Who Financed 9/11?

One family's quest to trace the money behind the murders.

Fighting Back

Listen to the taped conversation between Tom and Beverly Burnett and attorney Ronald Motley, and the pain you hear is as fresh and cutting as the day it began: September 11, 2001.

The Burnetts' son, Tom Jr., died in the crash of Flight 93 after he and other passengers fought the hijackers for control of the jetliner. Tom and Beverly contacted attorney Motley not because they want monetary compensation for Tom's murder. They are after something bigger. In the depth of his misery, Tom Sr. had the idea of using the American legal system to expose those banks, businesses, charities and individuals who funded the 9/11 attacks and other terrorist activities worldwide. By drying up the terrorists' cash flow, the Burnetts hope ultimately to spare other families the grief they live with every day.

To carry out their plan, the Burnetts needed an experienced and indefatigable attorney with deep pockets. And fate delivered just that. Ron Motley is a flamboyant South Carolina trial lawyer best known for suing Big Tobacco and winning hundreds of billions of dollars in settlements. Nearly two years before Tom and Beverly contacted him, Motley had also lost his only son -- Mark, 27 -- due to complications following a medical procedure. In their first telephone conversation, more than three years ago, he told the Burnetts, "I have some unfortunate personal experience with these matters."

Motley cautioned the Burnetts about the risks involved in filing such a suit and taking on some of the most dangerous people on earth. In the end, the Burnetts came to the same conclusion that their son reached on Flight 93: Whatever the personal danger, they had to do something.

After that first call, Motley met with Tom, Beverly, and Tom Jr.'s wife, Deena, in a conference room of a San Francisco hotel. There they began laying the groundwork for a lawsuit that would eventually become known as Thomas Burnett Sr., et al., Plaintiffs, v. al Baraka Investment and Development Corporation, et al., Defendants. The battle was joined.

Tommy Burnett was born at St. Mary's hospital in Minneapolis on John F. Kennedy's birthday -- May 29 -- in the year of the President's death, 1963. Tom and Beverly already had an eight-year-old daughter, but had lost two children at birth, so this time Beverly's labor was induced early, and their son was born six weeks premature. For a day or two there was some question as to whether this baby would survive. He weighed less than five pounds, and his father remembers, "His legs were not much bigger around than my index finger." The Burnetts -- devout Catholics -- decided to have him baptized in the hospital.

Tom Jr. survived, and thrived. With his older sister, Martha, and, six years later, a younger sister, Mary Margaret, he lived a classic American childhood in what was then the quiet Minneapolis suburb of Bloomington. His father taught high school English. His mother dabbled in real estate but mainly prepared meals, cleaned, and helped her children learn to read at an early age by sticking signs -- B-E-D, L-I-G-H-T -- on everyday objects around the house.

One stormy Sunday morning when he was 12, young Tom went off to the late Mass on his own, taking an umbrella from the front hallway. When he returned an hour and a half later, the umbrella had been blown to bits, and his shoes and the soles of his feet were scorched. And so he became the second member of the extended family to be struck by lightning, and the first to survive: Years before, lightning had killed his grandmother's first husband.

Tom Jr.

In high school, Tom Jr. began to show the leadership skills that marked him for the rest of his life -- a gift that reached a climax on September 11. A talented football player, he stopped bullies, more than once, from harassing less popular students at school.

He had a close relationship with his father -- later the best man at his wedding -- who took him hunting for deer and pheasant in the forests and fields of their home state. And he had a particular admiration for his father's brother Jack, who'd been a B-25 pilot in World War II.

Because of that admiration, and because his father wanted him to, Tom Jr. accepted an appointment to the Air Force Academy, where, in his first weeks, he stepped in to stop the hazing of a fellow classmate. He quickly realized military life wasn't for him, and transferred to Saint John's University in Collegeville, Minnesota. He was in line to become SJU's starting quarterback when a shoulder injury ended his football career. He transferred again, graduated from the University of Minnesota with a degree in finance, earned his MBA at Pepperdine, and continued a career that would take him, in the span of just ten years, to the position of senior vice president and chief operating officer of Thoratec, a California medical devices corporation. In the last year of his life, his income was close to a million dollars.

During the early stages of this rise, he met, courted, and married Deena Burchfield, a pretty flight attendant from Halley, Arkansas, who was herself an accomplished skeet shooter with a sweet golf swing. In 1996 Deena gave birth to fraternal twins, Halley and Madison, and, two years later, to a third daughter, Anna Clare. Says Deena: "Tom loved being a father. He took more satisfaction in the girls' accomplishments than in his own."

