Florida Man lurks in subtext of Richard Jewell book

The bomb, packed with six pounds of steel nails, exploded in Centennial Park on July 27, 1996, killing one visitor, injuring

111 others and replacing the bonhomie of the Atlanta Olympic Games with fear, anger and a clamor for justice. And quickly.

The immense pressure to find the killer pushed law enforcement and the media into all but indicting an innocent man. Until the enduring memory of the ’96 Olympics became a caravan of cops and journalists in perpetual pursuit of Richard Jewell.

Months would pass, three more bombs would explode, two more people would die, another 40 would be maimed before the FBI realized that the real culprit was a native of South Florida. As we say around the newsroom, so often that the cliché approaches a truism, “There’s always a Florida angle.”

The homemade bomb, three pipes packed with gunpowder, was a diabolical device that might have killed hundreds but for the vigilance of a 33-year-old security guard, Richard Jewell, who had noticed a suspicious green backpack under a park bench 23 minutes before the blast.

Jewell alerted police and did what he could to chase people away from that end of the crowded park before the blast. Sadly, his very heroism was construed as damning evidence, conflated with his past failures at a law enforcement career before his temporary gig as an Olympic park security guard. Jewell matched the FBI’s wannabe cop, wannabe hero, “lone bomber” profile.

The hapless Jewell was never charged, but the FBI, hoping to wring a confession out of its only suspect, leaked his name to the press and then left him dangling in the vortex of a media frenzy. Because, hey, wannabe Jewell offered us such a pat story line.

The circumstances that contributed to Jewell’s three-month ordeal before the FBI’s begrudging admission that he wasn’t the bomber has been meticulously documented in “The Suspect: An Olympic Bombing, the FBI, the Media, and Richard Jewell, the Man Caught in the Middle,” by Kent Alexander, who was the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia at the time of the 1996 Olympics, and Kevin Salwen, a former Wall Street Journal columnist. (Kent and I have been friends and basketball combatants since 1981.)

Their book was listed as source material for Clint Eastwood’s rather less-factual movie version of the security guard’s ordeal, “Richard Jewell,” which opens in South Florida theaters on Friday.

Of course, a Florida Man lurks in the subtext.

The actual bomber was Eric Robert Rudolph, an anti-government, Jew-hating, Holocaust-denying, homophobic, racist zealot. And a South Florida homeboy.

Rudolph was born in Merritt Island in

1966 and spent his early childhood on Gardenia Road in the Broadview Park community west of Fort Lauderdale. Biographer Maryanne Vollers (“Lone Wolf: Eric Rudolph and the Legacy of American Terror”), wrote that his parents, Bob and Patricia, members of a local Pentecostal church, became friends here with fellow congregant Thomas Wayne Branham, who was steeped in radical, racist, apocalyptic beliefs of the Christian Identity movement.

After Bob Rudolph lost his job as an airplane mechanic and was hired as a carpenter at Zoo Miami, Eric, his parents, three brothers and a sister, moved to Homestead. Bob, however, was dying of cancer (and refusing conventional medical treatment). He died in 1981, and the family followed their old Fort Lauderdale friend Branham to a remote mountain farm near Nantahala, N.C.

The area was home to a number of radical far right militants, including onetime Broward County state Rep. Ben Klassen, formerly of Lighthouse Point, who (after losing a state senate race) moved to the North Carolina mountains to continue his twisted ministry over the World Church of the Creator, which was infamous for fomenting racist violence .

Rudolph’s terrorist campaign was apparently motivated by such hate-driven philosophies. While the FBI and the press were obsessed with Richard Jewell, Rudolph followed his Olympic murders with similar attacks on two abortion clinics and a gay bar. But after a clinic bombing in Birmingham, two witnesses tailed him long enough to get his license plate number.

The FBI finally knew the real bomber’s identity. But, probably with the help of sympathetic locals, Rudolph managed to elude a massive manhunt in the rugged forests near Nantahala for five years. Until, on May 31, 2003, a rookie town cop found the mythical survivalist dumpster diving behind a Murphy, N.C. supermarket.

Richard Jewell, the besmeared hero, died of heart failure in 2007. The real culprit, the utterly unrepentant transplanted Florida Man, wangled a plea deal and is spending out his days in a federal Supermax prison.

Fred Grimm, a longtime resident of Fort Lauderdale, has worked as a journalist in South Florida since 1976. Reach him by email at leogrimm@gmail.com or on Twitter: @grimm_fred