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http://www.nj.com/news/ledger/index.ssf?/base/news-16/1091783465312221.xml
FBI searches houses tied to doctor from Jersey
Friday, August 06, 2004
BY KEVIN COUGHLIN, BRIAN T. MURRAY AND BRIAN DONOHUE
Star-Ledger Staff
The hunt for the killer in the 2001 anthrax attacks returned yesterday to New Jersey, where the attacks originated.

Federal agents searched a lagoon-front bungalow in Dover Township along with two upstate New York homes of a physician who founded an organization to train emergency workers to deal with biochemical attacks.

The doctor, Kenneth M. Berry -- a Teaneck native who in 1997 advocated anthrax vaccines for cities and predicted an imminent bioweapons attack -- was staying at his parents' red clapboard summer home in the Chadwick section of Dover Township when authorities arrived around 8 a.m.

Neighbors said Berry took his family to breakfast at the nearby Sand Dollar Pancake House as the search proceeded.

Later in the afternoon, Berry was arrested at a motel in Point Pleasant Beach following a domestic dispute in which the doctor allegedly assaulted four family members, police said. He was released on $10,000 bail last night from the Ocean County jail, a jail spokesman told the Associated Press.

In Chadwick, agents removed garbage bags filled with bulky contents from the bungalow, according to a neighbor. Authorities also removed boxes with clear plastic bags in them.

More than three dozen agents, some wearing protective suits, also rummaged through a pair of homes in Wellsville, N.Y., continuing a search that began Wednesday night. Property records list the homes as past and present addresses of Berry, who founded PREEMPT Medical Counter-Terrorism Inc. in 1997. On the organization's Web site, Berry, 48, also described himself as president of the American Academy of Emergency Physicians.

FBI spokesperson Debbie Weierman said, "This is solely regarding the anthrax mailings of 2001." Nobody was taken into custody, she said, explaining only that FBI agents and U.S. postal inspectors were executing search warrants that remain under seal.

Gov. James E. McGreevey said there was "no threat to public health or safety."

Berry's father, in an interview late last night at his home in Newtown, Conn., said the FBI was making his son a scapegoat for a botched investigation.

"Hey, here's a guy being shafted by the FBI," said William C. Berry, a retired financial director who now serves as president of PREEMPT. "It's just buying time because they have nothing on anthrax. You are looking at a setup."

Point Pleasant Beach police said last night that officers responding to a 911 call at the White Sands Motel discovered Berry being detained by an off-duty police officer and a motel employee.

Berry allegedly assaulted four family members, police said. His relationship to the four was not immediately known.

Five persons died and at least 17 were sickened after anthrax- laced letters, postmarked Sept. 18 and Oct. 9, 2001, were sent to two Democratic senators and media organizations. The letters were processed at a postal center in Hamilton Township -- finally reopened this year after a costly decontamination -- and may have been sent from a mailbox in Princeton. The attacks prompted the closure of many government buildings and rocked a nation still reeling from the 9/11 terror strikes.

Over recent weeks, authorities have appeared to ramp up their efforts to crack what ranks among the most frustrating cases in FBI history.

For several days last month, they shut down labs at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick. They have reinterviewed former researchers from the Frederick, Md., base and even drained a nearby pond looking for discarded lab equipment.

Federal agents have logged more than 270,000 hours on the case, conducting more than 5,279 interviews, according to Weierman. Thirty FBI agents and 13 postal inspectors continue to hunt for clues.

Most attention so far has focused on another medical doctor, Steven J. Hatfill, described as "a person of interest" by Attorney General John Ashcroft but never charged.

From 1997 to 1999, Hatfill worked at Fort Detrick, the Army center that originally housed the anthrax strain sent in 2001. He has proclaimed his innocence and is suing the government and the New York Times.

Neither Hatfill nor Berry could be reached for comment yesterday. Berry's Web site says he presented a bioterrorism paper at Fort Detrick in January 1997, and, according to Berry's father, the two men know each other.