It was a challenge balancing his demanding job and the desire to spend time with his children. Tom had joined Thoratec in August 1996, moving his family to San Ramon, California. As his close friend and Thoratec CEO Keith Grossman puts it, Thoratec, at the time, was "a pretty pathetic little company" with about 40 employees. By 2001, the firm had grown into a major player in the medical devices field, employing 750 people. Weeks that stretched to 60 hours were not uncommon for Tom and Keith.

On September 7, 2001, they flew to Los Angeles to encourage press coverage on a Thoratec product. Tom returned home that night to have dinner with Deena and the girls, then caught a 10 p.m. red-eye east. As he often did when business took him to the other coast, he built in some time with his parents, stopping in Bloomington, en route. On this, his final visit home, he spent all day Saturday with his father, building a hunting stand at the farm they'd bought, just across the Minnesota border near Siren, Wisconsin.

"All the way up there and back, he was on the phone, doing business," his dad says now. But he took time to have a long conversation with a friend of a neighbor, a man named Larry Swanberg, who was waiting for a heart transplant. In a letter sent to Tom and Beverly a year after 9/11, Swanberg wrote: "That such a caring and concerned man would take his time to visit with some old guy up in the middle of nowhere is unbelievable to me."

Hijacked

The next day, Sunday, shopping for a scope for his hunting rifle, Tom misplaced his cell phone in a sporting goods store. He went back twice, finding it just minutes before he had to leave for the airport. That phone with its earpiece would prove to be central in the events of the following Tuesday.

His mother noticed that he seemed "melancholy" on that weekend visit. Deena says, "He was very intuitive, and he really did not want to go on this trip. Looking back, I wonder if he felt like something was going to happen."

On Monday evening, September 10, Tom entertained Larry Cohen, president of Thoratec's East Coast subsidiary, ITC, at a chic Manhattan restaurant called Judson Grill. It was pouring that night, and Tom was tired, anxious to get home, but in another letter sent to Deena after Tom's death, Cohen's wife, Ronnie, who was also at the dinner, described him as "delightful, genuinely interesting and extremely intelligent."

Though he was scheduled to sleep in and catch a later flight to California, Tom contacted United Airlines and changed to an earlier flight, so he'd be back home in time for dinner. Before turning in, he called and left a message for Deena and the girls, then phoned his parents and stood at the window of his Marriott Marquis hotel room, describing Times Square to his mother, because she had never been there.

When Burnett arrived at Gate 17 at the Newark airport the following morning, he was assigned seat 4C in first class on Flight 93, right beside one of the day's other heroes, Mark Bingham. Two of the hijackers sat directly in front of them; one was probably in coach. And Ziad Jarrah, who is believed to have been the leader and the man who eventually flew the plane, occupied seat 1B, right behind the cockpit door.

A little over an hour later, Tom's sister Mary Margaret heard the news that planes had struck both World Trade Center towers. She knew her brother was in New York but was unsure of his flight schedule. She called her parents. "Where's Tommy?" she asked. She then called her brother's cell phone, but he did not pick up -- unusual for him, except, of course, when he was airborne. Meanwhile, Beverly called California, where Deena had just gotten the children up and was making breakfast. "Wait a second," Deena said. "He's calling on the other line right now."

As she habitually did with friends, Deena took notes during this call, the first of four Tom would make to her from the hijacked plane. Later she reconstructed them to avoid having to repeat the painful conversations again and again:

Deena: Tom, are you okay?

Tom: No, I'm not. I'm on an airplane that has been hijacked.

Deena: Hijacked?

Tom: Yes, they just knifed a guy.

Deena: A passenger?

Tom: Yes.

Deena: Where are you? Are you in the air?

Tom: Yes, yes, just listen. Our plane has been hijacked. It's United Flight 93 -- Newark to San Francisco. The hijackers have already knifed a guy. One of them has a gun. They are telling us there is a bomb on board. Please call the authorities.

The Heroes

When Tom hung up, Deena called Beverly and gave her the news. Tom Sr., standing nearby, yelled out "NO! NO!" Martha and Mary Margaret rushed to the house, and the family prayed together, then stood in front of the television, flipping channels. Tom Sr. went out onto the back patio, where countless times he'd thrown baseballs and footballs with his son, and then to the front walk, where he paced, sent up prayers to Mary, promised God he'd do anything, anything, if his son got safely off that plane.

As the family watched, reports began to come on the TV that a large plane was down in Pennsylvania. "They didn't say 'crashed,' " Mary Margaret remembers. "They said, it 'was down.' I kept holding out hope." But just after 10 a.m., Tom Sr. was on the front walk when he heard a scream and wailing from inside the house. He knew instantly what it meant.

