Editor’s Note: As I indicated Sunday a few weeks ago in the introduction to a series on the importance of the press in making democracy work, there can be no doubt that experience matters. This is the sixth part of a series designed to show how experience matters when it comes to understanding media and politics — and how to make democracy work. It is a very rough first draft of what will eventually be a literary, non-fiction memoir published with ink on paper in book form, to be sold as a print-on-demand book and promoted on the Web.

In case you missed Chapter 1: Musical Chairs and the Summer of ’79
Or Chapter 2: The Pioneer — To Print or Not to Print
Or Chapter 3: Chapter Three: The Crimson White
Chapter 4: The Baldwin Times in Bay Minette

Chapter Five: A Christmas Story

by Glynn Wilson

The weekend before Christmas in 1984, I made the rounds in the Baldwin County courthouse and ended up in the office of the new district attorney, David Whetstone, who had an open-door policy for the press. Actually, that’s an understatement. He was a media-hound like no politician or lawyer I encountered before, or since. He would prop his cowboy boots up on his desk (which he always wore even with his best Sunday suits and in court), light a cigarette (since you could still smoke in public buildings in those days) and regale me with the details of cases he was prosecuting. Mostly, though, we talked about national, state, and county politics.

On this day, however, his door was closed. And I could tell from the body language of his secretary that something was up. So I hung around for a while. While sitting in the outer office, I distinctly heard a woman crying behind the closed door. My reporter instincts told me big news was about to walk out that door, so I waited, and waited.

After a little while, a young woman came out of Whetstone’s office, still wiping her eyes. I asked him what was up. He hesitated at first, but our relationship was such that I finally broke him down and got him to talk. It seems the young Fairhope woman had married a man of Syrian descent, had his baby, and then divorced. The day before, the man had visited the woman at her apartment in Mobile and gained her trust long enough for her to go to the grocery store — and leave the child at home with him. When she got back, her ex-husband and her baby were gone.

Samer Mohammad Tayssir Akil had kidnapped 7-month-old Joshua Ryan Akil. As I would eventually find out, he fled to New Orleans for a passport, then to Miami, and finally made the trans-Atlantic flight to London. From there he called his ex-wife and told her if she ever wanted to see her baby alive again, she should fly over as soon as possible and meet them there. Mrs. Akil was afraid of going, however, because she figured he would then kidnap her as well and take them into Syria or one of the other primarily Muslim, Middle Eastern Countries, where the male and first-born child hold special significance — and where no extradition treaties existed with the United States government.

Whetstone swore me to secrecy, since he was going to contact the FBI, the State Department, and anybody else he could think of to try and capture Akil and get the baby back. If one word of the story got into print, he insisted, the baby’s life could be in danger, since Akil had relatives in the U.S. who could warn him if word leaked out that authorities were looking for him.

So I sat on the story for a couple of days while law enforcement authorities set up a sting at Heathrow International Airport in London. Mrs. Akil was given a quick passport in New Orleans, then put on a plane bound for London, where the London Metropolitan Police and INTERPOL officers would be waiting.

Our last news edition before Christmas was scheduled to come out on Saturday. I was the only news reporter to find out about the story for three full days. Our final deadline was set for 5 p.m. Friday, hours early because most of the staff planned to be off through Christmas Day on Monday. The next issue of our paper after that would not be out until the next Wednesday, so timing was of the essence.

Mrs. Akil’s flight was set for Friday night, and news of what was to happen at the airport was not likely to be known before early Saturday morning. A major dilemma. I was sitting on a major international scoop. But my papers could not go to press with the story until Saturday. Due to the contingencies of publishing, we could not hold the presses until Saturday morning and keep the entire production and circulation staffs away from their families just because of one breaking story. So it looked as though we would get beaten by at least three or four days, depending on when The Mobile Press-Register found out about the story.

I knew I couldn’t hold Whetstone back once news reached him about what went down at the London airport. But there was nothing else to do at that point except write up everything I could find out about the couple and the baby’s kidnapping. I interviewed Mrs. Akil before she left and talked her into giving me a picture of the baby from her wallet.

With a draft of a story in the computer system ready to transmit to Robertsdale, I went home at lunch on Friday and packed our little Toyota hatchback and got ready to head for Birmingham and a week off for Christmas. I drove to the office and called my editor in Robertsdale, and told him the story was ready. But I insisted that someone else would have to make the decision on whether to publish it or not, based on what we knew. He talked to Everett, the publisher, but they did not know what to do and couldn’t seem to make a decision. So I told him I would force Whetstone to make the decision.

I headed over to the courthouse, where Christmas parties were already underway. I ran into Judge D’Olive and listened for awhile to his fiddle playing with the bluegrass band and sipped on a Jack Daniels and Coke. As time was running out, I grabbed Whetstone and pulled him away from the party and told him we had a story ready to go and that I was headed to Birmingham. I told him the decision was going to be up to him about whether we published or not, since I was only a cub reporter, and the editor and publisher didn’t know what to do either. I damn sure didn’t want to have the poor kid’s life hanging on my head. So I asked Whetstone at the last minute, “Can we go with it or not? It’s up to you.”

