Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11

He shunned the pulsing social and cultural life of Hamburg, a wealthy city where the sex trade prospered alongside a thriving commercial district. He grew a beard and became a fixture in the city’s most radical mosque, called al-Quds, the Arabic name for the city of Jerusalem. Most of the seventy-five thousand Muslims in Hamburg were Turks with moderate beliefs, but al-Quds catered to the small minority of Arabs drawn to extreme interpretations of Islam. The mosque’s location placed the spiritual literally above the worldly: the rooms of the mosque sat atop a body building parlor in a seedy part of the city. Preachers tried to outdo one another in expressions of hatred toward the United States and Israel. Congregants could buy recordings of sermons by popular imams, including one who risked arrest under German antihate laws by declaring that “Christians and Jews should have their throats slit.”

By 1998, nearly finished with his studies, Atta had surrounded himself with like-minded men who came to Germany for higher education but retreated into a radically distorted understanding of their religion.

One close confidant with whom he could engage in endless anti-American rants about the oppression of Muslims was named Marwan al-Shehhi, a native of the United Arab Emirates with an encyclopedic knowledge of Islamic scriptures. Ten years younger than Atta, Shehhi struggled in school but flourished as a fundamentalist.

Another member of Atta’s inner circle was Ziad Jarrah, the only son of a prosperous family from Lebanon. Jarrah seemed an unlikely Islamic firebrand: he attended private Christian schools as a boy and later became a sociable, beer-drinking regular at Beirut discos. Jarrah found a girlfriend after he arrived in Germany, but later fell harder for the ferocious ideas he heard at al-Quds.

Along with at least one other member of their circle, the trio of Atta, Shehhi, and Jarrah decided to put their beliefs into action by waging violent jihad among Muslim separatists fighting Russians in Chechnya. While still in Germany, they connected with a recruiter for Osama bin Laden’s terror group, al-Qaeda, who urged them to go first to Afghanistan, where they could receive training at jihadist camps. They reached Afghanistan in late 1999, where they pledged bayat, or allegiance, to bin Laden. The three well-educated men quickly drew attention from al-Qaeda’s top leaders, including bin Laden himself. He’d been searching for men exactly like Mohamed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi, and Ziad Jarrah.

In the months before the Hamburg group’s arrival in Afghanistan, bin Laden had embraced the idea of a simultaneous suicide hijacking plot against the United States, and he needed certain recruits to serve as its key participants: men who possessed English language skills, knowledge of life in the West, and the ability to obtain travel visas to the United States. Known to al-Qaeda as the Planes Operation, the plot was reportedly the brainchild of a longtime terrorist named Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who’d met bin Laden in the 1980s. Mohammed admired the murderous ambitions of his nephew Ramzi Yousef, who carried out the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. After Yousef’s 1995 arrest in Pakistan, as the terrorist was flown by helicopter over Manhattan, a senior FBI agent lifted Yousef’s blindfold and pointed out the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers, aglow in the dark. The agent taunted his prisoner: “Look down there. They’re still standing.” Yousef replied: “They wouldn’t be if I had enough money and explosives.”

Al-Qaeda’s Planes Operation sought to pick up where Yousef left off and to go much further. The plot had several iterations during its years of planning, but as envisioned by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed at least as far back as 1996, jihadists would hijack ten planes and use them to attack targets on the East and West Coasts of the United States. Bin Laden eventually rejected the idea as too complex and unwieldy. He wanted a combination of high impact and high likelihood of success. In a scaled-down version, approved by bin Laden in mid-1999, the plot intended to fulfill the threat of his 1998 fatwa against the United States and its people, and to inspire others to similar action, by striking key symbols of American political, military, and financial might.

Soon after meeting Atta, bin Laden personally chose him as the mission’s tactical commander and provided him with a preliminary list of approved targets. Bin Laden sent the group back to Hamburg with instructions about what to do next. To avoid attracting attention and to appear less radical, Atta shaved his beard, wore Western clothing, and avoided extremist mosques. Next, in March 2000, he emailed thirty-one flight schools in the United States to ask about the costs of training and living accommodations, all of which would secretly be covered by wire transfers from al-Qaeda. Before they applied for visas to the United States, Atta, Shehhi, and Jarrah each claimed that he had lost his passport; their replacements eliminated evidence of potentially suspicious trips to Pakistan and Afghanistan. By late May 2000, all three men had new passports and tourist visas. By late summer they were studying in Florida to be pilots, with Atta and Shehhi at one flight school and Jarrah at another.

