Shattered Lives – We Win America

Shattered Lives; Overcoming the Fraunces Tavern Terror

Precursing 9/11/01, Americans have
been murdered by terrorists for decades.

Shattered Lives begins by taking thereader into the graphic horror of major terror attacks, the lives of victims and their families, the aftermath of their shattered lives and even the terrorists themselves, providing context for their deeds.

Shattered Lives uniquely connects the acts and actors of these past events to our current and even future situations.

Since 2012, I walked every day into the lobby of my office at 150 E 42^nd street in NYC.

Many of those days, I thought of 26 year old Charles Steinberg sure that my colleagues all around me never heard his name; never knew who he was, never knew of the terror bombing, the horrendous carnage and the murder of Mr. Steinberg that occurred in that very lobby on August 3, 1977. Did anyone know that on that day some 40,000 people in the World Trade Center were evacuated due to the same terrorists’ threat to the twin towers?

I was sure that no one around me knew that my father, 33 year old, Frank Connor and three other innocent men were murdered by these terrorists two years earlier, on January 24, 1975 in the cradle of American Liberty, Fraunces Tavern or that our father’s god son, cousin, Steve Schlag was murdered in the WTC a generation after these terror attacks.

Frank Connor

33 years old
Son of immigrants, Washington Heights NYC
Father Tom, England
Mother Margaret, Ireland, best person I will ever know
Mother Margaret got him a job at JPMorgan out of HS so he would be safe, not a cop or fireman
Lived American dream
City College at night (where they put up a Student Center for William Morales and Shakur (Chesimard)
Graduated from Fairleigh Dickenson, at night
Married Mary Lynch (Irish immigrant) sons
Sons Tom (1964), Joe (1966), Martin (1967), died after birth
We planned to celebrate Tom and my 11th and 9th birthdays that night
He never came home
Lasagna my mom made was eaten by mourners after funeral
FALN never wanted to free PR but to enslave its people in a Cuban style Marxist dictatorship.

Did anyone know the source of this evil? How many of them heard of the Puerto Rican separatist terrorists, Armed Forces for National Liberation (“FALN”), about their reign of terror or about the lives they SHATTERED?

After attacking America with over 120 bombings, murdering six and wounding scores between 1974 and 1983, the FALN terrorists were arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced to prison terms ranging from 35 to 90 plus years.
- In 1999 the Clintons offered executive clemency to 16 FALN members while Hillary Clinton, in an attempt to ingratiate herself to New York’s latino community, planned her 2000 senate run.
- Eric Holder, at the Clintons’ request, was the architect for this clemency
  - I testified at Holder’s AG confirmation hearing
  - They played Russian Roulette by releasing terrorists
  - Holder didn’t have the values, character or judgement to be our chief law enforcement officer
None of the terrorists requested clemency nor were required to provide information for unsolved crimes
- One terrorist, Oscar Lopez Rivera refused clemency and stayed in prison
- I faced Lopez at his 2011 parole hearing keeping him in prison
- Obama offered a second clemency to Lopez in 2017, during his last days in office

I began writing what what evolved into this book on the train ride home from lower Manhattan on September 10, 2001

Exactly 2 years after the terrorists were released from prison
Exactly 1 day before I witnessed the attacks on 9/11 that murdered my cousin, my dad’s godson Steve Schlag
I purposely avoided seeing Steve on the train that night to begin writing
In the meantime, I co-authored and published with Mike Duncan, The New Founders, bringing the American Founders alive in the 21st century

This book went nowhere until I met Jeff Ingber, a very accomplished writer

Jeff had written 2 books
- Bela’s Letters
  - Based on his father, a Holocaust survivor
- Resurrecting the Street
  - How Wall Street recovered after 9/11
Jeff was working on a third book, about terrorism on Wall Street
- We talked and he decided to focus the book on our family and Fraunces

Shattered Lives takes the reader into the graphic horror of major terror attacks, focuses on the lives of the victims and their families, the aftermath of their shattered lives and even the terrorists themselves, providing context for their deeds.
- Shattered Lives uniquely connects the acts and actors of these past events to our current and even future situations.
  - Eric Holder may run for President in 2020.
    - Here’s why we should be afraid of this
      - Released terrorists
      - Fast and Furious gun running
      - Politically weaponizing the DoJ and FBI
  - Luis Gutierrez has been spoken of also as a Presidential candidate…
  - Must secure return of William Morales, Joanne Chesimard, Victor Gerena from Cuba
  - Help Americans understand our relationship with Puerto Rico for over a hundred years
  - Politicians continued use of terrorism as a political tool
    - FALN clemencies
    - Closing GTMO
    - Stop surveillance of terrorists
    - Failure to identify our enemies
    - Commit to fight a full war on terrorists
      - ISIS
      - al Qaeda
      - Domestic

Shattered Lives is ultimately an uplifting though cautionary story of uniquely American families overcoming and fighting back against the murder of their loved ones, the political use of their murders by the highest levels of the United States government and what we the people can do improve our future.

Shattered Lives is now available on Amazon.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0985410043/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1522271874&sr=8-1&keywords=jeff+ingber

April 7, 2018. Steve Malzberg and Joe introduced Shattered Lives on WMAL.