Brazen Figure May Hold Key to Mysteries

Apprehension of Ahmed Abu Khattala May Begin to Answer Questions on Assault

By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK NY TIMES

　

CAIRO — Ahmed Abu Khattala was always open about his animosity toward the United States, and even about his conviction that Muslims and Christians were locked in an intractable religious war. "There is always hostility between the religions," he said in an interview. "That is the nature of religions."

During the assault on the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, on the night of Sept. 11, 2012, Mr. Abu Khattala was a vivid presence. Witnesses saw him directing the swarming attackers who ultimately killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.

Afterward, he offered contradictory denials of his role, sometimes trying to say that he did not do it but strongly approved. He appeared to enjoy his notoriety.

Even after President Obama vowed to hunt down the attackers, Mr. Abu Khattala sat for repeated interviews with Western journalists and even invited a correspondent for tea in the modest home where he lived openly, with his mother, in the el-Leithi neighborhood of Benghazi.

Who Is Ahmed Abu Khattala?

Seen as an eccentric extremist even by his ultra conservative Islamist neighbors, he was wanted by the United States as a prime suspect in the Benghazi attack.

But for all his brazenness, Mr. Abu Khattala also holds many tantalizing secrets for the Americans still investigating and debating the attack.

Captured by military commandos and law enforcement agents early on Monday, Mr. Abu Khattala may now help address some of the persistent questions about the identity and motives of the attackers. The thriving industry of conspiracy theories, political scandals, talk show chatter and congressional hearings may now confront the man federal investigators say played the central role in the attack.

Despite extensive speculation about the possible role of Al Qaeda in directing the attack, Mr. Abu Khattala is a local, small-time Islamist militant. He has no known connections to international terrorist groups, say American officials briefed on the criminal investigation and intelligence reporting, and other Benghazi Islamists and militia leaders who have known him for many years.

In several hours of interviews since the attack, Mr. Abu Khattala was happy to profess his admiration for Osama bin Laden and other leaders of Al Qaeda. He insisted that American foreign policy alone was to blame for the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. But he remained a distant admirer of Mr. Bin Laden’s organization, having spent most of his adult life in and out of jail for his extremism under Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.

　

Even by the standards of Benghazi jihadists — and even among many of his friends — Mr. Abu Khattala stands out as both erratic and extremist. "Even in prison, he was always alone," said Sheikh Mohamed Abu Sidra, an Islamist member of Parliament from Benghazi who spent several years in prison with Mr. Abu Khattala.

"He is sincere, but he is very ignorant, and I don’t think he is 100 percent mentally fit," Mr. Abu Sidra said. "I always ask myself, how did he become a leader?"

When the revolt against Colonel Qaddafi broke out in February 2011, however, Mr. Abu Khattala’s years in prison were an attractive credential to the young men looking for tough-talking "sheikhs" to follow into battle.

He formed a militia of perhaps two dozen fighters, naming it Obeida Ibn Al Jarra for an early Islamic general. But by the summer, Mr. Abu Khattala and his band had become notorious across Benghazi.

A group of Islamist militia leaders decided to "arrest" and investigate the main rebel commander, Gen. Abdul Fattah Younes, who had also become NATO’s preferred partner among the rebel leaders. His captors held him overnight in the headquarters of Mr. Abu Khattala’s brigade, and General Younes’s body was found the next day on a roadside, riddled with bullets.

Mr. Abu Khattala "became a boogeyman" across Benghazi, said Mohamed al-Gharabi, the Islamist leader of the Rafallah al-Sehati Brigade. "People started to fear him," he said.

Mr. Abu Khattala appeared to enjoy his new infamy. When the Islamist-dominated militias reorganized into a centralized coalition, he rejected it as insufficiently Islamist. Complaining that the coalition supported the Western-backed provisional government instead of demanding a theocracy, he pulled back from the front.

"He thinks he owns God and everyone else is an infidel," said Fawzi Bukatef, the coalition’s former leader.

President Obama said that Ahmed Abu Khattala, suspected of being the ringleader in the 2012 attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, was being transported to the United States.

