The car inched forward through early morning traffic at LAX. Buses and trucks surrounded it on all sides in a state of near-gridlock. Transit vans pulled over to pick up travelers who wandered the arrivals area with their smartphones out, hands held up to block the sun, wheeled luggage clacking behind them.
No one paid the car any attention—until the driver swerved, accelerating onto the sidewalk in front of Terminal 7. It ran over bags, flattened signage, and collided with pedestrians too slow to jump out of the way. In the few seconds anyone had to react—to shout, to call 911—the driver detonated a homemade bomb hidden inside the trunk.
The resulting explosion obliterated the front of the terminal, leading to a partial building collapse, and a catastrophic fire began to spread toward the gate area. The window-shattering blast was heard throughout the airport as black smoke, visible for miles, lifted in a pillar into the sky. Dozens were killed instantly.
Suicide car bombs had come to LAX. This was exactly the nightmare scenario Anthony McGinty and Michelle Sosa had been hired to prevent.
* * *
Anthony McGinty, 54, is a retired D.C. homicide detective now living in Pasadena. McGinty’s tenure in the nation’s capital, where he attained the rank of detective first grade, coincided with that city’s darkest era, when it was known as the murder capital of the United States. A Marine veteran who served in the second Gulf War and was stationed variously in Okinawa, Kosovo, Honduras, and the Mediterranean, McGinty is quiet, keeps his hair shorn close to his scalp. He bears a slight resemblance to actor J.K. Simmons in the film Whiplash.
While he was working the murder beat back east, McGinty also applied for and received Top Secret clearance. This helped pave the way for him to become a liaison between D.C. police command staff and the National Counter-Terrorism Center, where one of his responsibilities was to review classified overseas intelligence reports detailing threats that might target the DC area. It was this experience that set the stage for his career’s unexpected second act at LAX.
Michelle Sosa, 37, graduated with a degree in international relations from Boston University in May 2001. Trilingual in French, Spanish, and English, Sosa did not immediately know what sort of career to pursue. She often flew cross-country from Boston to Los Angeles to visit her father who, today, still works for the airline industry. Then, four months after she graduated, 9/11 happened; one of the planes, hijacked by ringleader Mohamed Atta, was on the same Boston to Los Angeles route Sosa herself had flown so many times before.
No longer confused about what to do with her degree in international relations, Sosa was moved by the attacks to apply for a federal intelligence job—and, to her surprise, the lengthy application process worked. Six months later, she disappeared into the labyrinth of U.S. intelligence, working as an analyst over the course of the next decade in both Florida and D.C. Her move out west to L.A. was not only professionally motivated: Sosa, a youthful, even glamorous presence in a world of fluorescent lights and office cubicles, wanted to live near her family again, to ensure that her now 7-year-old daughter could grow up in the company of her grandparents.
Together, Sosa and McGinty, who have both maintained Top Secret security clearance, were hired two years ago as part of a unique experiment in infrastructural protection and security at LAX.
As McGinty describes it, their current operation falls somewhere between a start-up and a think tank. Together, the two of them have brought classified in-house intelligence analysis to one of the world’s busiest airports, augmenting traditional beat police operations with an investigatory agenda previously associated not just with a federal agency but with the power and reach of a nation-state.
Political and economic authority has always accumulated in sites of public infrastructure. Possibly the most significant civic figure in the history of Los Angeles, for example, was never elected to public office: William Mulholland, L.A.’s early 20th-century water czar, fundamentally reorganized Southern California through a series of massive hydrological projects that continue to shape the region today.
In his September 2016 cover story for The Atlantic, Stephen Brill suggested that infrastructure’s outsize political influence today has only been amplified and accelerated by the country’s ongoing reaction to the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Under the moniker of “critical infrastructure protection,” sites of energy production, transportation logistics, waste disposal, and more have been transformed from often-overlooked megaprojects on the literal edge of the metropolis into the heavily fortified, tactical crown jewels of the modern state.
Bridges, tunnels, ports, dams, pipelines, and airfields now have geopolitical clout that rivals democratically elected civic institutions. Infrastructure is now conflict—and cooperation—by other means. Architect and Yale University urbanist Keller Easterling refers to this as the practice of extrastatecraft, or an emerging form of power, manipulation, and influence that exists outside the norms of what we currently consider representative government (e.g. #bridgegate). It is soft power in a hard shell.
