Part Two of the report by Randall Sullivan, published in the Oct. 18, 1981 edition of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner.
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LOS ANGELES HERALD EXAMINER
Sunday October 18, 1981
RANDALL
SULLIVAN
He took 'them' on - now he wonders who 'they'
were
The conclusion of our two part series.
Teddy D'Orsay's
phone call from New Orleans in May 1977 was Mike Ruppert's first voice contact
with her since Teddy disappeared from their Culver City apartment 10 weeks
earlier. During that conversation, Ruppert wrote Teddy's new phone number and
address in Gretna, La., on a sheet of paper already filled with information
regarding his mother's pending $45 million real estate deal. He had that paper
in his jacket pocket, Ruppert said, the next evening when he finished his shift
at the Police Academy and drove to Brennan's Pub in Marina del Rey where he had
met Teddy 17 months earlier.
While Ruppert was drinking in Brennan's, his
car door was unlocked by someone who used a metal shim, according to the
official police report, and the jacket, the sheet of paper and Ruppert's service
revolver all were stolen.
The next day Ruppert was back in the office
with LAPD organized crime Investigators Lee Goforth and Charles Bonneau,
attempting to convince his increasingly remote fellow officers that Teddy's life
was in danger. "They" were going to kill her with Ruppert's own service
revolver.
Goforth and Bonneau told Ruppert he looked tired. They advised
him to take some time off.
In July 1977 Ruppert took a weeks vacation and
drove to New Orleans pulling Teddy's furniture behind him in a U-Haul
trailer.
During his six days in New Orleans, Ruppert reported, he was
shot at as he and Teddy stood outside a bar. He and Teddy were followed by car
and on foot. In Teddy's apartment he discovered more than a half-dozen phone
jacks, including one complicated electrical hookup unlike anything he had ever
seen before. He called a friend, a naval and communications officer, described
the phone and hookup, and was told it sounded like the KY3 model scrambler
phone, which required top secret clearance.
Teddy was cold and stony. She
would not sleep with him. She told Ruppert that the smartest thing he could do
would be to forget that he had ever met her.
Teddy was visited at night
by a friend who wore a 44-caliber Magnum pistol in his boot and talked about the
work he was doing for Mafia don Carlos Marcello. During the day, Teddy was
visited by an Air Force sergeant named Johnny who brought her Manila envelopes
from Belle Chase Naval Air Base filled with what he described as
"communiquΘs."
Another friend who was employed by a company specializing
in offshore oil rig communications systems said he was helping Teddy see that
"some things got moved off the mainland."
Teddy and Johnny gobbled speed
and smoked grass that they described in Ruppert's presence as "issued," laughed
crazily at Ruppert's ardent, attentive expression.
He left New Orleans at
the end of that week, Ruppert said, "borderline suicidal."
Back in Los
Angeles, Ruppert notified Goforth and Bonneau that he now wanted to "drop the
whole thing."
Shortly after Ruppert's return from New Orleans, his father
Ed, an Orange County businessman, received a phone call from Teddy.
"She
said she was worried about Mike," Ed Ruppert recalled. Teddy said she was "doing
some sort of sensitive work involving organized crime." An organization she
referred to alternately as "my people" and "my company" had considered Mike for
employment, Ed Ruppert remembered Teddy telling him, but had decided Mike
"wasn't ready" for that kind of work.
Because Mike was "worried about
bugs," Ed Ruppert relayed the conversation to his son on the banks of the Santa
Monica Beach palisades.
[Pull Quote: "I've never seen anyone as
committed to something as Mike has been to this … Imagine what he could have
accomplished if he had used the energy and the dedication he has devoted to this
over the past five years to further a career" -Ed Ruppert, Mike's father.
End Pull Quote]
Two days later, as he left a theater in Westwood,
Ruppert said, he was chased around the perimeter of the UCLA campus by two men
in a white pickup truck.
Ruppert called Bonneau and Goforth. He had
imagined the tail, they told him. There had been no scrambler phone in Teddy's
apartment. Maybe three weeks vacation wasn't enough.
That week, Ruppert
signed in as a voluntary patient at Woodview-Calabassas Psychiatric
Hospital.
A battery of tests and hours of interviews during which Ruppert
repeated his "incredibly detailed story" to staff psychiatrist, Dr. Robert A
Cole, consumed much of the two months that Ruppert was registered as a day
patient at the hospital. Cole noted that Ruppert's "ties to reality were
adequate with no evidence of bizarre thought, processes, delusions or
hallucinations." In Ruppert's official "Discharge Recommendation" Cole referred
to his patient as "an exceptional individual with no major
weaknesses."
On Sept. 9, 1977 Ruppert saw Teddy again at his father's
house, where she had come to pick up the last of her personal
possessions.
Ruppert used a hidden recorder to tape most of their
conversation. He played this tape later for Cole, who described what he heard as
"a solid basis for his (Ruppert's) interpretation of events." On the tape, Cole
heard Teddy "admit her involvement in investigative pursuits of an admittedly
vague nature."
