At Anthrax Ground Zero

...The New York Times, for all its thoroughness, has not trafficked in such details...

...In accordance with the city's stripper ordinance, which mandates that topless dancers must be of age, hard-looking women traipse through the lobby to secure their identification cards...

...He is down from Tallahassee on anthrax visitation, and he looks as calm and collected as a Methodist deacon...

...Perhaps it is because they don't want to disclose any particulars in an ongoing investigation...

...After Arizmendi cleared his name, I offered to take him out to dinner to discuss his travails...

...Trimmed in the garish aquamarine that is permissible only south of Jupiter, Florida, the building feels like home to many reporters...

...c) While the state's top epidemiologist said there was "no reason to believe at this time this was an attack at all," the FBI and Attorney General John Ashcroft, who still refuse to categorize this as the work of terrorists, took an additional five days to make the no-duh upgrade, finally calling theirs a "criminal investigation...

...A Globe cover featured bin Laden under a "Wanted Dead or Alive" headline ("or alive" was crossed out), then disclosed bin Laden's secret poison recipe (corn, green beans, spoiled meat, and "about two spoonfuls of excrement...

...There are, of course, anthrax vaccines—but they're only available to the military...

...I don't think the government's telling us everything," he says...

...Though inhalation anthrax contracted from natural causes is exceedingly rare (only 18 Americans have had it the past century), when the disease isn't treated with antibiotics before symptoms appear, it carries an 85 percent mortality rate...

...Governor Frank Brogan has materialized from an elevator...

...Part of the distrust is undoubtedly due to the clumsiness with which many local officials have handled the anthrax affair...

...Frightened tabloid reporters were forced to wait in lines outside for over three hours (several suffered heat exhaustion), until someone turned up with a key...

...The only line that local, state, and national officials can seem to stay together on is their choral mantra: "This is no time to panic...

...There are worse ways to die than from inhalation anthrax (Crimean-Congo fever, for instance, sees its victims bleed to death from every orifice...

...But he's scared now...

...A supreme irony takes shape as the mainstream media stake out the tabloid media, who have, under duress, become a respectable lot, given to restraint, quick with a "no comment," generally resistant to our invading their lives as they have so many others...

...Sorry dude," he declined, obviously shaken, "I got Larry King at nine...

...But it is unlikely that actor Russell Crowe has access to lethal strains of anthrax...

...Little did he know how much worse it would get...

...Not for nothing did a recent Palm Beach Post survey reveal that 90 percent of the public doesn't believe officials are being completely forthcoming...

...While health and law enforcement authorities have refused to deduce a terrorist act from the circumstantial evidence (despite their belief that several terrorists had subscriptions to American Media titles, and that nearly one-quarter of the 300-plus associates in their network at one time lived in Florida), AMI would make an ideal target, as it accounts for 25 million weekly readers...

...Here, displaced tabloid writers temporarily work out of claustrophobic cubicles in a pastel-hued building the color of Don Johnson's old undershirts...

...As Brogan concludes, most of us turn our attention to Roberts, who asserts she has no expertise on anthrax, a claim that is a rather easy sell...

...The only farewell gift he'd left in the office was some bagels and cream cheese...

...Unless they bring the anthrax out in handcuffs," offers one impatient reporter, "there's nothing to see here...

...Though personnel from the Centers for Disease Control and the FBI mill around the off-limits parking lot, while men sporadically exit the building in snow-white hazardous materials suits that make them look like menacing Easter bunnies, there are no soot-covered firemen or leather-faced iron workers to romanticize, as we did at the original ground zero...

...But other employees aren't so cavalier...

...When the state's Department of Health shut down the building (two and a half days after Stevens died), they did so on a Sunday...

...in Boca Raton, where the Globe, the National Enquirer, and just about every other tabloid that graces grocery-store racks is published...

...Flanked by a posse that includes the state's secretary of health and our old friend Carol Roberts (the pouty, Gore-supporting third Stooge), Brogan has no news to break...

...Sheri suspects that Stepford-like public health officials, in a mad stampede to promote calm, are skimping on the details...

...This isn't Chicken-Little stuff—'the sky is falling,'" he says...

...The e-mail promised co-workers, "You'll remember me from all the little surprises I hid around the office...

...But a survey of post-September 11 issues says otherwise...

