A new subject of anthrax probe

By Seattle Times news services

JOE R. LIUZZO / AP FBI and other law-enforcement officials surround Dr. Kenneth Berry's home, which they raided in Wellsville, N.Y., on Thursday.

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The physician hosted a conference in Washington, D.C., in which he crusaded for better training against biological attacks. He filed for patents on two systems to shield buildings from biochemical agents.

And he was charged in a forgery scheme that, an accomplice says, was meant to fund Berry's fight against bioterrorism.

Five years later, these strange crosscurrents have splashed more mystery onto the maddening hunt for the person responsible for the 2001 anthrax mailings, which killed five people and sickened 17.

In recent days, FBI agents have searched Berry's home and former apartment in Wellsville, N.Y.; his parents' summer home on the Jersey shore; and a car Berry reportedly kept at an airport in rural southwestern Pennsylvania.

During the winter, agents asked the manager of the Wellsville Municipal Airport, where Berry kept his small plane, about the doctor's flight routes. Manager Gary Barnes said he told the agents that Berry mainly flew back and forth to Pittsburgh for his job as an emergency-room doctor at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center-McKeesport.

	Dr. Kenneth Berry: an FBI "person of interest."

"We had no knowledge of what it was leading to," Barnes said of the questioning.

Sharing spotlight

Suddenly, Berry shares a dubious spotlight with Dr. Steven Hatfill, another crusading physician whose biodefense career ended when authorities labeled him a "person of interest" in the anthrax case.

No one has been charged or detained in the federal investigation. Both Hatfill and Berry say they are innocent, and Berry's father, William, says his son is just the latest scapegoat in an inept federal probe.

Berry and Hatfill hail from a small community of officials and self-styled experts who, after a bomb detonation during the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta and a nerve-gas attack in a Tokyo subway, began sounding alarms in the late 1990s about America's vulnerability to weapons of mass destruction.

It's a fraternity under an FBI microscope. The FBI won't say whether it is focusing on individuals who fit a specific profile, but Hatfill and Berry appear to share some traits.

Both were educated at foreign medical schools — Hatfill in Zimbabwe, Berry at the American University of the Caribbean School of Medicine in St. Maarten, Netherlands Antilles — and seemed driven to prove themselves. Both liked the limelight and portrayed themselves in interviews during the 1990s as bioweapons experts.

Hatfill's colorful, soldier-of-fortune résumé, asserting adventures with foreign paramilitary groups and work with NASA in the Antarctic, has been the fodder for debate for three years.

On his Web site, Berry, 46, claims he helped with the forensics investigation of the TWA 800 crash. The Federal Aviation Administration last week said it never retained Berry in any official capacity, though it did not rule out possible volunteer work.

Berry's site also notes his leadership within the emergency medical community on issues pertaining to weapons of mass destruction. Yet despite hosting conferences in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., Berry failed to make a lasting impression with big-name participants.

"Charming-type guy"

How Berry, who declined to be interviewed for this story, landed on the FBI's radar screen puzzles some acquaintances. They describe a good family man with two passions: piloting his private plane and fighting bioterrorism.

"He's a low-key, charming-type guy," said Edward Wicks, a Connecticut inventor who shares a 1999 patent with Berry.

Like Hatfill, Berry also appears to be a man of contrasts. Neighbors in rural Wellsville, N.Y., say he dotes on a young son. But while agents were combing through his home, Berry was arrested in Point Pleasant Beach, N.J., on domestic charges unrelated to the anthrax investigation. Authorities said he had been fighting with four family members at a motel and that the family members required medical treatment. He was released on $10,000 bail.

His father said Berry became a born-again Christian at 14 and spent time in a seminary. He was drawn to medicine after volunteering in a Danbury, Conn., hospital.

Yet that medical career almost crumbled over a scheme to forge the will of a deceased doctor who was Berry's friend.

Forgery charge

Berry was charged in 1999, the same year his organization PREEMPT (Planned Response Exercises and Emergency Medical Preparedness Training) staged its third annual biodefense conference.

Berry and his PREEMPT secretary, Cathy Litzburg, were accused by authorities in New York's Allegany County of conspiring with Mary Colletta to fake a will for her late common-law husband, Andrew Colletta.

The orthopedic surgeon had died in 1998 of a heart attack at his home near Wellsville. The forged will attempted to make Mary Colletta the beneficiary of the doctor's real-estate holdings, she said. That shocked Andrew Colletta's first wife, whom he had not divorced.

Mary Colletta said Berry tried to coax more than $1 million from her "to fight bioterrorism."

"I remember he would go on and on about bioterrorism defense and, specifically, it was the anthrax threat," she said in an interview Friday. "He wanted me to financially invest in a number of items, some of which had to do with communications and other equipment he needed, which I'm not going to mention.

"He wanted me to go in on a small private jet with him. It was a substantial amount he wanted. In the seven-figure range."

Colletta said FBI agents visited her home Thursday and that they spoke with her by phone Friday. She would not discuss those conversations. But she said she handed over a taped speech, a tribute to Andrew Colletta in which Berry made some "bizarre statements about the government."

In the will scheme, Berry initially was charged with forgery. He was allowed to plead guilty to disorderly conduct and was fined $300. A prosecutor told the local newspaper he did not want Berry to lose his medical license. A judge approved Berry's request to seal case records, according to New York State Police Investigator William Fish.

Sounded alarms

Colletta said that at first she dismissed Berry's passionate talk about bioterrorism. But soon it became clear that Berry was "on a mission."

Speaking in San Francisco at a Federal Emergency Management Agency workshop in September 1997, Berry said the country was not prepared for an attack involving weapons of mass destruction.

"The overall general consensus insists it is not a question of if it's going to happen, but when," Berry said, according to a transcript on his Web site. That same year Berry called for anthrax vaccines and proposed a training program for 200,000 first responders.

Between March 1999 and September 2001, Berry applied for — and would receive — three patents related to bioterrorism. One was for an automated system of sensors to seal a building against biochemical attack.

Another, for a system to identify attacks over a wide area, was filed only days after the first anthrax letters were processed at a Hamilton Township, N.J., post office in September 2001.

A third patent involved a modification that Berry suggested to Wicks, the Connecticut inventor, involving a sprinkler that can pump air into a contaminated building.

William DiBerardino, retired administrator of Jones Memorial Hospital in Wellsville, where Berry worked from 1996 to 2001, said he doesn't think Berry would do anything to hurt his country.

"He's just a very bright guy," DiBerardino said. "He is a little different in what he does and the way he is, but not in any bad sense."

FBI under the gun

To date, the FBI has conducted more than 5,000 interviews in its pursuit of the anthrax killer. In their zeal, agents dogged Hatfill so closely at one point that they ran over his foot.

People who follow the investigation wonder if the focus on Berry signals a break in one of the FBI's most baffling cases — or just desperation.

Rutgers University professor Leonard Cole, author of "The Anthrax Letters," said he hopes the FBI has more evidence against Berry than it appears to have against Hatfill — for the bureau's sake.

"If they're just making a big show, if they don't come up with anything, what kind of confidence do we have in the FBI? It's not good for them or the country," Cole said.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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