The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking (12 page)

After Franks’s body was removed from the nearly empty plane, the flight proceeded to John F. Kennedy International Airport, where White was told he could transfer to a larger jet capable of travel to Southeast Asia. While on the ground in New York, White stuck his head out the cockpit window to survey the scene. He saw something move in the darkness beneath the plane’s right wing—a man crouched low to the asphalt, creeping forward inch by inch. White fired once at the trespasser and missed; the man, an FBI agent who was working his second hijacking in as many weeks, fired back and pegged White in the left biceps. The bleeding skyjacker meekly surrendered at once.

Two days later, as White was wheeled out of the hospital by federal marshals, a reporter shouted out, “Why were you going to Vietnam?”

“I wanted to bring arms to help the people there fight,” yelled back White, who had never before expressed the slightest hint that he
cared about the war.

In the days that followed, TWA was widely criticized over the security loophole that had led to Howard Franks’s murder: White had been permitted to walk onto the tarmac and ascend all the way to the plane’s entrance despite the fact he didn’t have a boarding pass. Because White was not a ticketed passenger, no TWA agent had compared him to the FAA’s skyjacker profile.

But TWA rejected the notion of altering its security policies even one iota. “How far can the airlines go?” replied a clearly irritated TWA spokesman when asked whether his employer planned to make any changes to its boarding procedures. “Restrict everyone from the terminal except those
who have a ticket? Stop everyone from entering the airport area except those who have a ticket?”

The Gregory White hijacking did, however, increase the airlines’ faith in the FBI. The agent who wounded White did so in the dark, firing upward from fifty feet away. His pinpoint accuracy under pressure convinced the airlines that the FBI could be trusted to use lethal force, though only if no passengers were present.

That was precisely what happened six weeks after White’s capture, when a former Navy aviation mechanic named Richard Obergfell
hijacked a TWA flight as it departed New York’s LaGuardia Airport. Obergfell demanded passage to Milan, where he intended to propose marriage to a female pen pal. The Boeing 727 he had commandeered lacked the ability to cross the Atlantic, but Obergfell was promised a long-range jet if he released his hostages. He did so back at LaGuardia, keeping only a twenty-one-year-old stewardess as he boarded a maintenance van bound for nearby Kennedy Airport, where a Boeing 707 was waiting to take him to Italy.

As he walked toward the new jet with his gun pressed against the stewardess’s back, Obergfell had no idea he was being marked for death. An FBI sniper had climbed halfway up the ten-foot metal wall that stood behind the 707’s tail. Clad in tight white trousers that hiked up to his calves, the sniper balanced his high-powered rifle atop the wall and peered through his telescopic sight. But Obergfell was too close to his hostage for the sniper to fire safely.

A few feet away from the Boeing 707’s stairs, the stewardess accidentally stepped on Obergfell’s toes. The hijacker momentarily lost his balance and staggered back a foot. The sniper took advantage of the split-second opportunity.

The stewardess heard two shots and thought,
I’m dead—he killed me
. But then she heard the thump of a body hitting the tarmac and realized there was no longer a gun barrel lodged against her spine.

“I looked around, and [Obergfell] started to get up on his elbow,” she would later recall. “He looked a little dazed. When I saw he was still on the ground, I thought he was going to shoot me, and I started to run, run, run.”

But Obergfell never managed to pull his trigger. One of the sniper’s bullets had shredded his vital organs; he was pronounced dead at Jamaica Hospital
thirty minutes later.

TWA did not hide its elation over Obergfell’s demise. “TWA is grateful to the FBI for forestalling the further hijacking of a TWA aircraft to Europe, with all the potential tragedy that might result from an armed man in charge of a crew,” the airline wrote in an official statement. “The assurance of prompt and swift justice is the most
certain method of discouraging acts of armed aggression against the passengers
and crews of aircraft.”

For the first time since early 1970, when the debut of the FAA’s behavioral profile had coincided with a sudden downturn in skyjackings, there was genuine hope that the epidemic had entered its sunset phase. The publicity surrounding Obergfell’s death seemed certain to dissuade potential hijackers, since they now knew that the FBI had the means and the authority to kill at will. Perhaps the occasional hijacker could still get away with flying direct to nearby Cuba, where he would likely end up in a tropical gulag. But those with grander ambitions would always need to stop on American soil to obtain fuel or ransom. And the more time a skyjacker spent idling at an airport, the greater the odds that he would be felled by a sniper’s bullet.

But though the skyjackers may have been a delusional bunch, psychological illness does not necessarily interfere with raw intelligence. Those who aspired to commit the crime studied their predecessors’ failings and took away a vital lesson: the best way to avoid law enforcement was to avoid the ground.

P
AUL
J
OSEPH
C
INI
might have become a celebrated figure in criminal folklore if he hadn’t been so assiduous with his wrapping.

When the twenty-six-year-old Cini hijacked a Calgary-to-Toronto Air Canada flight on November 13, 1971, he did so carrying a brown-paper package bound tightly with twine. No one paid much attention to the parcel, for they were more concerned with the weapons that Cini was brandishing: a sawed-off shotgun and ten sticks of dynamite, one of which he rudely stuck into the mouth of an unfortunate flight attendant. Falsely claiming to be a member of the Irish Republican Army,
^‖
Cini demanded $1.5 million and passage to Ireland. Air Canada scrounged up $50,000, which it delivered to Cini at the small airport
in Great Falls, Montana. Unlike Arthur Barkley, who had freaked out when TWA shorted him by $99,899,250, Cini didn’t mind the lesser ransom.

