Taking to the Skies

by Jim Eames

  13

  Messrs ‘Brown’ and ‘Smith’ and the business of extortion in the air

  The aviation industry has a unique vulnerability when it comes to extortion, and Australia’s Qantas has had more than its fair share of it. The fact is, any airliner, in the air with passengers, subject to threats related to altitude and barometric pressure, compresses the time frame in which crucial assessments, and the decisions resulting from them, must be made.

  Undoubtedly the best known in Qantas’ case was the famous incident on 26 May 1971 when the extortionist known as ‘Mr Brown’, subsequently revealed as Peter Pasquale Macari, got away with $500 000 after claiming there was a bomb on that day’s flight to Hong Kong.

  Initially it was no different to any other bomb hoax, something most airlines have become accustomed to over the years. In fact, the first call—to a Commonwealth policeman at Sydney airport—didn’t mention any particular flight, but simply indicated there was a bomb in a locker at the international terminal. But when police and airport officials opened the locker there was little doubt this was more than just a hoax call.

  Inside they found a bag containing the ingredients of a very workable bomb—twelve sticks of gelignite wired to an altimeter which could be set to explode as an aircraft descended through any pre-set altitude. Also inside were a batch of letters, one to police to tell them to alert Qantas’ general manager, Captain R.J. Ritchie, that there was a bomb on ‘QY755’ to Hong Kong and instructing police to take the bag and the bomb immediately to him; another saying a similar bomb was already aboard the aircraft and capable of exploding if the aircraft descended below 20 000 feet.

  A separate letter to Ritchie placed a demand for half a million unmarked dollars by 4 p.m. that day and announced a series of phone calls which would be made to him that afternoon containing further instructions. Once all instructions regarding the collection of the bomb had been followed, Mr Brown would divulge the height to which the bomb had been set, along with its hidden location on the airline’s Boeing 707. Another note, which contained a description of the bomb on the 707, revealed one critical difference to its locker counterpart. It said the bomb in the aircraft contained 24 sticks of gelignite.

  Convinced that the threat was real Qantas immediately advised Captain Bill Selwyn, now at 35 000 feet en route to Hong Kong, to maintain that altitude while searches were made both in the air and on the ground.

  With 126 passengers and crew aboard, Selwyn was quick to organise a preliminary search of the aircraft’s cabin to see if he could detect where the bomb might be placed, while other Qantas people on the ground at Mascot climbed over a similar Boeing 707 to discover any other places where a bomb could be hidden. They searched galleys, toilets, safety equipment stowages, behind access panels, even dropping the passengers’ oxygen masks to check their in-ceiling containers, all the while keeping Selwyn in the loop so that his crew could follow up on their suggestions.

  Meanwhile, at Qantas’ Hunter Street head office the money was being gathered from the Reserve Bank and Ritchie was going through a series of telephone conversations with Mr Brown, who finally directed that the money be placed in two suitcases and would be picked up near Qantas House sometime after 5.30 p.m.

  Selwyn, circling over New South Wales in Qantas Flight 755, was counting down his fuel supplies and estimating he would have to be on the ground at least by 7 p.m.

  Finally, at 5.30 p.m. Mr Brown rang again. In five minutes a yellow van would be outside Qantas House, the suitcases should be handed over and after the money was checked, Qantas would be informed of the location of the bomb and instructions on how to deal with it. Ritchie went downstairs with the suitcases and at precisely 5.46 p.m. a van arrived, the suitcases were handed over and the vehicle sped off.

  Police, meanwhile, had been preparing to nab Mr Brown, but a mix-up in communications and timing had robbed them of their chance. Having staked out the area but aware of how easy it was for criminals to monitor their radio calls, police unfortunately had to employ a somewhat cumbersome communications process which involved an alert signal being sent to their car radios, after which they went to a phone box to receive their orders. By the time they had received the details, Ritchie had handed over the money and Mr Brown had safely avoided their net.

