Four years ago, Navy SEALs descended on a Pakistan compound and assassinated the most wanted terrorist in the world, Osama bin Laden. Or did they? One man thinks we’ve all been duped. And as he lives to see his story become a Hollywood movie, Gary Faulkner also is planning to show the world that President Obama was conning the country when he announced: “We got him.”
“He’s alive and well, of course,” Gary Faulkner, 55, told The Daily Beast in an exclusive interview from his Wyoming hideout. The construction worker once embarked on a one-man mission to find and kill bin Laden in Pakistan. The ex-con went armed with a sword purchased on a home-shopping network, a knife, a gun, and some night-vision equipment.
The Bible-thumping, self-taught bounty hunter believes he’s being watched and monitored with a chip in his wrist. Our chat was being recorded, too. And somehow he’s survived multiple threats on his life that forced him into hiding. Through it all, Faulkner’s still sharpening his sword and raring to go again to seal the deal and kill the real Osama bin Laden (who he refers to as “Binny Boy”) once and for all. “The Pakistani government knows I will be back once things are better.”
But first Faulkner needs a kidney. “Once I get a kidney I’m going back.”
The ailing bin Laden hunter, who earned the moniker “Rocky Mountain Rambo,” will get immortalized on the silver screen. Hollywood actor Nicolas Cage is to play the army of one who tried and failed and tried again and again and failed each time to kill bin Laden, who was referred to as “Geronimo” during the SEAL Team 6 mission to take him out at the compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
“They said he was killed to get everybody to think that he was gotten,” said Faulkner, who says the confirmed kill of the al Qaeda leader was bogus and meant to deter him from fulfilling his destiny. “They were trying to get me to think not to go back. I’m quiet right now, but things will shake up.”
The initial attempts did not go as planned. Rocky Mountain Rambo did, however, get to go on The View and Late Show with David Letterman to discuss his endeavor:
No word yet, however, regarding how Faulkner feels about being played on the silver screen by Nicolas Cage. Cage once was a great actor whose Oscar win for his portrayal of a Hollywood drunkard in 1995’s Leaving Las Vegas was well-deserved. His work in such films as Wild at Heart, Adaptation, and Matchstick Men are worth repeat viewing.
The 51-year-old actor has since degenerated into a punchline for being a directionless shadow of his former self who is clearly, and desperately, taking crap jobs in the hopes of paying off some major debt. He also is famous on the Internet for being comically bad and losing his shit onscreen:
But now, just months after the release of Cage’s godawful Bible movie Left Behind, it sounds as if the actor has an intriguing role on the horizon.
Larry Charles (director of Borat and The Dictator) is set to direct the satirical comedy Army of One, with Cage as star. The script is loosely based on Chris Heath’s 2010 GQ article of the same name.
Going forward, it may be tough for Gary Faulkner to get his vigilante justice for a 12th time in Pakistan, since the Osama hunter squandered any goodwill there. “I really pissed them off where I was at and the problem is, there’s a bounty on my head,” he said.
Faulkner doesn’t know how much money someone could earn for taking his life, but he says he’s dodged two attempts to kill him. Both occurred when he was living in Colorado. “It was no threat,” he said. “They came for me.” They being Mexican cartels (which Faulkner believes are in cahoots with the Taliban and al Qaeda because of their mutual opium interests).
On a summer night in 2012 at 3 a.m. Faulkner says, he heard a man’s voice yell, “Emergency! Manager! Emergency!” He says he came to the door and three men rushed him and tried to get at his retreating girlfriend, Jen. She made it to the bedroom and locked the door. But Faulkner says he was on the ground—and lacking his weapons (which happened to be stashed in the kitchen) he reached for the next best thing. “These guys are on me and I couldn’t reach my pistol at the time, so I stepped up on the couch to keep jumping towards the kitchen and because I have blades and weapons in the kitchen. I fell into the kitchen and I wrapped my hand around a can of that wood stuff—Lemon Pledge.”
Faulkner says that after using the wood cleaner as a distraction, he retrieved a pistol. “I jumped over the table and grabbed my .40 cal, a Springfield .40 caliber.” One of the men who had been pounding on the bedroom door gave up and ran toward Faulkner, who raised his gun. “He was on the couch and I put the gun up toward the guy’s head and pulled the trigger and it went ‘Click.’”
