of a large baking sheet. It was meant to protect Manown’s upper torso from stray flak. The upper-left quadrant, though, is missing, leaving behind a jagged, warped edge. Scannon points at the torn steel. “He probably took a direct hit from an antiaircraft round. It would have killed him instantly.”
That evening, everyone returns to their hotel rooms back on shore feeling especially hopeful. With artifacts from the cockpit laid out on deck, there is a sense among the team that they are getting close. But the next morning a tropical storm grazes the islands. The wind and waves snap one of the cables anchoring the barge, putting the operation on hold. For two days everyone hunkers in their hotel rooms as sheets of rain inundate the islands.
When the weather finally clears, the team eagerly returns to the barge. A large metal basket filled with many cubic feet of sediment earlier in the week is hauled from the depths. Once it touches down on deck, team members remove the heavy cover, revealing a visually confusing mix of shells, scraps of metal, chunks of coral and pebbles.
Blake Boteler, a team member and former agent with the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, sees it first: a small piece of what looks like gray coral. It is splintered on one end. He picks it up wordlessly and hands it to Weise, who turns it over in her hand and nods. “A piece of a tibia,” she says. (Later, she explains that this was a provisional identification. Only DPAA has the authority to make an official determination about what it calls “osseous remains.”) Team members now begin transferring the contents of the basket to five-gallon plastic pails and bringing them to the screening station, which hangs off the back of the barge.
Screening sediment is a simple process but takes time. You take a pail and dump the contents into a shallow wooden tray lined with wire mesh. Then you use a hose to wash away the sand and silt, leaving behind anything larger than a quarter of an inch. Scannon and Boteler begin work, joined by Derek Abbey, a longtime team member who was among the group that found pieces of Manown’s Avenger on a nearby island. A former Marine who piloted F-18 Hornets, Abbey took over as Project Recover’s chief executive officer in 2019, though Scannon remains heavily involved in day-to-day operations.
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Team members clean and inspect recovered wreckage identified as part of the plane’s fuselage. Any human remains and personal belongings discovered will be repatriated to the United States. The plane’s wreckage, however, will ultimately be returned to the sea. Christopher Perez
No one at the screening station says much. The sound of running water dominates. As the sand washes away, the screens reveal the usual mix of shells and coral fragments but also much more: shards of clear, red and green glass, which evidently came from an instrument panel; knobs and dials; and additional items that look likely to have come from the cockpit.
Then someone finds a piece of curved gray material. It resembles a shell, but when shown the object Weise says: “It’s a piece of a cranium.” Soon what appear to be more bones surface in the screens: another possible skull fragment, a likely bone from a foot and other pieces, each recorded in a log by Weise.
As the operation winds down, many other artifacts come to light. A piece of the plane’s communication system; a button from a flight uniform; and, finally, a small circle of metal that some cleaning and polishing reveals to be a nickel, quite possibly from the pilot’s pocket—perhaps a talisman or charm. The coin is dated 1941, the year the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, setting in motion the sequence of events that would lead to the deaths of Manown and his crew—and, in the fullness of time, the presence of everyone on deck that day.
---
The likely bone fragments were sent directly to Oahu, Hawaii, for intake at DPAA’s state-of-the-art forensics facility, the largest skeletal identification laboratory in the world. The structure is a gleaming, light-filled building with two wings—from a distance it looks a bit like a plane. The lab houses dozens of active-duty forensic scientists who specialize in handling and analyzing human remains. Typically working with photographs of missing service members in plain view—a constant reminder of the gravity of their charge—these scientists carefully collate, record and analyze the bones and teeth along with any personal effects recovered. To make a positive identification, they make use of evidence such as the location of the remains relative to the wreckage; the presence of items belonging to the deceased; comparisons with dental records, typically those recorded in military personnel files; and dog tags.
But these methods are suggestive, not dispositive. DNA evidence, on the other hand, when compared with DNA taken from cheek swabs of the deceased’s relatives, can provide conclusive identification—a process that can take months and sometimes years. Until that time, the military won’t comment on the status of any investigation, not even to family members—including, for now, Manown’s.
Once a case is closed, however, the remains are sent to the closest surviving family members and given a full military funeral. Project Recover members frequently attend these funerals, as many did in September when Wilbur Mitts was [laid to rest](https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/09/12/after-nearly-80-years-a-family-is-able-to-lay-their-missing-veteran-to-rest/) in Seaside, California.
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Wilbur Mitts was laid to rest in California in September 2023. Diana Ward, his niece and oldest living relative, was among dozens of family members who attended the ceremony. Brian Frank
It took two years to identify the remains of Wilbur Mitts, recovered in 2021. Brian Frank
Diana Ward, Mitts’ niece and oldest living relative, sat beneath a canopy at the gravesite, surrounded by dozens of family members. She never met her uncle, she said during her eulogy, having been born three days after his plane was shot down in Palau. But she described how he remained a palpable presence during her childhood: The family sang his favorite songs and nurtured his memory as if he might one day return.
Her account is typical of many surviving relatives of MIAs. With no body to mourn, survivors experience what psychologists call “ambiguous loss.” Deprived of the closure of a conclusive death, family members dwell in a peculiar purgatory that can carry over from one generation to the next. Perhaps this helps explain why Mitts’ funeral felt more like a celebration than anything else. The dead cannot come back to life, but they can come home.
As the coffin was lowered into the ground, Zaborski quietly approached Ward. He knelt beside her, and the two spoke privately for several minutes before he hugged her and returned to the Project Recover team members who were standing in a circle nearby.
At a reception afterward, Scannon mused on the meaning of it all. If the remains he and his team found over the summer are ultimately proved to belong to Manown, Scannon said, he’d find it eerie, if a little fitting, that the plane’s junior crew members had been found first. “When a plane is headed for a crash, there’s an important rule that the pilot or commander is the last one to bail out,” he explained. “In a way, then, it’s appropriate that Di Petta and Mitts came home first.”
Time will tell whether Manown will come home, too. His Avenger will not. The government of Palau considers the plane, like other wrecks and relics from World War II, a part of the nation’s historical heritage. Which is why, a few months earlier, on the expedition’s final day, the team collected all the pieces of the bomber the divers had recovered during the excavation. Under a dark gray sky, they wrapped the plane parts in a burial shroud made of wire mesh and secured it with a rope. As everyone gathered to watch, the crane lifted the giant bundle and brought it out over the water before gently lowering it until it rested just below the surface. A single diver jumped overboard and, dodging whitecaps, swam out to the rope. Then he pulled a knife from a sheath strapped to his leg and cut the line. The shattered pieces of Manown’s plane vanished from view, reunited with the rest of the wreckage in the darkness below.
<spanclass='ob-timelines'data-date='2023-12-15-00'data-title='Eczema'data-class='orange'data-type='range'data-end='2024-01-15-00'> A Eczema starts around the 15th December.
<spanclass='ob-timelines'data-date='2023-12-15-00'data-title='Eczema'data-class='orange'data-type='range'data-end='2024-03-01-00'> A Eczema starts around the 15th December.
Medication from Paris on 29th December: anti-histaminique and local cream
</span>
@ -60,5 +60,10 @@ On [[2023-01-01|1st January]], a few spots start to form around the wounds.
On [[2024-01-12|12th January]] , end of anti-histaminic supply.
On [[2024-03-01|1st March]], still no fundamental amelioration. Went to [[Dr Cleopatra Morales]] and received:
> [Où acheter des vinyles à Lyon : nos 5 adresses préférées](https://lyon.citycrunch.fr/ou-acheter-des-vinyles-a-lyon-nos-5-adresses-preferees/2021/04/07/)
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