The father described Berry as exhausted and upset. He said his son has been interviewed before by the FBI because of his counterterror expertise.

"They have been on him for three years. They have no leads," William Berry said from his farmhouse, near Danbury.

Kenneth Berry, a father of seven who has been married twice, now teaches emergency room skills at a hospital affiliated with the University of Pittsburgh, his father said. Born in Teaneck, Kenneth Berry moved with his family to Switzerland at age 5. They returned to New Jersey, living in Wayne, and then moved to Connecticut.

The attention of the FBI is not all that Berry shares in common with Hatfill. They have foreign medical degrees, an evangelism for bioterror preparedness, and a flair for self-promotion and even hyperbole in their quests to become bio- defenders for the country.

Years before 2001, each man gave extensive interviews warning how bioterror attacks might be attempted, and how to thwart them.

"We ought to be planning to make anthrax vaccine widely available to the population starting in the major cities," Berry told USA Today in 1997, soon after the military announced plans to inoculate 2.4 million soldiers. Berry told the newspaper that military experts believed terrorists would attack a major U.S. city with biological weapons within five years.

From 1997 to 1999, Berry organized conferences under the banner of PREEMPT -- short for "Planned Response Exercises and Emergency Medical Preparedness Training." He proposed a system to train 200,000 emergency personnel for the aftermath of weapons of mass destruction. At a 1997 conference in San Francisco, he outlined a hypothetical scenario in which Middle East terrorists threatened to rain a "new strain of anthrax" on that city -- potentially killing more than a million people -- unless one of their leaders were released.

"It is important to know, however, that 99.9 percent of (emergency medical) personnel would not have competence in a WMD response," he told the conference, according to a text of his presentation.

That same year, he told MSNBC: "We don't want to oversensitize the population of the United States but we want to encourage in a very systemic and rational way that this indeed is a threat to our national security."

On Sept. 28, 2001 -- as it turns out, just days after the first anthrax mailings -- Berry filed for a patent on a surveillance system for identifying biological, chemical or nuclear attacks. The patent was awarded in March of this year.

Berry's conferences drew praise from former Sen. Sam Nunn (D- Ga.). "I wish you well in this most important endeavor," Nunn told Berry, according to a transcript. "What you're doing now is crucial to America's security."

Nunn's office was less effusive yesterday. Spokeswoman Lisa Cutler would say only that Nunn had met the doctor many years ago at a conference.

Berry's Web site also cites forensics experience that included the crash investigation of TWA Flight 800 in 1996. That was questioned yesterday by a spokeswoman for James Kallstrom, the former FBI official who headed the crash probe.

"He had nothing to do with it," Vicky Loughman, Kallstrom's spokeswoman, said of Berry.

Licensed as a physician in New York state, Berry lists a 1983 medical degree from the American University of the Caribbean School of Medicine. Three years ago he quit as director of emergency medicine at the Jones Memorial Hospital in Wellsville after a scandal.

Berry and two others were charged in 1999 with forging the will of a fellow doctor who had died of a heart attack the year before. The common-law wife of the deceased doctor eventually was sentenced to five years in prison on forgery charges. Berry pleaded guilty in May 2000 to a disorderly conduct charge and paid $300 in fines and court fees.

A neighbor said the forgery incident "didn't do much for his reputation" in the tight-knit town of 7,600 people near the Pennsylvania border.

But a retired administrator from Jones Memorial Hospital doubted Berry could be involved with anthrax.

"He's an emergency room doctor. He's not a chemist or anything like that," William DiBerardino told the Associated Press.

The forgery episode did not derail Berry's counterterrorism efforts. According to his Web site, he spoke at a June conference in Sweden, advocating a network of air sensors to alert the population to bioterrorism agents and filtration systems in federal buildings such as the White House and CIA headquarters.

In Ocean County, a neighbor said Berry did not appear fazed by the investigation yesterday over breakfast at the pancake house.

"He seemed to be in a good mood," said Carolyn Schlichtig, who is renting the home next door to Berry. "There's a lot of speculation, but hopefully it turns out to be nothing."