The gun, Faulkner says, never fired. But the trio, who spoke Spanish, ran out the door and Faulkner followed. “I pulled the holster off and locked and loaded it. Stepped outside and aimed the pistol on these three guys.”
The reversal of fortune had Faulkner licking his chops. “There is nothing more beautiful than the effervescent green glow of the sight on some piece of shit’s ass that’s just tried to attack you.”
He admits he fired off a couple rounds as warning shots. But he was ready to take out his assailants. “I ran 60 feet toward the end of the apartments and I’m aiming my gun down as they’re getting into the car. I said to myself, ‘If they come out with any weapons, I’m going to kill all three of them.’”
The attack, which Faulkner is certain was the handiwork of Mexican cartels connected to a neighbor, forced the self-declared bin Laden hunter to defend against charges he fired his weapon unnecessarily, but he beat the gun charge. “I was acquitted in 15 minutes,” Faulkner said.
Not two months later, after Faulkner relocated to another home, in Greeley, Colorado, he was pursued, he says, by several cars that ran him off the road. “It was really my fault for staying around,” Faulkner said of being a marked man. He says he was behind the wheel of a putt-putt Kia Sonata (or “four-banger,” as he puts it, in reference to the four-cylinder vehicle) and that while he was driving near his home three cars forced him to smash into a cement barrier.
He recalls one of the cars “was a government car with the lights just pure red; no orange ones or nothing. And at first they just sat there watching me.”
Faulkner says he sought out a farmer, who ended up calling the police. Because the people he said were watching him leaped into action, Faulkner says, he could hear what sounded like a mob carrying pitchforks coming through the thicket. “I was being chased by a bunch of people trying to kill me,” he claims.
When you are facing death, you can have super powers, Faulkner says. “I can hear them coming,” he said. “When your endorphins and adrenaline are pumping, you can hear a mouse farting from 200 yards.”
Sheriff’s officials finally arrived, says Faulkner, who is convinced that saved his life. But the incident made it clear, he says, that he had to get out of Dodge. “I knew I had to leave Colorado at that point.”
At first, Faulkner, who receives $721 a month for his disability, was able to find a place to live in a senior-living community. But his name got around and with his girlfriend he was forced to relocate again.
“Where I’m at is much better; you can see people coming and going.” But if somebody is determined enough, they can find the man who vowed to ice bin Laden. “I’ve had a couple people track me down.”
Maybe it’s the government, Faulkner claims, that is monitoring his every move. Even our interview probably was being listened to by the NSA or the feds, he suggested. “I’m still in there,” he said. “When you see the scar on my arm it’s right by my wrist and then you see the scar closer to the crook of my arm where I have my fistula —two totally diff scars. It’s night and day.”
Why the chip in his wrist? To lead the government to “Binny Boy.”
“That’s why they put the chip in my arm; because they knew I was going back and was going to lead them to him. All they do is just bomb the cave and kill two birds with one stone!”
If Gary Faulkner tries again to go out and track down Osama bin Laden (ghost or mortal), his frail health may do him in. His kidney disease, he says, is debilitating; and to get a new one means waiting. He’s also a long shot due to his rare blood type, he says. “I could give my blood to anybody. But I can’t accept it from just anybody. And government controls all the medical in this country.” He’s considering going to India for the transplant.
Faulkner chats with The Daily Beast while hooked up to a dialysis machine at a local hospital. Nevertheless, he’s ready to settle the score and prove bin Laden is alive and kicking in a cave.
“I’ve been to the cave,” Faulkner said without stuttering. “I know exactly where it’s at, but when I was there the last time it was being worked on. They got workers with axes cutting woods down. You wouldn’t think they were anything unusual, except people cutting down wood for their homes.”
But it’s these same lumberjacks Faulkner is convinced double as diehard bodyguards to the still-alive jihadi. “You’re not going to see them carry any weapons of any kind. No AKs or swords, because those can be seen by drones and satellites.”
