Текст книги "Target Manhattan"
Автор книги: Brian Garfield
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“For once in their lives, Craycroft and Ryterband were the right men in the right place at the right time. They went to the Air Force with an offer of fractions of a penny on the dollar. It had cost two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to build a B-17 Flying Fortress; Air Corps Associates managed to buy these aircraft from the mothball fleet for prices ranging from ten thousand dollars down to seven hundred and fifty dollars, depending on condition.
“But that would have done no good without Craycroft’s genius for mechanical repair, redesign, and restoration. Other potential buyers-representatives of foreign governments, scouts for feeder airlines, hobbyists interested in air-racing-had looked over the bargain-basement airplanes at Kingman and had passed them up. To them it had appeared insurmountably expensive to get any of the corroded hulks back into flying trim. To Craycroft and Ryterband, evidently, the same challenge acted as a spur to their ingenuity.
“The result was that by nineteen fifty-six Air Corps Associates had equipped itself with an air force of considerable proportions. Starting from scratch in nineteen fifty-four with a capital investment of forty thousand dollars (most of the money put up by motion-picture producers), Craycroft and Ryterband had pyramided their operation within two years to a sixty-three-plane Luftwaffe; and of that inventory, according to company records dated twelve September nineteen fifty-six, fully forty-eight airplanes were in flying condition-including a full squadron of P-40 Warhawks and a ‘flight’ (six planes) of B-17 Flying Fortresses.
“Most war films used actual newsreel combat footage in their aerial sequences. But movies like Twelve o’Clock High and its many successors required substantial ground fleets of actual airplanes for use as backdrops in scenes set on the runway flight lines. A cliche in films of the period was the scene in which the wing commander stands at the railing of the control tower, counting the number of bombers returning from the day’s raid on Berlin or Schweinfurt or the Channel ports. These scenes could not be reconstructed out of wartime news footage; they had to be filmed on the spot, with real airplanes which actually flew. It was Air Corps Associates which provided these warplanes.
“Craycroft restored (and test-flew) the B-29s that bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki; he gave us-in several films-the Japanese air fleet that bombed Pearl Harbor (most of these being U. S. Navy surplus planes mocked up to resemble the silhouettes of Zeros); he made possible the movie scenes in which John Wayne and Robert Ryan fought the Japanese in the Pacific, in which countless Hollywood stars bombed Germany, and in which other stars fought dogfights with the Luftwaffe, the Italian Air Force and the Imperial Japanese Air Fleet.
“By the early nineteen sixties it was routine for Craycroft and Ryterband to accept a special rush order for a squadron of B-24 Liberators to be painted up with the markings of a specific World War Two unit (real or fictitious), and to actually fly the planes across the Atlantic and deliver them to the moviemakers’ locations in England or Spain.
“In his early forties Craycroft was a success. On paper he was a millionaire. But his wealth consisted entirely of stock certificates in Air Corps Associates. His standard of living was meager. He had never married; he lived in a modest apartment in Sherman Oaks, hardly a ten-minute drive from the company’s immense hangar-field in Burbank. His personal car was a war-surplus Jeep, made by Ford in nineteen forty-two; he had paid eighty-five dollars for it at an Army auction and had rebuilt it himself. He owned two business suits and, it is said, one necktie. His fingernails were invariably black with petroleum grease and grime. When not on purchasing expeditions to Kingman or ferry-delivery flights to film locations, he appears to have spent seven days a week working in the hangars of the Burbank facility. All evidence indicates he had little interest in money for its own sake; his work was his life. He neither swam nor played golf nor drank more than one or two drinks a week. He had no known romantic relationships, either heterosexual or homosexual. His social activities were minimal, confined to occasional dinners with his sister and brother-in-law and the unavoidable business lunches and dinners, the number of which he kept to an absolute minimum. He is not known to have had any close friends other than Charles Ryterband. He had not been in touch with his eldest sister, who still lived in Ohio, since the late nineteen forties.
“Interviewed recently by the FBI, an aircraft mechanic who was employed by Craycroft at Air Corps Associates during the period between nineteen fifty-five and nineteen fifty-eight had this to say:
“‘I guess most of us guys who devote our lives to airplanes are a little screwy. But most of us aren’t that screwy. I mean, I was married then, I had the first kid and the other one on the way, I had a bowling league, and we’d go to Disneyland or down to the beach on the weekends. We had plenty of friends, God knows. I mean we’re normal, you know? But Harold, he was something else. I mean, for openers nobody ever called him Hank or Hal or Old Buddy. He didn’t like “Mr. Craycroft” at all, even if he did own the whole shebang. But he’d only answer to “Harold.” No nickname. Now everybody in the airplane racket has a nickname. My name’s Joseph but half the guys I work with don’t know that; I’m Shorty, that’s all, on account of I’m so tall. Old Mr. Ryterband, we all called him Charlie.