The DC-8 was en route back to Calgary to refuel when Cini decided to spring his surprise: he told the crew to open one of the plane’s emergency exits so he could parachute to freedom. In preparation for his jump, he started to unwrap his brown-paper package, which contained a parachute he had purchased from a Chicago skydiving shop.

Cini had been planning this stunt for over a year. In September 1970, while downing shots of vodka in his Victoria, British Columbia, apartment, Cini had seen a television news segment about a failed hijacking in California. His alcohol-fuzzed mind somehow managed to produce a eureka moment: a hijacker could escape with his ransom only if he jumped from the plane.

Cini initially had no designs on attempting this himself, for he was deathly afraid of heights. But the more he contemplated the risky caper, the more he became convinced that it represented his one shot at improving his lackluster life. “I wanted recognition,” he would later explain. “I wanted to stand up and say, ‘Hey, I’m Paul Cini and I’m here and I exist and I want to be noticed.’ ”

Cini spent months preparing for the crime. He cased airports, studied aircraft design, and asked copious questions at a Calgary skydiving school. Worried that his red-and-yellow parachute would be too conspicuous in the sky, Cini dyed it dark blue and then paid a Canadian paratrooper to repack it properly. On the morning of the hijacking, he filled a suitcase with candy bars and survival gear, just in case he had to spend days wandering through the Albertan wilderness.

But one minor error was Cini’s undoing: he wrapped the parcel containing his parachute too tightly.

Unable to loosen the package’s twine, Cini asked one of the pilots to lend him a sharp instrument to cut free his parachute. When the
pilot offered him the DC-8’s fire ax, Cini absentmindedly laid down his shotgun to accept it. Seeing that the hijacker was now unarmed, the pilot kicked away the shotgun and grabbed Cini by the throat. Another crew member took the ax and smashed it into Cini’s head, fracturing his skull. Paul Joseph Cini would be remembered not as the world’s first “parajacker”
but as a fool.

The fame that Cini had so desperately craved would instead go to a man who called himself Dan Cooper. Just eleven days after Cini’s misadventure, Cooper boarded a Northwest Orient Airlines flight in Portland, Oregon. Shortly after takeoff, he informed a stewardess that he had a bomb in his briefcase. He requested $200,000 in cash and four parachutes, all of which he received after the plane landed in Seattle. After releasing the hostages, Cooper asked to be flown to Mexico City, with an agreed-upon refueling stop in Reno, Nevada.

But shortly before the Boeing 727 reached the Oregon border, Cooper jumped from the aft stairs into a wicked hailstorm. He was never seen again, though tattered bills from his ransom were later discovered along the banks
of the Columbia River.

Experienced skydivers scoffed at the notion that Cooper could have survived his jump. The man seemed to know virtually nothing about skydiving, as evidenced by the fact that he jumped without a reserve chute and didn’t ask for any protective gear. The plane was traveling at roughly 195 miles per hour when Cooper exited, a speed that even experienced parachutists consider unsafe; it is possible that Cooper was knocked unconscious immediately after jumping.
^a
Even if he did survive the initial plunge through subzero air temperatures and pounding hail, the terrain below was lethal—nothing but hundred-foot-tall fir trees and frigid lakes and rivers. Like so many
skyjackers before him, Cooper was probably too psychologically askew to have thought his plan
all the way through.

But a massive search through the forests of southern Washington and northern Oregon turned up no trace of Cooper, dead or alive. The case’s lack of resolution gave the public free rein to mold the skyjacker into a folk hero, a quasi–Robin Hood figure who stole from the rich to prove the machismo of the average American male. “His was an awesome feat in the battle of man against the machine,” declared a University of Washington sociologist who pronounced himself a Cooper expert. “One individual overcoming, for the time being anyway, technology, the corporation, the Establishment,
the System.”

Known to the public as D. B. Cooper due to a reporter’s transcription error, the mysterious skyjacker was celebrated in both art and commerce. A twenty-nine-year-old Seattle waiter made a small fortune selling T-shirts depicting a suitcase full of money attached to a parachute; a Portland lounge singer scored a minor hit with “D. B. Cooper, Where Are You?,” which featured the admiring couplet “D. B. Cooper never hurt no one / But he sure did
blow some minds.”

By now well versed in the contagious nature of skyjacking, the airlines and the FBI both braced for the inevitable post-Cooper outbreak. But they were still woefully unprepared for the utter mayhem of 1972.

P
LANNING HIS MISSION
to liberate Angela Davis became Roger Holder’s full-time occupation in late April 1972. He started off with a broad concept: he would hijack a plane and swap the passengers for Davis, who was on trial in San Jose, California. Then he would fly the Communist philosophy professor to North Vietnam, where the nation’s grateful prime minister would grant her political asylum. The resulting media circus would somehow force America to confront the blunt realities that had turned Holder against the war: the senseless deaths from booby traps, the generals’ baseless optimism, the Army’s lack of sympathy for its most loyal soldiers.

But how would Holder gain control of the aircraft? How would he avoid FBI snipers while on the ground? And most important, what would he and Cathy Kerkow do after they safely delivered Davis to Hanoi?

Holder spent hours pondering these vital details, filling page after page of a spiral-bound notebook with his fastidiously neat handwriting. The ideas poured out of him at such a furious clip that he had trouble keeping them all straight. The more intently he focused on the project, the more his thoughts sprawled into a jumble. He increased his intake of marijuana to cope with his mania, much as he had once relied on the drug to tune out the bedlam of Vietnam.