Target Manhattan

by Brian Garfield

  I’m being rather patient about this, I think, Mr. Skinner, but I don’t really think that sort of petty accusation deserves to be dignified by an answer.

  Of course. You had both the responsibility and the authority, as chief executive officer of the bank.

  Yes.

  And, of course, the money was insured.

  There seems to be some dispute whether it was insured against this type of crime.

  Oh?

  I’m sure we’ll iron out those definitions to our satisfaction. There isn’t an insurance company in the world that won’t try to renege if they think they can get away with it. They couldn’t make it stick, of course, but it is the sort of fine print that makes it possible for insurance companies to drag their heels and delay payments. Time is money, of course—the more an insurance company can delay paying, the less it costs them to pay. Aren’t we getting off the track?

  Yes, I suppose we are. Let’s return to the decision you had made, to raise the money.

  May I offer a comment on that?

  Certainly.

  I made two decisions, actually. One was to raise the money, if at all possible in the time allowed us. The second decision, of course, was to pay the ransom. The two were separate.

  I understand that.…

  The point is we had some small reason to hope that the authorities would find some method of dealing with the threat. I tried to give them full cooperation, of course. If there was any chance of forestalling the threat, it would make it unnecessary for us to actually pay the ransom. But I had to try to raise the money anyway. You see that.

  Of course. Now you spoke with your executive vice-president, Mr. Prince, at a few minutes before eleven. What was the result of that conversation?

  Mr. Prince told me he’d get back to me as soon as he’d found out our cash-on-hand situation.

  And he did so?

  Of course. He called me back and informed me that—

  At what time did he call you back?

  Around eleven twenty, I suppose. There were several police officers in the office by then, interrogating Ryterband and tying up my phones a good part of the time.

  And what did Mr. Prince say?

  He said there wasn’t a chance of getting that much cash together within the time limit from our own resources. We have more than forty branch offices and they’re located throughout the metropolitan area. Given enough time we might have been able to do it, but the deadline made it logistically impossible.

  What did you do then?

  I immediately called our chief cashier, Mr. Valkenburg, and explained the problem to him. I suggested several possibilities.

  Could you give me an example or two?

  Well, we could have called all the various banks in the Wall Street area, for example. Made up a consortium, got contributions from a lot of different banks. Or we could call the Federal Reserve. Or we could—

  In the end that’s what Mr. Valkenburg did, isn’t it? Called the Federal Reserve?

  Yes. That was his decision. I left it up to him. Emmett Valkenburg has one of the keenest minds in this business. He thinks fast, he’s decisive, he’s a go-getter.

  He’s also got a rather sharp sense of humor, I’ve been told.

  Have you met him yet?

  No. We’ve scheduled an interview for later this week.

  You’ll enjoy meeting him. He’ll leaven your proceedings, I can promise you that.

  You left the implementation of the decision up to him?

  Yes. I’ve found the single secret of administration is to hire the best people you can get and then rely on them. I relied on Emmett Valkenburg to find the fastest method of raising the money. I don’t think my judgment was misplaced.

  Eastlake

  Your name, please?

  David Eastlake.

  Your title and position, Mr. Eastlake?

  I’m the assistant director of the Federal Reserve Bank for the New York district.

  Then you’re the chief operating executive officer of the New York Federal Reserve Bank?

  That’s right, yes, sir.

  Have you prepared a statement for this inquiry?

  No, sir. I wasn’t aware one was required.

  We have no requirements, Mr. Eastlake. Some of the witnesses have prepared statements and some haven’t. Now, with reference to the Craycroft case, I wonder, could you give us the time and circumstances of your first participation?

  I had a call from the disposal office at approximately half past twelve—

  On May twenty-second?

  Yes. They’d had a call from the Merchants Trust. They wanted five million in cash, and the story was they had to have it by three o’clock or those madmen would blow up the city.

  “The story was.” Didn’t you believe it?

  I suppose I took a little convincing. It was a little farfetched.

  This was at about twelve thirty?

  I don’t keep time-clock records of incoming calls, but it was around that time, yes.

  What did you do?

  I tried to put through a call to the president of Merchants Trust.

  Mr. Maitland.

  That’s right. But he was unavailable. At first my secretary was told he was in conference. I told her to place the call again and tell them it was an emergency. She did so, and she was told—

  By Mr. Maitland’s secretary?

  I guess so. She was told he had an emergency himself. I had to tell her to place the call a third time and explain to the damn fools that their emergency was our emergency. They were the ones who had called us in the first place.

  And did you finally get through to Paul Maitland?

  Eventually.

  What time was that?

  I don’t know. It may have been a quarter to one, ten to one, by that time.

  What was said between you and Mr. Maitland?

  I couldn’t give you a verbatim account of that. I don’t have that kind of memory. And anyhow there was an incredible amount of noise. He sounded as if he had fifty people crowded into his office and all of them trying to talk at once. I had trouble hearing him. I could imagine the trouble he must have had hearing me.