“‘You know what it was about Harold? I’ll tell you how he always struck me. He never looked his age, you know. I guess he must have been around forty when I worked for him but he could have been twenty-eight, thirty. He was always kind of gangly and he had that shock of dark hair that he was always shoving back out of his face. He’d got kind of farsighted, I guess, and he had to wear glasses to do close-up work or reading. He had these great big black-frame eyeglasses that kept slipping down his nose. You’d see him working on an engine torn apart on the bench, and he’d be pushing his hair back, pushing his glasses up on his nose, and biting his lower lip-his teeth were a little buck. Actually he wasn’t bad-looking at all. He got mistaken for Gregory Peck a couple of times, only his jaw was a little small and he had those big upper teeth. But he always struck me like one of those introverted kids you always knew in high school-the ones that never had the nerve to date girls, they were always wrapped up in their toy chemistry sets and their microscope slides and their butterfly collections. You know what I mean? He wasn’t queer or anything. He was just sort of a teenage kid that never outgrew the stage of being fascinated with brainy toys. I bet you when he was fourteen he had an Erector Set.’
“Craycroft hadn’t had an Erector Set at fourteen, of course; by the time he was fourteen he’d dropped out of school and was learning to fly. But the characterization seems apt-as accurate as anything the detectives have been able to learn about Craycroft up to this time. He had a single-minded and virtually adolescent devotion to the mechanics of flight and the romance of aviation.
“This, mainly, is why it has been difficult to ‘get a handle’ on Craycroft’s psychology. It has been impossible to interview his friends because he had no friends in the usual sense. Employees, business associates, and fellow airmen have been interviewed but their answers have been limited to the sphere in which they knew Craycroft: the professional sphere. He lived for his work, and apart from it he seems to have had no life at all. Nothing about him, really, has been added to what was written in his early Army file reports. He was a mechanical genius, dedicated and devoted to the one passion of his life-the airplane.”
But evidently he’d made himself very successful. He was doing what he enjoyed doing, and making a great deal of money from it. How does that jibe with the obvious sudden desperation that led him to this incredible crime?
Well, it wasn’t all that sudden. And the success didn’t last you know.
(Reading) “By the early nineteen sixties the Hollywood fashion for war movies was waning. Apparently it was Ryterband who first saw the signs of change. Shrewdly Ryterband began to put subtle pressures on his brother-in-law to diversify the operations of the company. In time-by about nineteen sixty-three-Craycroft had been brought around to Ryterband’s way of thinking. By then ACA had a force of two hundred and forty-five planes, nearly all of them airworthy-and most of them, ironically, stored in mothballs because the movie market was drying up; nobody was making World War Two films anymore.
“It was Ryterband’s inspiration to go into the used-airplane business. Ryterband was by no means a marketing genius, but he had the intelligence to persuade Craycroft to hire a small staff of sales personnel, four former Air Force fliers who had flown both in the U.S. forces and in mercenary forces overseas, and who had a large number of business and foreign contacts among them.
“There had never been much of a business in surplus bombers. Progress in aircraft design had rendered them obsolete as military planes. And for civilian use-as cargo planes or passenger transports-they were ill-designed; they had not been built for comfort, economy, or spaciousness. The B-17 bomber, for example, was a huge airplane for its day: a wingspan of more than one hundred feet, standing nearly twenty feet high, weighing eighteen tons empty, capable of carrying another fourteen tons of fuel and cargo at a maximum speed well in excess of three hundred miles per hour (cruising speed two hundred and twenty-five) to a service ceiling of thirty-five thousand feet. It had a range, with three tons of bombs aboard, of two thousand miles.
“But the fuselage was narrow-too narrow to insert more than two rows of passenger seats abreast, and the diameter shrank rapidly toward the tail so that nearly half the length of the plane was unusable for passenger accommodation. At intervals the fuselage was interrupted by bubble canopies designed to house machine-gun turrets. There was no provision for cockpit pressurization or heating; combat fliers had worn electrically heated flying suits against the high-altitude outside temperatures of below forty degrees Fahrenheit, and crews had been forced to wear oxygen masks above ten thousand feet.
