A Far-Right Terrorism Suspect With a Refugee Disguise: The Tale of Franco A.

A Far-Right Terrorism Suspect With a Refugee Disguise: The Tale of Franco A.

OFFENBACH, Germany — At the peak of Europe’s migrant disaster, a bearded man in sweatpants walked right into a police station. His pockets had been empty apart from an previous cellphone and some overseas cash.

In damaged English, he introduced himself as a Syrian refugee. He stated he had crossed half the continent by foot and misplaced his papers alongside the best way. The officers photographed and fingerprinted him. Over the subsequent yr, he would get shelter and an asylum listening to, and would qualify for month-to-month advantages.

His title, he provided, was David Benjamin.

In actuality, he was a lieutenant within the German Army. He had darkened his face and palms along with his mom’s make-up and utilized shoe shine to his beard. Instead of strolling throughout Europe, he had walked 10 minutes from his childhood residence within the western metropolis of Offenbach.

Credit…Franco A.

The ruse, prosecutors say, was a part of a far-right plot to hold out one or a number of assassinations that could possibly be blamed on his refugee alter ego and set off sufficient civil unrest to convey down the Federal Republic of Germany.

The officer, Franco A., as his title is rendered in courtroom paperwork in line with German privateness legal guidelines, denies this. He says he was making an attempt to reveal flaws within the asylum system. But his elaborate double life, which lasted 16 months, unraveled solely after the police caught him making an attempt to gather a loaded handgun he had hidden in an airport lavatory in Vienna.

“That was really a shocking moment,” stated Aydan Ozoguz, a lawmaker who was commissioner for refugees and integration on the time. “The asylum system should identify cheaters, no doubt. But the bigger story is: How could someone like this be a soldier in Germany?”

The arrest of Franco A. in April 2017 surprised Germany. Since then his case has largely slipped off the radar however that’s prone to change when he goes to trial early subsequent yr.

When he does, Germany will go on trial with him — not just for the executive failure that allowed a German officer who didn’t converse Arabic to go himself off as a refugee for thus lengthy, but in addition for its longstanding complacency in combating far-right extremism.

Franco A.’s case spawned a sprawling investigation that led the German authorities right into a labyrinth of subterranean extremist networks in any respect ranges of the nation’s safety providers — a risk that, they acknowledged solely this yr, was much more in depth than they’d ever imagined.

One group, run by a former soldier and police sniper in northern Germany, hoarded weapons, stored enemy lists and ordered physique baggage. Another, run by a special-forces soldier code-named Hannibal, put the highlight on the KSK, Germany’s most elite power. This summer season, after explosives and SS memorabilia had been discovered on the property of a sergeant main, a complete KSK unit was disbanded.

I interviewed many members of those networks over the previous yr, Franco A. included. But the story of his double life and evolution — from what superiors noticed as a promising officer to what prosecutors describe as a would-be terrorist — is in some ways the story of at the moment’s two Germanys.

One was born of its defeat in World War II and reared by a liberal consensus that for many years rejected nationalism and schooled its residents in contrition. That Germany is giving strategy to a extra unsettled nation as its wartime historical past recedes and a long-dormant far proper rousts itself in opposition to a diversifying society. Germany’s postwar consensus teeters within the steadiness.

When I first met Franco A. greater than a yr in the past at a restaurant in Berlin, he got here outfitted with paperwork, a few of them notes, others extracts from the police file towards him. He appeared assured then. A Frankfurt courtroom had thrown out his terrorism case for lack of proof.

But a number of months later, the Supreme Court restored the case after prosecutors appealed. Franco A. referred to as me on my cellphone. He was shaken. If convicted, he faces as much as 10 years in jail.

Even as his trial was pending, he agreed to a sequence of unique recorded interviews and invited me and two New York Times audio producers to his childhood residence, the place he nonetheless lives, to debate his life, his views and features of his case. I went again a number of occasions over the subsequent yr, most just lately the week earlier than Christmas.

Sometimes he’d present us movies of himself in refugee disguise. Once, he led us down a creaky stairwell, by way of a safe-like steel door, into his “prepper” cellar, the place he had stashed ammunition and a duplicate of Hitler’s Mein Kampf earlier than they had been confiscated by the police.

