MAN IS ALIVE, RICH IN LEBANON
BTEKHNAY, Lebanon -- Ten months after he supposedly burned to death in Miami, backyard mechanic Ezzat M. Aboul-Hosn is home again -- a rich man in a small Lebanese mountain village.
He owns two new cars and a truck. His $250,000 villa is under construction. He maintains a fat savings account at a local bank. He pays his bills from a book of fancy oversized checks.
People here wonder where a 30-year-old former army sergeant, the only son of a poor family, got his money.
Ezzat's sister Ghada knows.
She was paid $500,000 as beneficiary of Ezzat's insurance policies after he "died" in a freak flash fire while working beneath his 10-year-old Chevrolet Vega at his rented Kendall home.
Ghada says her brother faked his death. She says she has no idea who the real dead man might be. Neither do homicide detectives in Miami.
"When I found that my brother is still alive, I was shocked," Ghada insisted in an interview at her family's modest home in this snow-covered village in the mountains east of Beirut.
"I was happy that he wasn't dead, but I was so hurt and angry that I had been used. I didn't want any of the money. I gave it to him. It's dirty money," she lamented, tears welling in her green eyes.
Ghada said she was studying nursing in Tampa last May when her brother was reported killed. She claims she didn't know until later that she was beneficiary of his $1.3-million in life insurance.
After paying the first half-million, insurance companies discovered from Ezzat's dental records that he wasn't the dead man. They refuse to pay the outstanding $800,000.
Ghada claims she no longer speaks to her brother.
"We had a big fight. We haven't talked since. Ezzat knew he had to leave here."
Ghada claimed that her brother fled their village with his clothes and his money only hours before a Herald reporter appeared Tuesday.
Ezzat took a taxi to Damascus, Syria, and planned to fly "to Europe, for two years, maybe longer," Ghada said. Another of Ezzat's six sisters, questioned earlier and separately, said he was still in the area. Villagers suggested that Ezzat is nearby, avoiding outsiders.
The truth is hard to know, and dangerous to pursue in Btekhnay, a redoubt of Lebanon's mystical Druze sect. The people are fiercely clannish, at home in mountains that are easy to defend and hard to capture.
In village streets now thigh-deep in snow, the old men wear baggy black Turkish-style pants with red tarboush hats. Young men bristle with Soviet-made submachine-guns and rocket launchers.
They have more than insularity in common. They are all followers of the same secretive Druze offshoot of Islam, and every one of them is surnamed Aboul-Hosn. Literally, every one of the estimated 2,500 villagers is named Aboul-Hosn.
Some of the Aboul-Hosns working as doctors, engineers, bankers and pilots in Beirut have learned from relatives in the United States of the adventures of their relative Ezzat.
"Some of us think that we should turn him over to the U.S. Embassy so he can be tried. And if he did kill someone for this money, he should get the electric chair," said Adnan Aboul-Hosn, 34, a cargo pilot. "This is a disgrace to the Aboul-Hosn name and the village."
EXTRADITION UNLIKELY
In Beirut, the American Embassy says there is little chance of forcibly returning Ezzat to Miami.
"There is no extradition treaty betweeen the United States and Lebanon," said consular officer Lisa Piascik. "It's up to the local authorities."
The local authorities in the mountains around Btekhnay are not Lebanese, but Syrian. The Syrian Army has occupied the territory since Lebanon's 1976 civil war, under an Arab League mandate.
Even reaching the village now is a heart-of-darkness gantlet of Syrian and Druze checkpoints, snow-clogged, shell-cratered roads, the wrecks of bombed cars. Along the road, Soviet-made tanks sleep like hibernating bears, blanketed to their turrets in snow.
The usual route to Btekhnay, about 20 miles east from Beirut, has been closed by snow for two weeks. The route newly carved through the snow is a tortuous, roundabout, single-lane track, about 42 miles long and two and a half hours from Beirut.
Ezzat has run, but it remains to be seen whether he can hide
from his Aboul-Hosn clan.