In the period before the attack, Mr. Abu Khattala was living in el-Leithi, known for its high concentration of militant extremists. He made his living as a building contractor in blue Dickies coveralls. But he was still active with a small, part-time militia, which at certain times over the last two years controlled at least one checkpoint on a highway near Benghazi.

On the day of the attack, Islamists in Cairo had staged a demonstration outside the United States Embassy there to protest an American-made online video mocking Islam, and the protest culminated in a breach of the embassy’s walls — images that flashed through news coverage around the Arab world.

As the attack in Benghazi was unfolding a few hours later, Mr. Abu Khattala told fellow Islamist fighters and others that the assault was retaliation for the same insulting video, according to people who heard him.

In an interview a few days later, he pointedly declined to say whether an offensive online video might indeed warrant the destruction of the diplomatic mission or the killing of the ambassador. "From a religious point of view, it is hard to say whether it is good or bad," he said.

Several witnesses to the attack later said that Mr. Abu Khattala’s presence and leadership were conspicuous from the start. He initially hung back, standing near the crowd at Venezia Road, several witnesses said. But a procession of fighters hurried to him out of the smoke and gunfire, addressed him as "sheikh," and then gave him reports or took his orders before plunging back into the compound.

Spotting him as the central figure in the attack, a local official, Anwar el-Dos, approached Mr. Abu Khattala for help in entering the compound. The two men drove into the mission together in Mr. Abu Khattala’s pickup truck, witnesses said. As the men moved forward, the fighters parted to let them pass.

When the truck doors opened inside the walls, witnesses said, Mr. Dos dived to the ground to avoid gunfire ringing all around. But Mr. Abu Khattala strolled coolly through the chaos.

"He was just calm as could be," a young Islamist who had joined the pillaging said, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. Mr. Abu Khattala showed up on internal security cameras at about 11:30 p.m., according to American officials who have viewed the footage.

A short time later, Mr. Abu Khattala drove to the headquarters of Ansar al-Shariah, a local Benghazi militia whose members, witnesses said, also played a prominent role in the attack.

Although widely seen at the attack, Mr. Abu Khattala made no attempt to flee. The safest place for him may have been Benghazi, where Libya’s weak central government feared exerting its authority because of the superior power of the local Islamist militias.

Mr. Abu Khattala’s neighbors and other residents of Benghazi were apparently unaware of his capture, perhaps because they assumed he was caught up in other fighting in the city. A renegade general has been waging a local campaign against Islamist militants such as those in Ansar al-Shariah and Mr. Abu Khattala.

In interviews after the news emerged, two Benghazi residents said they had last seen Mr. Abu Khattala on Sunday. A neighbor in the el-Leithi district said he had seen Mr. Abu Khattala leaving his house alone in an Afghan-style jallabiya, with a Kalashnikov rifle slung over one shoulder and a Belgian FN rifle over the other.

"Then he walked deep into el-Leithi," the neighbor said. "We haven’t seen him since."

Suliman Ali Zway contributed reporting from Tripoli, Libya.

 

(Will Fox News or Alex Jones EVER tell the truth about this soldier? DAF)

 

Washington Post

Bergdahl’s writings reveal a fragile young man

By Stephanie McCrummen

This camouflage case arrived at the home of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl’s friend Kim Harrison several days after he disappeared in Afghanistan. Inside was Bergdahl’s laptop computer, a journal, a copy of Ayn Rand’s "Atlas Shrugged" and a cracked Kindle, as well as military papers in which Bergdahl named Harrison as the person who would receive his body should he be killed. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)

Before he became a Taliban prisoner, before he wrote in his journal "I am the lone wolf of deadly nothingness," before he joined the Army, Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl was discharged from the Coast Guard for psychological reasons, said close friends who were worried about his emotional health at the time.

The 2006 discharge and a trove of Bergdahl’s writing — his handwritten journal along with essays, stories and e-mails provided to The Washington Post — paint a portrait of a deeply complicated and fragile young man who was by his own account struggling to maintain his mental stability from the start of basic training until the moment he walked off his post in eastern Afghanistan in 2009.