  Just under twenty minutes after Ritchie had returned to his office, Mr Brown called again to announce there was no bomb on board QF755, Selwyn was cleared to land back at Sydney and the hunt was on for the culprit.

  As identikit images of the extortionist were compiled from Ritchie’s description of him, news of the hoax flashed around the world, but there was little for police to go on, beyond the fact that the van had been found abandoned near the intersection of Bathurst and George streets in Sydney. But as the weeks went by, Macari, alias ‘Mr Brown’, made several basic mistakes, not the least of which involved going on a spending spree. In Brisbane he purchased a Jaguar sports car for $5000 in cash using $20 notes, then several Mini Coopers and a Chevrolet Camaro, paid a deposit on a premises in Annandale in Sydney and made a downpayment towards a unit in Bondi.

  But by now police had narrowed down the origins of the gelignite to Mt Isa in Queensland, finally tracking down its source, but the critical break came when an informer provided police with a tip-off towards Macari and several friends who had assisted him. Arrested, Macari was charged and began to appear before the courts in September 1971 until, finally, late in January 1972, he was sentenced to fifteen years in gaol.

  Of the original $500 000, more than $100 000 of it was discovered by police in a bricked-up chimney in the Annandale premises, but much of the remainder was never recovered.

  One of the ironies of the ‘Mr Brown’ case was the fact that where the use of public telephone boxes by the police had played into the hands of the extortionist, on this occasion his use of a public phone box less than a kilometre away from the Qantas office would bring a would-be extortionist unstuck in a most bizarre way.

  Like ‘Mr Brown’, this later extortionist would be using an unimaginative nom de plume: ‘Mr Smith’. And in contrast to his predecessor and his international notoriety, he would remain virtually unknown. Now, almost fifteen years later, it’s even difficult to find out his real name.

  Mr Smith had two runs at his Qantas ‘target’, both within several months of each other in 1985, employing a pattern of behaviour with striking similarities to Mr Brown, at least as far as the ‘bomb’ was concerned. This time, however, on the first occasion, during a phone conversation with the airline’s Chief Operating Officer, John Ward, his ‘duplicate’ device was just up the road from Qantas’ main office, in the toilet of the Sportsman’s Bar at the Menzies Hotel.

  Acting on Ward’s instructions police found that, unlike Macari’s weapon, it lacked gelignite but had enough wiring and detonating devices to convince both the police and Qantas that the threat was real.

  Mr Smith’s nominated flight of choice was the airline’s daily QF43 Boeing 747 service to Auckland, New Zealand, his demand was for $300 000 and, after a number of phone conversations between Ward and Smith, and with Qantas’ Corporate Secretary, Les Fisk, in the throes of arranging for the money, the exchange never quite reached that point where pickup details were discussed. Then the phone calls stopped.

  But several months later, Smith was back again, this time following through with a whole series of calls starting late on the morning of 23 April 1985 and ending in what Ward would later describe as a situation ‘almost straight out of a Mack Sennett movie!’. Once again it was a threat against the Auckland flight.

  This time, police were being led by Criminal Investigation Branch Senior Detective Michael O’Brien, one of the state’s most respected officers, and were ready to act. Ward remembers O’Brien, who, prior to his death at an early age in the 1990s, arrived in his office that day casually dressed in tan slacks and a light blue shirt.

  He appeared the quintessential old-style policeman, fit and as tough as nails. I rem
ember assuming that the way he was dressed he couldn’t possibly have a weapon on him, then when he sat down I saw he had one strapped to his lower leg!

  O’Brien walked Ward through each of the calls coming in from Mr Smith through public phones as they tried to keep the man on the line for as long as possible. Between phone calls, O’Brien’s team, acting on the call pattern from the earlier Mr Smith experience, began to deduce that he was moving from station to station through the inner-city rail network. So they set about trying to match the pattern by placing plainclothes police near phone boxes at Central and Wynyard stations and while Ward continued to take the extortionist’s calls, O’Brien was working his radio with his own police between railway stations.