"People in the village are beginning to hear about Ezzat and his 'accident,' " said Dr. Aref Aboul-Hosn, a Beirut physician. "If he's a criminal, we don't want him running loose."
PROSPEROUS TOWN
Like a half-dozen Aboul-Hosns interviewed in Beirut, he expressed concern for "the family name" and "the reputation of the village."
Btekhnay is considered one of the best-educated and most prosperous localities in Lebanon. Its major export seems to be professionals to the United States, including to the Florida cities of Orlando, Tampa and Titusville.
Local commerce revolves around apples and cherry orchards, and the harvesting of pine cones for snobar, or pine nuts.
In the village, the family of Ezzat Aboul-Hosn was not prominent until Ezzat's ostentatious return from Miami. His father, Aref (the Aboul-Hosns often also share first names), owned a grocery shunned by some villagers, according to both Dr. Aref and Adnan, the pilot.
"The son joined the army after his schooling, and everyone thought it was good that he was turning out better than the father," Adnan said.
A few years ago, however, Adnan crossed the path of Ezzat in Louisville, Ky., where a number of prosperous Aboul-Hosns have settled.
"The police wanted him for paying someone to steal his furniture, then claiming it on insurance," Adnan said.
(According to Louisville police, Ezzat reported $2,300 in stereo equipment, cameras, encyclopedias, clothing and jewelry stolen in February 1979.)
After moving to Miami, Ezzat took jobs as a waiter, taxi driver and salesman, accumulating his life insurance policies over two years.
SISTER IN DARK
His sister Ghada says she lived with Ezzat for about 18 months in Miami, renting at the Caravel Apartments in Kendall. She studied medical technology at Miami-Dade Community College before moving to Tampa.
During this time, she claims, she never knew that she was the beneficiary to Ezzat's insurance.
"I didn't know he had insurance until I went through his papers" after his reported death, she asserted.
Ghada says she returned to Lebanon in mourning shortly before last summer's Israeli invasion. She claims she didn't see Ezzat in the village, or learn that he was alive, for several months.
"He wasn't here when I came back in May," Ghada said."He convinced everyone not to tell me when I was in the village the first two times."
It wasn't until "just before Christmas" that she saw Ezzat, Ghada insisted.
That, she claimed, was after she had returned to Miami last fall to collect the first insurance payment.
Adnan and one other native of the village, however, said that Ezzat and Ghada returned to the village only "one or two days apart" in late May or early June.
PLEASANT HOME
When confronted on the street below her family's home, Ghada first refused to talk. After about 15 minutes standing knee-deep in snow, chatting about the neighborhoods of Tampa, Ghada agreed to step inside.
Her mother, a pleasant white-haired woman named Linda, was too polite to refuse a request for coffee brewed on a cast iron wood-burning stove that kept the living room comfortable and
sent smoke curling about the red-tile roof.
Ezzat named a Miami company after his mother, at least on his business cards for "Linda Advertising," which he hands out to villagers when he explains how he struck it rich in America.
Before Ezzat returned with his money, Linda helped support the family by skillfully knitting woolen sweaters in a distinctive twisted pattern. Sitting around the wood stove, dark-haired Ghada wore one of her mother's white sweaters.
"Now that this has happened, I have no social life," Ghada complained. "Nobody talks to me and I don't talk to them. I work at the village medical clinic, alone in the lab. I come home and help with the house and read my books ... mostly medical books. I want to go back to Miami and clear this up. I just want to go back to nursing school in Tampa."
She said she wonders whose remains she had cremated. She left the ashes with a Syrian friend of Ezzat's in Miami.
Dade medical examiners retained the teeth of the burned corpse, and with the help of an insurance investigator established some seven months after the fire that the victim was not Ezzat.
"I went crazy knowing that I had these ashes of someone else," Ghada said.
When her brother's friend, Bassam Wakil, learned that the remains were not those of Ezzat, Ghada said, "he threw them into the ocean" somewhere near Miami.