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US law catches up with fugitive after 39 years
Source: Agencies |
September 29, 2011, Thursday
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A 1970s militant who carried out one of the most brazen hijackings in United States history lived for decades in an idyllic Portuguese hamlet near a stunning beach with his Portuguese wife and two children, his neighbors said yesterday.
George Wright, 68, worked odd jobs around Almocageme, 45 kilometers west of Lisbon, most recently employed as a nightclub bouncer, said two neighbors who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Wright, taken into custody on Monday at the request of the US government, also spoke very good Portuguese, they said, adding that his children were now in their 20s.
A woman who answered the door at his home in Almocageme said she had no comment and shut the door.
Wright used the alias of Jose Luis Jorge dos Santos, US officials said, and townspeople in Almocageme knew him as "Jorge" and "George."
Almocageme gas station attendant Ricardo Salvador said Wright had business cards which gave his first name as George and many locals called him that. Most locals said they assumed Wright was African, not American.
A fingerprint on a Portuguese ID card was the break that led a US fugitive task force to Wright, who was arrested by Portuguese authorities and is being detained in Lisbon.
Wright was convicted of the 1962 murder of gas station owner Walter Patterson, a decorated World War II veteran who was shot during a robbery at his business in Wall, New Jersey.
Eight years into his 15- to 30-year prison term, Wright and three other men escaped from the Bayside State Prison farm in Leesburg, New Jersey, on August 19, 1970.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation said Wright became affiliated with an underground militant group, the Black Liberation Army, and lived in a "communal family" with members in Detroit.
In 1972, Wright - dressed as a priest and using an alias - hijacked a Delta flight from Detroit to Miami with four other BLA members and three children, including Wright's companion and their 2-year-old daughter.
After releasing the 86 other passengers in exchange for a US$1 million ransom - delivered by an FBI agent wearing only swim trunks, as per the hijackers' demands - the hijackers forced the plane to fly to Boston. There an international navigator was taken aboard, and the plane was flown to Algeria, where the hijackers sought asylum.
The group was taken in by American writer and activist Eldridge Cleaver, who had been permitted by Algeria's Socialist government to open an office of the Black Panther Movement in that country in 1970. The group eventually made its way to France, where Wright's associates were tracked down, arrested, tried and convicted in Paris in 1976 but not extradited to the US.
Wright remained at large, and his case was among the top priorities when the New York-New Jersey Fugitive Task Force was formed in 2002, according to Michael Schroeder, a spokesman for the US Marshals Service, who worked with New Jersey's FBI and other agencies on the task force.
George Wright, 68, worked odd jobs around Almocageme, 45 kilometers west of Lisbon, most recently employed as a nightclub bouncer, said two neighbors who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Wright, taken into custody on Monday at the request of the US government, also spoke very good Portuguese, they said, adding that his children were now in their 20s.
A woman who answered the door at his home in Almocageme said she had no comment and shut the door.
Wright used the alias of Jose Luis Jorge dos Santos, US officials said, and townspeople in Almocageme knew him as "Jorge" and "George."
Almocageme gas station attendant Ricardo Salvador said Wright had business cards which gave his first name as George and many locals called him that. Most locals said they assumed Wright was African, not American.
A fingerprint on a Portuguese ID card was the break that led a US fugitive task force to Wright, who was arrested by Portuguese authorities and is being detained in Lisbon.
Wright was convicted of the 1962 murder of gas station owner Walter Patterson, a decorated World War II veteran who was shot during a robbery at his business in Wall, New Jersey.
Eight years into his 15- to 30-year prison term, Wright and three other men escaped from the Bayside State Prison farm in Leesburg, New Jersey, on August 19, 1970.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation said Wright became affiliated with an underground militant group, the Black Liberation Army, and lived in a "communal family" with members in Detroit.
In 1972, Wright - dressed as a priest and using an alias - hijacked a Delta flight from Detroit to Miami with four other BLA members and three children, including Wright's companion and their 2-year-old daughter.
After releasing the 86 other passengers in exchange for a US$1 million ransom - delivered by an FBI agent wearing only swim trunks, as per the hijackers' demands - the hijackers forced the plane to fly to Boston. There an international navigator was taken aboard, and the plane was flown to Algeria, where the hijackers sought asylum.
The group was taken in by American writer and activist Eldridge Cleaver, who had been permitted by Algeria's Socialist government to open an office of the Black Panther Movement in that country in 1970. The group eventually made its way to France, where Wright's associates were tracked down, arrested, tried and convicted in Paris in 1976 but not extradited to the US.
Wright remained at large, and his case was among the top priorities when the New York-New Jersey Fugitive Task Force was formed in 2002, according to Michael Schroeder, a spokesman for the US Marshals Service, who worked with New Jersey's FBI and other agencies on the task force.
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