"I’m worried," he wrote in one journal entry before he deployed. "The closer I get to ship day, the calmer the voices are. I’m reverting. I’m getting colder. My feelings are being flushed with the frozen logic and the training, all the unfeeling cold judgment of the darkness."

A few pages later, he wrote: "I will not lose this mind, this world I have deep inside. I will not lose this passion of beauty."

At another point, using his often unorthodox spelling, he wrote: "Trying to keep my self togeather. I’m so tired of the blackness, but what will happen to me without it. Bloody hell why do I keep thinking of this over and over."

On June 9, 2009, two weeks before he walked away, Bergdahl sent an e-mail to a friend.

"l1nes n0 t g00 d h3rE. tell u when 1 ha ve a si coure 1ine about pl/-\ns," read the partly coded message, one of Bergdahl’s many references to unspecified plans and dreams of walking away — to China, into the mountains, or, as he says at one point, into "the artist’s painted world, hiding from the fields of blood and screams, hidden from the monster within himself."

Several days after he vanished, a box containing his blue spiral-bound journal, his laptop computer, a copy of the novel "Atlas Shrugged," military records and other items arrived at the home of his close friend Kim Harrison, whom Bergdahl designated in his Army paperwork as the person who should receive his remains.

Harrison said she decided to share the journal and computer files with The Post because she is concerned about the portrayal of Bergdahl as a calculating deserter, a characterization she says is at odds with her understanding of him as sensitive and vulnerable.

Bergdahl’s parents declined a request for an interview about their son’s writings and mental health. A military spokesman said questions could not be put to Bergdahl, 28, "at this point in his reintegration process."

Harrison and others close to Bergdahl said his writing and the events surrounding the Coast Guard discharge raise questions about his mental fitness for military service and how he was accepted into the Army in 2008. Typically, a discharge for psychological reasons would disqualify a potential recruit.

According to Coast Guard records, Bergdahl left the service in early 2006 with an "uncharacterized discharge" after 26 days of basic training. The term applies to people discharged before completing 180 days of service. No reason is specified in such discharges, and a Coast Guard representative said no further information was available.

A senior Army official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, confirmed that the Army was aware of a prior "administrative discharge" when Bergdahl enlisted. A separate Army official, also speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that Bergdahl would have required a waiver to enlist under such circumstances. The official could not immediately confirm that Bergdahl received one.

With two wars raging in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2008, the Army was meeting recruitment goals by issuing waivers that allowed people with criminal records, health conditions and other problems to enlist. According to a 2008 Army War College study on the subject, the Army was issuing waivers at a rate of one for every five recruits at the time.

Whatever the exact circumstances of Bergdahl’s enlistment, the Coast Guard discharge came as no surprise to Harrison and other friends who grew up with him in Ketchum, Idaho, and said he was a poor fit for military service.

"He is the perfect example of a person who should not have gone" to war, said Harrison, who spoke on the condition that she be identified by her former married name because she is concerned about threats. "The only person worse would be someone with a low IQ. In my mind, they didn’t care."

Harrison only recently brought herself to watch the video of Bergdahl’s release, in which he walks stiffly from a battered Taliban truck to a U.S. helicopter.

In earlier Taliban propaganda videos, she said, she always recognized some part of the Bowe she remembered from Ketchum, some aspect of the good posture he kept or a familiar expression. As she studied his tense muscles and movements in the release video, she said, "I didn’t see any of Bowe left."

‘Light in this darkness’

The writing in Bergdahl’s journal, e-mails and laptop spans the year before he walked off his post in eastern Afghanistan on June 30, 2009. Harrison has had custody of the material since a few days after that, except for a brief period when she provided it to U.S. government investigators. None of the writing in the journal or computer files references the Taliban, or the politics of the war in Afghanistan, although there are references to modern war generally.