...I thought that would be the worst story we'd ever see...

...And last week brought perhaps the saddest and scariest news—a Sun tabloid employee died after being infected with anthrax, evidence of what might be the only bioterrorism attack in America since followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh poisoned a Shakey's salad bar in 1984...

...But the intern, 23-year-old Jordan Arizmendi, turned out to be a Jewish communications major who lives with his parents in Ft...

...If they can't catch a bunch of terrorists that are six feet tall, blowing up airplanes, how are they going to get a handle on an invisible, microscopic situation...

...The Weekly World News has called Bin Laden a "lily livered piece of crap" with "dung breath," while the National Enquirer offered Osama Toilet Paper to "wipe the smile off bin Laden's face...

...Last November, slow-witted voters and slower-witted officials kicked off the most grisly debacle in U.S...

...It is here Matt Labash is senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...

...To add insult, the tabloid alleged he was a "mentally ill, drug-addicted fanatic" with an "inner rage" caused by his "underdeveloped sexual organs...

...Plus, to carry out such a heinous act, he'd have to be really, really mad about the National Examiner's reporting that the former "real-life Maximus" now has a "double chin and a jelly belly...

...Skeptics say that the tabloids make lots of enemies, which is true...

...The Globe recently reported that Lopez had determined that the best way to show the terrorists America can't be intimidated was to go ahead with "her fabulous $500,000 wedding...

...BY MATT LABASH Palm Beach County If any place in the country deserves a respite from dubious headlines, it is surely Palm Beach County...

...Because of the lull, many of us move several miles up the road, to American Media Inc.'s accounting building...

...Sheri is hardly alone in her skepticism...

...Still, fever, dyspnea, vomiting and abdominal pain, followed by delirium and hemorrhagic meningitis, doesn't exactly sound like a Jennifer Lopez wedding...

...Instead, he wants to express "how proud we are" of local officials for "the way they've maintained calm...

...When the rare employee does talk—usually on background—he has as many questions as answers: How did this happen...

...that journalists keep 24-hour vigils behind yellow police tape, waiting to catch a glimpse of . . . no one's exactly sure what...

...If there is, indeed, some sort of widespread bioterrorism attack, officials might want to desist from the Pollyanna shtick...

...Last month, it was discovered that the region played host to over half the terrorists involved in the September 11 attacks...

...Nearly one year ago, it was here that we assembled daily (and nightly) to get butterfly ballot updates, as officials like Judge Charles Burton, Supervisor of Elections Theresa LePore, and County Commissioner Carol Roberts (affectionately deemed the Three Stooges) would call press conferences to tell us what they didn't know...

...It's crazy," she says, her belly tattoos quaking so violently that I can't tell if they're dolphins or just some sort of Rorschach ink blot...

...She introduces me to her companion, Thomas Davis, an older gent who owns a yacht sales company...

...Rather, it is here that Robert Stevens, a much-beloved Sun photo editor, was exposed to anthrax spores of unknown origin (they were found on his computer keyboard), causing his death on October 5. It is from here that hundreds of AMI employees have been evacuated, as they await word on their nasal swabs and blood samples, which should reveal whether they too have been invaded by the anthrax bacterium (two additional employees have tested positive, though they appear to be doing okay...

...We're used to stupid stuff coming in the mail, which is why nobody would pay attention to such a letter," says Lynn Allison, who reports on medical issues for several of the tabloids...

...American Media chief executive David Pecker—who initially rejected the bioterrorism theory, then came to embrace it after a third employee was found to have suffered exposure—has said that his tabloids haven't been any harder on Osama bin Laden and Co...

...Promoting cool-headedness in times of adversity is an admirable goal...

...Asked the same question, Davis goes into the kind of rant one can hear anywhere on the streets of South Florida, though not in the Emergency Operations Center...

...b) Health officials first said there were no additional cases, though tests later showed two employees had had anthrax exposure...

...Or perhaps, most of us suspect, they just don't want to waste their good anecdotes in somebody else's newspaper...

...This scenario is particularly terrifying to AMI employees, who are in the habit of receiving all sorts of nut mail...

