Target Manhattan Page 4

  He didn’t seem bothered by it. I informed him that he was engaged in a grave crime. That the punishment could be severe. I asked him if he had any means of getting in touch with his partner in the airplane. He said he had.

  Can you recall his exact words at that time?

  He said, “We’re not idiots. You’re not dealing with idiots. Of course I can get in touch with him.”

  Did he say how?

  By radio.

  Where was his radio?

  As it turned out, he’d left it in his car, which was parked in a pay lot about three blocks away from the bank. Two of the police officers immediately went to the lot and collected the radio and brought it back to the bank. Ordinarily we’d have taken the suspect into custody and transferred him elsewhere for questioning, but we didn’t want to waste the time that would be involved in transferring him from one place to another.

  So you had the radio brought to the office. What sort of radio was it?

  An ordinary air- and marine-band transceiver. A battery portable. Perhaps twenty pounds in weight, easily transportable.

  Did you attempt to make contact with the pilot of the aircraft at that time?

  Yes. But Ryterband warned us that his partner wouldn’t respond to calls from anyone except himself.

  But you tried to talk to Craycroft anyway, is that right?

  I talked. It was a one-way transmission. The pilot didn’t respond.

  How did you know you had the right transmission frequency?

  Ryterband gave us the frequency. He seemed amused at that point.

  Was that his general attitude at the time? Amusement?

  Only for a little while. Most of the time he was in a state of rather childish agitation. He kept throwing tantrums.

  What sort of tantrums?

  Heaving himself around the room, demanding to know whether we realized how serious it all was. Demanding to know whether we realized how short the time was getting.

  And did you realize those things?

  Naturally.

  Did he restate his deadline and demands?

  Yes.

  What did he say?

  He said he had to have the money, delivered to him in his parked car, by three o’clock. He was then to be given two hours and ten minutes, without surveillance of any kind, to get away with the money. At five ten, if we cooperated with the demands, the airplane would leave its station. By its station I mean the fact that it was circling over Manhattan Island.

  Hadn’t he demanded that the money be delivered by five ten originally?

  I’m told that was his initial demand; but afterward he said he’d been rattled at the beginning and had got it wrong. He said obviously he had to have time to get away with the money before the airplane could leave its station.

  In any case, three o’clock became the deadline. It was now—what, about a quarter to one?

  Yes. The exact time is in my report, of course. We told him it was physically impossible to raise that much cash in that short a time. But he was adamant.

  Valkenburg

  Your name?

  Emmett O. Valkenburg.

  Your title and position, Mr. Valkenburg? It’s for the record.

  Executive Vice-President, Merchants Trust Bank Company, Incorporated. Chief cashier.

  Do you have a prepared statement?

  No.

  At some point on May twenty-second you received an interoffice call from the president of your bank, Mr. Maitland. He apprised you of the situation in his office and asked you whether you could make arrangements to raise five million dollars in cash. Could you tell me what time you received that call?

  It was about eleven thirty in the morning, give or take ten minutes.

  I see. Then that was long before the FBI arrived on the scene.

  I’m afraid I wouldn’t know that, Mr. Skinner.

  Sorry. Talking to myself. Can you tell me what action you took?

  Well, after I came down off the ceiling I called in my two chief assistants and we had a council of war. I told them what Paul Maitland had told me. There was a bughouse character threatening to spray bombs all over Manhattan if we didn’t come up with five million in unmarked bills, nothing larger than hundred-dollar denominations. I asked my assistants if they had any bright ideas. That’s what assistants are for. One of them had the only bright idea any of us came up with during the day.

  What was that?

  Get out of town.

  (Laughter) I can quite understand that. But you did make concrete efforts toward raising the cash, didn’t you?

  Well, sure we did. But we had to start from a depressing premise. There isn’t that much cash. I mean there simply isn’t. Oh, you could go out and canvass every biped in the five boroughs of New York and you might find an average of ten bucks a person. But you don’t find that kind of cash lying around in one institutional bundle. The biggest bank in the city might have a few hundred thousand in cash on hand at any one moment. But the only place where you’d find anything in the millions would be the Federal Reserve or maybe the safe-deposit boxes of a few Mafia dons.