"Really, how pathetic i feel as i listen to people talk of the hell I will be heading to . . . " he wrote in a computer file titled, "my army memories." "Compared to hell of the real wars of the past, we are nothing but camping boy scots. Hiding from children behind our heavy armored trucks and our c-wire and sand bagged operating post, we tell our selves that we are not cowards . . . "

Mostly, the writing describes Bergdahl’s internal thoughts and struggles, from his first journal entry, dated June 11, 2008 — the month he headed to Army basic training in Georgia — to the last e-mail, dated June 27, 2009, three days before his disappearance.

"These are just thoughts in the start of this journey," the first journal entry began in the careful, slanted handwriting that Harrison said Bergdahl practiced as a teenager to help overcome what she thought was dyslexia. "These thoughts insist on trying to overwhelm my mind. . . . I’ve spent a lot of my life thinking blackness was all I had in front of me, that it would be blackness to the very last instent. I know this is not right. I know that there is light in this darkness, and that I can actuly reach it if I keep walking, keep moving to it."

Although Bergdahl’s friends in Ketchum were worried about his decision to join the Army, they also described it as "typical Bowe."

After growing up as a home-schooled kid in the rural fringe of Hailey, Idaho, Bergdahl was drawn to an artistic, free-thinking crowd in the nearby ski town of Ketchum, where he met Harrison when he began taking ballet and fencing lessons at an arts center she ran. He started living away from home, bouncing from couch to couch, and became close friends with Harrison’s son, Shane, and daughter, Kayla. He befriended two other young men who spoke to The Post last week on the condition of anonymity because they also are concerned about threats.

They described Bergdahl as an introspective young man who sometimes painted his fingernails black and identified with Japanese samurai warriors and medieval knights. He was often seen writing in a notebook and reading. He liked to portray himself as a dark, adventurous soul with a chivalrous spirit, a dramatic persona his friends often teased him about.

"There were two sides; one was this guy who was super sweet," one of his friends said. "At the same time, there was this heady introspection."

When he turned 18, Bergdahl began taking off on short-lived adventures. He told friends he was joining a sailing crew in Florida, going to France to become part of the French Foreign Legion, or setting out to bike around South America, only to reappear in Ketchum after a month or so.

Then one day in 2006, Bergdahl announced that he was joining the Coast Guard, a decision his friends thought was unwise given his personality. Harrison said she tried to talk him out of it, but finally relented and drove him to a military office in Idaho Falls to take the entrance exam.

Soon after he left Ketchum for basic training, Bergdahl sent her a dozen or so notebook pages filled with tiny writing, diatribes against the rigors of military life. She was alarmed, she said. When he returned after a few weeks, he told her he had gotten out on a psychological discharge.

"He told me he faked it," she recalled. "I said, ‘You don’t fake a psychological discharge, you have to become unfit.’ I told him that. The reality was it wasn’t okay. I saw it in the letters, the way the writing was changing, the anger."

Another friend remembered having a similar conversation with Bergdahl.

"I said, ‘What happened?’ " this friend recalled. "He said he started to feign a psychological disorder, saying strange things to get out. I remember flat out calling him out on it — I said, ‘There is something else going on.’ He said, ‘I chose to do it.’

"I know he believed he was in control, but I didn’t," the friend added. "I sincerely doubted that."

Two years later, in early 2008, Bergdahl revealed to Harrison that he had enlisted in the Army.

"I was like, ‘Why and how did you even get in?’ " she said. " ‘How did they let you?’ I was furious."

Chronicling his worries

Bergdahl landed in Georgia for basic training in June 2008, and began filling the blue journal.

On the calendar in the back, he scratched out the days with uniform slashes and dots. Inside, he slipped cut-out Sudoku puzzles with the answers taped on the back.

"A wolf, mutt, hound, dog, I’ve been called these from my childhood," he wrote in the first few pages. "But what good am I, my existence is that of exile. To live on the fringes of this world as a guard . . . "

He wrote about what he described as "shallow" and crude minds around him, and "this hell that pools so many fools, and they are all part of the illusion."

"Bullet sponges," he wrote at one point. "This is what some of the SEALs call regular Army and other mass ground troops. Its right, the job of a soldier is to basically die."

At another, "Lightning, there is nothing as truly beautiful as lightning . . . "

And then, "Puddle of mud, skitsafrentic phyco."

