The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking (36 page)

Two days later Holder noticed a suspicious van parked down the street from his apartment. He sneaked out the back and drove his fifteen-year-old Pontiac Grand Prix to Santa Barbara for the weekend. The men in the van, agents with the California Department of Justice, did not inform their superiors that Holder had
given them the slip.

Holder finally called Torres on July 1. He said he was backing out of their deal because he had already bought some “boat putty” from a source
in Santa Barbara.

The following afternoon, concerned that Holder might have gotten his hands on some C-4, the FBI raided his apartment and placed him under arrest. The agents found no weapons, though they did discover a bulletproof vest. They also seized the first thirty-one pages of a new memoir that Holder had been writing. Its tentative title was
Terror by Fiat
.

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E
LEVEN MONTHS WOULD
pass before Holder got his day in court. He was first sent back to New York to face charges that he had violated his parole by conspiring to hijack a plane. He was represented pro bono by Susan Tipograph, a friend and colleague of Lynne Stewart. Tipograph had famously defended William Morales, the alleged leader of Puerto Rico’s Armed Forces of National Liberation, as well as Black Liberation Army members responsible for killing two policemen during a 1981 armored-car robbery.
^†
She was drawn to Holder’s background
with the Black Panthers.

At Tipograph’s request, Holder was sent to a federal prison hospital in North Carolina to receive a psychiatric evaluation. He was examined by three doctors, who diagnosed him with a range of possible ailments: post-traumatic stress disorder, drug and alcohol dependence, panic disorder, bipolar disorder, even paranoid schizophrenia “with grandiose and persecutory delusions.” All agreed, however, that Holder was
competent to stand trial.

On June 2, 1992, Holder was finally brought before Judge Eugene Nickerson of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York. The prosecutor in the case, assistant U.S. attorney Jason Brown, was stunned by the skyjacker’s feeble appearance. Like Holder’s daughters, Brown had expected an intimidating figure, the sort of man whose physique and demeanor would inspire fear among a flight crew. But Holder was frail and bookish, and he looked a decade older than his nearly forty-three years.

This guy, this docile guy, is supposed to be some
big-time political terrorist?
Brown thought.

Based on what he had heard on the tapes of Holder’s conversations
with Marvin Bullock and David Torres, Brown knew he had a tricky case on his hands. Bullock, in particular, had egged Holder on to an unseemly degree. Shortly after the meeting at the Brigantine, for example, Holder had clearly told his ex-brother-in-law that he no longer wished to do business with Torres—“I’m out of it,” he had said emphatically. But Bullock had countered that the explosives were already en route from Mexico, and that both he and Holder would be in serious trouble if they reneged on their commitment. This threat had caused Holder to backtrack just enough to keep the
sting operation going.

Brown gamely argued that Holder was still a threat to public safety, but Tipograph’s claims of entrapment were more persuasive. “Each time Holder resisted participating with the informant and the undercover agent, they pressured him to participate in or admit to the crime,” Judge Nickerson wrote in his ruling. “There is no credible evidence that Holder ever discussed any plans to commit a terrorist act with anyone other than these government agents.… Nor has [the government] shown that Holder himself had the criminal intent to have violated a condition of his release by conspiring to commit a terrorist act.”

Judge Nickerson ordered that Holder be released at once and allowed to return to San Diego. But he also cautioned Holder that the legal system would not be so lenient if he ever again flirted with the idea of
recapturing past glory.

T
HE FINAL PRICE
tag for ending America’s skyjacking epidemic exceeded the airlines’ wildest fears. In 1977, after a few quiet years in the nation’s skies, a University of Chicago economist named William Landes attempted to quantify the cost of the calm. Based on data culled from the airlines and the FAA, Landes calculated that the cost of deterring a single hijacking was as high as $9.25 million—or put another way, $219,221 per passenger spared the agony of becoming a hostage. “Although the mandatory screening program is highly effective in terms of the hijackings prevented,” Landes concluded, “its
costs appear enormous.”

But there was little the aviation industry could do aside from grouse about the fiscal inconvenience. The American public seemed to rather like hijack-free travel; airline ridership increased by 25 percent between the start of universal physical screening and the publication
of Landes’s study. And the government is always loath to rescind security measures once they’ve been put in place.