  What did you decide to do?

  Hell, we did the only thing we could do. We got permission from Paul Maitland and we phoned the boys over at the Federal Reserve.

  Grofeld

  Your name, please, Captain?

  Henry L. Grofeld. L. for Listowel, if it matters. Captain, NYPD. Chief of the First Division.

  I gather that’s a statement you’ve prepared for us?

  That’s right.

  Would you like to read it into the record?

  Is that necessary?

  We could simply have the stenographer insert it, if you prefer.

  That would save time, wouldn’t it? Why don’t you do it that way, then? Here you go.

  Thank you.…

  (Pause)

  Good Lord. This isn’t exactly what I expected.

  I guess it’s not the usual officialese.

  Did you prepare this for publication, Captain?

  Sort of. But under the circumstances I don’t suppose I can ever submit it.

  It’s a shame. This looks like a nice piece of work.

  Well, I’ve got a confession to make. I moonlight as a writer—detective stories, crime novels. Under a pen name, of course. I’ve written several books.

  Just leafing through this, it looks like a remarkable job of reconstructing the background of this case—the histories of the two men. How did you find the time?

  I asked for it. It wasn’t just that I’d participated in the case. The whole thing fit into all my interests, as it happened. Criminal psychology, aircraft, and of course writing. I was given departmental leave to research the profiles on Ryterband and Craycroft. The leave was granted because the department was interested in the case the same way you’re interested in it—the idea that possibly we could determine what had caused the thing, and maybe if we knew that, we might be closer to preventing it happening again. Anyhow, I was put on detached duty with the assignment of compiling dossiers on the two men and the background of the case from its beginnings. Eventually, as you see, that took me back nearly forty years.

  (Reading) “The bombs were five-hundred-pounders. Armed, contact-fused, balanced with machine-shop precision. They squatted in the abdomen of the thirty-year-old Flying Fortress like a deadly brood embryo.

  “They hung in racks above open bomb-bay doors, poised to drop. Beneath them was the unsuspecting target: Manhattan, the city of New York—innocent hostage to one man’s demented dreams.

  “Harold Craycroft had prepared a squadron of Eighth Air Force bombers for their participation in the deadly bombardment of the city of Dresden in the Second World War. Now he had prepared his own bomber—an airplane which actually had flown in the Dresden raid—for a macabre encore against the most concentrated urban center in the United States.

  “The anatomy of the Craycroft-Ryterband case is unique in American criminological history. There can be no ques
tion that Craycroft was deranged, but his derangement led to a crime that was stunningly brilliant in the simplicity of its plan, awesome in concept, terrifying in implication. Drawn up and executed in its entirety by one solitary man (with incidental assistance from his brother-in-law), the Craycroft ransom may well turn out to have been literally the crime of the century.”

  That’s an impressive opening, Captain. Here—I return this to you temporarily so that you can refer to it. I wonder if you’d mind covering the essentials of your paper orally, for our tape recorder. You may use the paper for reference as you talk, of course, and read from it if you wish. We’ll enter the entire document into the record, of course, but I’d rather go over it with you orally because various questions are bound to occur to me that may not be covered by the document itself. Do you mind?

  No. However you want to do it.

  Well, just start at the beginning then, if you will.

  Right. I began with a biographical resume on Harold Craycroft. You want me to go over that?

  Please.

  Craycroft was born in Cincinnati on January twenty-third, nineteen eighteen. His father was an American aviator, in the Army, fighting in France. The father was killed when Craycroft was barely three months old.

  (Reading) “Craycroft grew up in the shadow of his father’s legend. His mother (who gave piano lessons to augment the meager pension) and his two older sisters seem to have lived their lives as supplicants at the altar of Jeremy Craycroft’s memory; their Bible was the scrapbook of the elder Craycroft’s heroics.