Bergdahl wrote many character sketches and stories about knights who were philosophers and about a girl who "loves the beauty that she sees in this world."

"I’m worried," he wrote a few pages later. " . . . Remember. REMEMBER. Imagination. Realness. To dream. The Universes. REMEMBER. Cold. Swift. Clear. Calm. Logic. Nothingness. Die here. Become empty here."

As he prepared to deploy to Afghanistan, Bergdahl began making long lists, including one labeled "Movies 4 My Insanity," which included the Cary Grant film "Houseboat," "Mary Poppins," "The English Patient" and "The Silence of the Lambs." He wrote about his fantasies and goals.

"One day, if I make it out of this, I will go around the world. I will not use airplanes, but only trains, boats, vehicles, and . . . (if I still have them) my feet."

"I will learn Russian. I will learn Japanese. I will learn French. I will learn Chines."

On the final journal page he wrote on, he listed story ideas, the last of which was "a story about one going-crazy-to wander the earth alone."

On a scrap of paper tucked into the journal, he wrote, "Walk us to the end of this. Walk on. And walk us out of here . . . "

An undated photo from Bowe Bergdahl’s laptop computer. (Courtesy of Kim Harrison/The Washington Post)

‘Pulling away’

Bergdahl was sent to Fort Richardson in Alaska to finish out the year, and by March of 2009, he had arrived in Paktika, Afghanistan, where his post was a football-field-size swath of sand partly surrounded by barbed wire.

Into this beige landscape, Bergdahl brought his new laptop, loaded with dozens of photos of clouds — clouds at sunrise and sunset, in oranges and blues and grays.

As fellow soldiers have described him, Bergdahl was either a brooding, aloof figure, or "a good soldier" who did what he was asked. In a file titled, "threw the brain," Bergdahl wrote of his new experience, "i’m at an odd place here."

"Like i’m pulling away from the human world, but getting closer to people," he continued. "Almost as if its not the people I hate, but society’s ideas and reality that hold them. . . . I want to change so much and all the time, but then my mind just locks down, as if there was some one else in my mind shutting the door in my face. . . . I want to pull my mind out and drop kick it into a deep gorge."

In a file dated a few days later, repetitions of the phrase "velcro or zipper/velcro or zipper/velcro or zipper" cover nearly two pages.

Bergdahl’s platoon mostly avoided firefights. In May 2009, when the fighting season was underway in Afghanistan, there was one serious battle with the Taliban, and a bungled mission that left him and his fellow soldiers stranded in the mountains for four days.

Bergdahl started writing an account of it on his laptop, describing a mission intended to help recover an armored vehicle that went wrong when his convoy was hit by an improvised explosive device.

"The mission was extended, but little detail . . . for command acts like their guarding some kind of secrets when ever oders are passed out. . . . Hitting the mountain road, which is no more then a cart trail winding its way up a redicoulisly steep mountain face, seat belts are strapped, helmets are tightened, and your subconsciously bracing yourself with your hands and feet . . . "

He didn’t finish.

"So I don’t care weather my body’s whole or ash," he e-mailed that month to one of his friends in Ketchum, "preferably whole, it would just feel nicer if my body was thrown into the sea whole, instead of just the ashes being thrown overboard. . . . Thanks."

On June 7, three weeks before he walked off post, Bergdahl e-mailed Harrison’s daughter, Kayla.

"if at any point in time, kim gets a call from red cross, or the mill, no matter when, in a week, month, or years. . . . Keep her from panic and bad ideas. You know what I do, and ash I am still perfecting, actions may become . . . odd. No red flags. Im good. But plans have begun to form, no time line yet. . . . love you! Bowe."

Alarmed, Kayla wrote back, "Exactly what kind of plans are you thinking of?"

"l1nes n0 t g00 d h3rE tell u when 1 ha ve a si coure 1ine about pl/-\ns," Bergdahl wrote back the next day. "There is still time yet for thinking."

"Just don’t do anything stupid or pointless," Kayla replied.

"you know I plan better then that," Bergdahl wrote back.