  What was the gist of the conversation?

  I guess the first thing I asked him was whether this wild story was true. He confirmed it. I think he asked me whether Emmett Valkenburg had called me, and I said, no, it had been somebody in my own bank, and we must have wasted a few minutes asking each other to repeat everything so that we could hear each other. I was shouting into the phone and so was he. Finally he said he was between a rock and a hard place. He said he had a lunatic up there and another lunatic in an airplane. If he didn’t come up with the money, they were threatening to bomb New York. He didn’t have the money, and he wanted us to send it up.

  What was your reply to that request?

  I had no authority to release five million dollars to anyone. I told him that.

  Was that all that was said?

  Of course not. He pleaded with me. Then he called me names. It was understandable, under the circumstances. I didn’t get angry with him. He simply didn’t understand my position. My hands were tied.

  There’s no provision for emergencies in your directives from Washington?

  No emergency like this ever came up before. How could anyone have foreseen something like this?

  Was anything else said during that conversation?

  Maitland was fit to be tied. You couldn’t blame him. He kept pleading with me. I said I’d telephone Washington and do everything I could to get the money released.

  And did you call Washington?

  Of course. Immediately.

  What was the result of that call?

  Nothing. They were out to lunch.

  O’Brien (Cont’d)

  Sergeant, at what time did it become evident to you that there was a good chance the bank might not be able to raise the money in time, despite its best efforts to do so?

  Pretty early, sir. We
could all see that. It was a hell of a lot of money to get up in a couple of hours. Money doesn’t have habit of moving fast, not unless it’s crime money.

  When we were setting up this commission, the Mayor threw out the suggestion that Craycroft and Ryterband must have realized that.

  Yes, sir. I think a lot of us thought about that at the time.

  Did it lead you to a particular conclusion?

  I wouldn’t call it a conclusion. It wasn’t definite.

  A speculation, then.

  (Laughter) Sir, you don’t have any idea how many times I’ve been stopped dead in court by a lawyer who jumps up and yells an objection about “speculation on the part of the witness.”

  We’re not in court, Sergeant. I’d appreciate having your views.

  Well, sir, I was talking with Jack Harris—you know, the reporter who was up there with his television film. I know Harris for a long time. He’s a real reporter, one of the good guys. He talks, you pay attention. Now there’s a big crowd of us in the room there, and after Captain Grofeld got there and the FBI was swarming all over Ryterband, there wasn’t a hell of a lot for me to do there. I was over by the window with Harris, we were watching the damned B-17 circle over. We got to talking. You know how it is.

  Yes.

  Well, they’d worked this caper out in fantastic detail, you know. We could see that right away. They weren’t just bumbling around. They’d figured just about everything. They weren’t dumb.

  And?

  It was kind of hard to believe that anybody who’d gone to all that trouble would forget an item as important as the time it took to raise that much money.

  What did you deduce from that?

  Well, sir, we kind of figured maybe they didn’t really expect anybody to come up with the money in time.

  Oh?

  Yes, sir. They were nut cases, that was self-evident. And it seemed to us it was just possible they didn’t want us to be able to come up with the money in time.

  Why?

  Because if we didn’t produce the money, it would give them the excuse they were looking for. To bomb hell out of New York.

  Azzard (Cont’d)

  In terms of enforcement procedures your office decided to handle this case according to the procedures devised for dealing with kidnappings, isn’t that right?

  Essentially, yes. A hostage—the city—was being held for ransom. In principle it was the same thing as a kidnapping. A mass kidnapping.

  And the FBI is specifically organized to deal with the crime of kidnapping.

  That’s right. As a result of the Lindbergh case, kidnapping was made a federal offense and came under the jurisdiction of government authority. We’re the enforcement arm.

  Now, you have specific procedures for dealing with such cases?

  Yes. We’ve had a lot of experience with ransom cases.

  What are those procedures, in principle?

  The first priority is the safety of the victim. The second priority is the apprehension of the perpetrators. The third is the recovery of the ransom.

  In other words your regulations specify that no action be taken which might jeopardize the safety of the victim.

  That’s correct. Of course, in certain kidnapping cases we’ve had peculiar problems along those lines.

  Such as?

  Well, sometimes you develop clues which indicate that the kidnappers intend to kill the victim whether or not the ransom is paid. In cases like that, sometimes you have to go ahead and move in on them even though you know it’s a risk.

  Was this case in that category?

  Not to our knowledge, no.

  It’s been suggested Craycroft and Ryterband knew there wouldn’t be time to deliver the money. That they were simply looking for an excuse to bomb the city.

  Well, they could have bombed it right at the start, if that was all they wanted. I don’t really buy that theory.

  It has some rationale behind it, Mr. Azzard. They might have tried to justify such intentions by blaming the city itself for not producing the ransom. “You brought it on yourself,” that kind of rationalization.

  Maybe. I’m not convinced.

  So you didn’t feel you’d be justified in moving in on Craycroft before the ransom was paid, even if there were some way to get at him?