Exactly what happened on United Flight 93 will never be known. Scheduled to depart Newark at 8:01 a.m., it was delayed for 41 minutes in heavy runway traffic. It finally took off approximately four minutes before American Flight 11 hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

After that, the details become less clear. Breakfast had been served in first class by the time the hijackers made their assault on the cockpit. Tom made his first call to Deena at 9:27. Controllers at the Cleveland traffic control center heard the pilot or co-pilot say, "Get out of here! Get out!," then a gasping sound such as a man would make if his throat had been cut. They next heard someone with an accented voice telling the passengers that there was a bomb on board, that the plane was headed back to Newark. We know that one person was killed immediately after the hijacking. "I tried to help him," Tom said in his second call to Deena, "but I couldn't get a pulse."

The 41-minute delay meant that those on Flight 93 would hear about the other hijackings and be able to guess the hijackers' real plans. Between his calls to Deena, Tom passed on news to fellow passengers, who had been herded to the back of the nearly empty coach section. In later calls, Deena could hear him exhorting them to action. Tom was 6'2", 205 pounds, and accompanied by a group of other large men with similar athletic credentials. Mark Bingham was 6'5", 230 pounds, and a champion rugby player; 6'1" Jeremy Glick, also thought to be involved in the attempted takeover, had won a national collegiate heavyweight judo championship. Todd Beamer was 6', 200 pounds, and Lou Nacke was a 200-pound weightlifter. One passenger, Don Greene, had extensive flying experience, including some jet-simulator training, and was likely the one who would have taken over the controls, had the revolt been successful.

At 9:36, when it had been in the air almost an hour, Flight 93 turned abruptly south above Ohio. At 9:57 the sounds of a scuffle were recorded on the cockpit voice recorder. Probably a group of passengers used the food service cart as a battering ram to crash through the cockpit door, and then utensils, trays, boiling water, and their bodies as weapons. Certainly they were close to achieving their goal because those family members who gathered to hear the cockpit voice recording in Princeton, New Jersey, on April 18, 2002, said the hijackers were arguing among themselves as they realized the passengers were about to take back the plane. Deena, Tom Sr., Beverly and Tom's sisters are sure beyond a doubt that they heard Tom Jr. yelling, "In the cockpit! In the cockpit!," and then someone else saying, "Pull up!"

Eyewitnesses in and around Shanksville, Pennsylvania, say Flight 93 was flying upside down as it came in low over the tree line. On the cockpit voice recorder you can hear the screaming of the wind; the plane was moving at almost 600 mph when it hit a reclaimed strip mine on a forlorn hillside in the Allegheny Mountains at 10:06 a.m.

The Lawsuit

One week later there was a standing-room-only crowd of 1,500 at the memorial service at St. Edward's Church in Bloomington. School kids and neighbors lined the curb across the street holding up hand-lettered signs: "You're Our Hero" and "God Bless You." A homemade video of the ceremony shows Deena, obviously still in shock, almost teetering, reaching out to put a hand on her young daughter's shoulder.

Since then, the Burnetts have set up the Tom Burnett Family Foundation in Tom's memory, and he has been the posthumous recipient of a long list of awards: scholarships in his honor at Pepperdine, Saint John's University, the University of Minnesota; burial with honors in the National Cemetery 15 minutes from where he grew up; flagpoles erected in his name at Thoratec and at Hyland Park, where he rode his bike as a boy. The west Bloomington post office now bears his name, and Mary Margaret was instrumental in commissioning Patrick Wilson to create an arresting sculpture in her brother's honor at Bloomington's Mall of America.

None of those tributes diminish the survivors' pain, though. Deena speaks of her daughters' continuing sleepless nights, and of listening to them say things such as, "You liked it when Daddy kissed you, didn't you, Mom?" Tom and Beverly can still lose their composure describing trips Tom Jr. took them on to Korea, Paris, Costa Rica. In the months after her brother's death, Mary Margaret had recurring nightmares that she was fighting terrorists and saving his life. Older sister Martha says, "Our whole lives are divided into before Tom died and after Tom died."

It was Tom Sr.'s idea to do something constructive with that pain, to file a lawsuit against those believed to have funded the 9/11 hijackers, a decision attorney Motley describes as "quite extraordinarily ingenious." In late 2001 Tom Sr. approached Jeff Spragens, a Miami-based businessman and someone he and Beverly had known since before Tommy was born. "I want to get the sonsabitches who did this," Burnett told his friend, and Jeff's first response was, "You have to try to forgive. You have to calm down."

