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| Authorities are investigating whether suspected bomber Anthony Quinn Warner had ties to the London Bakers after learning he lived in Bakertown and once had a ceramic statue of the team's mascot Mr. TD in his front yard. |
FSN Sports
At the beginning of its championship weekend, the NFFA was literally rocked early on Christmas morning by a bomb attack that left the league’s founder missing and heavily damaged its downtown Nashville headquarters.
Shortly after 6:30 a.m. on Friday, an enormous bomb detonated from an RV parked in front of the NFFA Tower on Second Avenue. The explosion blew out windows in the building, along with an enormous hole in the first- and second-floor facades. Structural engineers have been on the scene for the past 24 hours to assess whether the building’s integrity has been compromised.
Worse than any damage to the building, sources are concerned that the NFFA may have lost its founder and guiding spirit, Dr. Jorgé Linardo, who was known to have been inside the league’s offices approximately an hour before the explosion.
“We’ve always kept this on the down low because of El Jefé’s modesty, but every Christmas Eve he likes to drive around town in his old red Saab and deliver packets, er, packages to people, shouting ‘Let it snow!’ and then tossing back his head in silent laughter,” said Beelzebubbas owner Mos’ Ded, who told police he was with Dr. Linardo most of the night. “We wound up at the Tower a little after 5, but we came in through the parking garage entrance on First Avenue and wouldn’t have seen whether a suspicious RV was parked out front. I left him there so I could go back to Club Gitmo to take Saddam and [former commissioner Jim] McMahon to Waffle House for breakfast, which is another of our little Christmas traditions. That’s the last I’ve seen and heard from Jefé.”
The search for Linardo continued into Sunday after police found what they believe are human remains in the blast area.
“I am shocked that anyone would engage in such a dastardly and cowardly act against the greatest sports league in world history,” said NFFA Commissioner Bernie Sanders, who had been at the official residence in the Towers just two days before the bombing. “Let me say this: We will work tirelessly to bring those responsible to justice. They will wish they were dead.”
“Reap what you sow,” tweeted President Donald Trump, who was ousted from his ownership position of the Village Green two years ago. “Looks like SOMEBODY finally stood up to these suckers and Losers.”
The Cambridge Animals were quick to claim that JTA, one of the sons of team owner DTA, was responsible. Unlike his younger brothers Wilder and Zuma the Animal, JTA has not been directly involved with team operations. DTA did not suggest why he believed that his son had organized the bombing. Some observers suggested that JTA might have been attempting to create a distraction for league officials that could benefit the Animals in their attempt to overcome the so-called Curse of Brady and claim their second NFFA crown.
But investigators also had to look into multiple other claims of responsibility from parties known to harbor a hatred for the league. Trump’s tweet added to suspicions that the bombing had been organized by white supremacist groups such as the Proud Boys (the name with which Trump unsuccessfully attempted to rechristen the Green after he became majority owner). But sources in Russia also were claiming that Vladimir Putin was behind the attack, due to his long-standing grievances against Sharif and Linardo. “Remember,” said a source within the National Security Agency, “that Putin tried to poison Sharif, and that was after he thought his troops had killed SirQ in Ukraine. He hates Linardo and Biden for being close friends to Sharif, and apparently it really stuck in his craw that Sharif and Ded just held the wildest Bacchanal ever in Putin’s back yard” (this year’s event took place in Odessa, Ukraine).
“This is really a case of round up the usual suspects,” said the NSA official. “James Dobson and Focus on the Family once put out a fatwa on Sharif. Senator Marsha Blackburn and her acolytes once attacked a sacred site for the Bakers in Sevier Park. The North Koreans were involved in several anti-NFFA intrigues. A bomb attack like this has all the hallmarks of an action by the Southern Baptist Convention, who learned their craft from the IRA. Maybe someone wanted to punish the league because one of its franchise owners admits bringing the coronavirus into the US from China, and another owner put Covid-19 on his roster, and then another one gave him asylum at Club Gitmo. There’s no shortage of people out there who would love to bomb the NFFA. Hell, even one of the owners once tried to bomb the NFFA. We’re going to be very busy looking into potential suspects.”
On Saturday, however, a prime suspect emerged from a surprising corner: a Nashville neighborhood known as Bakertown. Neighbors reported seeing an RV fitting the description of the vehicle that contained the bomb in the driveway of Anthony Warner. The RV, along with Warner, was last seen at Warner’s home on Christmas Eve.
Then investigators began noticing an odd string of circumstances that connected to the London Bakers. First, Warner moved to Bakertown the year after the Bakers became one of the NFFA’s founding franchises; neighbors said that he once had a ceramic figure of the team’s mascot, Mr. TD, in his front yard. In addition, said a police spokesman, Warner’s middle initial was Q; was it just coincidence, the spokesman asked, that the Bakers’ owner is also named Q and that the team’s old Nashville headquarters was located on Avenue Q? Another bit of circumstantial evidence: Though it was not previously reported, the music that blared from the RV during the countdown to the explosion was Petula Clark’s “Downtown,” which is known to be a favorite of Baker fans, who have made it a tradition to stand and sing it together at the end of the third quarter of games at Wembley Stadium.
Online conspiracy theories, which received an airing on Fox News, suggested that the NFFA Tower was not the primary target. Theorists claimed that hundreds of Dominion voting machines were being analyzed in the AT&T Building across from the NFFA Tower; they further alleged that AT&T had won a secret contract to purge the machines of software that would indicate they had been used to carry out fraud in the recent presidential election — and that Sharif, who has claimed to be QAnon, ordered one of his minions to carry out a suicide bombing on behalf of his friend Biden so that it would appear that the NFFA was the actual target.
“I’m incredibly impressed by the way the conspiracy buffs have thought this out,” Mos Ded told Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday. “But I can guarantee you nobody in the NFFA ever dreamed up anything like this, because if we had, we’d have already used it to blow up Fox News. You’re barking up the wrong tree house with Sir Q. And I think we all know why.”
Faced with the barrage of media speculation and police scrutiny, the usually loquacious Sharif refused to speak with reporters, referring all requests for comment to the law firm of Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones, LLC.
“He’s lawyered up,” said one league official who requested anonymity on the grounds that she was not authorized to speak publicly. “That’s always the smart move in the NFFA. It’s going to get a lot hinkier before it gets better.”