Franco A. denies any terrorist conspiracy. He says he had posed as a refugee to blow the whistle on Chancellor Angela Merkel’s resolution to permit greater than one million refugees to enter Germany, which he thought of a risk to nationwide safety and identification. The system was so overwhelmed that anybody may are available, he stated.

If something, he insisted that he was upholding the Constitution, not undermining it. He by no means deliberate to do something violent — and he didn’t, he stated. “If I had wanted it, why wouldn’t I have done it?” he would inform me later.

Prosecutors wouldn’t converse on the report, however their accusations are outlined within the Supreme Court resolution. They level to the loaded gun Franco A. had hidden on the Vienna airport, to an assault rifle they are saying he stored illegally and to a visit to the parking storage of a presumed goal.

Then there are the quite a few voice memos and diaries Franco A. stored over a few years that they’ve used as a highway map for his prosecution. I’ve learn these transcripts in police reviews and proof recordsdata.

In them, he praises Hitler, questions Germany’s atonement for the Holocaust, indulges in world Jewish conspiracies, argues that immigration has destroyed Germany’s ethnic purity, hails President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia as a job mannequin and advocates destroying the state.

Franco A., now 31, says these are personal ideas that can not be prosecuted. The most excessive views in his recording are little doubt shared by neo-Nazis and are fashionable in far-right circles. But his baseline grievances over immigration and nationwide identification have turn out to be more and more widespread within the Germany of at the moment, in addition to in a lot of Europe and the United States.

In his era, which got here of age after 9/11, in the course of the wars that sprang from it and in an period of worldwide financial disaster, the mistrust of presidency, far-right messaging and the embrace of conspiracy theories not solely entered pockets of the safety providers. They additionally entered the mainstream.

“Far-right extremist messages have shifted increasingly into the middle of society,” Thomas Haldenwang, the president of the home intelligence company, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, instructed me in an interview.

They may even be heard within the halls of Parliament, the place the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, leads the opposition.

Mr. Haldenwang’s company considers the AfD so harmful that it might place the complete occasion below statement as early as January — even because the AfD, like Franco A., claims to be the Constitution’s true defender. Such is the tug of warfare over Germany’s democracy.

Over the time I’ve interviewed Franco A., senior protection officers have gone from humoring my queries about extremist networks to publicly sounding the alarm. It was March 2019 once I first requested a protection ministry official what number of far-right extremists had been recognized within the army.

“Four,” he stated.

Four?

Yes, 4. “We don’t see any networks,” he stated.

Until this yr, the German authorities had turned a blind eye to the issue. Franco A.’s superiors promoted him even after he detailed his views in a grasp’s thesis. He grew to become a member of extremist networks containing dozens of troopers and cops. And he spoke publicly no less than as soon as at a far-right occasion that was on the radar of the safety providers.

But none of that tripped him up the best way a janitor on the Vienna airport would.

It was the janitor who discovered the gun.

Black, compact and loaded with six bullets, it was hidden inside a upkeep shaft in a disabled restroom within the Vienna airport.

The Austrian officers had by no means seen a gun prefer it: a 7.65-caliber Unique 17 made by a now defunct French gun-maker a while from 1928 to 1944. It turned out to be a pistol of selection for German officers in the course of the Nazi occupation of France.

To discover out who had hidden it, the police set an digital lure. Two weeks later, on Feb. 3, 2017, they obtained their man.

Within minutes of Franco A. making an attempt to pry open the door to the wall shaft utilizing the flat finish of a tube of hair gel, a dozen cops swarmed exterior the restroom door, weapons on the prepared.

Two officers in civilian garments walked in and requested him what he was doing.

“I stated, ‘Yes, I hid a weapon here,” Franco A. recalled. He said he had come to retrieve it and take it to the police.

“And I think someone started laughing,” he said.

The story he told the Austrian police that night as he was questioned was so implausible that he hesitated to retell it when we met. But in the end he did.

It was ball season in Vienna. He had been there two weeks earlier for the annual Officer’s Ball, his story went. Barhopping along with his girlfriend and fellow troopers, he had discovered the gun whereas relieving himself in a bush. He put it into his coat pocket — solely to recollect it within the safety line on the airport. He hid it to keep away from lacking his flight after which determined to return handy it in to the police.

“I feel so ridiculous by telling this,” he instructed us. “I know no one believes it.’’

