The 6,900-Mile Skyjack

With all the casual calm of a Grand Canyon-on-your-left announcement, Pilot Donald Cook's voice came over the public-address system: "There's a man here who wants to go somewhere, and he's just chartered himself an airplane." The 39 passengers on TWA Flight 85, over Fresno and bound for San Francisco, suddenly realized that they had joined the growing ranks of the skyjacked. It was not simply the 55th case of skyjacking in 1969; it turned out to be the longest and oddest pirated flight in aviation history.

One man, armed with a folding-stock M-l carbine, changed Flight 85 from a routine run into a fantastic flying hegira that led all the way across the U.S. and then over the Atlantic to a bizarre conclusion in Rome. All through its strange progress, the changing track of Flight 85 compelled the attention of the earthbound: the FBI, air-traffic controllers, and--quite understandably --President Forwood Wiser of TWA, who sat out the 17-hour ordeal with other top company executives at the airline's Manhattan headquarters. Said a Federal Aviation Agency official: "That flight was handled as if it were Air Force One." The general public of two continents hung on Flight 85's every move, fascinated by the airborne drama. Once again it was evident that the awesome machines of the jet age can become even more fragile hostages than the hapless crews themselves.

The skyjacker himself was an especially unlikely sort. A young (20 last week), pleasant-looking Marine veteran of Viet Nam, Lance Corporal Rafael Minichiello was absent without leave from Camp Pendleton, Calif. The Italian-born lad thought the Corps had cheated him of $200 in pay. To get even, he had broken into a PX and was facing a special court-martial when he quit Pendleton.

Warning Shot. After Flight 85 left Los Angeles, Stewardess Tanya Novacoff saw Minichiello fiddling with something under his seat. "Oh, I'm putting together a fishing rod," he explained. The fishing rod was the carbine, and a few minutes later Stewardess Charlene Delmonico was marching up to the cockpit in front of Minichiello with the weapon in her back. "I mean business," said Minichiello.

Once inside the cockpit, Minichiello held the carbine at the flight engineer's head and ordered Pilot Cook to head for New York. Cook laconically radioed the FAA control center in Oakland: "Rerouting to change to New York on account of hijacking." FBI agents hastened to Kennedy Airport, but in the meantime Cook persuaded the skyjacker to let him put down at Denver to refuel and allow the passengers and three of the four stewardesses to disembark. Fearful of making a dangerous situation worse, ground personnel did not intervene. After the Denver stop, the red and white jet took off again. Minichiello ordered Cook to stop at the end of a refueling apron far from the Kennedy Airport terminal buildings. FBI agents approached the plane, but Cook warned them away; at TWA's request, they did not open fire.

Minichiello wanted the plane to head for Europe. TWA scrambled to find two pilots qualified for the transatlantic run, since Cook and the rest of the Flight 85 cockpit crew were checked out only for domestic flights. Pilots Richard Hastings and Billy Williams, both 24-year veterans at TWA, volunteered to go along. Minichiello allowed them aboard, but suddenly he got jumpy. He fired a warning shot, which ricocheted harmlessly off an emergency oxygen bottle on the cockpit ceiling. Then Minichiello insisted that the jet take off at once. Trailed by a small plane full of FBI men, it flew northeast to Bangor, Me., to take on fuel for the ocean crossing. Again Minichiello passed the word through Cook that only the fueling crew was to come near the Boeing. Soon the jet was airborne once more, this time for Shannon and Rome, with only the skyjacker, Volunteer Stewardess Tracey Coleman, and a crew of five on board.

Minichiello, guzzling coffee to stay awake, was sometimes brusque, sometimes polite, alternately vague and acute. As the Jet approached Rome's Leonardo da Vinci di Fiumicino airport, Minichiello issued an elaborate set of instructions to the control tower. The plane was to be directed to a remote parking spot; a "police chief" was to drive up alone and unarmed, and come aboard in his shirtsleeves.

After some 20 minutes, all that was arranged and the Boeing 707 landed.

About 200 police stood guard from a discreet distance. Pietro Guli, chief of the airport police, volunteered to go aboard. Eventually he re-emerged with Minichiello, who got into the back seat of Guli's Alfa Romeo, pointed his carbine and asked him in Neapolitan-accented Italian to drive away. Only three miles out of Rome, Minichiello ordered Guli from the car and then drove on a short distance before jumping out and heading across the fields. As some 800 police and four helicopters fanned out in search, Minichiello wandered through the vineyard-dotted countryside for more than four hours, changing his clothes at least twice and finally abandoning the carbine and a bag with 250 rounds of ammunition. Police caught up with him at the 18th century Sanctuary of the Madonna of Divine Love, just a mile from the Via Appia Antica, where he surrendered quietly.

Kill or Be Killed. "Why did I do it?" he wondered aloud after his arrest. "I don't know." Pilot Cook thought that Minichiello had suicidal tendencies. Stewardess Coleman said Minichiello "wanted someone to come out to the plane so that he could kill them or be killed himself." Perhaps the troubled Marine, whose mother and sister live in Seattle, wanted to see his ailing 80-year-old father, who returned to Italy a year ago. If that was his aim, he chose an irrational way to achieve it. Italian authorities announced that Minichiello will stand trial for kidnaping and hijacking. In New York, U.S. officials filed charges of air piracy, kidnaping and other offenses that carry penalties from 20 years' imprisonment to death. At his Marine Corps court-martial, Minichiello faced a maximum sentence of only six months in the brig without pay and a bad-conduct discharge.

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