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Telling the Story of 41 Years on the Run
George Wright escaped from prison in 1970 and hijacked a plane two years later, winding up in Portugal, where he was arrested last month. Authorities found Mr. Wright, above, with his wife, Maria do Rosario Valente, on Friday, from fingerprints in Portugal's national identity database.
By RAPHAEL MINDER and JAMES BARRON
Published: October 28, 2011
CASAS NOVAS, Portugal — George Wright, the fugitive murderer who was captured in Portugal last month, 39 years after hijacking a jetliner and demanding a $1 million ransom, said he figured authorities in the United States had given up the chase long ago. But, he said, he never stopped worrying that they would come knocking.
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A Hijacker, a Longtime Fugitive and, Now, a Prisoner (September 29, 2011)
Jim Bourdier/Associated Press
George Wright escaped from prison in 1970 and hijacked a plane two years later, eventually winding up in a village in Portugal where he was arrested last month.
“Knowing the Americans, I always feared that they had their antennas up,” he said in a two-hour interview in this village outside Lisbon where he was arrested last month. Sitting at his kitchen table, he wore sweat pants, plastic sandals and the ankle bracelet ordered by a Portuguese judge who moved him from a Lisbon jail to house arrest while he fights extradition to the United States.
Mr. Wright, 68, was convicted in a 1962 murder in New Jersey — an armed robbery that netted him $70 but left Walter Patterson, a gas station owner and decorated World War II veteran with two daughters, dead. He escaped from a state prison in 1970, and in 1972, dressed as a priest, he, with four others, hijacked a Miami-bound jetliner and demanded it be flown to Algeria. He pulled a gun from a hollowed-out Bible he had carried aboard and held it to a flight attendant’s head.
The interview provided an account of his odyssey since the hijacking. Mr. Wright — who is fighting extradition under his assumed Portuguese identity of José Luís Jorge dos Santos — talked about how he had married a Portuguese woman he met at a nightclub more than 30 years ago and done odd jobs, working as a teacher in Western Africa and more recently decorating houses, as well as selling chicken and handicraft in Portugal. Mr. Wright said he lifted weights and rode an exercise bicycle before breakfast most days, and read the Bible — “I got rebaptized in 2002,” he said.
But he remained defiant toward American law enforcement, which tracked him down from fingerprints in Portugal’s national identity database. Noting that he had renewed his Portuguese identification card in 2004, Mr. Wright wondered why it had taken the authorities so long to apprehend him.
“It’s a little absurd for the Americans to come hunting me and making me look like the most evil man in the world, out of some horror movie,” he said. “I really should be a role model of rehabilitation.”
He described how the hijackers had chosen Algeria as a destination because “Eldridge Cleaver was there, representing the black liberation movement.” He also described his frustration when Algerian authorities made them give back the ransom money and proved to be less committed to promoting black rights than he had assumed.
He talked about a Portuguese admiral who advised and helped him to move to Guinea-Bissau, a former Portuguese colony in West Africa that eventually granted him political asylum.
And Mr. Wright denied his role in the shooting that sent him to prison in the first place, saying he never pulled the trigger — “It was a robbery that went wrong,” he said, insisting that it was the first crime he had committed. He said he had met the two other assailants a year earlier, when they worked together in a restaurant. “I didn’t know that they were involved in this type of thing at that particular time,” he said.
But he needed money because, he said, his wallet and other belongings had been stolen from a hotel room in which he had been staying. (On Friday, Ann Patterson, the daughter of the man Mr. Wright shot in 1962, declined to discuss Mr. Wright’s version of the robbery.)
Mr. Wright was caught a few days later and was eventually sentenced to 15 to 30 years. But after seven years of prison transfers and ending up in what is now Bayside State Prison in Leesburg, N.J., he and three other inmates escaped.
“We just went across the street to where the warden lived,” he said. “One of the guys was a very good mechanic. We wired his vehicle, and off we went.”
Mr. Wright said he moved to Detroit, where he assumed the name Larry Burgess and managed a fast-food restaurant for a while. But he was laid off, he said, and could not find work. “In a decent job,” he said, “you had to be fingerprinted, so we weren’t up for that.” Nor could he apply for welfare benefits.
He said he decided “to get involved with the struggle” as part of the Black Panther Party, and he and some friends concluded the hijacking would both “show our sincerity” and “get money for the Black Liberation Army.”
Mr. Wright boarded Delta Flight 841 in Detroit dressed as a priest “to not attract attention.” He would not discuss the gun in the Bible.
The plane first landed in Miami, and Mr. Wright demanded the money, saying over the cockpit radio, “If that money is not here by 2 o’clock, I’m going to start throwing a dead body out the door every minute.” The passengers were exchanged for the $1 million, delivered by federal agents in swimsuits — outfits the hijackers demanded, he said, because in conventional clothing “they could have come with weapons and made some sort of takeover attempt.” The plane then flew to Boston before going on to Algiers.
“He is a fugitive, and the process is still outstanding, ongoing,” said Neil Welch, who was the agent in charge of the F.B.I. office in Detroit at the time of the hijacking and is now retired. “He has to face justice here. He some explaining to do. The courts and all of us are anxious to know what his story is, and it all has to be done right here in the good old U.S. of A.”
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