The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking (6 page)

There had been one bizarre incident in 1954, when an emotionally disturbed fifteen-year-old boy named Raymond Kuchenmeister had attempted to hijack a plane at Cleveland Hopkins Airport. A social outcast due to his gargantuan size—he stood six foot seven and weighed well over three hundred pounds—Kuchenmeister sneaked onto an American Airlines DC-6 and aimed a revolver at the pilot while issuing a stark demand: “Fly to Mexico or be shot.” The pilot
responded to this ultimatum by reaching into his flight bag, pulling out his Colt .38, and shooting the
giant teenager to death.
^§
But this violent episode was so little noticed that Congress didn’t even bother to make hijacking a crime when it passed the Federal Aviation Act of 1958, which empowered the federal government to regulate the airline industry. Seizing control of an American aircraft was thus perfectly legal, at least according to the
letter of the law.

That legislative omission would prove deeply embarrassing in light of what occurred over a three-month span beginning on May 1, 1961. On that day a Miami electrician named Antulio Ramirez Ortiz boarded a National Airlines Convair 440 bound for Key West. The plane had just taken off when Ramirez entered the cockpit, held a steak knife to the pilot’s throat, and demanded immediate
passage to Cuba’s capital. “If I don’t see Havana in thirty minutes,” he said, “we all die.” Ramirez claimed that Rafael Trujillo, the Dominican Republic’s dictator since 1931, had offered him $100,000 to assassinate Castro. He wanted to warn the Cuban leader of his
Caribbean rival’s treachery.

With a serrated blade pressed to his windpipe, the National pilot had no choice but to make a beeline for Havana. After initially threatening to have the plane blasted with antiaircraft fire, perplexed Cuban air traffic controllers let it land at a military base south of the capital. Once soldiers dragged away Ramirez and his eighty-five pounds of checked luggage, the flight’s passengers and crew were treated to a chicken lunch and then allowed to depart for Key West, ninety miles to the north. America’s first hijacking ended up delaying the flight’s scheduled arrival by a mere three hours.
^‖

The FBI dismissed Ramirez as delusional, noting that he had flown under the pseudonym “Elpirata Cofresi”—a clue that he might have considered himself an incarnation of Roberto Cofresí, a nineteenth-century Puerto Rican pirate. The hijacking, explained an FBI spokesman, was nothing more than the deed of “a wild eccentric with no purpose in mind” and thus was highly
unlikely to be repeated.

But a similar incident occurred on July 24, involving a former Cuban policeman who had emigrated to the United States in the late 1940s and become a Miami waiter. He hijacked a Tampa-bound Eastern Air Lines flight to Havana, leaving behind a distraught wife and two young children. This time Castro elected to keep the $3.5 million plane, vowing to return it only if Erwin Harris gave back a Cuban naval vessel that had been hijacked to Key West. This extortionate ploy convinced many American politicians that Castro himself was behind the hijacking and that a dramatic military response was in order. “If we allow a little pipsqueak like Castro, with lice in his beard, to defy the United States of America, nobody is going to have any respect for us,” thundered Representative Wayne Hays of Ohio, in a speech arguing for the bombing of Havana. (The plane-for-boat swap
did eventually take place.)

Eight days after the Eastern flight’s diversion to Cuba, an inebriated oil worker named Bruce Britt tried to hijack a Pacific Air Lines DC-3 from Chico, California, to Smackover, Arkansas, where he hoped to reconcile with his estranged wife. He was subdued by several passengers before the flight could leave the Chico airport, but not before he shot both a Pacific ticket agent and the plane’s captain, the latter of whom was
blinded for life. Britt’s attack confirmed that hijackers were not afraid to follow through on their threats of violence.

Less than forty-eight hours later a forty-one-year-old parolee named Leon Bearden and his sixteen-year-old son, Cody, boarded Continental Airlines Flight 54 in Phoenix. The Boeing 707 was supposed to
reach Houston near dawn, after making stops in El Paso and San Antonio. But the Beardens, who had two loaded handguns tucked into their carry-on bags, had no intention of finishing their trip in Texas.

A
WOMAN
’
S PANICKED
scream roused Leonard Gilman from his slumber. In all his years of air travel, the lanky forty-three-year-old Border Patrol agent had never heard such a piercing cry of distress. He was about to leave his seat to investigate when the plane’s intercom switched on.