...d) While Florida's secretary of health, John Agwunobi, cannot go a day without assuring citizens that anthrax isn't contagious, the very information sheet given to AMI employees, which was put out by the Florida Department of Health, admits that in cases of cutaneous anthrax (an infection acquired through a cut or abrasion, and the form of the disease that was detected Friday in a New York NBC employee), drainage from sores can actually be contagious...

...But no media outlet has hit him harder than the Globe...

...than any other news organizations...

...Hey man, the sky already fell...

...I've had love letters from prison inmates, letters from religious fanatics saying 'God will strike you dead,' letters from people who spotted Elvis in a Florida Winn-Dixie...

...But if we are on the cusp of a state of emergency, it certainly doesn't feel that way—at least not at the Emergency Operations Center in West Palm Beach, the base of operations for a cross-section of public health and law enforcement types...

...One freelancer, who introduces herself as Sheri, is incensed because she's covering the Nostradamus beat, and the 16th-century mystic, who seems to have predicted everything else about the September 11 attack, missed the anthrax scare altogether...

...elections history...

...Additionally, here is just a partial list of the many errors, misrepresentations, and reversals of previously unshakable assertions that have transpired in just one week's time: (a) While numerous health officials first suggested that the anthrax infection likely came from natural environmental sources (even though Stevens suffered from inhalation anthrax, the most lethal and rarest type), half a week later, CDC director Jeffrey Koplan told Senator Bob Graham that the chances of its occurring without human intervention were "nil to none...

...The Star, for instance, has alleged that Mohammed Atta was a clumsy pick-up artist, "kind of goofy" and "determined to see a naked woman before he died...

...That last question might have an obvious answer...

...Back out in the parking lot, I ask adult entertainer Lisa how the anthrax news is affecting her...

...Bin Laden, the Star alleged, used to be a serious drinker who'd get in bar fights over prostitutes...

...And so it is again, as the national press corps deploys to the "new ground zero," the upscale office park of American Media Inc...

...One news report last week indicated that a "cryptic e-mail" had been sent by a former National Enquirer intern believed to have been of Middle Eastern descent...

...But as veteran observers know, tragedy never lasts long around here without giving way to farce...

...Lauderdale...

...I heard they tested it on monkeys, and many of them still died...

...Why us...

...she asks...

...Whatever the case, they are largely uncooperative...

...We have not come, however, in search of the Horn-Faced Lady or the Dog-Faced Man, whose exploits are championed in the Weekly World News...

...I hear Cipro [the antibiotic that all AMI employees have been given] isn't even the right thing to be taking if you've had exposure...

...With no Jesse Jackson entourage obstructing the doorway these days, it's much easier to enter the building...

...But in a show of incompetence that could rival even Palm Beach County election officials, health planners forgot it was Columbus Day and the facility was closed...

...The newest infection in New York will likely cause an additional run on antibiotics, which are already growing scarce in Florida...

...Since no one yet knows how anthrax entered the building, dark theories have abounded, though many have already been discarded...

...But an increasingly reasonable question persists: If now is not the time, then when...

...Perhaps, as some have alleged, their corporate masters have threatened to fire them if they talk...

...And in keeping with the president's directive, Palm Beach citizens appear to be carrying on their regular business, as the operations center is visited by a steady stream of "adult entertainers...

...Addressing a group of testy reporters, many of whom haven't had a call returned in days, Brogan goes on to say, "Communication is a very important part of how we deal with this issue...

...Is it related to September 11...

...So the mainstream journalists tan themselves in the tabloid empire's parking lot, waiting for our counterparts to leave the building as we slalom around grouchy security guards ("They don't want you here," says one) or just size up our prey like hunters in a duck blind...

...I remember May of 2000, when that Lake Worth middle schooler shot his teacher in the face," recalls a Palm Beach Post staff writer, pining for a simpler time...

...Another theory, since downplayed by investigators, is that the anthrax was transmitted in powdered form from a letter sent to the AMI offices, which was addressed to Jennifer Lopez and contained a Star of David...

...With salty, weather-beaten features, Davis doesn't look like he scares easy...

...How can we make absolute claims about something we're not familiar with...

...AMI employees were ordered to report to a Delray Beach health department annex early Monday morning to have their noses swabbed and to be given antibiotics...

...Just as I make the acquaintance of one Lisa Johnson, who cuts an elegant swath in her white bun-huggers and red mesh T-shirt, there is a media stampede...