  Again, however, there were unforseen communications problems which came to a head when Mr Smith made what was to be his final call to Ward. At the precise time Ward received Smith’s next call, one of Michael O’Brien’s surveillance police called O’Brien from a phone booth to tell him his police radio was not functioning properly in the underground complex. Years later Ward still chuckles about what happened next.

  I’m talking to Smith and Mick’s in the middle of this conversation where his own man is asking him if they can stand down as their radios are no good when suddenly the cop in the phone box says to Mick something like: ‘Hang on a minute. The bloke in the phone box next to me is wearing plastic gloves.’

  So I’m still in the middle of the conversation with Smith when suddenly I hear a crash through the phone line and then a gurgling sound. I think he must have grabbed him around the throat!

  Company Secretary, Les Fisk, also in the room, well remembers hearing the policeman shouting through the phone line: ‘I’ve got him. I’ve got him.’

  Finding genuine police charges or Qantas files on Mr Smith is difficult although Ward says he later turned out to be a disgruntled kangaroo shooter from northern Australia who was annoyed at a government decision to withdraw a bounty. ‘I think he must have then decided to take it out on the “big roo”,’ Ward says with a smile.

  I seem to recall he later appeared briefly as something of an ‘expert’ on a television programme about another extortion bid, but fortunately he never came our way again.

  However, not all extortion attempts end in the capture of the culprit. Queensland police were flung headlong into an extortion of their own in the 1980s when Trans-Australia Airlines (TAA) in Brisbane received a threatening letter from a group signing themselves as ‘Survival Security Team (Group 5)’.

  The letter claimed to TAA that a display aircraft on the perimeter of Brisbane airport had been ‘successfully attacked and damaged with one of our missiles from a range of approximately 150 metres (this missile contained a token load, for the purpose of demonstration).’ The letter went on to demand that unless $500 000 in US and Australian dollars was enclosed in a double black plastic garbage bag and placed in a rental car with a driver subject to further instructions, then one of the airline’s aircraft would be destroyed. Just to make sure the instructions were being followed, the group planned to place a parked car with 63 litres of petrol in a public place, to be detonated should any attempt be made to ‘deviate’ from these commands.

  Police soon learned that the already damaged aircraft was in fact a Canberra jet bomber, part of a museum display on the fringes of the airport. Inspection found it had certainly been hit by a missile of some sort.

  For days police staked out various sites in an effort to apprehend the extortionists, at the same time releasing details of the letter. Even the then federal minister for administrative services, Kevin Newman, saw fit to break into print with a press release with the result that scores of ‘confessions’ and literally hundreds of hoax calls bombarded the police emergency line.

  Embarrassingly, as it turned out, police would have no luck apprehending their quarry although their efforts were not without some unforseen outcomes. One report instructed police to place the bag of money under a bridge over the Brisbane River. They did so and then waited for the appearance of someone to collect it. Eventually they noticed a lone kayaker stroking his way down the river and as he neared the bridge the waiting police swooped, dragging him ashore. Unfortunately their startled target turned out to be just what he appeared to be—an innocent kayaker.

  After a week or so a further letter arrived, this time to the officer in charge of the police operation, informing him that the ‘TAA emergency’ was at an end and there had never been any intent to cause harm or collect the ransom.

  We placed ourselves at great risk in order to graphically demonstrate the potential danger that we are all subjected to due to ineffective flight-path security. Any city dweller could be a victim of disaster.

  Survival Security Team also apologised to the air museum, ‘but consider that at this instant, there [sic] old war bird has served the Australian people more now than at any time in its career.’

  This letter was scant comfort to the police who came in for a drubbing by sections of the media, charging that Queensland authorities had demonstrated a reluctance to cooperate with federal authorities on the extortion threat. The most cutting appraisal came from an editorial in the Australian:

  In typical fashion, Queensland has gone for the grandstand approach. The extortion melodrama involving a threat to shoot down a TAA jet has been produced, directed by, and starred, a Queensland cast.