To no small extent, then, Sosa and McGinty’s initiative is LAX’s attempt to reinvent itself as a player on the international intelligence stage. Their work promises to propel the city’s aging airport to the forefront of today’s conversations about what it means to protect critical infrastructure, and, in the process, to redefine where true power lies in the 21st-century metropolis.
* * *
The car bomb that decimated Terminal 7 shut down LAX for nearly a week and led to a nationwide terror alert. Flights around the world were affected and incoming planes had to be rerouted to other regional airports, causing knock-on problems there. Cargo losses at LAX alone were estimated at more than $100 million a day. The projected death toll continued to rise, as victims succumbed to their injuries despite emergency care.
It was a sobering but—thankfully—entirely fictional scenario, part of an emergency tabletop exercise held in a conference room deep inside the Westin Los Angeles airport hotel. The meeting was what’s known as an Aviation Security Contingency Plan Exercise, or AVSEC. It occurs once a year, always with a different plot. There have been car bombs, hijackings, mass shootings—an ever-growing catalog of speculative catastrophes, carefully studied and dissected for their training or tactical value.
I pulled into the hotel parking lot early on the morning of Wednesday, November 9. It was less than seven hours after real estate entrepreneur and former reality TV star Donald J. Trump delivered his presidential victory speech, marking an end to the 2016 U.S. election and the beginning of something altogether new in our nation’s history. Workers in airport traffic control, Homeland Security, Fire Department, and police uniforms walked sleepily down the hotel corridors, as their colleagues from the FBI, multiple international and domestic airlines, and nearby airport hotels stood sipping coffee in rumpled business attire.
The idea of hiring McGinty and Sosa can be traced back to the administration of Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villagairosa. In November 2010, Villagairosa assembled what’s known as a Blue Ribbon Panel to assess the state of airport security in and around Los Angeles. There was a general—and, as the panel confirmed, justified—fear that the region’s airports were not prepared to respond to a terrorist threat of any nature, let alone to something on the scale of 9/11. The group’s final report was released seven months later, in June 2011, and it included 162 pages of specific recommendations for the airport authority to implement as quickly as possible. After all, the 10-year anniversary of 9/11 was approaching—and no one knew if there might be another attack.
One of the commission’s key suggestions was that Los Angeles World Airports, or LAWA, the umbrella organization that controls not just LAX but a smaller regional airport over the Hollywood Hills in Van Nuys, “should consider creating the position of Director of Intelligence.” The person in this role “would proactively gather and share counterterrorism intelligence,” and he or she would do so not only with the region’s many airports, from LAX to Palm Springs, Van Nuys to San Diego, but also with federal—even, if necessary, international—law enforcement agencies. To assist with this, the report suggested, the airport’s future Director of Intelligence should also bring on board “a staff focused exclusively on gathering and analyzing intelligence regarding terrorist threats.” LAX would no longer be dependent on secondhand reports.
Ethel McGuire, a member of the Blue Ribbon Panel, took this advice seriously. In the end, she hired not just one but two intelligence analysts for the job: Anthony McGinty and Michelle Sosa. McGuire was impressed by the seeming complementarity of McGinty’s and Sosa’s respective approaches. Sosa was coming from an intelligence background and thus had a contextual eye for big-picture narratives; McGinty, on the other hand, a former street detective and Iraq War veteran, arrived at LAX with 25 years’ worth of tactical insights and a deep knowledge of police culture under his belt. McGuire liked what she saw—so she rewrote some budget lines and grabbed them both.
McGuire herself came to LAWA, where she is now Assistant Chief, after a full career at the FBI. She was, in fact, one of the very few female African-American agents in the Bureau’s history. Trailblazing runs in McGuire’s family: her daughter is also now an FBI Special Agent, making them the only mother-daughter duo ever to serve in the FBI simultaneously. McGuire is soft-spoken, with elegantly cropped hair and a helpful, even grandmotherly demeanor. In describing the intelligence program she has helped to initiate, she is both precise and emotionally honest, unafraid of revealing the frustrations and fears that have dogged much of the program’s creation.
McGuire and I met in person at the AVSEC exercise, during a break from discussions of terrorist car bombs, radiation fears, and terminal fires. She was attracting a lot of attention, I could see. People involved at almost every level of the exercise were tracking her down, crossing the room for a quick handshake or respectful hello. McGuire and I had already spoken at length about the intelligence program, as well as about the unique capabilities of McGinty and Sosa, but this gave us an opportunity to catch up in the context of her peers.
