The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking (35 page)

Through it all, Holder never lost track of time. He always knew that his five-year confinement to France was scheduled to end on June 13, 1985. He counted down the months, then the weeks, then the days.

On the morning of June 14, 1985, just hours after his suspended sentence expired, a bedraggled Holder celebrated his thirty-sixth birthday by walking into the American embassy in Paris and applying for a passport. No one there recognized him or his name; the embassy’s staff had turned over completely in the five years since his trial. But when Holder’s application was telexed to Washington, D.C., it was
flagged by the State Department’s new computerized lookout system. The FBI soon contacted its French equivalent, the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST), to inquire about the logistics of getting Holder back
on American soil.

Though even the most fervent of Holder’s former boosters had forgotten him, the French government was still reluctant to let him go; if the story came to light, President François Mitterand could be slammed for turning his back on France’s tradition of sheltering political firebrands. But Holder’s misdemeanor arrests in Aix-en-Provence provided the DST with a convenient excuse: the French could say they agreed to expel Holder because he had violated the terms of his sentence. Holder was taken into custody and placed in a psychiatric facility, to wait until the necessary diplomatic paperwork had been completed.

That process took an entire year, during which Holder languished in a Paris hospital, where he was pumped full of Thorazine and other
powerful psychotropic drugs. Finally, on the morning of July 26, 1986, four DST agents escorted him onto a TWA flight bound for New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport—the same airport where, fourteen years earlier, Holder and Kerkow had bid farewell to the United States en route to Algiers. The moment he stepped off the plane, Holder was arrested by the FBI and taken to the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Chinatown. He was so heavily medicated that he could barely register that his long-standing wish to return home
had finally come true.

Holder was fortunate to attract the interest of Lynne Stewart, an attorney who specialized in representing clients accused of using violence to further their political aims. She had recently defended Richard Williams, who had been convicted of murdering a New Jersey state trooper as part of the United Freedom Front, a Marxist group known for bombing
the offices of IBM.
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Respected and reviled in equal measure for her feistiness, Stewart agreed to take on Holder’s case pro bono.

Holder spent nearly two years in detention as Stewart tried to secure a favorable plea bargain. That such a deal was even possible was a testament to how much times had changed: the skyjackers of the early 1970s now seemed almost quaint, vestiges of a bygone era that American society had come to view with an odd sense of nostalgia. Cocaine and the Soviet Union were the designated bogeymen of the Reagan Era, not Black Panthers and disillusioned Vietnam vets. The federal government had lost its zeal for imprisoning skyjackers for decades on end.

Roger Holder under arrest at John F. Kennedy International Airport, July 1986.
AP PHOTO/DAVID BOOKSTAVER

Like the judge who had presided over the trial in Paris, the American prosecutors wanted Holder to express contrition for his acts. But as he explained in a letter to Stewart, he still had no interest in complying with that modest demand. “As for my personal feelings about the hijacking, I can say that I don’t feel that I did any or too much wrong,” he wrote. “There are a lot of things that happened in Vietnam that many Americans do not know about and in 1972 I felt that some bold and daring actions needed to take place to wake us all up to the apathy towards the many
deaths taking place.”

On March 18, 1988, Holder pleaded guilty to two counts of
interfering with a flight crew—a much less serious crime than either air piracy or kidnapping, the two top counts of his original indictment. He was sentenced to four years in prison, to be served at a medium-security facility in North Carolina.

Holder’s stay there was brief: in August 1989 he was transferred to a halfway house in San Diego, to begin his transition back to normal society. His initial probation report noted that he was “a polite man with a tendency to please” who had a “sincere wish to make
a life for himself.”

O
NE OF
H
OLDER
’
S
first acts in San Diego was to arrange a reunion with his twin daughters, who were now twenty-two years old. The meeting was brokered by Holder’s mother, Marie, who had raised Teresa and
Torrita as her own. The pressures of doing so had contributed to the breakup of her marriage to Seavenes—the couple had divorced in 1975, and Seavenes had passed away in April 1986, just three months before Roger’s return to the United States. In his final years, Seavenes had used his influence to have Roger’s Army discharge upgraded from “undesirable” to “general under honorable conditions”—a small but touching
act of paternal love.

The moment he laid eyes on his daughters, Holder could tell they were disappointed. He felt as if they had expected him to be a chiseled paragon of masculinity, like something out of one of the era’s B-grade action films. But with his sleepy eyes and gangly limbs, the man who had abandoned them to rescue Angela Davis was anything but imposing.

They think I look like Tweety Bird
, Holder thought as he looked at his daughters’ crestfallen faces. Their ensuing conversation was icy; a meaningful reconciliation
was not to be.

Holder had kept up a correspondence with Violetta Velkova, his French ex-fiancée, during his time in prison, and they began to speak regularly after he entered the halfway house. Once he was released from custody in the spring of 1990, Holder invited Velkova to come live
in San Diego; they married at the county clerk’s
office that December. The newlyweds moved in with Holder’s older brother, Seavenes Jr., now a divorced alcoholic who occupied a dreary, motel-like apartment wedged between an elementary school and
a freeway junction. Holder covered his share of the rent with money from his Social Security disability checks; a psychiatrist at the halfway house had diagnosed him with post-traumatic stress disorder, characterizing the combat-related ailment as “the root cause of
his psychological problems.”