  No. Our recommendation was to pay the ransom, and worry about recovering it after the threat had been removed.

  To whom did you make that recommendation?

  Specifically to Mr. Maitland, to Captain Grofeld, and—when he arrived—to Deputy Police Commissioner Toombes.

  And did they agree with your analysis?

  So far as I know they did. They didn’t argue the point.

  What procedure did you have in mind to recover the ransom?

  You try to use as many as you can. Circumstances differ, of course. In this case we had one built-in advantage. If the money was coming from the Federal Reserve disposal office, it meant they already had records of the serial numbers of the bills.

  That’d be a pretty unpromising way of tracing the money, wouldn’t it?

  It’s paid off now and then in the past. I grant you it’s slow. Usually by the time somebody spots a wanted bill in circulation, it’s been passed five or six times from hand to hand. But sooner or later you usually manage to trace one back to its source.

  What other methods did you elect to employ in this case?

  We decided to bring in three bleepers.

  Could you explain that term, for the record?

  Miniature battery-operated transmitters. It’s SOP to conceal them, for example, in the locks of suitcases in which the ransom is delivered. A direction finder can pinpoint the location of the bleeper by radio triangulation. It makes it possible for us to follow the ransom without showing ourselves.

  So you decided to put minature transmitters into the cases in which the ransom would be delivered to Ryterband?

  Yes. Two of those—one would be fairly obvious and the other would be well concealed. The theory was that we expected him to find the obvious one, and ditch it. Then he’d think he was safe. We’d still have the concealed one, to lead us to him afterward. But we had an additional advantage in this case. We had Ryterband himself. He was in that room with us for hours. We secreted a bleeper on Ryterband, without his knowledge.

  How did you do that?

  I had it brought up to the office from our headquarters by an agent. We slipped it to Agent Barstow, who’s quite deft. He managed to attach it to the back of Ryterband’s belt while Ryterband was looking out the window at Craycroft’s plane. Ryterband wasn’t aware of the contact; we distracted him by having Agent Cobb jostle him. Rather like a pickpocket.

  Very ingenious.

  It’s a procedure we’ve rehearsed regularly. We employ it fairly frequently, for various purposes. Both bleepers and bugs.

  So you were fairly certain of being able to track Ryterband if he took delivery of the ransom and drove away.

  Yes. As long as we could stay within about four miles of him. The effective transmitting range of the bleepers is about four miles in urban areas. More, of course, in open areas—up to about ten miles.

  That extended range would apply to the open water?

  That would depend on the amount of insulation around him. If he was on an ocean liner, for example, the range would be restricted by all the metal around him. On a small open boat we could pick him up from twelve or fifteen miles away.

  Did you take any other official action at that time, other than fixing these radio-tracking devices to Ryterband and preparing two others for attachment to the ransom?

  Yes. We made continuous efforts to talk Craycroft out of it, by using Ryterband’s transmitter.

  Did Craycroft respond?

  Not to us. He talked only to Ryterband.

  Did you record those radio conversations between Ryterband and Craycroft?

  We tape-recorded the ones that took place after about one o’clock. Prior to that time we didn�
��t have a recorder, but we made stenographic notes of the conversations. I can’t say we got anything very useful from them. They both knew the conversations were being monitored.Our people were standing right beside him when he was on the radio. They weren’t very likely to give us any information that would help us.

  What did they talk about?

  Ryterband did most of the talking. Keeping Craycroft abreast of what was going on in the office. Telling him they were making efforts to get the money together.

  What was the nature of Craycroft’s responses?

  Hard to tell. He said very little. Most of it was radio jargon. One-word responses like “affirmative,” “acknowledge,” “roger,” “negative,” that kind of thing. I was told by the reporter, Harris, that Craycroft was probably having his hands full flying the airplane and didn’t have a lot of time to devote to chatter. Evidently what he was doing was quite difficult. I wouldn’t know much about that end of it.

  Then you were content to let them take the ransom and then go after them afterward?

  That’s our standard procedure in ransom cases. But the problem here was that we didn’t know whether the money could be delivered in time. We had to try to work out ways to neutralize Craycroft’s bomber, because the money might not materialize. That wasn’t a matter of choice. It was dictated by the facts.

  Adler (Cont’d)

  General, did you at one point recommend that Charles Ryterband be taken up onto the roof of the bank?

  I didn’t recommend it. I suggested it as one possible action.

  To what purpose?

  I told them they could try it. Take him up on the rooftop and hold a gun to his head. Tell the man in the plane that if he didn’t buzz off, we’d shoot the son of a bitch in the head. The suggestion was vetoed. I didn’t hold out much hope for it. Again, it was a military solution to a peacetime problem, and I suppose the two don’t gel.

  Did you really think it would have worked?

  It might have been worth a try. We didn’t have any idea how close the two men were. But Ryterband kept talking about his “brother.” I figured it might be worth a try.

  But it was vetoed. By whom?