Meanwhile, both before and after the Hamburg group began flight school, sixteen other men who’d also pledged their lives to bin Laden and al-Qaeda entered the United States to play roles chosen for them in the Planes Operation. One, a twenty-nine-year-old Saudi named Hani Hanjour, had studied in the United States on and off for nearly a decade and had obtained a commercial pilot certificate in April 1999. While in Arizona, Hanjour fell in with a group of extremists, and by 2000 he was an al-Qaeda recruit in Afghanistan, where his flying and language skills, plus his firsthand knowledge of the United States, made him an ideal candidate in bin Laden’s eyes to join the Planes Operation as a fourth pilot.

Thirteen of the others were between twenty and twenty-eight years old, all from Saudi Arabia except for one, who hailed from the United Arab Emirates. A few had spent time in college, but most lacked higher education, jobs, or prospects. All but one were unmarried. Like the Hamburg group, they’d joined al-Qaeda originally intending to fight in Chechnya. Bin Laden handpicked them for the plot and asked them to swear loyalty for a suicide operation. Although they weren’t especially imposing, most no taller than five foot seven, he wanted them to serve as “muscle” for the men who were training to be pilots. Most returned home to Saudi Arabia to obtain U.S. visas, then returned to Afghanistan for training in close-quarters combat and knife killing skills. They began to arrive in the United States in April 2001, keeping to themselves and generally avoiding trouble.

The other two “muscle” group members originally were supposed to participate in Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s ten-plane plot. Experienced jihadists who’d fought together in Bosnia, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar arrived in California on six-month tourist visas in January 2000, even before the Hamburg group began pilot training. The U.S. intelligence community identified Mihdhar as a member of al-Qaeda before he landed in the United States, and Hazmi had been described as a bin Laden associate. Yet neither was on a terrorist watchlist available to border agents. By contrast, other countries had both Mihdhar and Hazmi on watchlists. Once the two men reached the United States, the CIA withheld from the FBI crucial information about them and their movements. Compounded by what a later investigation would call “individual and systemic failings” by the FBI, the result was a series of missed opportunities.

Once in the United States, the two natives of Mecca, Saudi Arabia, insinuated themselves into the Muslim community of San Diego and received help from fellow Saudis. Originally viewed by bin Laden as potential pilots, neither Mihdhar nor Hazmi had the necessary English language skills. Aptitude and intelligence might have been lacking, too—their flight training stalled after they told an instructor they wanted to learn how to fly a plane but showed no interest in takeoffs or landings.

During the spring and summer of 2001, as part of their final preparations, Atta, Jarrah, and Shehhi took cross-country flights to observe the workings of crews and to determine whether they might smuggle weapons on board. Atta flew to Spain to brief an al-Qaeda planner about the plot, then returned to the United States. Jarrah and Hanjour sought training on how to fly a low-altitude pathway along the Hudson River that passed New York landmarks including the World Trade Center, and they rented small planes for practice flights. “Muscle” group members busied themselves training at gyms.

As months passed, bin Laden became frustrated, pressuring Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to put the Planes Operation into motion. Bin Laden wanted it to be executed in May 2001, marking seven months since the bombing of the USS Cole, and then in June or July, when Israeli opposition party leader Ariel Sharon visited the White House. Each date passed as Atta hesitated to commit on timing until he felt absolutely ready.

Finally, in late August, Atta picked a day just weeks away: the second Tuesday in September. It’s a mystery whether he made a simple logistical choice, based on his expectation that it would be a light travel day, which meant fewer passengers to deal with; whether he saw propaganda value in a date that matched America’s 9-1-1 emergency telephone system; or whether he sought historical revenge by choosing the month and day of the start of the 1683 Battle of Vienna, a humiliating defeat for the Ottoman Empire against Christian forces that began a centuries-long decline of Islamic influence.

Whatever the trigger, Atta and his eighteen associates started buying flight tickets, some by using computers in public libraries. They kept enough money for expenses, then returned much of the rest to al-Qaeda operatives in the United Arab Emirates. All told, the entire plan cost less than half a million dollars.