Franco A. was released that night. But officers kept his phone and a USB stick they had found in his backpack. They took his fingerprints and sent them to the German police for verification.

The match that came back weeks later startled officers who thought they were doing a routine check on Franco’s identity. He had two.

His ID had said that he was a German officer based with the Franco-German brigade in Illkirch, near Strasbourg. But his fingerprints belonged to a migrant registered near Munich.

Investigators were alarmed. Had Franco A. stashed the gun to commit an attack later?

He was caught the night of the annual fraternity ball, hosted by Austria’s far-right Freedom Party, which tended to attract militant counter-demonstrators. One theory was that Franco A. had planned to shoot someone that night while pretending to be a leftist.

Once the German authorities took over the investigation, they found two documents on his UBS stick: the “Mujahedeen Explosives Handbook” and “Total Resistance,” a Cold War-era information for city guerrilla warfare.

His cellphone led them to a sprawling community of far-right Telegram discussion groups populated by dozens of troopers, cops and others making ready for the collapse of the social order, what they referred to as Day X.

It additionally contained hours of audio memos wherein Franco A. had recorded his ideas over a number of years.

On April 26, 2017, in the course of a army coaching train in a Bavarian forest, Franco A. was arrested once more. Ten federal cops escorted him away. Ninety others had been conducting simultaneous raids in Germany, Austria and France.

In a sequence of raids, the police discovered over 1,000 rounds of ammunition. They additionally found scores of handwritten notes and a diary. When they began studying, they started to find a person who had harbored radical ideas from the time he was an adolescent.

In our interviews with Franco A., he went again additional in time, recounting his childhood and a household historical past that grafts nearly completely onto Germany’s personal.

Franco A. was 12 or 13 when he purchased his first German flag, he stated. It was a small tabletop banner he picked up in a memento store throughout a household vacation in Bavaria.

The buy could be innocuous in some other nation. In postwar Germany, the place nationwide satisfaction had lengthy been a taboo due to the nation’s Nazi previous, it was a small act of insurrection.

“Germany has always been important to me,” Franco A. stated as he confirmed us pictures of his childhood bed room, the flag within the foreground.

He didn’t see many German flags rising up in his working-class neighborhood, which was residence to successive waves of visitor staff from southern Europe and Turkey who helped rebuild postwar Germany, and who reworked its society as effectively.

Franco A.’s mom, a soft-spoken lady who lives upstairs from him, recalled having solely a handful of kids with a migrant background in her class as a pupil within the Nineteen Sixties.

By the time Franco A. went to highschool, she stated, youngsters with two German dad and mom had been within the minority.

Franco A.’s personal father was an Italian visitor employee who deserted the household when he was a toddler. He refers to him solely as his “producer.”

“I wouldn’t say it’s my father,” he stated.

In certainly one of his audio memos, from January 2016, Franco A. would later describe the visitor employee program as a deliberate technique to dilute German ethnicity. He himself, he stated, was “a product of this perverse racial hatred.’’

He told me that his grandfather was born in 1919, the year of the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, which sealed Germany’s defeat in World War I.

The treaty gave rise to the “stab in the back” legend — that Germany had received the warfare however was betrayed by a conspiracy of leftists and Jews within the governing elite.

The propaganda helped gas anti-democratic cells within the army that hoarded arms, plotted coups and finally supported the rise of Nazism — a lot the identical issues prosecutors accuse Franco A. of at the moment.

He stated his grandparents typically cared for him, serving him soup after college and telling him tales concerning the warfare. His grandfather regaled him about his adventures within the Hitler youth. The copy of Mein Kampf that the police confiscated as soon as belonged to him.

He stated his grandmother was 20 when she and her sister fled the advance of the Red Army in what’s now Poland. She instructed the boy a narrative of how their picket cart had damaged down, forcing them to relaxation in a subject exterior Dresden.

That night time, she stated, the sisters watched town burn in a devastating bathe of bombs that killed as many as 25,000 civilians and has since turn out to be a symbolic grievance of the far proper.

Years later, Franco A. would report himself enacting a fictional dialog wherein he raises the “bomb terror in Dresden” and asks whether or not Jews had the proper to anticipate Germans to really feel responsible endlessly.

His lecturers inspired him to problem authority and suppose for himself. They got here of age in the course of the 1968 pupil motion and sought to transmit the liberal values that sprang from it — a mistrust of nationalism and atonement for the warfare.

