Word: ransoming
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What would happen if Jim Jones hijacked the Love Boat? The villain of the show is Father Dunleavy, whose fanatical cult takes over the transatlantic luxury liner Festivale and holds its passengers hostage for $70 million in ransom. Like Jones, Dunleavy is said to be charismatic, sexy and demonic, but ABC is too smart to cast the role with an actor who might offend a Nielsen family. Instead, Dunleavy is played by Telly Savalas, whose bland manner and leisure suits make him seem more like a Las Vegas maitre d' than a satanic killer...
...looked as if the Soviet-backed regimes of Iraq and Syria might intervene. To complicate matters further, guerrillas hijacked four foreign airliners in early September and directed three of them to a dirt airstrip 30 miles from the Jordanian capital of Amman: there they held hundreds of passengers as ransom for imprisoned fedayeen. "Black September," the climactic clash between Hussein and the guerrillas who increasingly threatened his rule, was beginning to unfold. To weigh the situation, Kissinger activated his crisis committee, the Washington Special Action Group (WSAG). At the group's urging, the U.S. began placing airborne infantry units...
Nearly everyone turns out to be a materialist. The Palestinian gunmen are awed and seduced by the farmhouse's plumbing and appliances, and the radical chief is an art lover who decides to demand his prisoners' paintings as ransom. In the book's most amusing turn, crates of Cezannes, Degas and even a Vermeer arrive, and the farmhouse becomes an instant museum...
...I.R.A. set him up. After getting out of jail in 1977, he returned to New York on his own, but was pressed back into I.R.A. service. He says he was ordered to kidnap Dan Flanagan, who owns the chain of Blarney Stone bars in Manhattan, and hold him for ransom. He told the I.R.A. that he had agreed only to gather intelligence on Flanagan. Then McMullen heard that the I.R.A. planned to send a squad from Belfast to kill him, and he went into hiding...
...McMullen's story can be believed? Although Blake says he checked whatever he could, TIME sources found some parts of McMullen's story credible, other portions improbable. New York City police can see no reason why the I.R.A. would want to kidnap Flanagan, an unpolitical type; any ransom it might collect would hardly be worth the danger of provoking a police crackdown. David Blundy, a London Sunday Times writer who interviewed McMullen extensively before Blake did, says McMullen's accounts of two bombings in Ireland checked out in every detail, but that his stories...