CAPTURED ! ! !

Scratch one phony wannabe . . . S.L.


OFFICER IMPERSONATOR ARRESTED IN DEADHORSE, ALASKA


The imposter William Clark






August 28th, 2010 04:03 PM

FAIRBANKS -- A man who served prison time for impersonating an Army officer at the scene of an Oklahoma bridge collapse has been arrested in the North Slope community of Deadhorse. William J. Clark, 37, had outstanding warrants in five states, the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner reported Saturday.

The director of the North Star Council on Aging contacted Fairbanks police earlier in the week after Clark displayed a handgun. Though Clark posed as a military police officer, the woman told police she thought he was mentally ill or a jail escapee.

Despite the outstanding warrants, Fairbanks police let Clark go because he did not show up as a convicted felon in a statewide database. A national database was not checked until it was too late.

A hunter who read a newspaper article about Clark contacted police, reporting that he met a man in military fatigues who fit Clark's description, said Fairbanks police Sgt. Eric Jewkes.


That would be THIS article, no doubt - referenced in STORMBRINGER


The man believed to be Clark mentioned he was going to Deadhorse, more than 400 miles north of Fairbanks. North Slope Borough police found Clark at the Prudhoe Bay Hotel on Friday and he was arrested without incident, Jewkes said.

Clark is expected to be flown back to Fairbanks within the next few days.

Clark's most recent stint in jail ended in August 2009, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons.


Yeah, well, you're about ready to go back to the Big House there, Big Boy. I wonder what prison's like in Alaska in the wintertime?


This month a Davenport, Iowa, television station reported that Clark is suspected of passing a bad check at a computer store in April. The man who passed the check reportedly said he needed a laptop for his deployment to Afghanistan.


The merchant of that store in Davenport brought that information to our attention HERE.


Fairbanks police also are investigating Clark as a suspect in several cases of bad checks being passed off around the city, Jewkes said. Similar fraud charges are anticipated in Juneau.


This news is significant on many levels: A) a bizarre con man whose criminal scams involved disgracing the uniform of U.S. Special Forces has been brought to justice, B) thankfully nobody was hurt despite the fact this unbalanced individual was armed, and C) media reports on this issue - and the conduct of persons involved - seemed to echo information posted here on Blog STORMBRINGER. If in fact postings here contributed to the apprehension of William Clark, then this is quite possibly the first known instance of human tracking via the resources of the Internet.

I received training and experience as a tracker during my time as an instructor at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center, and subsequently used those skills throughout my career, to this very day. Several aspects of a classic tracking operation came into play during the saga of William Clark, i.e. persistence (the track may go cold, but the trail can always be picked up again); the psychology of tracking (getting inside the head of the person you're tracking - avoiding the scenario of the hunter becoming the hunted); and modern technology - which usually involves using vehicles, aircraft, and specialized optics.

In this case the power of the Internet was harnessed to spread the word, and the tracking operation was conducted like a game three-tiered chess across five dimensions; the three dimensions of the physical world, the dimension of time and the dimension of the virtual world.

In urban operations technique known as "hiding in plain view" is used, which is the art of masking one's identity via ruse and deception. That concept works fine down by the Koenigstrasse in Stuttgart but doesn't get you too far in a rural environment like Alaska where William Clark obviously stood out like a sore thumb.

Just this afternoon I was telling my brother that the trail may go cold, but it never goes away. I knew we were going to get him, sooner or later.

This is a good omen.


SEAN LINNANE SENDS



.