In a file titled, "If i’ve died_READ," dated June 8, Bergdahl wrote about the reality of his life as a soldier and the idea of a life as a "storyteller."

"Tomorrow i may be dead. The thoughts that have come to rest in my conscious and subconscious being. . . . These thoughts have placed themselves in my head. In my protection . . . I will try to use what little time this life gives me, to bring their beauty into the world. . . . This is the story teller’s life."

On June 14, Bergdahl e-mailed Kayla again saying that he was "looking at a map of afghan" and asking if he could wire money to her or kim "to protect my money in the bank just in case things go bad."

On June 21, he e-mailed her again.

"how far will a human go to find their complete freedom. . . " he wrote. "For one’s freedom, do they have the right to destroy the world to gain it?"

On June 27, he sent an e-mail to his friends titled, "Who is John Galt?," a reference to the hero of Ayn Rand’s novel "Atlas Shrugged," about individualism in a dystopian America.

"I will serve no bandit, nor lair, for i know John Galt, and understand . . . " Bergdahl wrote. "This life is too short to serve those who compromise value, and its ethics. i am done compromising."

Three days later, Bergdahl walked off his post.

Several days after that, a box arrived at Harrison’s home. Bergdahl’s handwriting was on the label.

Among the things inside was his computer and a Ziploc bag containing his blue journal.

"I was freaked out," Harrison recalled. "To me, it meant he did something stupid, or something crazy."

Next-Best Thing to Living Next Door to Your Idol

By JAMES BARRON NY TIMES

Victor Goines, a jazz saxophonist and clarinetist, at Woodlawn Cemetery, visiting the grave of Frankie Manning, an early creator of the Lindy hop.

During a break in a concert in the Bronx, Victor Goines, a jazz saxophonist and clarinetist, realized that he wanted to spend more time in that very place — a lot more time. Being there would put him close to people he idolized, like Duke Ellington, so he decided to spend $25,000 to buy the land behind the stage.

The land behind the stage was a cemetery plot, No. 10836 GR2-5, on a slope in the Hillcrest section of Woodlawn Cemetery. It is about 50 yards from where Ellington was buried in 1974, and he is not the only jazz great in the neighborhood.

"The location is prime real estate," said Mr. Goines, who is 52 and does not plan to occupy the plot anytime soon. "I’m looking at Miles Davis, who’s right across the same intersection, and Illinois Jacquet, who’s a couple of plots below where I am."

For Mr. Goines and others with similar ideas about where they want to be when they die, it is a different kind of hero worship, and puts a new twist on the real estate cliché "location, location, location." It could be the ultimate form of devotion, putting yourself closer to someone you admired than you ever were in life — especially if the only words you ever spoke to a favorite celebrity were "Can I have your autograph?" or "Can I take a selfie with you?" — or it could be the ultimate way to elevate oneself. You may not be famous, but proximity to someone who was could bestow some prestige.

Duke Ellington is among the many great entertainers and jazz musicians buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. Credit Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

It is one of those revealing, unexpected details of life, arranging in death to be slightly to the left or right of a Hollywood celebrity like Marilyn Monroe or a civil rights figure like Rosa Parks or someone else with a claim to fame when they were alive. It is not so surprising to people in the funeral business, though.

"It is much like it is if you want to live near your idols," said Patti Bartsche, the editor of American Cemetery and American Funeral Director magazines. "It has the same cachet — ‘I’m going to be buried near Lionel Hampton’ or ‘I’m going to be buried near Michael Jackson.’ You want to have a connection to somebody who’s important in your life. People choose to be buried, if they choose to be buried, in a place that has meaning to them."

There are amateur sculptors who arranged to be buried near famous ones like the avant-garde artist Alexander Archipenko. One woman who works at Woodlawn bought a space for her mother near the crypt of Celia Cruz, the Latin music star. And Jacob Reginald Scott, a businessman who was an amateur drummer before his death in 2012, has an image of a drummer on his tombstone, close to the grave of the bebop pioneer Max Roach.

"He had so many records of all the people who are there, Miles Davis and Duke Ellington," said his widow, Merri Hinkis-Scott. "He admired all the people he happens to be with now."

