The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking (14 page)

“Skyjackers seem intent to stand on their own feet, to be men, to face their God, and to arise from this planet to the other more pleasing place,” wrote Hubbard. “Just as when an infant first dares to stand in the ‘unknown’ of vertical posture, [skyjackers] must assume not only the load of a heavy burden, but the possibility of
falling and being destroyed.” Hubbard also argued that skyjackers drew an erotic thrill from their crime: pulling a gun on a stewardess, he said, “may be the first sexually
aggressive act of their lives.”

The Skyjacker
was a sensation in 1972 and not just because of its timely topic. Psychoanalysis was one of the year’s hot self-improvement fads, touted by Hollywood stars and featured in sitcoms, and Hubbard possessed a certain genius for tapping in to the public’s curiosity about the theories of Sigmund Freud. Hubbard’s bearded, avuncular visage became a staple of network news segments about the skyjacking epidemic, and magazines often highlighted his research in their weekly skyjacking roundups.
Life
hailed him as “the one man who probably knows more than anyone else about the
psychology of the hijacker.”

Hubbard was also prized as a pundit because he was unafraid to court controversy. He openly blasted the FAA’s behavioral profile as “a fraud” that would lead to “an expensive police state based on fallacious assumptions.” He believed it was futile to try and catch skyjackers on the ground, for the truly dedicated would always find a way to outwit security. Hubbard instead recommended measures designed to make
skyjacking seem unappealing to the psychologically unwell. These included the public dissemination of medical research linking the crime to sexual inadequacy; an end to FBI sniper attacks, which Hubbard criticized as catering to a universal “death wish” among skyjackers; and the training of female astronauts, so that potential skyjackers would be less prone to associate the concept of
flight with machismo.

Hubbard’s oddest notion, though, was that skyjackings could be prevented in the womb. He believed that all skyjackers suffered from physiological deformities of the inner ear, which explained
their poor equilibrium. Hubbard suspected that these deformities were caused by prenatal diets that lacked sufficient manganese and zinc. To test this hypothesis, he conducted a series of experiments at his Dallas research facility, the Aberrant Behavior Center: Hubbard and his staff injected toxins into the ears of baby monkeys, then compared the animals’ locomotion to that of monkeys whose mothers had been deprived of manganese and zinc while pregnant. Hubbard foresaw the day when all expectant mothers would take nutritional supplements containing those two minerals, thereby nipping any future skyjacking
epidemics in the bud.

As Hubbard’s fame grew, jealous critics and rivals lampooned his more outlandish theories. The FAA’s John Dailey mocked Hubbard’s focus on the sexual dynamics of skyjacking, half-jokingly accusing him of wanting to place prostitutes on flights in order to distract
sexually immature hijackers. James Murphy, the director of the FAA’s security office, likewise scoffed at Hubbard’s insistence that all screening should be abandoned as pointless. “The public,” he said, “wants us to keep the
bastards off the planes.”

The airlines, on the other hand, were big fans of Hubbard’s analysis, since it largely absolved them of responsibility for skyjackings. Virtually every airline hired him as a consultant, to brief their pilots on how best to deal with hijackers. Perhaps not coincidentally, Hubbard became a vocal defender of his employers, placing the lion’s share of blame on the same media that adored him. He denounced the press
for “communicating skyjacker techniques like Typhoid Mary in a nursery” and proposed that news organizations be sued for publishing communications between hijacked pilots and
air traffic controllers.

Seasoned journalists could only laugh at Hubbard’s naïveté about their business. The skyjacking surge was one of the biggest stories of 1972, right up there with President Nixon’s landmark trip to China. Even the dullest skyjacking made for scintillating copy. And the truly sensational ones were like gifts from the journalism gods—especially those involving men who managed to elicit sympathy from what Hubbard so eloquently termed the “little bit of
skyjacker in all of us.”