The members of the Planes Operation broke into three groups of five and one group of four, each led by one of the four men who’d trained as a pilot: Atta, Shehhi, Hanjour, and Jarrah. By the second week of September, all had rented rooms at hotels or motels in or near Boston, Newark, and Washington, D.C.

Atta and the other pilots worked on final details, while some of the others focused on earthly desires. In Boston, “muscle” members Abdulaziz al-Omari and Satam al-Suqami paid for the company of two women from the Sweet Temptations escort service. One spent a hundred dollars on a prostitute two more times in a single day. In New Jersey, another paid twenty dollars for a private dance in the VIP room of a go-go bar, while another contented himself with a pornographic video.

On September 10, when everything and everyone was almost in place, Ziad Jarrah stepped outside a Days Inn in Newark, New Jersey, where he and three “muscle” men had checked in the previous day.

Jarrah’s thoughts wandered to his girlfriend in Germany, a medical student of Turkish heritage named Aysel Sengün. They’d dated for five years, they emailed or spoke by phone almost daily, and she’d visited him in Florida eight months earlier. Jarrah showed off his new skills as a pilot, flying her in a single-engine plane to Key West. They’d discussed a future together, but Sengün’s parents insisted that she marry a fellow Turk. When Jarrah asked for her father’s blessing, the elder Sengün threw Jarrah out of his house. They continued their relationship in secret, and weeks earlier, Jarrah had flown to Germany to see her. Over their years together, she’d watched as the happy-go-lucky man she met grew a beard and criticized her for being insufficiently devout, but more recently Sengün had been seeing what she thought was a return to his easygoing ways. She had no idea what he would do.

Jarrah left the Days Inn in a rented car and drove three miles to Elizabeth, New Jersey, to mail a letter he wrote that day to Sengün. He placed it in a package along with his private pilot’s license, his pilot logbook, and a postcard showing a photo of a beach.

In a mix of German and Arabic, the letter began with expressions of love and devotion to chabibi, or “darling.” Before signing it “Your man forever,” Jarrah wrote:

I will wait for you until you come to me. There comes a time for everyone to make a move… . You should be very proud of me. It’s an honor, and you will see the results, and everybody will be happy… .

While Jarrah mailed his package, Atta prepared to leave his room at the Boston hotel. Some items in his Travelpro luggage made sense for a devout Muslim who’d received a commercial pilot’s license nine months earlier: alongside a Koran and a prayer schedule, he packed videotaped lessons on how to fly two types of Boeing jets; a device for determining the effect of a plane’s weight on its range; an electronic flight computer; a procedure manual for flight simulators; and flight planning sheets. Anyone who knew what he had planned would also have noted that he packed a folding knife and a canister of “First Defense” pepper spray. Finally, tucked into the black suitcase was a four-page letter, handwritten in Arabic, that charted Atta’s physical and spiritual intentions.

Divided into three sections, the letter provided detailed instructions and exhortations on the subjects of martyrdom and mass murder. It covered demeanor and grooming, battle tactics, and the promise of eternal life in the company of “nymphs.” After formal invocations, “In the name of Allah, the most merciful, the most compassionate,” the first section addressed Atta’s situation at that very moment. Titled “The Last Night,” it began:

1 Embrace the will to die and renew allegiance. -Shave the extra body hair and wear cologne. -Pray.

2 Familiarize yourself with the plan well from every aspect, and anticipate the reaction and resistance from the enemy.

3 Read the Al-Tawbah [Repentance], the Anfal chapters [in the Quran], and reflect on their meaning and what Allah has prepared for the believers and the martyrs in Paradise.

Near the end of the first section, it offered this direction:

1 13. Examine your weapon before departure, and it was said before the departure, “Each of you must sharpen his blade and go out and wound his sacrifice.”

Among the nineteen men with plans to wreak havoc in the next twenty-four hours, at least two others, one in New Jersey and the other outside Washington, had copies of the same letter.

Atta left the Milner Hotel and drove a rented blue Nissan Altima to a cheap hotel in the Boston suburb of Newton. There he picked up the man believed to have written, or at least copied, the instruction letter: Abdulaziz al-Omari, the same young Saudi who days earlier had ordered prostitutes like delivery pizza.

Atta and Omari headed toward Interstate 95 for a two-hour drive to Portland, Maine, a trip that could best be described as the first arc of a circular route. They held tickets for a commuter flight that would bring them back to Boston. The flight was scheduled to leave Portland at six o’clock the following morning, September 11.

