Part 60, page 88

Transcript

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

FD-350 (Rev. 7-16-63)

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SOME 'D. B. COOPER' GOT $30,000

Weekly's Hijacking Story Turns Into Tall Tale---Later

BY ALEXANDER AUERBACH Times Staff Writer

"What happens to people is news. What happens to reporters isn't," a cigar-chewing Boston city editor used to shout at reporters who turned in first-person accounts of events they had witnessed.

But what happens if the reporter is (A) the sleuth who solved one of the most publicized crimes in recent history, or (B) the victim of the cleverest hoax since Clifford Irving's bogus autobiography of Howard Hughes, or (C) both?

LA, a new weekly newspaper serving the Los Angeles area, just concluded a three-installment series recounting the "solution" of the successful $200,000 hijacking of a Northwest Orient Airlines jet last Nov. 24.

Only at the end of the series did LA tell its readers that the whole account was an apparent hoax that cost the paper's backers $30,000.

Karl Fleming, LA's editor, says he chose to tell the story in a way that some readers found misleading in order to let them vicariously undergo the same experience he did. Without realizing it, they were reading a story about Fleming, not simply by him.

The first installment told of D.B. Cooper ("an ordinary, God-fearing, patriotic, country club-oriented, upward-climbing WASP engineer") leaving his suburban Seattle home with a briefcase stuffed with two wigs, an altimeter and compass, a makeup kit, gloves and three red flares wired to look like a dynamite bomb.

Fleming, a respected veteran newsman (formerly bureau chief

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and contributing editor with Newsweek for 11 years) went on to describe every detail of Cooper's hijacking, in an article that ran some 4,000 words and took five pages of the tabloid, not counting a cover photo and a last-page teaser for the next installment.

One illustration showed Xerox copies of three $20 bills given to Fleming as proof of Cooper's identity; their serial numbers matched those on the FBI's list of bills that made up the ransom paid by the airline.

The second piece described how Fleming got the story. While still on Newsweek's staff, he put a classified

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(Indicate page, name of newspaper, city and state.)

PartIII pg 10 Los Angeles Times Los Angeles, Calif.

Date: 11/8/72 Edition: Wednesday Final Author: Alexander Auerbach Editor: William F. Thomas Title:

Character: or Classification: Submitting Office: Los Angeles

[ ] Being Investigated

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SEARCHED......INDEXED...... SERIALIZED...FILED...... NOV 8 1972

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DB Cooper-24750