“We have some men up here, they’re asking me to ask for … volunteers,” announced a clearly shaken stewardess. “They’re telling me they need four men to come up here to the front of the plane—no soldiers. They say they’ll let everyone else go. But … they need four volunteers.”

Gilman and three other male passengers responded to this cryptic plea for hostages, walking through the darkened cabin of Continental Airlines Flight 54 to the first-class bar beside the cockpit. When they got there, they were surprised to discover who their captors would be: a jittery, gaunt-faced man with a receding hairline and a dour teenage boy. Leon and Cody Bearden both held guns to the heads of stewardesses; the hammer on the boy’s .45-caliber pistol was cocked, his finger disconcertingly tight on the trigger.

The elder Bearden told the volunteers that he had ordered the pilot to keep flying to El Paso, Flight 54’s next scheduled stop. After the plane refueled, he and Cody would release all the passengers, save for the four hostages. The plane would then veer southeast to Havana, where the Beardens hoped to earn Cuban citizenship by giving Prime Minister Fidel Castro the $5.4 million jet as a gift.

As the plane began its descent to El Paso in the wee hours of August 3, 1961, Gilman gently asked Leon Bearden why he wished to go to Cuba with his son—was he a card-carrying Communist, or a great admirer of Castro’s fortitude? “I’m just fed up,” replied the convicted bank robber and unemployed father of four. “I don’t want to be an
American anymore.” Cody said nothing, just snarled and posed with his gun like some B-movie cowboy. Gilman sensed that the youth was itching to kill someone.

By the time Flight 54 touched down in El Paso at two a.m., President John F. Kennedy had been briefed on the developing crisis. The year’s two previous hijackings to Cuba had been embarrassing enough, but the Flight 54 situation was an order of magnitude worse. This was no mere commuter flight in Florida—it involved transcontinental travel and the jewel of Boeing’s fleet. And the perpetrators appeared to be white Everymen, whose arrival in Havana would give Castro a golden opportunity to declare that the American people were losing faith in their government. Loath to hand his Cuban nemesis yet another public relations victory, President Kennedy authorized the FBI to do everything in its power to prevent the hijacked plane from leaving Texas.

At the FBI’s behest, Continental’s ground crew stalled for time after the passengers were released, pretending that the jet required hours of maintenance to prepare for the fifteen-hundred-mile journey ahead. As the sun began to rise that morning, Leon Bearden became highly agitated by the endless delays. He commanded Flight 54’s captain to take off at once, punctuating his directive by firing a bullet between the co-pilot’s feet.

But the trip to Havana lasted less than fifty yards. As the Boeing 707 pivoted toward the runway, a dozen federal agents opened fire with submachine guns, shredding the jet’s landing gear and destroying one of its engines. Now stripped of their only means of escape, the Beardens agreed to let an FBI negotiator come aboard to discuss a possible resolution to their predicament.

But Leon Bearden had become too unhinged to strike a deal. “Do you see those policemen out there?” he screamed at the negotiator while gesturing wildly with his revolver. “They would as soon kill as not! They’d rather kill me. I would rather be killed myself than go to prison. I’d rather kill myself!”

An instant after making this suicidal threat, Bearden heard a
commotion in the main cabin. He glanced back to see the stewardesses sneaking out the plane’s rear exit.

Before Bearden could do anything drastic, Gilman punched him in the ear with all his might, shattering a bone in his right hand in the process. As the hijacker crumpled to the floor, the FBI negotiator spun and tackled Cody, who had let down his guard while listening to his father’s rant. Within minutes the two Beardens were lying prone on the tarmac, hands and feet chained behind them as if they were hogs. The dozens of newspaper photographers and camera crews who had gathered around the plane documented their humiliation; the media instinctively grasped the appeal of a
lurid hijacking yarn.

On the afternoon of August 4, the Senate Aviation Subcommittee convened an emergency hearing to address the rash of hijackings. A weary Leonard Gilman, his broken right hand heavily bandaged, testified about his heroism aboard Flight 54. The head of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), Najeeb Halaby, presented a six-point antihijacking plan that called for cockpit doors to be locked and for pilots to receive firearms training. A Justice Department official announced that his boss, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, had authorized a $10,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of anyone involved in “the actual, attempted, or
planned hijacking of aircraft.”