None of his lecturers that I spoke to detected any early hints of extremism however quite recalled loving his contrarian and inquisitive nature.

What they didn’t know was that round that point he had entered a boundless world of on-line conspiracy theories that will affect him for years to return. Those views started to take form — within the privateness of his teenage diary.

Franco A. described the entries as experimenting with concepts, not proof of a hardened ideology or any intention. They included musings on the methods he may change the course of German historical past.

“One would be to become a soldier and gain an influential position in the military so I can become the head of the German armed forces,” he wrote in January 2007. “Then a military coup would follow.”

In 2008, simply as Lehman Brothers imploded and the world descended into the most important monetary disaster for the reason that Great Depression, Franco A. joined the military. He was 19.

In no time, he was chosen as certainly one of solely a handful of German officer cadets to attend the celebrated Saint-Cyr army academy in France, based in 1802 by Napoleon.

His 5 years overseas included semesters at Sciences Po in Paris and King’s College London in addition to at Sandhurst, one of many British Army’s premier officer coaching faculties, and a summer season session on the University of Cambridge.

In 2013, he wrote a grasp’s thesis, “Political Change and Strategy of Subversion.”

Over 169 pages, Franco A. argued that the downfall of nice civilizations had at all times been immigration and the dilution of racial purity led to by subversive minorities. Europe and the West had been subsequent in line if they didn’t defend themselves, he stated.

Ethnically numerous societies had been unstable, he wrote, and nations that permit migration had been committing a type of “genocide.”

His last part posits that the Old Testament was the inspiration of all subversion, a blueprint for Jews to achieve world dominance. It is perhaps, he stated, “the biggest conspiracy in the history of humanity.”

The French commander of the army academy was aghast. He instantly flagged it to Franco A.’s German superiors.

“If this was a French participant on the course, we would remove him,” the commander instructed them on the time, based on German information media reviews.

The German army commissioned a historian, Jörg Echternkamp, to evaluate the thesis. After simply three days, he concluded that it was “a radical nationalist, racist appeal.”

But it was additionally mixed with “an insecurity due to globalization’’ that made it socially more acceptable, he said — and therefore “dangerous.”

But Franco A. was not faraway from service. Nor was he reported to Germany’s army counterintelligence company, whose remit is to watch extremism within the armed forces.

Instead, on Jan. 22, 2014, he was summoned to a department workplace of the German army in Fontainebleau, close to Paris.

An officer from the army’s inner disciplinary unit instructed him that his thesis was “not compatible” with Germany’s values, based on the minutes.

Franco A. defended himself by saying that because the No. 2 pupil in his yr he had felt stress to create one thing “outstanding” and had gotten carried away.

“I isolated myself completely in this newly created world of thoughts and no longer looked at it from the outside,” Franco A. instructed the interviewer.

After three hours of questioning, the senior officer concluded that Franco A. “had become a victim of his own intellectual abilities.”

He was reprimanded and requested to submit a brand new thesis.

When Franco A. returned to Germany later in 2014, it was as if nothing had occurred. His superior in Dresden described him as a mannequin German soldier — “a citizen in uniform.”

In November 2015, he obtained one other glowing report, noting how he’d been positioned in command of ammunition, a duty he fulfilled with “much joy and energy.”

Prominently displayed on Franco A.’s bookshelf is “The Magic Eye,” a quantity containing colourful photos that, if stared at lengthy sufficient, give strategy to totally totally different ones.

Franco A. is like that. Throughout our interviews, he forged himself as a peace-loving essential thinker who had turn out to be a sufferer of a political local weather wherein dissent was punished. But data and interviews with investigators and different folks accustomed to his case portrayed a really totally different individual.

After he returned from France, Franco A. gravitated towards troopers who shared his views. As it turned out, they weren’t laborious to search out.

A fellow officer and pal launched him to a national on-line chat community of dozens of troopers and cops involved about immigration.

The officer who had arrange the community served in Germany’s elite particular forces, the KSK, based mostly in Calw, and glided by the title of Hannibal.

Hannibal additionally ran a company referred to as Uniter, which provided paramilitary coaching. It has since been put below surveillance by the home intelligence service.