“We all have a common goal,” she said, referring to the maze of agencies connected to airport security, from Customs & Border Patrol to the DEA, “and that’s to prevent anything from happening in Los Angeles. We work really hard to make sure that we’re covering each other—through intelligence collection, dissemination, and sharing—as quickly as possible.”
The idea behind bringing Sosa and McGinty on board is still experimental, she emphasized. “I didn’t know exactly how this would work,” she told me, “but I wanted to try it.” After all, when she first got to LAWA in 2010, finding good intelligence about airport-directed threats was nearly impossible, she explained. “I’d been asking the first couple of years when I started here for intelligence reports for the airport, and there wasn’t a whole lot out there,” McGuire said. “But I was like, look: this was my former life. I know stuff happens at the airport! We’ve got to be able to provide something more if you want to protect this critical asset.”
The challenge was not only a bureaucratic one, she said, although it was not exactly easy to find adequate space for Sosa and McGinty to thrive in the already complex organizational structure of Greater Los Angeles security culture. It was also physical—the challenge of the airport itself. “What was significant to me, even when I was at the FBI,” McGuire said, “was that the airport environment is a different beast.”
LAX is a city within a city. At more than five square miles, it is only slightly smaller than Beverly Hills. 50,000 badged employees report to work there each day, many with direct access to the airfield—and thus to the vulnerable aircraft waiting upon it. More than 100,000 passenger vehicles use the airport’s roads and parking lots every day, and, in 2015 alone, LAX hosted 75 million passengers in combined departures and arrivals.
As McGuire knows all too well, LAX is also policed like a city. The airport has its own SWAT team and employs roughly 500 sworn police officers, double the number of cops in the well-off city of Pasadena and more than the total number of state police in all of Rhode Island.
“Not only do you have the operational component,” McGuire said, “but you have all the policing—and policing is so different from intelligence gathering. What I wanted to do was to really heighten or enhance the intelligence portion. It is so impactful to how you police, why you police, where you police, and everything that you do in combating a terrorist threat.”
For their work to have any real tactical value—for their jobs to be worth it—McGinty and Sosa would need to help assess a world that exists far beyond the perimeter of LAX. “This is global,” McGuire said. “We’re an international airport. We have about a hundred different countries flying here. If you stop traffic at LAX, it has an immediate global impact on aviation; if LAX shuts down, it immediately affects a hundred other countries. It has to stay a well-oiled machine.”
* * *
On a cloudless, 76-degree autumn day, I was picked up in an armor-plated Ford Interceptor driven by LAWA police officer Tia Moore. Sitting in back was Alicia Hernandez, our official escort for the day. Hernandez is a responsive and jovial veteran of the U.S. Army Reserves, where she spent eight years working airfield logistics and convoy tracking, including a year overseas in Kuwait. Anthony McGinty rode quietly beside her, phone in one hand, a small notebook out on his knee.
Officer Moore drove us for miles amongst the roots of jetways and towering international aircraft. Heat haze coming off the tarmac gave everything an otherworldly, almost oceanic shimmer. We passed baggage trucks and other security vehicles, and stopped at easily missed intersections marked on the ground with colored paint. With most vertical obstructions banned for fear of affecting the aircraft, the result was a landscape that had to be read, as if driving through a two-dimensional diagram five square miles in size.
“LAX attracts people who have a political agenda,” McGinty began. Their acts are intended as signs, symbols, statements. Think of the so-called Millennium Bomber, arrested trying to cross the U.S./Canadian border in December 1999 with a car full of explosives; his eventual target, McGinty reminded me, had been LAX. Or think of the man who targeted Israeli airline El Al in a combined knife and gun attack at LAX on July 4, 2002. Or the unemployed anti-government conspiracy theorist who came to LAX in November 2013 for no other reason than to shoot and kill a TSA agent.
Sometimes, however, these events can be borderline absurd. In August 2016, a man dressed as Zorro, carrying a plastic sword, triggered an armed response by LAWA police; unfortunately for Zorro, his appearance coincided with panic over a possible active shooter somewhere else in the airport. The resulting near-stampede threw LAX into chaos, with passengers and employees alike fleeing through security doors and assembling outside near the runways. At the AVSEC exercise, this was alternately referred to as “Zorro Day” and the “Zorro Incident,” not without stifled laughter.
