The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking by Brendan I. Koerner Read Free Book Online

flight when they could simply buy a ticket. A few distant nations might be willing to harbor an American hijacker—North Korea, for example—but getting there would require a herculean, multistop effort; the range of the Boeing 707, then the world’s mightiest passenger jet, topped out at 5,400 miles. ‡ And no American criminal could possibly be foolish enough to try and hijack a plane to a domestic airport—police would have the aircraft surrounded before it even rolled to a stop.
    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 pilotresponded to this ultimatum by reaching into his flight bag, pulling out his Colt .38, and shooting thegiant 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 theletter 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 immediatepassage 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 hisCaribbean 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 highlyunlikely 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