And there are people like Pauline Smith, a jazz fan and swing dancer who plans to be buried at Woodlawn near Ellington and Frankie Manning, one of the early creators of the Lindy hop.

Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn is the resting place of many well-known residents, like James S.T. Stranahan, known as the "Father of Prospect Park."

"Who knows what life is after death?" said Ms. Smith, a retired teacher who is 74 and lives in New Rochelle, N.Y. "Not knowing what it is, I want to enjoy the thing that brings the most joy to me in my life right now, so I want to be close to them."

That is the same motivation that prompted Marty Markowitz, the former Brooklyn borough president, to buy a plot at Green-Wood Cemetery adjacent to the graves of two prominent Brooklynites from the 19th century, one a mayor in the days when Brooklyn was a city on its own. "That’s what I wanted even before I became borough president," he said.

Not surprisingly, graves near the final resting places of famous people can carry premium prices. "Cemeteries love this kind of thing," said Thomas A. Parmalee, the executive director of the publishing company that produces Ms. Bartsche’s magazines and a newsletter, Funeral Service Insider. "When there’s a plot that’s in demand, they can advertise for more money, though I don’t think they go out and advertise because that’s not politically correct."

A crypt above Marilyn Monroe’s in a cemetery in Los Angeles had a winning bid of $4.6 million on eBay in 2009. The owner, a widow who wanted to pay off the $1 million mortgage her husband had left behind, moved his remains 23 years after he had been buried there. (In 1992, Hugh Hefner, the Playboy magazine founder, paid $75,000 for another crypt near Monroe’s.)

There were reports after Michael Jackson died in 2009 that prices for plots near his in Glendale, Calif., had jumped more than $2,000, to $9,900. And in 2006, after Rosa Parks died, the prices of crypts near where she and members of her family were entombed in a cemetery in Detroit climbed as much as $15,000.

A crypt above Marilyn Monroe’s in a cemetery in Los Angeles sold for $4.6 million on eBay in 2009.

Some cemeteries pre-empt price-gouging. After Jim Valvano, the Queens-born basketball coach who led North Carolina State to a national championship, died in 1993, Historic Oakwood Cemetery in Raleigh, N.C., laid a sidewalk next to his grave "so that no one could buy that property and sell it at a higher rate," said Robin Simonton, the executive director. "He was that important in Raleigh that there was a fear that someone would do it."

She said that the plots closest to Mr. Valvano’s grave — a short walk away, on the sidewalk — now go for $4,000. One was taken when Lorenzo Charles, the player whose dunk won the 1983 championship game, died in 2011 in a bus crash.

At Woodlawn in the Bronx, Susan Olsen, the cemetery’s historian, said that Ellington bought his plot in the late 1950s. The spot he chose was not far from the grave of the singer Florence Mills, who died in 1927 and whom Ellington elegized in the song "Black Beauty" the following year.

Over the years, other jazz figures were buried in the same section of the cemetery, which covers more than 400 acres. Then, in 2000, when the tap dancer Harold Nicholas died, "he wanted to be as close to Ellington as possible," Ms. Olsen said. "We contacted a family that had an unused space about 12 graves down and we bought it back from them for Harold Nicholas."

　

The vibraphonist Lionel Hampton had his people call the cemetery about being buried in the same area, Ms. Olsen said. The cemetery was so eager to welcome him that it cut down a tree before anyone made any arrangements. "We didn’t hear a word until the night before he died" at 94 in 2002, Ms. Olsen said, "and his agent called to make sure we still had the place."

Illinois Jacquet followed in 2004. And, several years later, Mr. Goines purchased his plot, with Ms. Olsen offering guidance.

"She was very strategic," said Mr. Goines, who will play a free concert at Woodlawn at 7 p.m. Wednesday with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and Wynton Marsalis. "She said you should buy here because you want people to be able to look up the hill and see you. She said: ‘Don’t get behind Illinois Jacquet. No one’s going to see you there; he has a huge headstone.’ She wanted me to be visible and well received and seen when people come into the place."