Charles Bishop’s "missing" Dad is Charles J. Bishara, a half-Sicilian and half-Lebanese career criminal who hails from Winchester, Mass., described by Bay State natives as a ‘Mob town.’
He is currently wanted on heroin charges.
News accounts had been at pains to make one thing perfectly clear: "The boy's father has been out of the mother's and son's lives for some time."
Bishara's organized crime ties could thus have had nothing to do with young Charlie Bishop's bizarre suicide, still the only authenticated act of Osama bin Laden-inspired terror in America since September 11.
Julia Bishara had changed her and son Charles' last names, from Bishara to Bishop. She told officials she made the change because ‘Bishara’ is an Arabic name and the U.S. was at war with Iraq, and subsequent news reports pointed to this as evidence that young Charles had had no contact with his "missing" father.
Team coverage was clearly the right way to go.
The MadCowMorningNews has learned that this may not be the whole story. We had puzzled over why the divorced woman hadn't reverted to her maiden name, Detore. She changed her name instead to Bishop.
"The entire Bishara clan in Winchester changed their names to Bishop," a long-time native of Massachusetts told us. "They anglicized it."
Six years after "small time hood" Charles Bishara had supposedly left his ex-wife and son's lives for good, had Julia Bishop changed her name to match her ex-husband’s?
Mother Julia and son Charles lived a rootless, nomadic lifestyle, moving from town to town and school to school, news reports indicated, without saying why. Julia Bishop listed five addresses in the Tampa Bay area. Charles had attended at least four schools there. It was a virtual prescription for maladjustment.
Behind the walls of his gated community, Charlie nursed a grievance.
One boy who lived on the same cul-de-sac told a reporter he would see Charlie walking his dog. "I said `Nice dog' a lot to him, but he never said anything back. I would smile, but he wouldn't smile back.''
The collapse of the official story of Charles Bishop's flight leaves troubling questions unanswered.
Where did the straight "A" Kamikaze Kid get the crazy idea that flying a plane at 160 miles an hour into a building after praising an Arab terrorist with a sideline in narcotics trafficking was going to be just way cool?
Does the identity of the Kamikaze Kid's father have anything to do with the manner in which the son "acted out?" Does this help unravel the mystery of just who it was that targeted innocent civilians for murder on September 11?
The FBI's new theme song should be sung by former Go-Go's lead singer Belinda Carlisle:
"Our Lips Are Sealed."
When we found Bishara’s million dollar penthouse condominium at the Ritz Carlton Golf Resort in Naples, Florida, we thought: why can't the FBI find Bishara?
We spoke recently with a grizzled McDill Special Forces Commander who had just come back Afghanistan, and used the opportunity to ask him something similar.
"Does the Sicilian Mafia or the Lebanese Arab Christian clans have a beef with the present Administration?
He allowed that they might.
Someone wrote to tell us that on a whim they had entered www.bishara.com into their browser's address line.
It turns out to be a subsidiary of the Sultan of Oman.
This is probably just coincidence.
In another unrelated story, officials announced that investigators from Treasury, Justice, and the FBI have "finished the initial phase of their exhaustive effort to trace the financial underpinnings of the attacks that killed about 3,000 persons in New York City and Washington, DC, on September 11."
Despite repeated charges from pundits and politicians, including President Bush, that Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda organization was aided and abetted by funds derived from drug trafficking, the federal "investigators" did not mention illicit drug profits as a source of funding for the attacks.
Huh. Imagine that.
Charles Bishop is the first American suicide bomber in history. Two weeks after his death authorities have finally ruled out acne as the explanation for his act of terrorism.
"Nothing to see here. Move along."