Super Bowl, Winter Olympics, soccer World Cup take extra security measures

Academy Awards — all without showing a ticket. He said in a telephone interview from his San Diego home that he attended 24 of the first 25 Super Bowls without a ticket by sneaking through a turnstile or ducking in a media entrance or using connections — he says he owned a San Diego bar popular among football teams — to stroll right into the stadium alongside players. “It’s extremely difficult now, in light of 9-11 and in light of this last terrorist attempt on the airplane. Security is getting tighter and tighter and tighter,” Rich said. “People say, ‘Do you think (a terrorist) could do the same thing you do?’ I say, ‘Possible, but highly improbable.’”

The security buildup is not just to stop rogue ticket-holders. The FBI does detailed background checks on everyone expected to work at the Super Bowl, from parking lot attendants to groundskeepers to beer vendors. John Gillies, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Miami field office, said each year the Super Bowl vetting process “does uncover people with background issues,” though he wouldn’t discuss specifics.

The FBI and Miami-Dade Police Department are running separate centers to collect and disseminate intelligence, but that might not uncover a person acting alone — the kind of threat that most worries the FBI’s Gillies and James Loftus, interim director of the Miami-Dade Police Department. “I’m not an alarmist, but we worry about the lone guy with the rifle. That’s where our attention is,” Loftus said. “That’s the guy who is not e-mailing, who is not networking.”

An Arizona man was sentenced to a year and a day in prison for mailing letters to major media outlets threatening to kill people at the 2008 Super Bowl. He was accused of bringing a semiautomatic rifle and 200 rounds of ammunition to a parking lot near the stadium; he did not attack, however, and turned himself into police.

Loftus said another concern is someone who might try to use a false police or firefighter uniform to gain unauthorized access. Steps taken to thwart fake credentials and new “expertise” being used on bags carried into the stadium are among changes Ahlerich said were made to Super Bowl plans this year.

He declined to go into details but said it is “certainly not uncommon” that guns and knives are found and taken away from people entering a Super Bowl, “and it’ll probably happen again this year. …