Part 50, page 189

Transcript

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

FLYING BANNERS TO ADVERTISE OR CELEBRATE ANYTHING Listen for our traffic reports over KRAM Country 1340AM

[upside-down text on banner: OLD EMBARRASSING]

Nevada Air Advertising NEVADA AIR ADVERTISING 5030 PARADISE ROAD, STE. B206, LAS VEGAS, NV A DIVISION OF COMMERCIAL AIR CHARTER, INC. (702) 798-4644 or 798-4060

---

You're not just moving in, You're moving up.

DURABLE DEVELOPERS offers Affordable Dream Homes in every price range.

1 OESTE VILLAS from the high $60's 2-3-4 bedrooms / up to 2½ baths 646-3070

2 VILLA BONITA ESTATES from the $130's 3-4-5 bedrooms / up to 3 baths 876-9301

3 RANCHO PLAZAS from the $100's 2-3-4 bedrooms / up to 2½ baths 871-4208

4 HACIENDAS DE PECOS from the low $100's 3-4-5 bedrooms / up to 3 baths 451-8078

5 SUNBURST from the high $60's 2-3-4 bedrooms / up to 2½ baths 361-2919

6 DISCOVERY from the low $60's 2-3 bedrooms / up to 2½ baths 361-2919

7 PARADISE HEIGHTS from the high $50's 2-3 bedrooms / up to 2½ baths 564-6521

Sales Offices Open Daily 11 AM to Dusk

Our Success Is Built Around Southern Nevada Contractor's License No. 9849A

---

mesmerized people," said his old friend Robert Dobbs, the Memphis attorney who re- ceived a call from Jack from Portland, Oregon, days before the skyjacking. Among these crowds, however, Jack always seemed to be ashamed of his prairie roots and the bitter poverty he experienced in his youth, poverty which had led him irreversibly, he believed, into a life of crime.

In early February of 1960 Jack's mother Ottie died a horrible death when her home burned to the ground in Baxter Springs, Kansas. Jack attended the funeral. He wore expensive suits and drove a late-model Cadillac, evasively telling relatives that he was "working back East somewhere." Where is not certain, but a year later, after meeting his red-haired confi- dante Tave in Las Vegas, Jack became per- manently established in the Washington D.C. area.

He never held a steady job there, but at various times he managed to come into "large sums of money" according to Tave herself — tens of thousands of dollars at the drop of a hat. To close friends he hinted that he was a "bag- man," someone hired by the Mafia to distribute bribes among crooked politicians. But then, one of his old Kansas cronies who visited him in Washington in the late 1960's watched J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI Director, throw a warm and friendly bearhug around Jack. Coffelt, it seems, had learned to play both sides of the fence shrewdly and with great finesse. He had finally become a valuable commodity.

Whatever murky substrata of society his operations belonged to, they were never, it seems, restricted entirely to the nation's capital. As one intimate source wrote, "I don't know if you are aware of the long 'tentacles' Jack had . . . in other parts of the world." It was a dark hint at the vast Rosicrucian circles which the shrewd con-man had learned to move in during those years of especially shady "power politics" when internationally moti- vated plots of intrigue ran rife in the capital. "That part of your letter where you said you weren't sure that I was real tickled me," Coffelt responded to one enthralled disbeliever. "I'm as real as I appear."

But this "modern Indian warrior," as my father and others often thought of Jack, finally fell prey to the white man's fated disease — Love. Those who knew Jack and Tave said he always referred to her as his "sister" or "cousin," never anything more. Most were of this opinion, summed up by one: "She always seemed to be watching him, like a plastic doll, in some sort of official capacity."

But then, in the latter half of the 1960's, along came another girl — a beautiful German blonde who was a research scientist. Jack "procured" her, as he himself described it. Her version: "I do everything Jack orders. DB Cooper-20794

---

90 NOVEMBER 1983/LAS VEGAN MAGAZINE