Holder promised both Violetta and Seavenes Jr. that he would find work to supplement his disability payments. But Holder wildly overestimated his value to employers. He initially hoped to parlay his military experience as a flight engineer into a job at an aerospace company, but such firms had no interest in hiring a confessed hijacker. He also investigated the possibility of attending law school, even though his only academic credential was the high school equivalency diploma he had
earned in prison. The only job Holder could land was at a hospice, where he earned six dollars an hour mopping floors and emptying bedpans; he quit
after a few weeks.

Frustrated by his lack of career options, Holder yearned for the days when the eyes of the world were upon him. A psychotherapist whom Holder saw as a condition of his parole noted that he was “stuck in the 1970s, perhaps with some idea of reliving the times and reconciling
his part in history.” In conversations with strangers and acquaintances, Holder spun colorful yarns about his adventures while on the lam. But few people believed that a disabled, unemployed ex-convict had ever walked the halls of Algeria’s presidential palace or quaffed champagne with Jean-Paul Sartre.

On May 12, 1991, Holder attended a Joan Baez concert at a San Diego amphitheater. He talked his way backstage after the show, and Baez greeted him with a hug and warm words. But rather than lift Holder’s spirits, this encounter with his old friend from Canisy reminded him just how far he had fallen. Holder began to loathe himself for doing nothing to
change the world.

To blot out his misery, Holder resorted to a steady diet of alcohol
and marijuana. He soon flunked a drug test administered by his parole officer, who warned Holder that he was in danger of landing back in prison. But Holder kept on using, often buying weed from a man with whom he shared an intimate connection: Marvin Bullock, the brother of his
adulterous ex-wife, Betty.

Several people advised Holder against hanging out with Bullock, whose rap sheet listed twenty-five arrests, primarily for selling and
possessing drugs. But Holder was too wrapped up in self-pity to heed his friends’ counsel. He smoked and drank with Bullock, who was a receptive audience for his tales of Algiers and Paris. During one of these two-man parties in June 1991, a stoned Holder mentioned something startling: he wanted to hijack another plane and donate the ransom to the African National Congress, Nelson
Mandela’s political party.

Holder could not have picked a worse confidant: Bullock had been a police informant
for fifteen years.

Bullock immediately tipped off his handler at the California Department of Justice, Special Agent Michael Coleman. Given Holder’s history, Coleman could not dismiss the hijacking proposition as mere fantasy. He alerted the FBI and ordered Bullock to wear a wire to his subsequent encounters with Holder.

On June 18 Holder and Bullock met to discuss the hijacking further. Holder drew the same bomb diagram he had shown the crew of Western Airlines Flight 701, and he described his proven method for tricking people into thinking that he had armed accomplices. Bullock urged Holder to consider using a real bomb this time, pointing out that the authorities were unlikely to be fooled by the same ploy twice. Holder said he would
think it over.

Three days later Bullock told Holder that he knew a guy who sold AK-47s and plastic explosives. “I’m more interested in the plastic explosives,” said Holder. “I’m gonna make body bombs … Try to beat him out of as many blasting
caps as you can.”

The conversation then turned to where Holder could take the hijacked plane. Holder said that it would be important for him to declare
his political objectives during the flight, as this would strengthen his case for asylum wherever he landed. He mentioned Germany or the Middle East as possible destinations, adding that he had befriended members of the Red Army Faction and the Palestine Liberation Organization
while living in France.

On the morning of June 26, Bullock swung by Holder’s apartment and told him that he had arranged a lunch meeting with the arms dealer—a Mexican named Dave who had ties to the Tijuana underworld. For the first time, Holder became suspicious of Bullock’s eagerness. He declined to attend the lunch, explaining that he didn’t yet have enough money to buy the explosives. But Bullock wouldn’t take no for an answer: “We got to go ahead and go through with this thing. ’Cause I got this hooked up and everything, man. I don’t
want to back out.”

A few hours later the two men drove to the Brigantine Seafood Restaurant, a popular tourist spot on Shelter Island. As soon as Holder entered the Brigantine’s brick-walled dining room, he knew that something was amiss. Dave was already there, occupying one of the semicircular booths near the bar. He wore a blazer despite the summer broil. He didn’t strike Holder as the sort of man who knew his way around
military-grade explosives.

At the square table opposite the booth, four clean-cut men in preppy vacation garb were sipping Cokes and iced teas. Holder pegged them for undercover cops.

After settling into the booth, the apprehensive Holder refused to remove his sunglasses or order any food. Dave—a California Department of Justice agent whose real name was David Torres—was the one to break the ice.

“Marvin brought you to me because you need some things, yes?”

Holder only nodded. The less
he said, the better.

Torres said that he had reviewed the diagram that Holder had made for Bullock, and he praised its sophistication. He assured Holder that his associates in Tijuana would have no problem supplying the
materials necessary to build the device. They just had to discuss the issue of money; Torres said he wanted five hundred dollars for a
brick of C-4 explosives.

Holder sheepishly admitted that he was flat broke. But even if he had a few bucks to spare, how did he know that Dave’s price would be best? “I want to look around, see what else is on the market,” he said warily.

But Torres started to get pushy. “I’m sure we can work something out,” he insisted, stressing that he would be happy to accept a small deposit, then wait for the balance until the
project was complete.

Holder felt cornered. He stammered a bit as he said that he could probably scrape together one hundred dollars
by the following week.

Torres seemed pleased. He was just curious about one thing.

“Now, tell me—what is it that you want to blow up?”

“Nothing really,” Holder replied cagily. “Just doing some ballistics.”

Torres asked several more times what Holder planned to do with the explosives, but Holder never let down his guard. At the meeting’s end, the two men agreed to discuss the matter further over the phone, using the code word “
boat putty” to refer to explosives.