Part 3, page 10

Transcript

The scan is the source; the transcript is machine-generated from it.

in $20 and $50 bills, concealed in several envelopes and buried in my tennis equipment case.

Shortly after checking into The Swept Wing Motel, near the Seattle airport, Thomas arrived, and minutes later, Cooper himself appeared, entering my room furtively from the parking lot. He was a nervous, slightly-built, balding, middle-aged man who wore a black raincoat, black shoes and black gloves. He kept the gloves on while he chain-smoked filter cigarettes. He spoke in a raspy voice that reminded me instantly of the Pueblo spy ship commander Pete Bucher.

Cooper was anxious to have the money handed over. But I insisted on seeing the real money, whereupon Thomas extracted a wallet and produced three crisp $20 bills. I checked their serial numbers against the FBI list. They matched.

Cooper asked if I would like to have the three $20 bills. "And I have $199,940 more of them buried in the ground that I will be happy to give you in exchange for other bills," he said. I told him I didn't think I wanted to have any stolen bills in my possession.

I continued to hesitate, prodding Cooper to yield up details of the hijacking — few of which had appeared in the press. He began hesitantly, but soon convinced me I had the right man. Subsequently I handed over the money, with the stipulation that it be held for Cooper's legal defense were he caught. What helped convince me was what Cooper said was his motive.

He was raised in an authoritarian Catholic household, Cooper said, and

---

his masculinity [illegible] associated with his ability to provide for himself and to earn a good living. When all of a sudden he is unable to do this, if he has been a red-blooded man who stood on his feet and worked all his life and asked no quarter from anyone, asked for nothing, then you in effect have emasculated this man. It means cut the balls off him."

Item: "I guess you would have to say that sex is better on payday."

Item: "You work hard for Dear Old Ironworks and do a good job and put in your years there and do the best you can and make money for them and get along well with everyone and you will be rewarded. Because besides your paycheck and your annual leave and your vacation, if you get a little higher up, you can look forward to a bonus and the pension and be well-fed and, of course, you'll get the gold watch or whatever."

That was D.B. Cooper, and that was the way he had lived his life, patiently hoeing out the row, obeying the rules, and waiting to cash in on the American Dream, as advertised.

Bitter Payoff

His payoff, he related bitterly, came one day when he went to his Boeing desk and found a pink slip of dismissal. He was crushed.

"It made me feel just like the first time I jumped out of an airplane... just bereft of everything that's inside you, that's all," he said.

He was being replaced, he discovered, by a man 15 years his junior, a junior man he had carefully trained. He had been a believer, an unquestioning cog, but now a jolt of hard truth hit him: "You're dead wood. If they could, they'd

---

finally, he [illegible] something inimical to everything he stood for, he went to the unemployment office. A typically crisp, impersonal, juiceless woman bureaucrat, he said, coolly interrogated him about his qualifications, then suggested he take a job as an "aide." He left in a boiling rage. The humiliation of that experience, the anger at being fired and tossed on the junkheap, the betrayal of his friends — they all came together at once and washed over him in tear-scalding anger.

He couldn't get work. His pride was deteriorating. He began to contemplate suicide. Pills, he finally decided, would be the way. He tried, but he couldn't do it. The Catholic Church had instilled too strongly in him that suicide, like marital infidelity, is a sin.

At home every day, he read a lot of newspapers. They were full of hijacking stories, which he read after vainly searching the classified job section.

"So then, I started thinking about it," he said. "The more I thought about it, the more I thought how easy it would be. Because the security is very weak, very lax, almost non-existent. So I started to organize, mentally, to do this. I would go on with everyday living. But I would begin to think about this in earnest."

Then followed a period of moral wrestling: "There's the code: you can't take what's not yours. But wait a minute. Who says it's not mine? Where would this money come from? Either the stockholders or the company that insures them. Now, wait a minute. Insurance. Who has a strangle hold on the American economy? Insurance companies. And

---

the insurance companies, they're trying to hide the money. They're buying land. They're loaning money. They're building skyscrapers. They're into everything. And then you get thoughts like: how many millionaires made $1 last year and didn't pay taxes. And look at the oil companies. I could put the money I would steal down as a depletion allowance," Cooper said.

So he planned. "I didn't want to give anything I had up, and in order to even maintain what I had, I had to do something. And then I was, if you'll pardon the expression, very much pissed off right then. So more and more, I planned, for over a year, and still I was not sure I would go through with it. But my bitterness was changing to hard cynicism."

If he did it, how much money would he ask? Had he worked at Boeing to retirement, his annual income, with company

---

Karl Fleming and D. B. Cooper

---

0 1 N M ♣ U 1 O r 8 0 0 0 1 N M ♣ U 1 O r 8 0 0 0 1 N ♣ U 1 O r 8 0 0 0 1 N M ♣ U 1 O r 8 0 0 0 r 8 0 0 0 - N - 0