“You never know what you’re going to get,” McGinty said. “We focus mostly on noncriminal threats—that means transnational threats, unconventional threats, homegrown violent extremists, assessing all of them in relation to LAX.” As he described the nature of the adversary, I was reminded of Don Delillo’s 1991 novel Mao II. “Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture,” Delillo wrote. “Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness.” So what do we do when someone decides to add their name to the apocalypse of history, and LAX is the venue they choose?
We stuck as close to the airport perimeter as we could, looking out at the black windows of nearby hotels, through which someone, of course, could also be watching us. McGinty explained that the process of gathering useful intelligence includes meeting with those local hotel managers to discuss potential threats. There might be a suspicious guest filming airplanes from his or her hotel room, or someone setting off a hotel’s rooftop alarm. They might just be going outside for a smoke—or they might be trying to shoot down one of many planes flying unnervingly low overhead. McGinty’s fears don’t stop at the boundary fence. “Our job is to go beyond the perimeter,” he said.
Stacey Peel would agree with this assessment. Peel is a globally recognized expert on the security implications of airport design. She currently works in central London, where she is head of the “strategic aviation security” team at global engineering super-firm Arup. For Peel, every airport can be thought of as a miniature version of the city that hosts it. An airport thus concentrates, in one vulnerable place, many of the very things a terrorist is most likely to target. “The economic impact, the media imagery, the public anxiety, the mass casualties, the cultural symbolism,” Peel pointed out. “The aviation industry ticks all of those boxes.” Attack LAX and you symbolically attack the entirety of L.A. It’s an infrastructural voodoo doll.
Even the best-designed aviation facilities still have serious security flaws, she pointed out, if, for example, their runways are surrounded by badly managed hotels with direct views of the airplanes. Approach roads, parking lots, green spaces—let alone local crime statistics—all help to define an airport’s threat profile. Each profile, much to the consternation of security professionals, is resolutely, frustratingly unique.
Even someone heading toward LAX in a taxi, acting strangely—perhaps holding unusual luggage, talking about God and bombs—needs to be on their radar, McGinty explained to me. Does the driver have a way to contact airport security without tipping off the passenger? Will LAWA police lose track of the taxi amidst the hundreds of others visiting the facility that day? Is the person inside even a danger?
We eventually reached a distant, all but silent corner of the airfield. This was where suspected bombs were dealt with. Moore, whose mother also once worked for LAWA police, pointed my attention down to a number of painted blue grids. These indicated spots where suspicious baggage could be detonated. She then gestured to a massive blue circle surrounding it all, a shape so large I would not even have noticed it. This circle, visible on Google Earth, marked the outer perimeter within which an entire aircraft would be parked during a bomb scare.
Of course, securing LAX doesn’t always big-ticket threats like this, Moore said. She has responded to numerous incidents of sheer stupidity, including stray pets, from dogs to birds, going wild in the terminals. A confused woman “off her meds” caused a seemingly endless series of car accidents in the passenger drop-off area. One night, two people caught sneaking a drink in a restricted area fled at great personal danger toward an active runway until Moore herself ran them down on foot. As trivial as these sound, any one of these events could be distractions for a larger terrorist incident minutes later; McGinty and Sosa would have to pay attention to every one of them.
While we were talking, I noticed a field of sand dunes and empty streets at the western end of the airport. There used to be a suburb there. A wealthy, whites-only enclave called Surfridge was acquired through eminent domain by the city of Los Angeles in the 1960s. Following a referendum in 1965, Surfridge was slowly dismantled in the name of airport safety, leaving behind nothing but uninhabited streets. The area is now officially a butterfly preserve, its cracked pavement nonetheless used by LAWA police as a convenient site for tactical driver training school and simulated chemical attacks.
The ghostly remains of Surfridge also present an unusual security risk. As we drove through a padlocked gate, McGinty noted that various systems of alarms and sensors ring the now-dead neighborhood, a place where retaining walls and old water pipes are still visible sticking up from the sandy ground. The views of the sea are incredible.
If an alarm goes off, it could just be kids sneaking in to smoke pot, he pointed out, or it could be something far worse. He mentioned the possibility of a terrorist group or cartel-affiliated gang smuggling shoulder-fired missiles into the city with the goal of shooting down planes at LAX. “The dunes,” as McGinty referred to Surfridge, would be an ideal location for this.
