Part 54, page 50

Transcript

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

experience it just exactly as I did," Fleming says. "It's an adventure story, as much about me as about D.B. Cooper, and I wanted to put the reader in my shoes. If the reader was reasonably alert, he would have seen in the press that these guys had been busted by the FBI."

If the man Fleming inter- viewed was not D.B. Cooper — and Fleming isn't totally sure he was not the hijacker — then he was a masterful con man, to hear Fleming tell it.

"I gave him the whole $30,000 at our first meeting, after I was convinced that this was D.B. Cooper," Fleming says. "At that point a con man would have taken the money and run like hell, but this guy, Cooper, came back and submitted himself to eight hours of taped inter- views, 30 minutes of filmed interviews and still photo- graphs. His intermediary signed a contract (saying the $30,000 would be used for Cooper's legal defense) with his real name and left his fingerprints all over the con- tract."

.. The story was to have been in the opening issue of LA. To avoid charges of aid- ing a fugitive from justice, Fleming turned his material over to the FBI 10 days be- fore publication (he had told Cooper not to tell him any- thing he didn't want the po- lice to know.) Included were Xerox copies of the $20 bills Fleming had been shown as proof of Cooper's identity. The serial numbers matched those on the list of ransom bills but FBI documents ex- perts said that the photoco- pies indicated that the bills were counterfeit.

With all the information Fleming's subjects h[ad] sup- plied, the FBI [in]d[icted] [a] rouble rounding the[m] ..

With the[ir] [in-] [dicted] [tur]ning [cult] [illits]

that he was duped. "I asked that guy questions no con man could have prepared for," he says. "I went over him like a vacuum cleaner."

He has an ingenious mir- ror-within-a-mirror . [sto]ry of his own.

"I'm not saying that the FBI was wrong, and I would never suggest that they would deliberately distort the facts — though if I, one lonely reporter, could get the story when 8,000 FBI agents couldn't, then that's not the kind of publicity that J. Ed- gar Hoover, then alive, would want for the FBI."

Noting that "Cooper" was aware the information would be published and get to the police, Fleming says, "It is very, very difficult for me to accept the fact that a mind brilliant enough to concoct a story as sophisticated as the one this guy told me, would be stupid enough to turn around and expose himself to capture this way.

"I don't exclude the possi- bility that he was both smart enough to pull off the hijack- ing, sell me the story and spread enough false clues in the story so it would not look right and the FBI would say he isn't the hijacker. So, if he does do any time, it's for fraud, not for hijacking. And when he comes out, the $200,000 is still there."

In that case, of course, Fleming's series would be a true account of the hijack- ing, as readers of part one might have thought, not the account of how a reporter got duped, as part three indi- cates, or perhaps it would be both.

Fleming may have some lingering doubts about the man he interviewed, but Pla- typus Publications, publisher of LA, appears to have none. It has filed a $30,000 civil suit against the m[en] a[nd] [a ci]v[il] the FBI, clai[min]g frauded beca were not the claimed to be