CHAPTER 2

“HE’S NORDO”

American Airlines Flight 11

September 11, 2001

AMERICAN AIRLINES PILOT JOHN OGONOWSKI ROUSED HIMSELF BEFORE dawn on September 11, 2001, moving quietly in the dark to avoid waking his wife, Peg, or their three daughters. He slipped on his uniform and kissed Peg goodbye as she slept.

As the sun began its rise on that perfect late-summer morning, John stepped out the back door. Coffee would wait until he reached Boston’s Logan International Airport, forty-five minutes away. He climbed into his dirt-caked green Chevy pickup, with hay on the floor and a bumper sticker that read THERE’S NO FARMING WITHOUT FARMERS.

John drove a meandering route as he left the land he loved. He could see the plots he’d set aside for the Cambodian immigrants, plus five acres of ripening pumpkins and ten acres of fodder corn whose stalks would be sold as decorations for Halloween and Thanksgiving. John steered down the long dirt driveway, through the white wooden gate that gave the farm its name. He passed the home of his uncle Al and tooted his horn in a ritual family greeting. It was nearly six o’clock.

Under sparkling blue skies, John drove southeast toward the airport, ready to take his seat in the cockpit and his place in a vast national air transport system that flew some 1.8 million passengers daily, aboard more than twenty-five thousand flights, to and from more than 563 U.S. airports.

He expected to be home before the weekend, for a family picnic.

AS JOHN OGONOWSKI neared the airport, Michael Woodward left his sleeping boyfriend at his apartment in Boston’s fashionable Back Bay neighborhood and caught an early train for the twenty-minute ride to Logan. More than six feet tall and 200-plus pounds, Michael had a gentle face and a razor wit. Thirty years old, bright and ambitious, he’d risen from ticket agent to flight service manager for American Airlines, a job in which he ensured that planes were properly catered, serviced, and equipped with a full complement of flight attendants.

A salty breeze from Boston Harbor greeted Michael when he exited the train at the airport station, but that was the last he expected to see of the outdoors until the end of a long day. At 6:45 a.m., dressed in a gray suit and a burgundy tie, Michael walked to his office in the bowels of the airport’s Terminal B, one level below the passenger gates. He wore a serious expression that revealed his discomfort.

Michael remained friends with many of the more than two hundred flight attendants he supervised, and now he had to scold one to get to work on time, keep her uniform blouse properly buttoned, and generally clean up her act or risk being fired. He called her into his office, took a deep breath, and delivered the reprimand. She accepted the criticism and Michael relaxed, confident that he had completed the worst part of his September 11 workday.

Outside Michael’s office, flight attendants milled around a no-frills lounge where airline employees grabbed coffee and signed in by computer before flights. Michael brightened when he saw Betty Ong, a fourteen-year veteran of American Airlines whose friends called her Bee, sitting at a desk in the lounge, enjoying a few minutes of quiet before work.

Tall and willowy, forty-five years old, with shoulder-length black hair, Betty had grown up the youngest of four children in San Francisco’s Chinatown, where her parents ran a deli. Betty loved Chinese opera, carousel horses, Nat King Cole music, and collecting Beanie Babies; she also excelled at sports. Betty walked with a lively hop in her step and had a high-pitched laugh that brought joy to her friends. She ended calls: “I love you lots!” After countless flights together, she’d grown friendly with pilot John Ogonowski and his flight attendant wife, Peg, who often drove Betty home from Logan Airport to her townhouse in suburban Andover, Massachusetts, not far from the Ogonowskis’ farm. Single after a breakup, between flights Betty acted like a big sister to children who lived in her neighborhood and took elderly friends to doctors’ appointments. Betty had returned to Boston the previous day on a flight from San Jose, California. Now she was back at work, piling up extra trips before a Hawaiian vacation later in the week with her older sister, Cathie.

Michael scanned the room and saw Kathleen “Kathy” Nicosia, a green-eyed, no-nonsense senior flight attendant whom he’d taken to dinner recently in San Francisco. Kathy had spent thirty-two of her fifty-four years working the skies, and she’d developed a healthy skepticism about managers, a skepticism that somehow didn’t include Michael. He walked over and she gave him a hug. A whiff of her perfume lingered after Kathy and Betty headed upstairs to the passenger gates.

