Target Manhattan

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 fu

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.

Go on.

The weather was cloudy that day. Mostly cloudy, a few patches of hazy clear sky here and there. But of course he was well below the clouds. I suppose the clouds were at four or five thousand feet. They weren’t rain clouds.

Did that enter into your calculations?

It entered into our wishes, that’s for sure. But wishes don’t make facts. We saw pretty quickly how it would be easy to outfox him if the clouds were lower.

Oh? How?

Confuse his instruments when he was flying inside a cloud.

What good would that do?

Well, we figured it this way. There was one point where he was vulnerable. It was up at the top of his swing, when he was making that tight turn across the top of Central Park. If he miscalculated just a little bit, he’d be out over the Hudson River.

I see. Continue, please.

At that point the Hudson is more than a mile wide. We figured if you could coax him out over the Hudson, you could shoot him down. The altitude he was flying, he and his bombs would hit the river. They wouldn’t cross over as far as the New Jersey shore. He was only about a quarter of a mile above sea level.

There was no other point in his flight path which coincided with that possibility?

No. At the southern end of the oval-it was an oval, not a circle really-he had that other turn, a ninety-degree turn across the Wall Street district and then his figure eight over Brooklyn-but that took him across the East River, not the Hudson. The East River isn’t a river at all, it’s a saltwater cha

I see. Go on, then.

Well, a lot of this gets pretty technical. I’ll try to explain it as simply as I can, but you’ve got to remember it took a lot less time than this for O’Brien and me to discuss it, because we used a lot of airman’s shorthand.

I appreciate that. Do try to keep it to layman’s terms if you can.

Right. First, let’s consider the flight path. You draw a half-circle from Ninety-sixth and York Avenue to a Hundred and Tenth Street and Lenox Avenue-the peak of his swing-over to Ninety-sixth Street and Amsterdam Avenue. Manhattan is a bit less than two miles wide at that point. But the diameter of his circle was less than that. There’s a lot of centripetal force in a tight turn like that, and he was ending his turn above Amsterdam Avenue-which is four blocks inland from the Hudson River-because if he didn’t he’d be wide open. If his circle had been wider, we’d have been able to shoot him down while he was over West End Avenue, say, or Riverside Drive. The centripetal force would have spun both the airplane and the bombs out into the river.