The metal detectors and X-ray machines were by no means foolproof. In the last years of the 1970s, a few skyjackers slipped through the system: a disturbed Army veteran tried to hijack a United Airlines jet to Memphis, only to surrender at the Denver airport after the pilots
jumped from the cockpit; a former mental patient was arrested in Portland after threatening another United plane with a fake bomb
and demanding that the airline pay
his outstanding debts; a seventeen-year-old girl with road flares strapped to her chest commandeered a TWA flight en route to Kansas City, in a futile attempt to free an imprisoned skyjacker who had been
her mother’s lover.

Then, in the early 1980s, there were two minor outbreaks that were reminiscent of the epidemic’s earliest phase: thirteen planes went to Havana in 1980, and another twelve in 1983. But these outbreaks were explicable anomalies rather than portents of a skyjacking revival. Nearly all the perpetrators were Cubans who had come to the United States during the Mariel Boatlift of 1980 and had decided to return home after struggling to find work or running
afoul of the law. They mostly targeted small commuter flights in South Florida, so there was little anxiety in the
country at large. And once Fidel Castro started to send these hijackers back to the United States
to face prosecution, the outbreaks abated and the “virus” failed to spread. After the brief spike of 1983, the number of skyjackings once again dwindled to one or two per year, carried out with comic ineptness by
the mentally unwell.

The contagion lost its power partly due to America’s growing trepidation of the Muslim world, where hijacking remained a favored tactic of militants. The Iran hostage crisis, which lasted from 1979 to 1981, convinced millions of Americans that radical Islam was a paramount threat. That mind-set was only reinforced two years later, when Islamic Jihad suicide bombers killed 241 American servicemen in Beirut. Then in 1985 members of Hezbollah seized a TWA flight bound from Cairo to London, seeking the release of hundreds of their imprisoned brothers-in-arms. The hijackers murdered a U.S. Navy diver who was on the flight, and they held dozens of passengers hostage for two weeks. The episode’s iconic photograph depicted the plane’s fifty-eight-year-old American pilot, a ruggedly handsome Korean War veteran, leaning out the cockpit window while one of his swarthy young captors held a gun to his head. In the American imagination, that photo forever rebranded skyjacking as an alien crime; the virus could not get its hooks into a population that now equated hijacking with the ambitions of a despised and enigmatic foe.

After 1991 skyjacking disappeared entirely from America’s aviation landscape: over the next nine years, not a single commercial flight was seized
in American airspace. As the skyjacking threat grew more remote with each passing year, airlines came to view security as an expensive nuisance ripe for trimming. They doled out contracts to private firms that submitted absurdly low bids; those firms, in turn, routinely provided less personnel than promised, or hired screeners whose only training consisted of watching twenty-minute
instructional videos. By 2000 the average salary of an airport security officer
was just $12,000.

The airlines saw no reason to update their hijacking policies, which remained unchanged from the mid-1960s. Crew members were still instructed to offer hijackers their complete cooperation, on the assumption that such compliance would ultimately save lives. A hijacked crew’s main directive was to connect their captors with officials on the ground so that negotiations could commence. The airlines had every confidence that open dialogue would always lead to peaceful resolution.

No one in a position of authority fathomed a scenario in which skyjackers would have no interest in using their hostages as bargaining chips.

A
MOMENT AFTER
pressing Roger Holder’s buzzer for the first time, I noticed that his apartment building’s security gate was ajar. I nudged it open right as Holder was rounding the stucco wall at the entranceway’s rear. He was wearing a purple shirt unbuttoned to the sternum, dark-blue Levi’s, and black cowboy boots embroidered with floral patterns. He was taller and skinnier than I had imagined, with legs that loped in deep, graceful strides. His sleepy eyes and broad nose were much more prominent in real life than in photographs.

“I’m sorry, your—your gate here was already open,” I stammered, unsure of what to expect from an aging skyjacker dressed like a Reagan-era lothario.

