ShareThisRALEIGH, N.C. - North Carolina's own walking parody of U.S. foreign policy is at it again.
This time Mexico is the stage for veteran con man Jonathan Keith "Black Jack" Idema. Is he on yet another Rambo mission?
Local media on the Caribbean coast of Mexico are reporting that Idema is barricaded in a turreted house -- which he has dubbed "Casa Blanca" -- because police want to question him about allegations that he held a woman against her will and assaulted her, among other accusations.
Black Jack has never been one to remain in the background for long. In the 1990s Idema went to prison for 58 counts of wire fraud and conspiracy and collected dozens of lesser charges such as writing worthless checks and assault on a female. Idema sued CBS and Steven Spielberg's studio, claiming a movie starring George Clooney was an unauthorized version of his life story.
Then he hightailed it to Afghanistan, where he reinvented himself for the international media as a sunglasses-wearing, AK-47-toting counterterrorism expert who boasted of shadowy U.S. and Afghan government connections. He peddled things such as bodyguard services and videotapes of alleged al-Qaida training exercises and was quoted in a host of admiring stories.
Eventually though, Idema, now 54, was arrested by Afghan police along with other members of a rag-tag group he called Task Force Saber 7 and charged with running a private jail and torturing innocent Afghans there. The Afghan government commuted his sentence in 2007 after three years in prison.
Now he is causing a controversy in Mexico, where police are trying to talk to him about allegations that he held a woman against her will and assaulted her. Headlines in Mexico refer to Idema as Rambo, and one story notes that he now refers to himself as "Black Jack."
Idema didn't return phone calls or e-mail messages seeking comment. Guillermo Torres, an attorney in Mexico who said he is working for Idema, said he couldn't talk about the allegations without Idema's permission.
New Jersey attorney John Edwards Tiffany, who has represented Idema, said he didn't believe there was any truth to the stories about his former client being barricaded.
"This is Jack Idema we're talking about," Tiffany said. "You think something would be going on like that and CNN wouldn't already have a satellite truck there? The major news outlets would be camped out."
Author Robert Young Pelton, who wrote a chapter about Idema in his book "Licensed to Kill: Hired Guns in the War on Terror," said Idema gave himself the Black Jack nickname when he swapped one fantasy for another with the move from Afghanistan to Mexico. He has grown his hair and beard long, raised a pirate flag over the house and begun renting out boats, using images from "Pirates of the Caribbean" in his advertising.
In Afghanistan, some of the world's best journalists were duped by Idema.
"The guy listens and he copies and he duplicates and he fools. He fooled CBS, he fooled National Geographic, he fooled Fox," Pelton said. "You know that guy that wanted to go get bin Laden with a balloon or something and drop something on his head? We want these rogue hero guys to exist. And the thing about Jack, he knows we want him to exist."
Pelton said that Idema had always wanted to be the subject of a movie and that he was trying to make himself a star when he formed Task Force Saber 7.
One of the other Americans in the group, Ed Caraballo, was a freelance videographer who had worked for several TV networks. His job was to film the exploits of the "task force."
The group thought Idema was leading them on a legitimate hunt for Osama bin Laden and other members of al-Qaida, Pelton said.
"He was shooting a reality show, and they thought they were actually hunting terrorists," Pelton said. "...When he does things like stop buses at gunpoint on camera and tells the Afghans to get off and beats them up, he's acting for a TV show, but the guys with him think he's hunting terrorists."
Caraballo, via e-mail, declined to comment.
Idema somehow persuaded the commander of the Afghan prison, one of the worst in the world, to give him comfy digs with carpet and a satellite phone. He also had Internet access, which he used to proclaim his innocence and strike heroic notes in websites he or his supporters set up, and built a small cult following who believe he was set up by the U.S. government.
The fraud conviction in 1994 was related to a company he formed in Fayetteville, N.C., to sell military-style gear, among others things. According to North Carolina criminal records, he also was charged with more than three dozen other crimes here, including assault on a female, assault with a deadly weapon, passing worthless checks, assault by pointing a gun and reckless driving.
According to Wake County court records, he is still wanted here for impersonating a law enforcement officer during a 2004 traffic stop, apparently on a visit home shortly before he was arrested in Kabul.
Pelton said that the nickel-and-dime nature of many of Idema's crimes, along with his aggressive response to any challenge with tactics like lawsuits and Internet attacks, has helped keep Idema out of jail over the years. In short, extraditing him or arresting him isn't worth the effort.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
Must credit The News and Observer of Raleigh, N.C.
Wow, so assaulting a woman
Wow, so assaulting a woman and holding her against her will is not worth arresting over... I wounder how it makes you feel about your own mother or sister being safe...
Thank you for saying that,
Thank you for saying that, the charges don't seem that important to the Mexican authorities for some reason.
Wow, so you can't tell the difference..
...between "all of his crimes" and what the article actually says: "many of his crimes"
Nor can you tell the difference between "not worth arresting" and "not worth extraditing or arresting"
Nor can you tell that of the three mentions of his assaulting a female, one it says he went to jail for, one it says the Mexican police want to charge him with, and the third he's still wanted for in North Carolina - I suppose you think they're going to issue international warrants for every assault in the US, and the authorities in other countries will scour the hills for any of these tens of thousands of wanted Americans.
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