Franco A. attended no less than two Uniter conferences. Badges of the group had been discovered amongst his belongings. He was “known as intelligent” on the KSK base, police interviews counsel. “Several soldiers knew him,” one soldier stated in a witness assertion.

Many of the chat members had been “preppers” anticipating what they believed could be the collapse of Germany’s social order.

Franco A. himself started stockpiling a “prepper” cellar with meals rations and different provides. He additionally started acquiring weapons and ammunition illegally, prosecutors say.

Russia had just lately invaded Ukraine. A febrile interval of Islamist terrorism had simply begun in Europe.

In August, Ms. Merkel welcomed tons of of hundreds of largely Muslim asylum seekers from wars in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. The risk of warfare or civil unrest inside Germany felt actual, Franco A. recalled.

At this level, prosecutors say, he started considering violence. The combat of the state towards terrorism was a “fight against us,” he stated, based on the indictment towards him.

But the “gift of truth” must be “well-packaged.” To lead folks to it, a “trigger event” was needed.

That was when he began his seek for plenty of doable triggers, or targets, prosecutors say.

He denies this. But on the finish of his Christmas break in 2015 — 10 days earlier than he would take up his first task within the Franco-German brigade close to Strasbourg — he donned his refugee disguise.

As he sat ready on the police station for his first interview as David Benjamin, his refugee alter ego, Franco A. studied a world map on the alternative wall. He was making an attempt to resolve whether or not Damascus or Aleppo would make a extra credible birthplace.

Over time, he would invent a sprawling household historical past. Fluent in French after his army coaching in France, he instructed his interviewers that he was a Syrian Christian of French descent.

He stated he had attended a French highschool after which labored as a fruit farmer in Tel al-Hassel, a small village exterior Aleppo.

“I tried to be prepared the best I could,” Franco A. recalled. “But in the end, it was not necessary at all.”

He stated his story was by no means questioned by the German authorities, overwhelmed on the time. Two days after displaying up on the police station, he registered as an asylum seeker and was then bused to a sequence of momentary group shelters.

Eventually he was assigned to a small residence in Baustarring, a Bavarian hamlet 250 miles west of his military base.

Franco A. filmed a number of movies of his shelters on his cellphone digicam. He was clearly unconvinced of how needy the asylum seekers had been. Many of the Syrians, specifically, had fled previously middle-class lives in cities destroyed by combating. They regarded “more like tourists” than refugees, he stated.

“I decided to take a bad telephone, because I didn’t want to stand out with a good telephone,” he stated. “In the end, I had the worst.”

The system was overly beneficiant and conspicuously forgiving, he stated. Even as he turned down job gives, he continued to obtain his month-to-month stipend. He confirmed up on the shelter maybe as soon as a month, and missed two dates in a row.

In Franco A.’s view, Ms. Merkel’s authorities had helped create its personal humanitarian disaster by becoming a member of wars within the Middle East. It was like a case examine from his disgraced grasp’s thesis materializing earlier than his eyes.

“Millions of people came from a destabilized region that in my eyes could have been kept stable,” he stated.

The Moroccan interpreter in his asylum listening to later testified that she had doubts he spoke Arabic. But due to his Jewish-sounding title she didn’t dare converse up. As a Muslim, she apprehensive about sounding anti-Semitic.

Franco A. was in the end granted “subsidiary protection,” a standing that enables asylum seekers with no identification papers to remain and work in Germany.

Credit…Franco A.

Parallel to his refugee life, his repute in far-right circles grew. Franco A. stated he attended debating occasions in bars. After one such occasion, he was invited to talk.

On Dec. 15, 2016, he stated, he spoke on the “Prussian Evening,” an occasion organized at Hotel Regent in Munich by a writer run by a Holocaust denier. His subject that night time: “German conservatives — diaspora in their own country.”

Throughout that yr, his voice memos sounded more and more pressing. Those who dared to voice dissent had at all times been murdered, he stated in a single from January 2016, three weeks after registering as a refugee. “Let’s not hesitate, not to murder but to kill,” he stated.

“I know you will murder me,” he added. “I will murder you first.”

Franco A. had been residing his double life for nearly seven months when, in the summertime of 2016, he traveled to Berlin, prosecutors say.

On a aspect avenue close to the Jewish quarter, he went to take 4 pictures of automobile license plates in a non-public underground parking storage, they are saying. Investigators later retrieved the photographs from his cellphone.

