Bird Dream

by Matt Higgins

  Chapter 11

  “HOLY CHUTE!”

  Turning and turning in the widening gyre

  The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

  Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold

  —William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming”

  NEW YORK, SPRING 2006

  His landing ambitions stalled due to the lack of a solid theory for touching down unhurt, Jeb Corliss considered an extraordinary job offer.

  Jordan Stone was a producer in Los Angeles who worked on a succession of cable TV shows that had bought much of Jeb’s stunt footage. Working at Real TV, Stone acquired the first video Jeb sold, documenting his trip to Angel Falls. Stone called Jeb regularly in search of fresh footage. One day in 2004, he phoned with an altogether different proposition: Had Jeb ever considered working as a TV host?

  Jeb hadn’t, and he wasn’t thrilled with the idea. But Stone explained that he had something different in mind. The host of his show would act like a fly on the wall, talking with athletes—in this case, skateboarders, snowboarders, skydivers, motorcyclists—as they dreamed up, planned, and attempted to execute never-before-seen stunts. Each episode would feature a different athlete pursuing a first in his discipline.

  Stone was impressed with Jeb’s performance in a documentary called Fearless, on the cable network OLN, which explored Jeb’s life and the circumstances of Weston’s death. He would later write in an e-mail what had prompted him to pursue Jeb, a novice, as a TV host: “Jeb is a larger-than-life character, and that comes thru [sic] on camera—he also has a genuine interest in other people and what motivates them . . . I knew he’d be a huge asset to my show.”

  The show’s other producer and cohost was a former stuntman named Perry Barndt. Their show would be called Stunt Junkies and air on the Discovery Channel. With a salary of $10,000 per episode, all of Jeb’s hard work and risk taking appeared to have finally paid off.

  Right away, though, certain aspects of production chafed—reading from scripts, parroting dialogue, doing voice-overs. “All of a sudden I was a regular host,” Jeb would recall. “I didn’t like that very much. It really wasn’t what I was designed for.”

  Worse, Jeb was on the other side of the microphone from the men who took the risks in each episode. The erstwhile BASE jumper was eager to return to stunts. He began working an idea over in his mind. With a group of confidants, he spent months fine-tuning a plot, which they would finally set in motion on April 27, 2006, under a bright spring New York sky.

  • • •

  It was the kind of day on which, from the observation level on the eighty-sixth floor of the Empire State Building, visitors gained views of Manhattan’s muscular grandeur—the spires and pinnacles of the city’s lesser skyscrapers, New York Harbor, and the iconic bridges leading to the outer boroughs and beyond. West, across the dark waters of the Hudson, the vast promise of the American continent stretched from New Jersey’s satellite cities and burgs to the barren hills on the horizon.

  Jeb Corliss had been in the city a week, waiting out winds and rain for just such a day. He had admired the Empire State Building from street level while out walking. And when favorable conditions finally arrived, he entered the building’s ground floor at around 3 p.m.

  With his tall, lanky frame and shaved head, Jeb normally stood out in a crowd. Stunt Junkies meant he had a modestly famous face. But no one recognized him as he made his way through the building’s lobby. To ensure no one would, he wore a $15,000 disguise consisting of a fat suit and a latex mask with a wig, fake mustache, and sunglasses, which had transformed him into an aging, overweight tourist.

  Cameras in the building captured images of visitors and relayed them to command-center monitors, which security personnel scanned for anything unusual. Footage that would later figure prominently in a trial showed Jeb pass through one of the building’s X-ray machines, his bulky suit stuffed into beige pants and jacket. He waddled through the lobby and up an escalator. A camera at the top captured him coming into view: first his sunglasses, followed by a blue-striped button-down shirt, and finally a disguised Jeb Corliss stepped off, duck footed, in dark shoes, moving down a corridor to a staging area. He had paid an extra $40, on top of the price of admission, to be escorted to the front of the line to ride the express elevators. He was in a hurry. Underneath his disguise he wore a parachute specially constructed with plastic parts, to ensure passage through the building’s metal detectors. In his head he carried a plan to leap from the building and float into midtown Manhattan.

