Killer nabbed 40 years later

NEW YORK – The FBI agents wore swimsuits – the better to ensure they were unarmed as they delivered $1 million cash to the hijackers. The criminals wore beatific looks, traveled with young children, and were “polite as possible,” a passenger on the ill-fated Delta flight recalled at the time.

For one man, it was the perfect crime – for nearly 40 years.

But on Tuesday, the FBI said it had caught up with the last hijacker, a convicted killer named George Wright who had escaped from prison in 1970 and resurfaced two years later when he joined members of a radical black nationalist group in forcing the jet to fly to Algeria.

Wright, now 68, was picked up outside his home in Portugal as he headed to a neighborhood cafe, said Michael Schroeder, a spokesman for the U.S. Marshal’s Service in New Jersey.

Officials planned to request his extradition to New Jersey to finish serving his sentence of 15 to 30 years for shooting to death a gas station employee during a robbery on the day after Thanksgiving in 1962. It was unclear if Wright could also face trial for the hijacking, which made headlines with its radical perpetrators, record-setting ransom and wild costumes. In addition to the FBI agents in swimsuits, news reports at the time said that one of the hijackers – alleged to be Wright – wore priestly robes and hid his gun in a hollowed-out Bible.

“It read like a Hollywood script,” Schroeder said of the case, which had gone cold until 2002, when Schroeder said the marshal’s service created regional fugitive task forces throughout the country. Wright’s case, with its dramatic flair and heroic victim – the man killed at the gas station was a decorated World War II veteran named Walter Patterson – quickly became a priority.

“Our guys really blew the dust off this case,” Schroeder said. “The key was working every lead.”

An address in Portugal was one such lead, and it paid off Monday when Wright was arrested without incident.

It marked the apparent end of a life on the lam whose chapters harken back to an era when hijackings were a common tool of militants, when it was possible to board a plane without being patted down or putting your carry-on through X-ray machines, and when $1 million was enough to make five hijackers happy.

In August 1970, when the three men and two women of the Black Liberation Army commandeered the flight, $1 million was the most ever paid for the release of airplane hostages. The $50 and $100 bills were stuffed into a briefcase, which was tied to the end of a rope dangling out the jet window. After it was hoisted inside and all 101 passengers were freed, the Delta DC-8, which had been seized while on a flight from Detroit to Miami, left for Algeria.

Algerian officials ended up seizing the plane and the money and returning them to the United States, but the hijackers were let go. Several years later, four were captured in France, but the fifth remained missing.

The FBI says Wright had joined the Black Liberation Army, an underground black nationalist group, after fleeing prison in New Jersey and moving to Detroit. In subsequent years, the BLA would be accused in a number of violent crimes and sometimes worked with the Weather Underground, another radical group.

Despite the group’s revolutionary rhetoric and record of violence, the hijackers were not accused of abusing the passengers or crew members. However, they did insist that the FBI agents who delivered the cash wear either swimsuits or underwear, to be sure they did not carry weapons.

After U.S. officials got a tip that Wright might be in Portugal, Portuguese authorities were notified. Fingerprints submitted by Wright to get a national identity card there matched those on file with the FBI.