Burnett would not be dissuaded. Eventually, Spragens promised he would try to put the Burnetts in touch with a good lawyer. It turned out that his wife, Joy, had lived next to Ron Motley when he was a young attorney, and it was Joy who approached Motley and set up the phone call that led to the first meeting. Of that five-hour discussion in the San Francisco Ritz-Carlton, Motley says, "The emotional energy in the room was extraordinary. Afterward I said to Jodi [Flowers, another member of the firm, who was also in the room], 'I don't care where this case leads; I'm going to do it.' "

Financers of Terrorism

Burnett et al. v. al Baraka et al. is still, after three years, in what is called the Rule 12 stage, where Motley has to convince the judge that he has established "causes of action" against the defendants in order to warrant moving forward. The suit has been transferred to the Southern District of New York, where it is being heard by a federal judge named Richard Conway Casey, who is completely blind. Casey has the tens of thousands of pages of documentation read to him by a clerk, or via a special computer program. Casey and an earlier judge dismissed some of the 200 defendants -- among them, al Baraka, as well as two Saudi princes protected from claims by their official connection to a foreign government. Casey still must decide if the remaining defendants -- Islamic charities, banks and individuals -- are liable to be sued for damages. Motley and his colleagues are guardedly optimistic, and have wagered a great deal of time, energy and money that the judge will find in their favor.

While the result of the lawsuit is in question, what is not in question is the fact that Al Qaeda, and groups like it, need large sums of money to keep operating. Like all Muslims, members of the Wahhabi sect of Islam, prevalent in Saudi Arabia, are urged to perform zakat, a kind of tithing. Osama bin Laden's Wahhabi notion of zakat, a perversion of this tenet, encourages donations not to hungry children in the slums of Riyadh, but to organizations bent on killing "infidels," all infidels -- non-Wahhabi Muslims as well as Americans and other Westerners. Documents unearthed by Motley's investigators show that bin Laden estimated the annual operating costs of Al Qaeda at $30 million. From all indications, this money is funneled to the terrorist organization through a complex array of sham corporations, banks and charities all over the world. Motley's investigators must trace the hidden channels through which funds travel from wealthy militants into the pockets of killers.

The Burnetts are confident that Motley will be able to accomplish the task. Says Beverly Burnett, "In my mind, there is no one else -- no one -- who would have stuck with the case this long."

In addition to the tobacco settlements, Motley and his firm have made millions from lawsuits involving asbestos, breast implants and the Dalkon Shield. Much of this success can be traced to the 61-year-old Motley himself, whom associates credit with having a near-photographic memory and a fierce tenacity. "He is the most brilliant person I've ever come across," says Flowers. "He has a big ego, too, but he's got a really big heart."

True, but Motley's Southern drawl and courtly manner mask the instincts of a bulldog. He once brought into court a squirt gun shaped like a swiveling finger to underscore his argument that his opponents were trying to point the finger at everyone but themselves. Another time he held a pair of military boots up to a jury and said, "We're going to fight for my client the way our men and women in uniform fight for our freedom." Though Motley declines to discuss it, since deciding to take on the Burnett lawsuit, his associates say he has spent approximately $15 million of his own money to set up a worldwide investigative team.

"Patriots First"

One of Motley's chief international investigators, a French intelligence expert named Jean-Charles Brisard, was the man who connected Al Qaeda to the Spanish train bombings. Others on the team include D.C. policy insiders like Allan Gerson (among the first to file a civil suit against Libya in the bombing of Pan Am 103), international investigators, accountants, translators, and Internet wunderkinds. It's almost as though -- in pursuing justice for the Burnett family and the thousands of other claimants (mostly family members of those who died in the September 11 attacks) who have joined their suit -- Motley has set up a small international entity of his own.

The team has already collected some two million documents, pieces of evidence and clues they hope will trace the movement of money from well-protected Middle Eastern individuals and institutions into the hands of killers. Some documents include Al Qaeda formation plans and a fund-raising scheme.

Fond of saying, "Our clients are patriots first," Motley has made this massive database available to the FBI, other branches of the Justice Department and state prosecutors. With all the legal technicalities and millions of pieces of evidence involved in the suit, which seeks $1 trillion in damages, Motley calls it "a labyrinth of caves. Sometimes I feel like I have a coal miner's helmet on and I have to find my way out."

When asked if the events of that day altered his thoughts about the meaning of human life, Tom Burnett's friend Keith Grossman says, "I believe, and I think Tom believed, that there is a purpose to our lives. I look at Tom's life and I believe people are often placed in certain situations for a reason, and I think that Tom -- and others -- were probably meant to be on that plane. Tom grappled with his calling. He loved business, but I think he felt that his calling was something greater. We used to talk a lot about that. He was struggling with a higher, different purpose for his life. I think he found it."

Perhaps the world is ordered that way, and tragic events have a secret meaning we can sense but not grasp. Near the end of that first phone conversation Motley had with Tom and Beverly Burnett, he was kind enough to give them his private phone number, suggesting they call him at any time. The number cannot be revealed in full here, but a year later, when the Burnetts sold the house where they had raised their son, a house full of the sweetest and most tragic memories, and moved to a condominium half an hour away, the new phone number they were assigned, randomly, also included those same numbers in the same order. The numbers were 911.