“And the in-flight economy of these planes was very poor. They were designed for power, not fuel conservation. The four Wright Cyclone engines developed a peak horsepower of nearly five thousand horsepower-a combined power plant which made for superb climbing ability and maneuverability, and meant that a shot-up bomber could still fly even if two engines had been destroyed. But in terms of ordinary cargo or passenger economy the B-17 was absurdly overpowered-much like a five-hundred-horsepower Detroit car: fine for the profligate owner, but useless as a taxicab.
“These factors had made it impossible for anyone to make a successful business out of converting old bombers to useful civilian aircraft. But that was before Charles Ryterband persuaded his brother-in-law to try it.
“By the end of nineteen sixty-three Craycroft had blueprinted two complete redesigns-for the B-17 and the B-24-which for the first time showed how these models could be rebuilt for passenger and air-cargo use.
“Two prototypes were completed and flown in July, nineteen sixty-four. Performance and economy figures were analyzed. Craycroft made further adjustments in his designs, and in August the two planes were flown again. Ryterband and Craycroft pronounced them satisfactory, and the four-man sales force was sent out into the world to secure orders.
“Craycroft had achieved nearly the impossible. By the astute use of new lightweight metal alloys (very expensive but used sparingly) and the almost total redesign of the Wright engines, using the original engine blocks and essential parts, Craycroft had devised inexpensive ways to reduce the bombers’ fuel-consumption by more than one-half. Performance suffered to a remarkably small degree. The service ceiling was cut from thirty-five thousand feet to twenty-four thousand but for normal commercial purposes that was still ample. Top speed was reduced by more than forty mph, but cruising speed-the important element-was actually increased: to two hundred and thirty-five mph at ten thousand feet.
“In fact, the most extensive and costly part of the redesign program was neither in the power plants nor in the mechanical components of the airframes. It was in the field of comfort and convenience. By sealing windows, building an interior skin and installing recirculation and heating systems (most of them acquired from parts-dealers specializing in scrap components from obsolete ruined civilian planes), Craycroft succeeded in building modern heating and pressurization systems into these airplanes which had never been designed for them. This was the crucial item in the design, because it meant the planes now could be used to carry passengers or live-animal cargo in comfort.
“In many cases the original instrument systems had to be updated to meet the requirements of international and domestic regulations. Radio-navigation devices had to be incorporated, to supplant or replace the original gyrocompass and magnetic gauges. LORAN and communications systems had to be installed. Even radar was built into some of the later models.
“It was inevitable that the end result would be far more expensive than the restorations in which ACA had specialized before. These new cross-breed aircraft weren’t dirt-cheap. But they were competitive, and that was the important thing. Craycroft’s converted bombers had cargo and passenger capacities which compared with those of the secondhand DC-6s and Constellations, which airlines were selling in order to make way for their new jets. He was able to undersell the airlines by about thirty percent in purchase price-and this made his planes very attractive to charter airlines, small governments, and business concerns which didn’t need jet transports or gigantic machines.
“ACA’s first customers included the government of Morocco, three group-charter airlines in the United States and one in London, and a fruit-plantation company which owned several islands off the coast of eastern South America. The latter concern bought Craycroft’s planes for fast delivery of fresh fruit to Florida and Texas markets; they chose Craycroft’s planes over the competition because their runways on the islands were of limited length and the Craycroft planes required considerably less runway than did standard transports for landing and taking off.
“A Greek intranational feeder line bought three planes in nineteen sixty-five, and this purchase pumped enough capital into ACA to convince Ryterband and Craycroft that they had made the right decision. Construction and sales efforts were intensified; ACA’s Burbank facility was expanded onto a leasehold next door, and at considerable expense the old buildings there were razed to make way for enlargement of the assembly shops and offices.
“Given Craycroft’s track record as a businessman, however, it was inevitable that a fly settle in the ointment.
“According to recent testimony by Fredric Phelps (then office-manager and treasurer of ACA), ‘We never had anything much better than a rickety jerry-built financial structure.’ Craycroft and Ryterband had built the initial company on investment capital they had raised by selling stock to four motion-picture producers. Each of the four producers had been in preproduction with war movies at the time. For the first few years the relationship between ACA and the four producers had been successful and symbiotic. But the producers were no longer making war movies. (One of them, in fact, was no longer in the film business at all.) ‘And ACA was no longer a Hollywood outfit,’ Phelps recalls. ‘I guess they felt they had no further reason to go on lending us the support and encouragement of the movie community.’