  “By the middle nineteen thirties, encouraged by the pressures of mother and sisters, Craycroft had apprenticed himself to a series of itinerant aviators of the breed that drifted incessantly across the Midwest during the Depression: the barnstorming county-fair pilots who walked the wings of their fabric-and-wood biplanes, slept in open cornfields under the wings of their rickety Spads and Jennies. At the age of seventeen Craycroft had already developed a reputation in the Ohio-Indiana area as one of the most exciting daredevil pilots on the fairground circuit.

  “In nineteen thirty-six his mother fell ill with a lingering ailment, which probably was Parkinson’s disease. To support the family—only one sister had married—Craycroft was forced to seek gainful employment.…”

  He was eighteen then? What about education?

  He’d left high school at fourteen. Of course it was the nadir of the Depression then. But he found a pretty good job right away, as a flight-line mechanic on the Trimotor assembly line at the Ford plant in Dearborn.

  Sorry. Go on.

  (Reading) “He was even then, according to testimony provided by retired Ford employees, a genius with aircraft engines.

  “In nineteen thirty-eight he joined forces with Charles Ryterband, an aircraft designer and fellow Dearborn mechanic, to form the short-lived Cray-band Motors, Incorporated, an independent and privately owned company organized for the purpose of designing and building specialized airplane engines for racing planes, polar exploration aircraft and other custom uses. The company foundered within ten months.

  “Evidently in search of adventure, Craycroft left the Midwest shortly after the death of his mother in December, nineteen thirty-eight. In July, nineteen thirty-nine, his name is found on the roster of the Balchen Expedition. Craycroft was in charge—”

  I’m sorry. What was the Balchen Expedition?

  An Arctic expedition. An attempt by air to land at the North Pole. I’ll go on, if I may?

  Yes, Please do.

  (Reading) “Craycroft was in charge of maintaining the two aircraft used in the successful leg of the expedition (to Nome and Point Barrow), but he did not accompany the party on the ill-fated final leg, which led to the deaths of two explorers and the loss of one aircraft; the Pole was not achieved.

  “Craycroft remained in Alaska for several years, working first as a hired mechanic in Juneau, then opening his own maintenance facility at Anchorage; in the latter enterprise he was again joined by his former business partner, Ryterband, who was some six years older than Craycroft.

  “In nineteen forty the U.S. Army Air Corps delivered its first defense squadrons of bomber and fighter aircraft to Alaska. A cold-weather testing facility was established at Fairbanks under the command of Colonel Everett S. Davis. Throughout nineteen forty and nineteen forty-one Harold Craycroft worked informally with and for the Davis laboratory, on a part-time basis, helping to devise cold-weather navigational techniques and solving problems caused by the extreme low temperatures of that region, in which oil would congeal and rubber turn brittle.

  “At the outbreak of the war in December, nineteen forty-one, both Craycroft and Ryterband volunteered immediately for the draft. Ryterband was refused—he had a history of asthma and rheumatic fever. And until nineteen forty-four Ryterband continued to operate the Craycroft-Ryterband maintenance hangar at Elmendorf Field near Anchorage. The business went bankrupt in November, nineteen forty-four. In the meantime Craycroft had been accepted by the draft and, through the influence of Colonel Davis, had been granted an Air Corps commission as a first lieutenant. He earned his pilot’s wings in June, nineteen forty-two, at Travis Field but saw no service as a combat pilot; he was transferred immediately back to Alaska and by nineteen forty-three had become chief of maintenance for the Eleventh Air Force in that theater of war (the campaign in the Aleutian Islands).

  “In November, nineteen forty-three, Craycroft was assigned to a training command in Nebraska, where he trained ground crews until May, nineteen forty-four, when he went to England, now carrying the rank of lieutenant colonel, to become deputy maintenance commander for the Eighth Air Force.