The constructing housed the workplaces of the Amadeu Antonio Foundation, a company based and run by Anetta Kahane, a outstanding Jewish activist. The daughter of Holocaust survivors, she has been the goal of far-right hatred for many years.

Judging from notes they confiscated, prosecutors consider that Ms. Kahane, now 66, was certainly one of a number of outstanding targets Franco A. had recognized for his or her pro-refugee positions.

Others included Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, who was justice minister on the time, and Claudia Roth, a Green lawmaker who was then Parliament’s vp.

Ms. Kahane’s title seems no less than twice within the notes, as soon as on the finish of a bullet-pointed record of seemingly mundane gadgets comparable to “fridge” and a reminder to name the financial institution the place his refugee alter ego had an account. Franco A. confirmed them to me. He stated it was an unusual to-do record.

On one web page, he famous Ms. Kahane’s background, age and work deal with. He additionally drew an in depth map of the placement of her parking storage. On the identical piece of paper, he wrote: “We are at a point where we cannot yet act like we want to.”

Before the journey to Berlin and within the days after, prosecutors say, Franco purchased a mounting rail for a telescopic sight and elements for a handgun, and was seen at a taking pictures vary making an attempt out the equipment with an assault rifle.

He additionally traveled to Paris, the place he met the top of a pro-Putin Russian suppose tank with hyperlinks to France’s far proper and is believed to have purchased the French handgun that was later present in Vienna.

In all, prosecutors say there’s “probable cause” that Franco A. was making ready a killing.

Franco A. disputes just about each a part of the accusations. None of what the prosecutors say quantities to an intention to hurt Ms. Kahane, he stated.

“There are pictures on my phone, but then this doesn’t prove I was there,” he stated throughout a tense six-hour interview one night time.

“I can’t talk about this at all,” he stated, citing his upcoming trial. But then he did anyway, in “hypothetical terms.”

If he had gone, it could have been to have a dialog, Franco A. stated. He would have rung the bell however discovered that Ms. Kahane was not there. Then he might need gone to the parking storage, considering, “OK, maybe you can find out something out about the car.”

“And then you could maybe find, through whatever lucky circumstance, find this person,” he stated.

Even if he had deliberate to kill Ms. Kahane — which he asserted was “definitely” not true — and even when he had visited the storage, “at worst it would be the preparation of an assassination” and never terrorism, he argued.

How does this endanger the state? he requested. “This person’s not even a politician.”

I visited Ms. Kahane to ask what she thought. The day we met, one other neo-Nazi risk had simply landed in her e-mail field. She will get them on a regular basis.

“We will cut a swastika into your face with a very sharp ax,” the message learn. “Then we will cut your spine and leave you to die in a side street.”

But scarier nearly than the threats, she stated, was the naïveté of the German authorities.

She recalled the day the police got here to inform her they’d caught a neo-Nazi soldier who deliberate to kill her. They had been referring to Franco A. and two of his associates.

She had laughed and stated, “So you got them all, all three of them?”

“They always think it’s just one or two or three Nazis,” she stated.

There is a provision within the German Constitution, Article 20.4, that enables for resistance. Conceived with Hitler’s 1933 enabling act in thoughts, wherein he abolished democracy after being elected, it empowers residents to take motion when democracy is in danger.

It is fashionable amongst far-right extremists who denounce Ms. Merkel’s administration as anti-constitutional. That Constitution has satisfaction of place in Franco A’s library. He quotes from it typically.

The week earlier than Christmas, I went to see him another time.

He was upset that I had transcripts of his voice memos. I challenged him on a few of the issues he had stated — for instance, that Hitler was “above everything.”

How may he clarify that?

He had meant it in an ironic method, he stated, and performed that part of the recording for me. The tone is informal and banter-like, two voices chuckle.

But it isn’t apparent that it’s all a joke.

I requested him about one other recording, from January 2016.

Anyone who contributes to destroying the state was doing one thing good, Franco A. had stated. Laws had been null and void.

How may he say that and say he defends the Constitution, too?

There was a protracted silence. Franco A. checked out his personal transcript. He leafed by way of his lawyer’s notes. But he didn’t have a solution.

Lynsea Garrison, Clare Toeniskoetter, Kaitlin Roberts and Christopher F. Schuetze contributed reporting.

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