“To build the company in the first place, Craycroft and Ryterband had made an initial stock tender of ten thousand shares. By the time they got done raising capital, they ended up-between them-owning only twenty-six percent of the company. The remaining seventy-four percent belonged to the four producers.
“But the bylaws and articles of incorporation of ACA’s charter had left operational corporate decisions to the absolute authority of Craycroft and Ryterband so long as they, between them, controlled more stock than any other single stockholder.
“Since the company’s inception it had been the policy of the brothers-in-law to plow profits back into the company. By nineteen sixty-seven ACA had sold or contracted more than seventy converted bombers. In small-business terms they were doing a tremendous volume, considering that each sale meant gross receipts from forty thousand dollars up. But the large expansion of facilities between nineteen sixty-five and sixty-six still hadn’t been paid off, and operating expenses were climbing because of inflation and labor costs.
“By 1968 the producers were arguing that business was falling off because of the increasing obsolescence of propeller-driven aircraft. The world was well into its second and even third generation of jet passenger and cargo planes. Even the smaller countries and businesses were buying jets now. The invention of new, economical jets like the Lear and the Boeing 727 had made a large competitive dent in the market that had previously been dominated by the venerable DC-3 Dakota and the Craycroft conversions.
“Phelps recalls, ‘Back at the beginning, when we were doing mainly mock-ups and restorations for air-war movies, there was a time when I tried to persuade Harold and Charlie to restructure the financial setup. They could have gone public even then. It was a sound operation. It was making good money. If they’d gone public, they’d have ended up in absolute control of the company, with very little additional investment of their own. Or, I told them, they had the alternative of buying out a couple of the producers. If they’d bought that stock back then, they could have got it for ten bucks a share, and they’d have ended up owning more than fifty-one percent of ACA.
“‘But I couldn’t talk them into it. They didn’t want to go public because they didn’t want to hassle with the SEC and all that crap-they were both kind of naive, they didn’t want to get mixed up in the big bad world of high finance. And they didn’t want to buy out any of the other stockholders because that was money they’d rather plow back into the company to keep expanding. Hell, you couldn’t help seeing the handwriting on the wall.’
“The four producers soon reached loggerheads with the brothers-in-law; and a relationship that had begun at arm’s length ended up at sword’s point.
“The result was a complex series of legal maneuvers by the procucers. Two of them sold their stock, with buy-back options, to the other two. This made the second two producers majority stockholders. By August, nineteen sixty-nine, Craycroft and Ryterband occupied an untenable position, despite the protection they thought they had gained with their authoritarian charter and bylaws.
“Business was still excellent, but the number of new orders was falling off. The producers insisted this was because of competition from the new low-priced jets. They insisted that ACA could only prevail in the market by moving into the jet age.
“This was anathema to Craycroft, of course. He wouldn’t have a jet on a platter: He hated them.
“The end was inevitable. Craycroft and Ryterband were forced to divest themselves of control of the company. They sold their twenty-six percent of it to the producers, who promptly went public. ACA is a thriving corporation today, well invested in jet aircraft development and sales, but the partners who created the company were frozen out in nineteen sixty-nine and have had nothing to do with it since then.
“A small Long Island concern, Aeroflight, Incorporated, had been struggling along for years selling aircraft of its own design to the private-aviation market-mainly two– and four-seater monoplanes for the weekend-flier trade. It had never given Cessna or Piper any cause for alarm but for several years Aeroflight had been doing a steady little business in lightplane sales. The president and chief designer of Aeroflight was a man named Samuel Spaulding, who in World War Two had been a maintenance engineer under Craycroft’s command.
“Spaulding had been following the ACA case in the financial trade publications. When he learned of the ouster of Craycroft and Ryterband, he made contact with them and arranged a meeting.
“The conference took place November sixteenth, nineteen sixty-nine, in Aeroflight’s offices on the company’s private factory and airfield near Brook-haven, Long Island. Its result was that Craycroft and Ryterband joined Aeroflight.
“The brothers-in-law had realized a certain amount of capital from the forced sale of their ACA stock. Some of this had been eaten up by legal fees and costs, and a good chunk was taken from them as capital-gains taxes; but they had retained approximately one hundred thousand dollars each, and with that money they bought into Aeroflight-an investment which bought them eighteen percent of the company.
“Spaulding was tremendously loyal to Craycroft-it was a kind of hero worship-and it was not long before Craycroft moved into the center of action. Using Aeroflight’s capital, he returned to California and made a tender to the new bosses of ACA to buy some of the old bombers they still had in inventory from Craycroft’s tenure. ACA was only too willing to unload these obsolete craft; Craycroft-with Spaulding’s bargaining agents acting for him-was able to buy the old planes at excellent prices. ACA was happy to write them off as tax losses.