Ruppert later turned the tape over to LAPD's Bonneau. He
never saw it again. During the summer of 1978, as the foment in Iran built
toward revolution, Ruppert, now a senior training officer at the Police Academy,
began once again to make those long-distance connections that obsessed
him.
On Aug. 17, 1978, Ruppert went to Bonneau to say that he believed
his ex-girlfriend Teddy was involved in a plot that had something to do with the
overthrow of the Shah of Iran.
Twelve days later Bonneau called Ruppert
and asked for details of Teddy's "associations."
According to Ruppert,
the "harassment" began again immediately: hang-up phone calls, tails,
break-ins.
On Sept. 7, 1978, Bonneau said he had been unable to contact
Teddy. What Bonneau did not mention was the FBI in New Orleans had contacted
Teddy. On Sept. 12, Ruppert said, he was followed by a car with a license plate
he checked through the Department of Motor Vehicles. It was registered to a post
office box registered to the U.S. Government.
On Sept. 30, Ruppert was
followed again, he said, by two vans bearing license plates registered to post
office boxes.
He ran a check on Teddy's license plate and discovered it
was also registered to a post office box.
On Nov. 17, Ruppert formally
requested an interview with LAPD's new chief, Daryl Gates. The connection was
made through Sgt. Virginia Pickering, who worked in Gates' office. Pickering
came to the Police Academy on Nov. 28 to meet with Ruppert and on Nov. 29 told
the young officer he would get five minutes with the chief the next
day.
Five minutes was not enough time to tell his story, Ruppert
insisted. He was lucky to get one minute, Pickering told him. On the morning of
Nov. 30, 1978, Ruppert reported that he has been followed to work by two vans, a
Volkswagen and a Pontiac Firebird. He failed to show up for his five-minute
meeting with Chief Gates. That afternoon, Ruppert submitted his official
resignation from the Los Angeles Police Department.
In an interview with
the FBI four days later, Ruppert sad he had left the LAPD "to save my
life."
o
Three years have passed and Ruppert hasn't let go. His
fixation on Teddy and the international intrigue Ruppert believes he was drawn
into by her has become both his vocation and his avocation.
Supported by
files obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, through research into the
affairs of Mafia don Carlos Marcello, through information contained in a U.S.
Drug Enforcement Agency report on the exchange of drugs for weapons - classified
top secret because of a U.S. government agency's alleged involvement in these
transactions - and through a historical study of the United States' involvement
in Iran, Ruppert insists he now knows what "this incredibly story I stumbled
into" was all about.
It was about suppressing the revolution in Iran,.
Ruppert believes Teddy, useful because of her childhood friendship with the
shah's niece, Minou Haggstrom, was assigned by the CIA to cultivate
relationships with organized crime figures who would assist - in exchange for
free access to refined Mideast heroin - in the transport of weapons to Kurdish
counterrevolutionary forces in Iran.
"The actual transaction went down in
New Orleans," Ruppert assures all who will listen, "under the supervision of
Carlos Marcello. Teddy helped coordinate it all."
What is perhaps most
incredible about Ruppert's story is that so many people in the best positions to
evaluate it consider it "plausible."
Aaron Kohen, former deputy director
of the FBI and head of the New Orleans Crime Commission considered the world's
foremost legal authority on Carlos Marcello, found Ruppert's theory "entirely
plausible." Speaking from a lawn chair beneath a shade tree in the back yard of
his home in Lake Ponchartrain, Kohen said he, "would not be at all surprised" to
learn of either Marcello's or the CIA's involvement in such
enterprise.
Ruppert's attorney, Bill McCord, a former FBI agent, noted
that "LAPD probably has had closer connections with the CIA and with SAVAK (the
secret police of the shah of Iran) than any police department in the country. If
Mike had been on to something, a lot of people would have known about it." What
McCord finds less plausible is Ruppert's portrait of Teddy as a CIA agent. "It
sounds like Teddy was a bit of a party girl who knew law enforcement people and
also knew people on the other side of the law." McCord's friend and former
colleague Buck Sadler, an FBI agent assigned to Los Angeles who conducted the
official agency interview of Mike Ruppert, also found the theory "plausible,"
but added that he had "been offered no facts whatsoever to support
it."
Other FBI agents, ones stationed in New Orleans, interrogated Teddy
during the autumn of 1977. Teddy was almost immediately released, and the FBI
has "no available record" of her statement.
Freedom of information Act
petitions concerning the matter filled by Ruppert with the Central Intelligence
Agency and the U.S. Justice Department were answered with written statements
that "nothing pertaining to your request" was found in the files of either
agency.
o
On the evening of Oct. 9, I reached Teddy by phone at a
bar in Honolulu, and she called back later from her home on the other side of
Maui.