  The fact that the production sometimes resembled an aerial Keystone Cops has done little to reassure the public that our skies would be safe if their policing was left to the Queensland constabulary.

  In recent days, the public has been treated to a spectacle of police blundering around Brisbane suburbs trying to hand over a million-dollar ransom which apparently even the extortionist did not seriously expect them to deliver.

  One assumes even the hapless kayaker would tend to agree.

  14

  Buying a Boeing

  It’s not that different to buying a new car, really. At some point there’s an attractive brochure with photographs of the exterior all shiny and new, with glossy shots of the range of interiors you can choose from, depending on the type of use you’re going to put it to. Other attributes to attract the discerning buyer, such as the differences in horsepower of the engine on offer and the customised interior comfort you can choose, all come at a cost, of course.

  There’s the usual argy-bargy about the price, but if you’re finally happy with that you sign the order form and you are now on the way to having it come off the factory assembly line and taking it for your first test ‘drive’. Except we’re not talking about the average BMW, Ford or Toyota and this time the financial outlay involved is counted in millions. We’re buying a Boeing.

  While the Boeing 747 jumbo jet has now been surpassed as the giant of the skies by aircraft like Airbus Industrie’s A380, it’s worth pondering just what a leap of faith it was for the manufacturer and the airlines when it arrived on the scene more than 40 years ago, and the sometimes surprising procedures an airline adopts to make sure it flies right. Let’s take Qantas as an example.

  It’s not too much of an exaggeration to suggest that a team of Boeing people arrived on the airline’s doorstep one day and announced they had a new project in hand. Along with other US manufacturers, such as Lockheed, they’d been asked to submit a proposal for a large transport aircraft for use by the US military. It needed to be large alright—in fact capable of carrying troops and their heaviest armoured equipment to the war zone. Boeing, however, were hedging their bets. They’d come up with the idea that if they missed out on the military tender they could look at developing a similar giant for civil passenger use.

  Since it was the first non-American airline to purchase the Boeing 707, Qantas had become something of a special customer of Boeing’s, the airline’s unique long-range route structure calling for the manufacturer to improve the range and performance of the 707 to the point where other airlines followed Qantas’ lead into Boeing’s order boo
k.

  But when that Boeing team arrived, Qantas executive Bob Walker had his doubts about such a concept. The 707 in use had around 120 passengers and here were these people, with the cheap-fare regime not yet on the horizon, suggesting an aeroplane twice the size.

  ‘When they said it would be about the size of a Manly ferry and will carry 350 passengers I said, jokingly: “Go away.”’ He even pointed out that if two or three airlines in the region got together they might buy one of them!

  But dramatic changes were about to take place in the airline industry with the advent of excursion fares tapping a whole new market and a surge of charter operators in Europe and other parts of the world offering cheap packages. Ultimately, Boeing missed out on the military tender to an aircraft which subsequently became known as the Lockheed C-5A Galaxy, and the 747 was on its way.

  By now Qantas studies had confirmed the 747’s advantages. They didn’t come cheap at $18 million each, but Qantas figured if they worked it hard and took advantage of its low, break-even seat factor they could make it pay. So, in August 1967 they ordered four.

  Walker remembers his visits to Boeing in Seattle in the early days of the 747’s development, seeing for the first time the mock-ups of what was to come and wondering whether its size would ever let it get off the ground. He admits being in awe of the concept: cabin interiors with two aisles, stairways up to what would start off as cockpit space but morph into an upper-deck lounge, an undercarriage with four sets of wheels. But he soon got used to it and even became caught up in the excitement of it all.

  Pan American World Airways had signed up for 30 aircraft as the launch customer for the first production run, to be known as the 100 series, with Boeing estimating if they sold 200 of the giants they would break even. (The total number of 747s sold would eventually reach around 1500.)