Word: ransoms
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Eastern Airlines jet out of Houston (TIME, Nov. 13) and three blacks captured a Southern Airways plane from Birmingham (TIME, Nov. 27). Both groups arrived in Cuba expecting a welcome mat for "revolutionaries" from the mainland. Instead, they were thrown into jail and the $2,000,000 paid in ransom money by Southern Airways was confiscated as evidence for a future trial...
...assistance of Eva Perón, who used contacts in the Vatican to get him a passport issued under the ironical Jewish name of Eliezer Goldstein. For making Bormann feel at home in Argentina, Farago claimed, Dictator Juan Perón extracted from Bormann's booty a ransom of nearly $200 million...
...boarded Flight 49 in Birmingham and took the 30 passengers and four crew members on an odyssey of terror that ended 29 hours later in Havana. Everybody lost something on the flight: the copilot was wounded, the passengers were badly shaken, Southern Airways may be financially crippled by the ransom it paid, the FBI has been damned for a trigger-happy performance and the hijackers are said to be condemned to spend the rest of their lives in 4-by-5-by-5-ft. cells in Fidel Castro's Cuba. On top of all that, the painful problem...
...skyjacking attempts worldwide since the first one in 1930; of those, about two dozen, all of them recent, have been for extortion purposes. The most successful attempt was made last November by the notorious parachuter D.B. Cooper, who was never captured (authorities believe that both he and his ransom money were buried in a Washington State snowdrift). Of 38 other skyjackers, three were killed and 35 are in custody or in foreign hands; almost all the extortion money has been recovered. Thus the fact that air-piracy extortion is almost never successful is not in itself a deterrent...
...even appears to be encouraging them. A boycott would presumably apply to such states as Cuba, Algeria and Libya, which have made a practice of admitting hijackers. But even some of these nations have recently shown that they are getting tired of it. Twice Algeria has returned kidnapers' ransom money to U.S. airlines, and Cuba now jails many of the fugitives who fly to Havana on commandeered airliners. "If you hijack a plane to Cuba these days," says a British airline official, "you have an excellent chance of spending the rest of your life in prison...