The senators, meanwhile, decried their colleagues’ failure to make hijacking a crime back in 1958, a blunder that meant the Beardens could be prosecuted only for run-of-the-mill kidnapping. Senator A. S. Mike Monroney of Oklahoma vowed to rush through legislation that would make air piracy punishable by life imprisonment. But Senator Ralph Yarborough of Texas pronounced that penalty too light. “When civilized nations begin hanging air pirates,” he said, “piracy will disappear
from the air lanes.”

In the midst of all this aggressive posturing, a senator asked the FAA’s Halaby if he and President Kennedy had discussed the possibility of requiring airlines to screen passengers—perhaps by searching carry-on bags, a tactic that likely would have prevented the Beardens
from boarding Flight 54. But Halaby scoffed at the idea as wholly impractical: “Can you imagine the line that would form from the ticket counter in Miami if everyone had to submit to police inspections?”

Satisfied by Halaby’s curt dismissal, the committee did not
raise the issue again.

Four days after the Senate hearing, a frustrated artist named Albert Cadon left his Manhattan apartment without saying goodbye to his wife. He surfaced a day later aboard a Pan Am jet bound for Guatemala City, holding a gun and demanding to be taken to Havana. Cadon told the crew that the hijacking was a protest against America’s failure to support Algeria’s National Liberation Front in its long and vicious war of
independence against France.
^a

One of his hometown tabloids, the
New York Daily Mirror
, splashed Cadon’s story on its front page. The bolded headline invoked a neologism that would soon become a much-used part of the American lexicon:
PAN AM JET
SKYJACKED TO HAVANA
.

A
LL OPPOSITION TO
Senator Yarborough’s get-tough approach vanished within hours of Albert Cadon’s arrival in Cuba. On August 10 the Senate unanimously passed an air piracy bill that made the crime
a capital offense. President Kennedy signed the bill into law
on September 5, 1961; twelve days later American newspapers reported that Cuba had executed two of its own failed skyjackers
by firing squad. The rest of the year passed without a single hijacking attempt aboard an American or Cuban airliner.

The following year was free of American skyjackings, too, as were 1963 and 1964. The spate of incidents in the spring and summer of 1961 quickly faded from memory; once again skyjacking came to be viewed as a phenomenon unique to the Communist realm, an option
of last resort for those who could no longer tolerate the dictatorship of the proletariat. There were at least two such hijackings in the Soviet Union in 1964 and 1965: one involved a pair of ex-convicts whom the Kremlin’s official press agency dubbed “Fatso” and “Crewcut,” the other a young Armenian couple who yearned to reach Istanbul. All four of these hijackers were arrested and presumably executed; their grim fates elicited brief nods of sympathy from Americans who skimmed the “World Roundup”
sections of their newspapers.

The domestic lull in skyjackings lasted until the summer of 1965, when a fresh outbreak originated in one of the nation’s most far-flung locales. On August 31 of that year, a fourteen-year-old boy named Harry Fergerstrom boarded a Hawaiian Airlines DC-3 in Honolulu and announced that he was taking over to protest the newly minted state’s
lack of political sovereignty. Six weeks later, in nearby Molokai, two disgruntled Navy sailors whipped out hunting knives on an Aloha Airlines flight and demanded transportation to their respective hometowns of White Earth, Minnesota, and Watonga, Oklahoma; unlike Fergerstrom, who surrendered peacefully, the sailors had to be forcibly subdued with shotguns and flares. It was no coincidence that both hijackings took place in Hawaii: as would soon become evident, each skyjacking tended to influence the next, in terms of both location and modus operandi.

A wave of hijackings to Havana then ensued, inspired by a small thaw in U.S.-Cuba relations. In October 1965 Fidel Castro allowed a few thousand refugees to leave the island by boat. Buoyed by the hope that his family might finally be able to join him in Miami, a twenty-year-old exile named Luis Perez tried to hijack a National Airlines flight bound for Key West. His asinine plan was to arrange a personal audience with Castro, whom he planned to beg for his parents’ and siblings’ freedom. One of the pilots ended the hijacking by knocking away Perez’s gun with a fire ax, thereby sparing the young man certain
disappointment in Havana.

Three weeks later a sixteen-year-old runaway from Brownsville, Texas, named Thomas Robinson hijacked a National plane out of
New Orleans. The boy fired several shots into the fuselage before he was tackled by three passengers, all officials with NASA’s Gemini space program. When questioned by police, Robinson claimed to have a patriotic motive: he wanted to organize a jailbreak for Cuba’s political prisoners, to show the world that Castro’s regime remained wicked despite its
relaxed emigration policy.