AROUND 7:15 A.M., on the tarmac outside the terminal at Gate 32, Logan Airport ground crew member Shawn Trotman raised his fuel nozzle and inserted it into an adapter underneath a wing of a wide-bodied Boeing 767. The silver plane had rolled into place a little more than an hour earlier, after an overnight flight from San Francisco. It stretched 180 feet long, with red, white, and blue stripes from nose to tail. The word “American” spanned the top of the first-class windows. Bold red and blue A’s, separated by a stylized blue eagle, adorned a flaglike vertical stabilizer on the tail.

The work done, Trotman snapped shut the fueling panel. The plane’s two enormous wing tanks sloshed with highly combustible Jet A fuel—essentially kerosene refined to burn more efficiently—for the six-hour flight across the country. Trotman had filled the wings with fuel weighing 76,400 pounds, about the same weight as a forty-foot fire truck.

As Trotman moved on to another plane, the ground crew finished loading luggage and delivering catering supplies. While they worked, John Ogonowski walked under the plane to inspect the landing gear, part of a pilot’s routine preflight check.

Meanwhile, inside the 767, flight attendant Madeline “Amy” Sweeney was upset. Blond and blue-eyed, thirty-five years old, Amy had recently returned to work after spending the summer at home with her two young children. This would be the first day she wouldn’t be on hand to guide her five-year-old daughter Anna onto the bus to kindergarten. Amy used her cellphone to call her husband, Mike, who comforted her by saying she’d have plenty of days ahead to see their kids off to school.

AMY SWEENEY, BETTY Ong, and Kathy Nicosia were three of the nine flight attendants, eight women and one man, who’d be working with Captain John Ogonowski and First Officer Thomas McGuinness Jr., a former Navy fighter pilot. They were the eleven crew members of American Airlines Flight 11, a daily nonstop flight to Los Angeles with a scheduled 7:45 a.m. departure.

Boarding moved smoothly, a process made easier by the wide-bodied plane’s two aisles between seats and a light load of passengers. The youngest passenger through the cabin door was twenty-year-old Candace Lee Williams of Danbury, Connecticut, a Northeastern University student and aspiring stockbroker en route to visit her college roommate in California. The oldest was eighty-five-year-old Robert Norton, a retiree from Lubec, Maine, heading west with his wife, Jacqueline, to attend her son’s wedding.

Daniel Lee from Van Nuys, California, a roadie for the Backstreet Boys, had slipped away from the pop group’s tour and bought a ticket on Flight 11 so he could be home for the birth of his second child. Cora Hidalgo Holland of Sudbury, Massachusetts, needed to interview health aides for her elderly mother in San Bernardino, California. Actress and photographer Berry Berenson, widow of the actor Anthony Perkins, was headed home to Los Angeles after a vacation on Cape Cod.

Also on board was seventy-year-old electronics consultant Alexander Filipov of Concord, Massachusetts, a gregarious, insatiably curious father of three. He knew how to say “Do you like Chinese food?” in more than a dozen languages, which enabled Filipov to strike up conversations with foreigners on business trips like this one. Nearby, missing his wife, Prasanna, after a three-week work trip, Los Angeles computer technician Pendyala “Vamsi” Vamsikrishna called home and left a message saying he’d be there for lunch.

As boarding continued, thirty-year-old Tara Creamer walked down the aisle and slid into window seat 33J. Tara was a woman who didn’t rattle easily. Years earlier, on a first date, on Valentine’s Day no less, a fellow college student took her to dinner at a red sauce Italian dive called Spaghetti Freddy’s, then to the cannibal-versus-serial-killer movie The Silence of the Lambs. She married him.

Tara had met John Creamer at the University of Massachusetts Amherst when she was a vivacious, curly-haired brunette sophomore. John was a shy, blue-eyed football lineman for the UMass Minutemen, named for the Revolutionary War patriots. Tara lived on a dorm floor near some of John’s friends, so he hung around her hallway long enough for her to notice him. After that first date of pasta and fava beans, they were a couple.