“There were twelve planes involved: six B-17 Flying Fortresses, four B-24 Liberators and two Lockheed Constellations. All of them were at least twenty-five years old. They had all been made airworthy, but since none had been on order by any paying customer, the pressurization and heating and navigational systems had not been updated. In sum they were sound but dismally obsolete.
“In March, nineteen seventy, Craycroft, Ryterband, two Aeroflight pilot-employees, and eight hired free-lance pilots arrived in Burbank to take delivery of the twelve aircraft on the ACA airfield. The sale was consummated and the airplanes took off on the first leg of what would have been a comic odyssey if it hadn’t been for its tragic consequences.
“With only one man aboard each plane-the pilot-the flight of twelve planes worked into an uneven formation over the San Fernando Valley and began flying eastward across the Southwestern deserts and mountains. The flight plan called for a route that took them across Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Nebraska, Iowa, and Illinois, and thence east to New York. Refueling and overnight stops were scheduled at Denver, Des Moines, and Toledo. It had been necessary to obtain clearances in advance for the twelve-craft flight, and therefore the expedition had to adhere to its precleared schedule; the airports en route were not equipped to handle such large influxes of transient aircraft normally, and special arrangements had to be made.
“An oxygen malfunction aboard one of the B-24’s forced that plane to deviate from the planned course over the Sierra Nevada range; the plane had to make its own way south and follow the much longer low-altitude route east by way of Tucson, El Paso, and Oklahoma City. This reduced the formation to eleven. It was further reduced-to nine-when one B-17 developed engine trouble and had to divert to Salt Lake City, and almost simultaneously a Constellation lost touch with the group in a heavy cloud formation-the result of primitive instrumentation and inadequate communication air-to-air-and because of a faulty compass ended up with insufficient fuel to reach the first stop (Denver). It had to divert to Grand Junction, Colorado, and because of a fuel shortage at that airport it never caught up with the rest of the flight.
“The nine remaining planes straggled into Denver over the course of ninety minutes during the evening of March twenty-first, nineteen seventy. A feature article from the next morning’s Denver Post includes an impressive photograph of the ancient planes lined up at their hardstands, and a brief nostalgia-slanted interview with Craycroft, who is quoted as saying, ‘You may never see their like again around here. They’re really kind of majestic, aren’t they?’
“Pushed by the tight schedule of clearances, the nine planes took off from Denver at six fifteen A.M. March twenty-second, heading for a midday refueling stop at Des Moines. The distance is about seven hundred miles and Craycroft expected to reach Des Moines by about eleven CST.
“A half hour out, Ryterband reported altimeter trouble but no one expressed much alarm, since they were flying VFR and the weather looked good, and there were no mountains along the route.
“Then a front, forecast as stationary, suddenly began to move north across Kansas and eastern Nebraska. Tornadoes struck four towns and several farm areas along the border between the two states, and Omaha radio advised Craycroft’s flight that it now looked as if the storm would be right in the middle of the flight plan if Craycroft stayed on course.
“It was a severe storm, the remnants of Hurricane Bertha, which had struck the Texas coast two days previously and was moving in an unusual due-north direction. Storm ceiling was altitude zero and the Air Force reported that it went straight up to thirty thousand feet. It was moving north, by eight that morning, at nearly sixty miles an hour and its interior winds were measured at more than that.
“Then a new meteorological report came in, at approximately eight fifteen, which said the storm appeared to be slowing down its rate of travel and veering toward the west.
“Craycroft elected to try and beat the storm into Des Moines. He did, however, order Ryterband to change course and land at Grand Island, because he didn’t want to risk Ryterband’s being stuck in obscure weather with a faulty altimeter. Ryterband peeled off in his B-24, and that left eight.
“At about nine forty-five (now on Central Time) the flight entered a bank of floor-to-ceiling cloud which obstructed visibility but contained very little turbulence; it was the remainder of a slow-moving cold front crossing the plains, and was not connected with the hurricane weather system to the southeast. Craycroft and his pilots seem to have felt no alarm about the cloud front. They had expected it. They also expected to emerge from its leading edge some twenty-five miles later.
“Some of them did.
“Unfamiliarity with the old controls, and lack of visibility within the cloud front, made for uncertain navigation for the pilots. At nine fifty-two one B-17 sideswiped another in the murk.
