Not just a bad tipper — he killed people

San Francisco Chronicle

LAS VEGAS — Samantha remembers the killer settling into the crushed red velvet chair, staring blankly up at her while she undulated inches from his face.

He didn’t look evil, she said. Not even interesting. Certainly not like a man who would, just three months later, hijack a jet and smash it into the World Trade Center to slaughter thousands of people in a suicidal fireball.

To the 29-year-old stripper, Marwan Al-Shehhi simply looked "cheap."

"Some big-man terrorist, huh?" Samantha said this week as she took a breather from the two-dozen lap dances she bestows daily upon the lonely at the Olympic Garden Topless Cabaret. "He spent about $20 for a quick dance and didn’t tip more."

She stopped and bit her lip, throbbing rock music rattling the dimly lit crystal ball overhead while other "girls" in G-strings gyrated for tourists.

"I’m glad he’s dead with the rest of them, and I don’t like feeling something like that," Samantha finally said. "But he wasn’t just a bad tipper — he killed people."

Samantha would have never given Al-Shehhi another thought if she hadn’t seen his photo in a news article naming him as one of five Sept. 11 hijackers who stayed in Las Vegas not long before they pulled off the deadliest terrorist attack in U.S. history.

Just why the five chose Vegas is still somewhat of a mystery, and FBI agents are knocking on doors up and down the Strip, the casino-studded road cutting north to south, to try to solve it.

But one thing seems clear. The self-styled warriors for Allah, who believed their hijackings would earn them eager virgins in heaven, engaged in some decidedly un-Islamic sampling of prohibited pleasures in America’s reputed capital of moral corrosion.

"Some of the girls here remember a couple of those guys coming in here in August, too," said Samantha, who like three other Olympic "Samanthas" preferred that her family not read her real name in a newspaper. "It’s freaking us all out."