Both twenty-three when they wed, Tara and John had scraped together a down payment for a sweet yellow Cape Cod–style house with a screened porch in Worcester, Massachusetts, not far from where John’s parents lived. They renovated it themselves after long days of work. After one seemingly endless paint-and-wallpaper binge, John lost patience. While he stewed, Tara, several months pregnant, calmly went to their unfinished basement, carrying a wide brush dripping white paint. On a rough gray wall, she painted “Tara s John.” The tension passed, but the sign and the sentiment endured. At night, they slept under a maroon, pink, and white quilt made by Tara’s aunt, with a design of interlocking circles that symbolized their wedding rings. Written on the soft cloth were the words “Made with Love for Tara and John,” and their wedding date, August 13, 1994.

Their son, Colin, arrived in 1997, followed three years later by a daughter, Nora. A fashion merchandising major in college, Tara became a planning manager at TJX Companies in Framingham, Massachusetts, parent firm of the big-box retailer T.J.Maxx. She sang to Colin and Nora on the way to work and spent lunch hours with them in an onsite company daycare center. Tara meticulously updated their milestone books, recording first crawls and first steps, first teeth and first words. When a company supervisor urged Tara to get into the habit of working late, Tara declined. Time with her children came first.

Tara and John never traveled together by air in the years after Colin’s birth. She worried about leaving him, and then both Colin and Nora, in the event of a crash. Tara’s mother died of cancer in 1995, and the loss still ached. But in May 2001, one of John’s closest friends invited them to his wedding in Florida. Before the trip, Tara went on a planning spree, arranging insurance, guardians, and family finances, just in case. She also took the opportunity to explain the concept of death to Colin. He had only one grandmother, Tara told him, because the other one, her mother, was an angel in heaven, looking after him. Colin seemed to understand, but Tara couldn’t be sure.

By late summer 2001, Nora had celebrated her first birthday, and Tara was ready to resume traveling for work. On this trip, Tara had the option of staying in California through the weekend to see a close friend, but she scheduled a red-eye return so she’d be home Friday morning. Packed and ready the night before Flight 11, Tara completed one last task before bed. Fulfilling her self-appointed role as family planning manager, she typed a detailed memo for John. Titled “Normal Daily Schedule,” it was a mother’s guide to caring for their children. It began: “Wake Colin up around 7–7:15. Let him watch a little cartoons (Channel 52). Nora—if she is not up by 7:30—wake her up. Just change her and give her milk in a sippy cup!”

In the seat next to Tara was auburn-haired Neilie Anne Heffernan Casey of Wellesley, Massachusetts, also a TJX Companies planning manager. Two days earlier, Neilie and her husband, Mike, had run a 5K race to raise money for breast cancer research. They ran pushing a stroller with their six-month-old daughter, Riley. In nearby rows were five of their TJX colleagues, also headed to California on business: Christine Barbuto, Linda George, Lisa Fenn Gordenstein, Robin Kaplan, and Susan MacKay.

Susan’s husband, Doug, was an FAA air traffic controller. He’d switched his schedule to an early shift that day so he could attend a nighttime school event for their eight-year-old daughter and make dinner for their thirteen-year-old son. When he got to work, Doug planned to radio American Flight 11’s cockpit to ask Captain John Ogonowski to surprise Susan by saying hi for him.

IN A WIDE leather seat in the first row of first class sat financier David Retik of Needham, Massachusetts, a practical-joking, fly-fishing family man whose wife, Susan, was seven months pregnant with their third child. His colleagues considered David a rare bird: a venture capitalist whom everyone liked. On his drive to the airport, David had spotted a familiar car on the Massachusetts Turnpike. He sped up, pulled alongside, and waved to his surprised father, a doctor on his way to work.

Next to David sat travel industry consultant Richard Ross, whose family in Newton, Massachusetts, counted on him to spontaneously break into Sinatra songs; to raise money for brain cancer research; and to be chronically late. He held true to form this morning, as the last passenger to arrive for Flight 11. A flustered Richard told a gate agent that terrible traffic had made this the worst day of his life. Another agent took pity and upgraded him from business to first class.

One row behind David and Richard sat retired ballet dancer and philanthropist Sonia Puopolo of Dover, Massachusetts, looking elegant with a camel-colored pashmina scarf draped over her blazer. Her luggage bulged with baby pictures and childhood mementos for a visit to her Los Angeles-based son Mark Anthony, whom she called Mookie. A wealthy patron of the arts and Democratic Party politicians, Sonia wore a distinctive wedding band with diamonds embedded in golden columns. The bejeweled shafts looked like the support pillars of a landmark building in miniature.