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

forgive an act born from a civilization of aircraft and war violence. A civilization which overwhelmed this uncultured peasant, this Don Quixote without Dulcinea, without Sancho Panza, who instead of mounting his Rocinanteflew across the skies.”
    Given Minichiello’s stratospheric popularity, the trial’s outcome was a foregone conclusion: he was convicted of a single charge and ended up serving just eighteen months in jail. After his release, he signed a contract to star ina spaghetti Western. e
    The Nixon administration was dismayed by Minichiello’s escape from American justice. Italy was supposed to be a close ally, a founding member of NATO that had sent millions of its sons and daughters to the United States over the decades. Yet now it was not only providing sanctuary to a fugitive hijacker; it was lionizing him for his courage and hailing him as a sex symbol. Once American viewers saw footage of Minichiello and his moon-eyed teenage fans, how long would it take for others to try and follow his lead?
    The answer was roughly a week. In Norwood, Ohio, a troubled fourteen-year-old boy named David Booth watched Minichiello’s saga unfold on the evening news. On November 10, he ditched school and caught a bus to Greater Cincinnati Airport, where he pulled a knife on an eighteen-year-old ballerina as she bade farewell to her grandmother. “You’re going with me, you’re going to Sweden,” Booth told his hostage as he prodded her through the terminal and onto a Delta DC-9. Once on board, he told the pilots to head for Stockholm, evidently unaware that a DC-9 cannotcross the Atlantic.
    Booth was persuaded to surrender as the jet idled on the Cincinnati tarmac. But though that incident ended peacefully, it signified that the skyjacking epidemic had entered an erratic new phase: even the most tranquil and law-abiding countries were being sucked into the madness. The United Nations, declaring itself “deeply concerned over acts of unlawful interference with international civil aviation,” soon passed a resolution calling for all of its members to criminalize air piracy and punish hijackers as harshly as possible. The final vote was 77–2, with only Cuba and Sudanvoicing opposition.
    In the eighteen days between the UN resolution’s passage and the dawn of the next decade, another six planes were hijackedaround the world.

    Rafaelle Minichiello speaks to the adoring press in Rome.
AP PHOTO
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    * Etymological lore holds that the verb
to hijack
derives from the slangy directive issued by gangsters who commandeered freight trucks: “Hold your hands high, Jack!”
    † Harris also made a habit of impounding freight shipments bound for Cuba. His biggest haul, taken from the Palm Beach, Florida, docks, consisted of 3.5 million pounds of lard.
    ‡ A later version of the Boeing 707, the 707-320B, could travel an additional 1,200 miles without refueling.
    § The pilot, William Bonnell, was traumatized by the shooting. He tried to pay for Kuchenmeister’s funeral, but the Cleveland police talked him out of doing so. Bonnell never carried a gun again, and he eventually burned the hundreds of congratulatory letters and telegrams he received from admirers around the nation.
    ‖ Ramirez, who returned to the United States in 1975, was interviewed by the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978, while serving time in prison. He stated that while working for Cuba’s intelligence service, he had seen a file that identified Lee Harvey Oswald as “Kennedy’s future assassin.” The committee ultimately rejected Ramirez’s claim, concluding that “the essential aspects of his allegation were incredible.”
    a A year prior to the hijacking, Cadon had been arrested for vandalizing the New York City headquarters of the Chemstrand Corporation. He told police that he was upset that Chemstrand was marketing a synthetic fiber called “Cadon” without his permission.
    b While in Cuba, Williams established Radio Free Dixie,