Without saying hello, Holder inspected the gate’s bolt and knob, which seemed to operate to his liking. “Well, you always did remind me of a burglar,” he said, before beckoning me toward his ground-floor apartment with a flick of his head.

Holder’s place was cramped but tidy, with a collection of antique baskets nailed to the breakfast nook’s wall. Though the living room’s one window was open to the street, the air reeked of cigarette smoke; an abalone-shell ashtray was overflowing with Pall Mall butts. After offering me coffee and a deflated croissant, Holder showed off his Dell desktop computer and asked if I could help him set up the printer he had recently acquired; he was eager to get serious about finishing his memoirs.

Locating Holder had been a frustrating affair. After his release from federal custody in 1992, his name seldom showed up in public records—he was never arrested, never bought property, never seemed to hold a job. For many months, all I could unearth was a string of disconnected phone numbers and invalid addresses. His lawyers in the United States and France, his comrades from Vietnam, his Black Panther associates from Algeria—no one knew what had become of him. I only managed to find him thanks to a series of happy accidents—a bureaucrat’s failure to redact a Social Security number, Holder’s decision to update his voter registration, a letter that reached its mark despite being addressed to the wrong apartment.

Holder hadn’t left much of a paper trail because his life after 1992 had been remarkably sedate. When he returned to San Diego after the government’s conspiracy case fell apart, he discovered that Violetta Velkova had gone back to France and his brother Seavenes Jr. had moved to Sacramento. He used his disability payments to rent a tiny flat and occasionally worked as a day laborer. Seeing that Holder was struggling to get by, a shady acquaintance offered to employ him as a male escort, a job that paid far better than painting houses. Holder declined.

In November 1993 Holder attended a Thanksgiving dinner hosted by a friend of a friend. A fellow guest named Joy Gentilella, a health
aide and mother of five originally from New England, offered him a ride home. Gentilella had just gotten out of a bad marriage and wasn’t looking to start anything new. But she was drawn to Holder’s keen intelligence and off-kilter sense of humor. That weekend she and Holder went on their first date, an excursion to the beach. By Christmas, Holder had moved in to Gentilella’s place—the first of several apartments the couple would share over the years.

The loving Gentilella took care of all the couple’s financial needs, leaving Holder free to fill his days much as he had in Paris and Canisy: he chain-smoked Pall Malls during long strolls, built model helicopters, and jotted notes for his memoirs. Sometimes he brought vagrants home, to feed them and regale them with his musings on geopolitics. He drank a fair bit, too, to tamp down the anxiety that often overran his thoughts, but he never lost control—he was too afraid of disappointing Joy, who eventually took Holder’s surname even though they never married.

Holder tried several times to patch things up with his daughters, but he could never get past their bitterness; whenever he approached them to make amends, Teresa and Torrita would remind him that he had chosen Angela Davis over his own flesh and blood.
^*
But Holder did reconcile with his mother, Marie: when she fell gravely ill in 1994, she moved in with Joy and Roger. She remained with them until her death the following year, having achieved some small insight into her second son’s eccentric life.

Holder left the TV blaring as we sat down to talk that late-August morning in San Diego. As we chatted, he smoked in a curious manner, keeping three Pall Malls in play at all times; he would take a drag off one, stub it out, then move on to the next. “I quit for a long time, but I started back up last year,” he said apologetically, aware that the room’s tobacco haze was making my eyes water.

We spoke for many hours, stopping only to refill our mugs with
coffee and heaping spoonfuls of sugar. We went through his story step by step, starting with his happy childhood memories of accompanying his father to the Norfolk shipyards. Whenever we came to a painful moment—the grisly death of his friend Stanley Schroeder in Vietnam, his first wife’s betrayal—Holder would remove his eyeglasses and thoughtfully rub his chin and mouth before proceeding. But he was seldom shy about answering questions that conjured up raw emotions: he spoke frankly about his regrets over the way things had ended with the Army (“I’ve never been able to forgive myself for that”), the carnage he had seen and caused in Vietnam (“Death was mostly what I did”), and his lasting disdain for Eldridge Cleaver and the International Section (“The only thing I saw with the Panthers was that all of them were afraid to die for how they felt”).