He took a drag off his cigarette, killed his glass of whiskey, and with his eyes watering, he said, “No. I can’t in good conscience let you publish the story yet.”

His reasoning was this. While he sympathized with our publishing-deadline dilemma, the overriding concern was: What if something goes wrong in London? Someone at the Mobile paper would see our paper for sure on Saturday morning and put the story on the AP wire. It would get out to one of Akil’s relatives, and he would flee before authorities could catch him.

“We can’t take that chance,” Whetstone said.

So it was settled. I finished my drink and walked back across the street to the office and called Robertsdale. My editor didn’t like it, but he also was not there at the courthouse helping me make the argument with the DA and insisting that we publish anyway. We could have gone with the story, making the case that “the public had a right to know.”

My editor accepted the inevitability that we were going to be scooped badly, but I had no intention of losing out on the biggest story of my life up to that point.

As soon as I hung up from the call to Robertsdale, I called the editor of The Birmingham News, James “Jim” Jacobson. I had known his daughter at the University of Alabama and had met him at some function. He took my call.

I explained the situation to him, and he got managing editor Tom Bailey in on the call, and I explained it again. They seemed interested in seeing the story early Saturday morning.

So I took off north from Bay Minette and drove the 300 miles to Birmingham in a record time of about three hours, knowing I would most likely not get a speeding ticket. Due to a budget shortfall, Governor George Wallace had recently cut back the hours of state troopers on nights and weekends, especially holidays. So I hauled ass as fast as that little Toyota would go.

I had my notes with me and thought about the story the whole way. When I got to my fiancée’s mother’s house, I got a bite to eat, opened a beer, and started calling London to try and establish sources. I called Scotland Yard, the British Broadcasting Company, and anybody else I could think of to try and have my own source at the airport and to let me know as soon as possible if they captured Akil and recovered the baby.

I took catnaps throughout the night, calling my new sources back again, making sure I had a connection to Heathrow Airport. I called Whetstone at home and told him I planned to break the story in The Birmingham News on Saturday morning. The deadline for the Saturday Birmingham News, in those days an afternoon paper, fell at seven a.m. I got there at six.

I remember it took me five minutes to convince the guard over the intercom that I was expected in the newsroom, and another ten to convince Tom Scarrett, the editor on duty (now the executive editor), that Jacobson and Bailey were expecting me. Bailey was not due in until a little before seven to read the front page before it went downstairs to production.

Scarrett finally said OK and assigned me to a desk with a phone and a computer terminal. I began making calls and writing the story as fast as I could type. I sent the first draft to Scarrett at about ten minutes before seven. He read it and sent it to Bailey, who approved it and made it the second lead story, just above the fold, on page one.

We still did not know what happened at the airport, but we should know any minute, and the results wouldn’t matter then anyway. Either the authorities would have Akil in custody or he would have discovered the sting and escaped toward the Middle East. It was out of my hands.

I knew my editor at The Baldwin Times would not be too happy about it, but I also knew that I would not be working in Bay Minette much longer anyway. I had already made contact with a daily newspaper in North Alabama and was considering taking the job. If the story worked out right, I might even get a job in Birmingham as a result.

At one minute before seven and on the hour, I got two calls in the Birmingham newsroom. One came from Scotland Yard, the other from Whetstone. Both confirmed that the Metropolitan Police had arrested Akil at Heathrow airport and recovered the baby from Akil’s grandmother in Brighten, England.

I yelled across the newsroom to the two editors. We went back to work revising the story. I spat out the details over Scarrett’s shoulder as he typed a new lead and re-wrote parts of the story, updating it with the new information. He sent it to Bailey, who gave his OK, and it was sent downstairs to be printed and laid out on the front page.

Scarrett himself took me down to see it, and wow, what a feeling! My version of the story went on the wires, under my byline, and ran in hundreds of newspapers around the world that day. I would have loved to see the look on the faces of the editors in Mobile that morning when they realized how badly they’d been scooped.

Scarrett handed me the first copy of the paper as it rolled off the presses. He told me to go home and get some sleep, a little breakfast, and if I wanted to, I could come back a little later to do a followup story for the Sunday paper.

Of course I did it, and what a Christmas story it made. The News ended up paying me a grand total of $100 for those two stories on a freelance basis, but for whatever reason, never offered me a job. To this day I do not know why. They never tell.

I went back to Bay Minette the day after Christmas and wrote up the entire story for The Baldwin Times and all six of the Gulf Coast newspapers. That version of the story earned me an Alabama Press Association spot news award that year. The mother and baby miraculously made it back for an emotional Christmas homecoming. In my life and times, that was one of the few times I’ve seen the press and government work so well for such a worthy cause. Government worked that day; so too did the press. If only it could be like that every day — American democracy would be all the better as a result.

Related Links

Stolen baby recovered in England
Kidnapped child rescued
Letter from the DA

Tags: Chapter Five: A Christmas Story

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