All that was incredible abut the story in her mind, Teddy said, was
"that Michael Ruppert is still trying to make something out of this after all
these years. Doesn't it make you doubt the mental stability of someone who has
become so obsessed with things that happened so long ago?"
"Yes, I knew a
lot of people," Teddy said, "I'm friendly, I smile and I say hello. And if
you're a girl (Teddy is 32) and if you're friendly, you meet people. I didn't
always know what those people were involved in, what they did for a living. Some
of them may have been into strange things."
The problem with Ruppert,
Teddy said, was that "he was always making connections - if I was friendly with
two people who he knew or thought were involved in something together, then I
was involved too."
Yes, she had told Ruppert that her vacation in Hawaii
during the spring of 1977 had been cover for her involvement in a
government-Mafia exchange of cocaine for automatic weapons, Teddy said. "He kept
me up for hours the night I got back insisting that I tell him the truth, so
finally I told him what he wanted to hear so I could go to sleep."
Yes,
she had gone to San Francisco at the same time the West Coast Mafia dons were
meeting there in the wake of Carlo Gambino's death, Teddy said: It had been a
coincidence, but she had "let Michael think what he wanted to
think."
Eventually it became convenient to play the role Ruppert had
assigned her, Teddy said. Clandestine meetings and undercover assignments were
the best excuses available for getting out of the house, for not coming home at
night, for taking a weekend out of town.
After she ran away to New
Orleans and Ruppert followed her, things got a little out of hand, Teddy
said.
She was still a friendly girl and she had met people who were
involved in things she did not quite understand. "Some of them may have been
into - probably were into - - weird things," she admitted. "But I didn't know
about that until later."
Ruppert had come into town and started asking
questions of people who did not want to give answers, Teddy said. Some of her
friends "had kind of done a number on Michael." Some had implied their
involvement in an "operation" of international proportions. Others had
threatened him. Some had shown him government documents and weapons.
"Its
all kind of messed with his mind, and I'm sorry for that," Teddy said. "I just
wanted to get rid of him at that point."
Yes, she had talked of her work
as an undercover agent during a taped conversation with Ruppert, Teddy
said.
"I saw him slip this tape recorder behind the couch as I came in
and I figured if he was going to be this ridiculous, so would I." The one
question Teddy would not answer was how she had supported herself without
employment during the 15 months she spent with Ruppert: "That's nobody's
business but my own."
She was sorry Ruppert had been hurt, Teddy said,
but it would never have happened if he had developed a sense of
humor.
o
"She's lying, she's lying, she's lying." Ruppert insisted
pounding on the leather arm of a couch in the Herald Examiner lobby the next
morning. "She's very good, I'll admit, and you wouldn't be the first person
she's fooled."
He had been waiting three years to have his story told,
Ruppert said. "Don't cut me off now," he pleaded. "This is the closest I've
come."
o
Mike Ruppert's plight, his story, appeals to a collective
paranoia that has been cultivated in most of us. "They" really are everywhere.
And because we concede that much, we also must concede the possibility that
Ruppert's private obsession is some aspect of responsibility the rest of us have
failed to assume.
Ruppert says he is a victim. We need victims. They put
a human face on the corruption and incoherence most of us are unable to
confront. The inept innuendoes used by LAPD to rebut Ruppert's story only
encourage sympathy for him:
"He came in with a story, I believe, that his
mother was a CIA agent," said the department's official press spokesman, Cmdr.
William Booth. "And you were aware, I'm sure, that he has spent time in a mental
hospital."
Ruppert is a well-educated 30-year old who has been forced to
fall back on the financial support of his mother and father. At least two jobs
he had been promised after his resignation from the LAPD failed to materialize.
Ruppert believes this was the work of "some agency interested in closing all
doors to me."
Broke and beat, this UCLA honors graduate who reportedly
possessed the highest IQ in the history of the Los Angeles Police Department,
eventually took a job as a clerk in a 7-Eleven store. Two hours into his first
shift, Ruppert was arrested for selling liquor to a minor: "A setup, without
question," he says.
o
"I've never seen anyone as committed to
something as Mike has been to this," his father Ed said.
"Imagine what he
could have accomplished if he had used the energy and the dedication he has
devoted to this over the past five years to further a career."
It is
Ruppert's "commitment" that has compelled the attention of others who have
helped him along the way.
"Whether or not I buy Mike's theory, I consider
his personal credibility above reproach," said McCord, a former FBI agent. "I
have absolutely no doubt that Mike is telling what he believes to be the
truth."
That same phrase "what he believes to be the truth" was used by a
retired LAPD Intelligence officer, another FBI agent and psychiatrist Cole to
describe Mike Ruppert. Each of these three professionals professed both a
measure of admiration and a measure of fear of Ruppert.
Ruppert has
stayed on the case. In a world where so much seems possible and so little
likely, you begin to wonder if the courageous and the crazy are the same
people.
<END of PART 2>