R
ICARDO
C
HAVEZ
O
RTIZ
had an ulcer, a really nasty one that made it so he couldn’t get through an hour without vomiting. He was in no shape to travel, but he felt an irresistible urge to leave Albuquerque at once. He had been in the city for just thirty-six hours, having come to seek work as a cook—a last-ditch effort to support his wife and eight children back in Los Angeles. But after a sleepless night at a flea-bag motel, Chavez Ortiz had changed his mind: after nineteen years of living hand-to-mouth, he was finished with the United States. He would return to his native Mexico, to become a cop in Tijuana. The pay would be dreadful compared to what he could earn flipping eggs in America, but at least his own people wouldn’t call him
spic
and try to cheat him at every turn.

Chavez Ortiz spent virtually all his remaining cash on two items: a Frontier Airlines ticket to Phoenix and a .22-caliber pistol. He planned to take the bus from Phoenix to Tijuana, then sell the gun on the black market at a $50 profit—enough to tide him over until his first paycheck. After a few months on the police force in Tijuana, he would send for his eldest son, Jorge, to save the teenager from joining an East Los Angeles gang.

As Frontier Airlines Flight 91 climbed over Albuquerque on the morning of April 13, 1972, Chavez Ortiz meditated on the
hardscrabble life he was leaving behind. He had worked so many fifteen-hour days washing dishes and cleaning toilets and spent so many nights sleeping in cockroach-infested flophouses far from his family. One of his children had been born prematurely and died at seven months, a tragedy that Chavez Ortiz blamed on himself; he hadn’t been able to afford a special nutritional supplement that might have saved the baby’s life. Now the barrio streets were trying to steal Jorge from him, too.

Suddenly, a sense of purpose crystallized in his distraught mind. After a lifetime of being a patsy, he would take a stand:

Chavez Ortiz placed his unloaded .22-caliber pistol on his lap and told the stewardess that he would like to
speak with the pilot.

Upon seeing an armed man enter the cockpit, the pilot readied himself for what was sure to follow: the ever-popular demand for money. Just six days earlier a Mormon Sunday school teacher and former Army Green Beret named Richard McCoy had obtained $500,000 after hijacking a United Airlines flight out of Denver. McCoy had parachuted from the plane near his Provo, Utah, home, relying on his extensive skydiving experience to execute a perfect jump; unlike Richard LaPoint, McCoy had made sure to wear combat boots to guard against ankle injuries. Though McCoy had been swiftly
captured after his fingerprints were discovered on the hijacked plane, the airlines knew from experience that his sensational plot
would inspire copycats.
^†

But Chavez Ortiz had no interest in ransom. He asked only that the pilot fly past Phoenix and land in Los Angeles, where he would gladly release all the hostages on one condition: that reporters from the city’s Spanish-language media be brought on board to hear his statement regarding the indignities he had suffered in the United States.

“I don’t want to hurt no one, please,” Chavez Ortiz told the pilot in his slightly broken English. “This is for save my sons and your sons, too. I am trying to save America, to save the whole world, because we are all crazy. We are mad.”

He was true to his word. He let the passengers disembark at Los Angeles International Airport, keeping only the flight’s four crew members. A pack of journalists came on board, including audio engineers from a pair of local radio stations that planned to air the statement live. Once the microphones were switched on, he began his oration: “
Buenas tardes. Esta es su amigo, Ricardo Chavez Ortiz
…”

The rambling speech that followed lasted thirty-four minutes. Chavez Ortiz spoke of everything from the various bosses who had stiffed him on wages to the emasculating nature of America’s welfare system. Again and again he stressed that he could easily have asked for a million dollars and flown to Mexico, but that spreading his message verbatim was more important. Once he had spoken his piece, he politely handed his unloaded gun to the pilot while apologizing for the day’s inconvenience.

This shambolic performance made Chavez Ortiz an instant hero to the nascent Chicano movement, which was trying to stoke political
consciousness among young Mexican Americans. A defense committee formed to gather donations to pay for his $35,000 bail; dozens of families volunteered to put up their homes as collateral. Within a week of his capture, Chavez Ortiz emerged from the Los Angeles County Jail to the cheers of supporters gathered outside. As he awaited trial, the erstwhile cook and dishwasher made the rounds at California’s top universities, delivering off-kilter lectures about the immigrant experience while standing beneath giant “Free Ricardo Chavez Ortiz” signs emblazoned with his
world-weary face.