Indeed, the outer edge of LAX is one of the most interesting parts of the entire airport. Although we spent several hours that day touring secure construction sites, an emergency operations center with clocks set to Singapore, Sydney, London, and Moscow time, a sprawling fuel depot—connected by underground pipelines all the way to Long Beach—and a CCTV hub, it was this transition zone between LAX and the rest of the city, where the civilian world hits the secure, that was a constant source of concern.
What’s more, the true shape of the airport’s perimeter is invisible to the unaided eye; it is much more high-tech than mere fences and automotive patrols. Among other things, McGinty pointed out, new tracking software is being tested to keep tabs on local drones. Confronted with revised airspace regulations and technological options such as geofencing or even GPS jamming, future neighbors might find that their shiny new toys literally cannot fly within a mile or two of the airport. Why tear down the next Surfridge, in other words, when you can simply reprogram its airspace?
* * *
LAWA police headquarters is located in an unremarkable gated complex, tucked behind a cinderblock wall on a dead-end street off Sepulveda Boulevard. The famously close approach of passenger jets supplies a near-continuous roar, reminding everyone of what they’re here to protect. This is where Anthony McGinty comes to work every day (Michelle Sosa, on the other hand, spends most of her time at the Joint Regional Intelligence Center, or JRIC, a straight shot east on the 105 freeway in Norwalk).
After passing through a series of badge-accessible doors, the facility features low ceilings and small cubicles, all an unremitting shade of grey. Amongst all this, spots of color are all the more noticeable. On one of McGinty’s bookshelves I noticed a small stack of orange spiral-bound notebooks. I asked about them.
“My wife is Japanese,” he explained to me, pulling several notebooks down from the shelf. The two of them like to shop every once and a while at the downtown branch of Kinokuniya, a stationery and literature megastore roughly equivalent to a Japanese Barnes & Noble, where McGinty goes to buy the Apica Figurare brand of notebooks. Inside them, he said, he keeps notes for every day on the job, falling back on old habits developed from his days with D.C. police. They featured lists of mundane tasks, as well as larger research questions; there were lists of books and articles to read.
Amidst all of this was a thick binder of case files—or “case jackets,” in police parlance—that McGinty had taken with him from his time in D.C. We looked at page after page of his old investigations, his memory jogged by particular details: specific victims, witnesses, or suspects he was able to apprehend and arrest. In addition to investigating gang shootings and serial killers, McGinty also worked Internal Affairs, he pointed out, where he briefly served in a police corruption unit, tracking cops who, among other things, had been openly profiting from a local prostitution ring.
Elsewhere on McGinty’s desk were guides to the science of crowd control, an encyclopedia of airport operations, even a pamphlet or two on extremist groups, including how to recognize and interpret White Nationalist tattoos; we had discussed shoulder-fired missiles, Hezbollah, and disgruntled cargo employees. To protect LAX, you had to know about all of this—from riots to lone wolf terrorists, car bombs to incoming dignitaries. I was beginning to get a feel for how the true extent of LAX might have seemed overwhelming to McGinty and Sosa—this entire world, stretching far beyond its perimeter fence, its true international boundaries unreachable by foot patrols or CCTV.
Greg Lindsay is coauthor of the 2011 book Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next, written with University of North Carolina business consultant John Kasarda. Speaking to Lindsay, aviation logistics take on near-psychedelic dimensions. When you or I look at a map of the world, we might take in superficial details, like the outlines of nation-states, but Lindsay sees tax-free supply chain hubs, special economic zones, and transnational land deals. Individual airports, he points out, are complexly knit together through global service contracts and preferred air routes that often defy straightforward geopolitical explanations. What’s more, the value of consumer goods that pass through the LAX to Tokyo or LAX to Shanghai air corridors often exceeds the GDPs of many nation-states—yet those invisible routes, despite their economic influence, don’t show up on world maps.
The fact that an airport such as LAX would begin to realize its true power and economic stature in the world is not at all surprising for Lindsay—nor, of course, is it news to anyone that airports are increasingly terrorist targets. A piece of infrastructure turning into its own intelligence-gathering apparatus, Lindsay suggested, is just “the natural trickle-down effect of when, after 9/11, the NYPD expanded its own intelligence efforts, deciding that the FBI, CIA, and Homeland Security were simply not good enough. They had to project their own presence.” More to the point, they realized, like LAX, just how much there was to protect—and how badly other people wanted to destroy it.
