Part 50, page 183

Transcript

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

James Brown (l.) and Jack Coffelt at Bannock, Montana during their 1974 journey to Oregon. Photo by Byron Brown.

At various times, FBI agents close to the case have expressed the opinion that Jack Coffelt's story was too littered with "James Bondery" to be given any credibility. All his "wild bluster" about beepers sending out homing signals from a hidden jeep, fires set up on the ground as signal lights, and accomplices standing by with walkie-talkies evoked too much of a Hollywood aura. Why not just hide the parachutes instead of spraying them with a magnesium compound and torching them, as Coffelt claimed he did?

Even after Florence Schaffner identified Coffelt as the skyjacker, the FBI insisted that he was nowhere near Oregon when the crime took place, saying instead that he was then in the Washington D.C. area. But they wouldn't tell us where. "We've narrowed it down to days and hours," one agent told me flatly. "You've got the wrong man."

But one of Coffelt's most intimate acquain- tances, his best friend and trusted confidant, in fact, for nearly twenty years, Memphis attorney Robert Dobbs, who provided the old con-man with legal help more than once when Jack was in trouble, told me: "Jack was meticulous enough to have planned all the things" neces- sary to pull off the skyjacking. And for anyone who doubted it: "... then they don't know the real Jack Coffelt! You'd have to know Coffelt personally to be able to appreciate the significance of all of it!"

As tantalizing proof of his claim, Dobbs went to his library and brought back two valu- able relics straight from the dusky corridors of American history: the exquisitely carved ivory riding crop (a gift to the 16th President from the Emperor of Japan) and the gold pocket- watch and fob of Abraham Lincoln! "Jack gave me these once as payment for my legal services," he explained with a wink. The amazing story of how Jack came to acquire

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84 NOVEMBER 1983/LAS VEGAS MAGAZINE

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DB Cooper-20788