  “His reputation among the warrior pilots was supreme. Craycroft by now had become the best-known mechanic in the American air forces. He had redesigned the cooling mechanism of the P-48 cowlings to prevent them from overheating in high-speed combat climbs; he had rebuilt the bomb-rack systems of B-17 and B-24 aircraft (systems which invariable arrived from the factories in nonfunctional condition); he had contributed subtle revisions to the designs of propeller blades and wing-control surfaces which had the effect of increasing both the speed and maneuverability of several types of combat aircraft, both American and British.

  “Craycroft’s ground-crew teams, used as cadres by every squadron in the ETO, became justly famous for their ability to repair virtually any shot-up airplane and have it ready to fly within twenty-four hours—often by the cannibalization of parts from unserviceable wrecks. The period nineteen forty-four to forty-five was characterized by daily maximum efforts—against the factories of Germany, the cities of the Reich, the V-l and V-2 rocket installations and the waning Luftwaffe. Craycroft’s teams invariably provided more airworthy planes for each mission than the commanders had anticipated having available. Shortly after the Normandy landings in June, nineteen forty-four, Craycroft was promoted full colonel and took over the post of maintenance commander for the Eighth Air Force; he still held that position at the end of the war.”

  It was during that period that he assembled the airplanes for the Dresden attack?

  Well, that was a bit earlier. He was only responsible for one squadron of bombers at Dresden.

  Dresden keeps being mentioned in this inquiry. That’s why I asked.

  It had a devastating effect on anybody who had anything to do with it.

  Go on then, please.

  (Reading) “In nineteen forty-six Craycroft left active duty but retained his commission in the Army (subsequently the Air Force) Reserve. He rejoined his former partner, Charles Ryterband (who in nineteen forty-four had married the younger of Craycroft’s two sisters), in yet another abortive commercial enterprise, called the Alpine Aircraft Company. Buying a small hangar and machine shop in Palo Alto, California, the brothers-in-law set out to design and manufacture light planes for the hobbyist and business-travel trade. Experts interviewed recently have attested to the ingenuity and economy of the Alpine designs; evidently they were firs
t-rate airplanes, well ahead of their time in performance and stability. But only three prototypes were built—a twin-engine executive plane and two single-engine models (a two-seater and a five-passenger model)—before Alpine Aircraft obeyed the precedent and went bankrupt. Graycroft and Ryterband seemed as ingeniously dedicated to financial failure as they were to superb mechanical work.

  “Between nineteen forty-eight and nineteen fifty the partners went separate ways, Ryterband securing a position with the aircraft-testing division of Lockheed Aircraft and Craycroft returning once again to Anchorage, where he set up and managed the maintenance operations of Alaskan Airlines.

  “When the Korean War broke out, Craycroft’s Reserve commission was activated and he was shipped out to Japan to supervise repair and maintenance for the American Air Force wings stationed there. Evidently his performance during the first phase of the war was exemplary; but the Air Force was in the process of switching over from the P-51 Mustang (a propeller-driven pursuit craft) to the F-80 and F-86 jet fighters. When one reads between the lines of Craycroft’s service record, one reaches the conclusion that the man had no affinity for jet-powered aircraft. It seems clear he lost interest in the mechanical ingenuities that had made him such a legend; he became, in the words of one veteran who recalls him in his last months in Japan in nineteen fifty-three, ‘kind of a tired old pencil pusher. He was just going through the motions. We all figured he was washed up.’

  “One notes that this ‘tired old pencil pusher’ was, at the time, barely thirty-five years old. (He had attained an important World War Two command and the rank of full colonel at the age of twenty-six.)

  “Craycroft was rotated back to California before the end of the Korean War. In Los Angeles he stayed with his sister and his brother-in-law, who had left Lockheed and gone to work for a stunt and special-effects organization which specialized in helicopter and airplane work for motion pictures.

  “Craycroft resigned his commission at this time in protest against the replacement of piston planes by jets. ‘He never could abide the jets,’ one pilot recalls. ‘He was like a sailboat man sneering at power boats. Always called them stinkpots.’”