The incentives are undeniable. Today’s threats, whether terrorist or merely criminal, are increasingly networked and dispersed; it only makes sense that our response to them must take a similar form. It might sound like science fiction, but, in twenty years’ time, we could very well find that LAX has a stronger international intelligence game than many U.S. allies. LAX field agents could be embedded overseas, cultivating informants, sussing out impending threats. It will be an era of infrastructural intelligence, when airfields, bridges, ports, and tunnels have, in effect, their own internal versions of the C.I.A.—and LAX will have been there first.
“Our new norm is the unknown,” Ethel McGuire said to me as we wrapped up our conversation. She was worried about a change in the calculus through which certain kinds of attacks could be anticipated, and the urgency for airport intelligence to keep up. In December 2015, she reminded me, a married Jihadist couple opened fire on a San Bernardino health services firm during an office holiday party, killing 14 people and injuring 22. What could her team be doing to anticipate an attack of that kind at LAX?
“Our new norm is: what’s next?” McGuire added after a pause. “And that’s how it shouldn’t be.”
Case Files
Although Anthony McGinty and Michelle Sosa declined to provide information about specific criminal cases or terrorist plots that they have tracked while working at the airport, a number of hypothetical narratives emerged from my interviews with law enforcement authorities at LAX. The following scenarios are not examples of actual events that have taken place or real threats that have been averted, but are instead provocative fictions similar to the AVSEC exercise described in this article. Nonetheless, these are the kinds of scenarios that Sosa and McGinty were hired to watch for at LAX.
Taxi Driver
A local yellow cab picks up a passenger in Westwood who asks to be taken to LAX—but he is carrying a backpack from which odd-looking wires protrude and he has begun making suspicious comments into his cellphone. The driver manages to notify airport authorities without the passenger realizing it—but Los Angeles police have now lost the taxi in traffic. The clock is ticking, and the car is getting closer.
Internal Affairs
Someone with secure access to an airplane has been helping to ship contraband goods. As McGinty and Sosa explained to me, passengers smuggling things through LAX is unnervingly common—but this is a particularly ominous case, because it reveals an insider threat. A member of an aircrew, authorities learn, has been paid to stash something on an outbound plane, but the worker appears to have been duped into loading an explosive device in the cargo hold. Finding the airplane—and the network of airport workers responsible—is urgent.
Age of the Wolf
Two Iraq War veterans from eastern Oregon, already known to authorities for expressing vigorous support for White Power groups on social media, have stolen so-called MANPADs (Man-portable Air Defense Systems) from a National Guard armory in central California. On Tuesday morning, they are spotted in the Los Angeles suburb of Palmdale. That Friday night, there is a perimeter breach in the dunes behind LAX, and a van parked in the vicinity with plates that LAWA police trace back to a militant Neo-Nazi.
Hotel California
A Moroccan woman staying at a hotel near LAX leaves a video camera mounted on a tripod in her hotel room while she is out for the day. Although the camera is turned off, the housecleaning crew believes that she has been filming takeoffs and landings. They notify their manager. Federal authorities soon learn that the guest’s overseas associates once appeared on an FBI watch-list (although they have since been removed). Is the woman a film buff, an aviation enthusiast—or an imminent threat?
The Arrival
A logistical mix-up overseas means that, with less than three hours before arrival, federal authorities learn that a notorious, widely hated member of the Serbian mafia is on his way to LAX—and, it is feared, that this will not go unnoticed by local rivals. Airport authorities need immediate intelligence on whether or not someone might try to confront and even kill him within the airport; worse, they now have only two hours to gather and act upon it.
Fatal Attraction
An emotionally troubled man from suburban New Jersey has moved to Los Angeles to be closer to his favorite star. He also recently purchased a handgun and has been making openly paranoid statements to his Culver City landlord. The actress he believes he is in love with is flying out of LAX later this week—and he will do anything to be there to see her go.
Assassin’s Creed
It has been seven months since a graduate student in International Relations dropped out of USC after threatening a Jewish classmate for her public support of Israel. A member of the Israeli Knesset, well known for his hardline stance against an independent Palestinian state, is visiting Los Angeles next week. This former student will be at the airport to greet him.