Brian Garfield: Target Manhattan

And what did Ryterband do then?

He got back on the radio and talked some more. You could tell by his voice that he was honestly desperate-that, in a funny way, he was on our side.

Did that seem to change Craycroft’s attitude at all?

No. Not a bit. You’ve had this information from the other witnesses, haven’t you?

I’d like your recollection of it, Captain.

There was a discussion between Craycroft and Ryterband about the fuel situation. Of course, none of us had any hint about their getaway plan then. You know about that now, don’t you, from Mrs. Ryterband?

Yes. Go on.

Well, they were arguing. Ryterband said they could afford to shave an hour off the fuel margin. He said something about, “If they pay the ransom, you can ditch the bombs over open water. It’ll extend the range by reducing the weight of the plane.”

But Craycroft wouldn’t buy that?

No. He kept saying, “Negative.” Nothing would budge him. It was damned depressing. Because it made it crystal clear to us that we were dealing with a crazy man. He’d made his plan and he was too damned rigid to deviate from it, even if it meant the difference between success and failure. We were convinced he didn’t really care whether the money was paid or not. We were convinced he’d just as soon drop the damn bombs.

Now at about one forty-five, as I reconstruct it from the other testimony, you and Sergeant O’Brien were over by the window watching the airplane pass overhead. You’d already run through the taped film of the plane that you’d taken from the helicopter. Is that substantially correct?

It might have been closer to one fifty, one fifty-five.

And at that point you were speculating about Craycroft’s intentions. Whether he meant to bomb the city regardless of what was done on the ground.

Well, yes. I mean, suppose we did come up with the ransom on time? It didn’t look likely even then, but suppose it did work out. His partner collects the money at three and he’s long gone by five ten. What’s to prevent this screwball from dropping the bombs anyway? I mean, we didn’t know for sure what he’d do, but the way things were going, it was obvious we couldn’t count on his sanity.

Of course, this was after he had refused repeated requests by his own brother-in-law to postpone the deadline.

That’s right.

Please forgive my repetitiousness, Mr. Harris. It’s just that we’d like this record to be as accurate as possible.

I work the same way as a reporter, Mr. Skinner. You ask the same question ten times, phrase it a little differently each time, and maybe once or twice out of the ten you pick up a new piece of information you didn’t have before.

Exactly. Now, both you and Sergeant O’Brien knew quite a bit about airplanes. The sergeant served as a bombardier during the war, and you have a pilot’s license. At this time, talking with O’Brien at the window, and with the memory of your teletape close-ups fresh in your minds, you began to discuss the problem from a technical standpoint. Is that correct?

That’s correct.

As it turned out, this discussion between the two of you was to have considerable importance. Do you think you could reconstruct that conversation now, for our record?

I can hit the high spots. Of course a lot of that conversation was unspoken. I mean, certain things were obvious in the context of the moment and didn’t have to be vocalized. Like the things that had been going around in the room just before we talked. General Adler arriving, for example, with all his Neanderthal notions about don’t pay the ransom or take Charlie Ryterband up on the roof and jam a gun up his ass.

Is that what he suggested? Or was it to “put a gun to his head”?

“Jam it up his ass and pull the trigger.” That’s what he said, verbatim. I’m a reporter, and I was there. But I’m sure he’d deny it now.

About your discussion with Sergeant O’Brien…

Right. But you’ve got to understand the background-the motivation. I hate that word, incidentally, but it fits. We were motivated by the fact that we felt there was a fair chance Craycroft was crazy enough to drop his bombs whether or not the ransom was paid. Therefore, it was worth considering any solution, no matter how loony. You follow?

Certainly. Could you reconstruct the conversation now?

I’m trying to. But in my business you learn that the words that are spoken are no more important than the context in which they’re spoken. In other words, that talk I had with Billy O’Brien would have been totally irresponsible if we’d honestly felt that Craycroft would go away quietly after the ransom was paid.

Go on, please. I understand your qualification completely.

Good. Here’s the best way to describe it. You ever been to a really bad movie, where you knew what the next line of dialogue was going to be?

I’m sure we all have.

We had that movie right in front of us. The stars were General Adler and the FBI clown, Azzard. They were thundering around the place, coming up with one outrageous scheme after another. O’Brien and I were over on the fringe of it, and the way it started. he and I started making remarks under our breaths about these two jokers and their wild-hair ideas. Azzard wanting to shoot the plane down, Adler talking about scooping the plane up with some crazy kind of net, stuff like that. It was absurd. But it was funny. In a situation like that you’re under incredible stress, and it doesn’t take much to send you over the line from tension to laughter. I don’t excuse it. O’Brien and I were making jokes about it. About how Adler was the one who ought to be hauled away in a net. Or putting Azzard inside the cannon and shooting him at the airplane. Really poor jokes, you know? But, anyhow, it got us off on this crazy tangent of needling each other into coming up with wilder and wilder schemes. Soaring fancies about how you could stop Craycroft. O’Brien said what we ought to do is run a big ladder up from the Empire State Building and grab him with a skyhook when he flew by. I said the best way to handle it was to call him on the radio and tell him his house was on fire, he better get right home. It went on like that.

But it led you to more concrete, realistic ideas, didn’t it?

Yes. You couldn’t keep laughing it off. The thing I remember mainly is we figured we had to analyze his flight path. Finally we called Walter DeFeo at the Civil Defense Emergency office. He was in touch with the air-traffic controllers at the three airports-that was part of his job. He got us the flight plan from the radar people at JFK traffic control. In the bank office Maitland had a map of the five boroughs with red dots to indicate the locations of the Merchants Trust branches. We defaced hell out of that map with one of those felt marker pens, drawing Craycroft’s flight path. He followed the same route every circuit except for the variations he made in his crossings of the East River. Obviously he’d decided to do random crossings over the three bridges just in case we tried to set something up to ambush him when he was over the river. But the rest of it you could just about plot him on a street map.

What was the flight path exactly?

He’d go diagonally uptown from Front Street. Up First Avenue and then Lexington Avenue, and then he’d ease out toward York Avenue to make his left turn at the north end of his swing. That was a very tight turn for a B-17. He kept it directly above Manhattan, never going wide of land. The peak of the turn was right over Cathedral Parkway-a Hundred and Tenth Street, at the north end of Central Park. He’d swing back south over Riverside Drive at about Ninety-sixth Street and he’d head right down Broadway, all the way down. He never even went above Central Park. He kept it above heavily populated buildings every foot of the way. Finally down to Canal and start his leftward turn over the financial district. He went straight over City Hall and kept turning left so he’d end up crossing the East River above the Brooklyn Bridge or the Manhattan Bridge. He’d do a figure-eight turn over northwestern Brooklyn and come back across to Manhattan either by the same route he’d used before, or up across the Williamsburg Bridge. And so on, the circle as before. It took less time to plot it on the map than it does to describe it.