Like Raffaele Minichiello, the Italian-American hijacker who had been acclaimed in Rome, Chavez Ortiz had inadvertently tapped in to a wellspring of rage. Though his message was essentially incoherent, its raw spirit struck a chord with segments of society that felt entirely divorced from the political process—opponents of the war whose years of marching had come to naught, or denizens of crumbling cities who lived in fear of street crime while the president fretted about campus bombings. They admired Chavez Ortiz for having the moxie to risk everything to gain a voice, if only for thirty-four minutes.

The praise heaped upon Chavez Ortiz did not escape Roger Holder’s notice as he prepared for his mission. Rather, it fueled his belief that he, too, would be lionized once his ingenious plan came to fruition.

C
ATHY
K
ERKOW WAS
down to her last few dollars, a situation that complicated her efforts to find a new apartment for herself and Holder. She finally settled on a one-bedroom flat on Lauretta Street, right behind the University of San Diego campus. She lied to the property manager, telling him that she worked as a receptionist for a company that sold mobile homes. She also concealed the fact that Holder would be living with her, since she knew their interracial relationship was widely frowned upon. The manager was charmed and handed over the keys; Kerkow moved in on May 15, showing up in a borrowed van with her
waterbed and little else.

When Holder arrived a few days later, the couple had a frank talk about their future. Kerkow had just sold her Volkswagen to raise cash, but the balance in her checking account was still perilously low. She told him that her father wanted her to visit him in Seattle after Memorial Day. Though his dreams of becoming a full-time jazz musician had never quite panned out, Bruce Kerkow now earned a good living selling real estate. He was willing to send Cathy a round-trip Western Airlines ticket to Seattle and perhaps lend her some money, too. But her father’s largesse could only be a temporary solution to their financial predicament—upon her return to San Diego, she and Holder would have
to look for work.

Don’t worry, said Holder. Everything would be okay. The constellations were
aligned in their favor.

While Kerkow got ready to fly to Seattle on May 31, Holder redoubled his efforts to finalize the Angela Davis plan. He pored over newspaper accounts of each recent skyjacking, taking note of what worked and what didn’t. The month provided no shortage of intriguing case studies, including a pair of hijackings that took place on the same day. The first involved a young North Dakotan, recently drafted into the Army, who hijacked a Western Airlines flight from Salt Lake City to Havana; he did so with a note stating that he was just one of “several heavily armed members of the anti-imperialist movement” who were working to ensure that “the skies of America will not be safe again until the U.S. government ceases its aggression against the
people of Indochina.” At almost the exact same moment the hijacked Western plane touched down in Cuba, a forty-nine-year-old Pennsylvanian named Frederick Hahneman bailed out of an Eastern Air Lines Boeing 727 as it flew above northern Honduras. He carried with him $303,000 in ransom, obtained from the airline during a stop in Washington, D.C. Hahneman vanished into the jungle, amid rumors that he planned to donate the money to
Marxist insurgents.

But the more information Holder compiled, the more muddled his planning became. He concocted at least seven different skyjacking strategies of varying complexity, yet couldn’t quite decide which
one to pursue. He scribbled the step-by-step instructions for each scenario in his notebook, along with a list of alternate destinations for both himself and Davis should the hijacking go awry. And he drafted the notes he would use in the course of the skyjacking, trying to nail the right language and tone.

As his notebook began to run out of blank pages, Holder gave his mission a name culled from Greek mythology: Operation Sisyphus, a reference to a sadistic king sentenced to spend eternity rolling a
boulder up a hill.

On or around May 24, his head swimming from his mental exertions, Holder took a break to check out the latest Charlton Heston movie—a campy thriller titled
Skyjacked
.

The film was controversial due to its subject matter, and numerous TV stations had refused to run ads for it; one station manager in Washington, D.C., said he feared the movie would impel viewers with “
impressionable minds” to seize planes. But
Skyjacked
nevertheless opened strongly at the box office, drawing moviegoers curious to experience the terror of life
aboard a hijacked jet.