He says bin Laden’s quarters are like the Ritz of caves. “It’s really special and really a fixed-up cave high up in the Kalash Valley near a town called Dir.”
For years, bin Laden, according to Faulkner, was freely moving between India and Pakistan. But that changed in 2013 (two years after he was already officially dead) when the country was the epicenter of an earthquake. “It shut down his transportation.”
Bin Laden is holed up in Pakistan, not decaying at the bottom of the ocean as the official U.S. report says, Faulkner insists. He calls the details of the death one “big farce.”
“Where’d they get the DNA from? Muslims don’t give their blood like that. It doesn’t work that way.”
And bin Laden’s Islamic burial at sea aboard USS Carl Vinson a day after he allegedly was killed on May 1, 2011? No way, says Faulkner. “You take him on an aircraft carrier, wrap him up and give him a Muslim burial? A Muslim burial? Bullshit. Muslims bury their dead six feet underground, heads turned toward Mecca. You don’t have a burial at sea unless you die on a boat or get swamped by a whale or something like that.”
Faulkner garnered a great deal of press and attention after going off to take out the epitome of evil with a King James Bible, a sword, and a pistol he’d been handed.
He says he dodged what was surely to be a surprise attack by al Qaeda soldiers one night when he was staying at a posh Pakistan resort.
He was told at the time that al Qaeda wanted his head. A tribal leader informed Faulkner that, “They know who you are and they tried to get you many times when you were in the mountains by Swat [Valley] and everywhere else,” the bounty hunter remembers. “They’re going to come back and kill you tonight.” But Faulkner says he turned into the invisible man that night: “I took off into the mountains, into the darkness and nobody got a whiff of me.”
Why go after bin Laden and not, say, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the caliphate-chartering terrorist group ISIS? “What has he really done?” Faulkner says. “OK, he ran a bunch of stupid Iraqi cowards. He hasn’t done any really terrorist activities.”
Faulkner believes that ISIS is simply playing hocus-pocus while al Qaeda quietly ramps up. “ISIS is doing a magician’s act. They’re looking at ISIS: like ‘Oh, no! Watch out terrorists!”
But to Faulkner, ISIS is purely a repository for reject-jihadis. “The thing is, these guys will take in any idiot who will strap on a gun and start shooting.”
Going after any ISIS or even al-Baghdadi is fruitless, Faulkner says. “It’s a waste of my time. Let the politicians and everyone else play war and stuff like that. The bigger threats are in Pakistan and Afghanistan. There aren’t hardly any mountains where they’re at and they’re marching out in the open and people are just watching them do it.
“These ISIS guys marching down the road singing Dixieland or some stupid thing,” he says.
About going after bin Laden this last time, Faulkner wants to make sure he gets answers before eviscerating the terror kingpin. Once they are face to face, Faulkner says, he will “give him a chance.” “He can choose which weapon I’ll use: a pistol, rifle, sword, dagger, or whatever.”
“The purpose is to kill him. But it isn’t just to kill him and all that,” Faulkner said. “It’s to find out what really went down on 9/11 and what he knows. Now people will say, ‘He won’t talk and this and that.’ These Muslims are so set on death and Mecca and virgins and all the stupid stuff. This guy, when given a chance for his life or to be turned over to the CIA or to fight for his life and his freedom, he will take it and he will speak.”
Faulkner says all this even though he likely can’t make a trip to the grocery store without getting dialysis treatment. Regardless, he says he can pinpoint where the terrorist is holed up, and he has it scripted that the two will duke it out in some kind of epic good-versus-evil denouement.
“I will tell him, ‘You talk or you can fight for your life. If you win, then more to Allah. But if I win, then more to Jesus Christ.’”
And if the undead Osama bin Laden doesn’t agree to sing, Gary Faulkner will out him.
“No talk, then I’m going to turn your ass over to the CIA and still publish your face and they are going to come kill you and make you disappear and make you out to be a Hoffa.”
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEnZiipKmXsqK%2F02eaqKVflr%2B1tcKlnKxnYmV%2BdnuPamZrbl%2BjtqR5wpqenmWjYrumxNNmpKKro568r3nHrqWtZZKeu264wJ2cpw%3D%3D