  On the eightieth floor, Jeb disembarked one elevator car and boarded another for a ride up the final six stories to the observation level. Cameras followed his every movement, feeding video images from an Intellex surveillance system to security personnel, who by now were looking for him. Four hours earlier, an anonymous caller had phoned with a vague tip about a large man in a disguise who planned to jump from the building. Security personnel scanned the sidewalk and corridors. They looked in the lobby, scrutinizing visitors. Informed of the tip, the New York Police Department dispatched an officer to the eighty-sixth-floor observation deck, where he took a position along with several retired NYPD detectives now serving as private security at the building.

  Once on the eighty-sixth floor himself, Jeb Corliss proceeded past a bank of windows to a handicap bathroom, locked the door, and quickly shed his fat suit and disguise. He pulled a black helmet with a video camera mounted on top over his mask and completed his outfit with black fingerless gloves. Measuring himself in the mirror, he looked lean and long, decked out head to toe in black. Finally Jeb inspected his rig, unlocked the bathroom door, and stepped into a souvenir shop. Wearing a black jumpsuit and rig, black boots, black kneepads, black gloves, and black helmet, he made a startling impression on tourists as he strode with purpose past postcard carousels and King Kong curios.

  Moving quickly, he burst through a door to a wheelchair ramp along the southwest corner of the observation platform, in the middle of the block overlooking Thirty-third Street and the city’s jagged skyline, shreds of blue sky showing through the clouds. A few feet to his right, three members of the building’s plainclothes security detail had gathered to scan the crowd for the suspect described earlier by the anonymous caller. Former cops, they were large men with probing eyes and stern expressions, dressed neatly in sport coats, khakis, and slacks. They did not exactly blend in. A member of the building’s security team monitoring metal detectors in the lobby had radioed them about a large man. Something about the man did not sit right with him. With their backs to the door, searching for someone meeting the description provided by the security officer in the lobby, these men did not immediately see Jeb emerge onto the observation platform and, in one motion, stand on a railing along the ramp and vault onto a ten-foot-tall security fence. The fence’s vertical bars bend back toward the building at the top like a shepherd’s crook. As Jeb dangled there, security—searching for an overweight man—finally spotted him.

  “There he goes!” a plainclothes security officer shouted. Reaching for Jeb’s legs as he swung over the bars, the man lost his balance and his eyeglasses as he toppled headfirst from a six-foot wall. In the chaos, Jeb slid down the outside of the fence and settled onto a four-inch ledge, 1,044 feet above an early-rush-hour streetscape. Three hundred tourists were gathered on the other side of the bars. Some screamed. Others pointed cameras and began taking pictures. A baby wailed in the background. The commotion summoned the uniformed police officer, who sprinted through the gift shop.

  For two years, Jeb had carefully prepared and plotted what would happen next, just as he had studied and probed weaknesses in the building’s security setup. A tiered wedding-cake design makes the building more than fifty feet wider at the base of each side than at the top. To avoid the building’s outcroppings during his jump, Jeb would need to maneuver to a section where a channel runs down the side. There he would be able to leap safely clear to the street.

  He had studied ve
hicle patterns on Fifth Avenue and learned that traffic lights up and down the strip turned green simultaneously. He would time his jump so that vehicles on Fifth Avenue, at the intersection with Thirty-fourth Street, would be halted at a red light, allowing him to avoid a dangerous landing amid moving traffic. By his calculations, the whole stunt would be over in a matter of seconds. He would leap, deploy his parachute, and land at a predetermined spot in the street below. Afterwards, he would quickly gather his parachute, climb into a hailed cab, and disappear in Manhattan’s teeming early-rush-hour traffic. On the observation level he would leave behind only memories, a few images in the cameras of startled tourists, and his disguise.

  Legal research had convinced him that parachuting from the Empire State Building broke no specific laws. Still, that did not mean the building’s owners would welcome him, and indeed, once security spotted Jeb, they moved quickly. Before he made his way to a safe takeoff spot, they reached through the safety bars and grabbed him around the legs. Two men grabbed him by his parachute harness and held tight.

  Jeb had prepared for this possibility, too. He’d concocted a script, one that had been used by Thor Alex Kappfjell seven years earlier, when he had jumped the Empire State Building during his Manhattan spree. Pleading with security to let go, Jeb explained that he could lose his balance and drop to his death.

  “What you’re doing right now can kill me,” he said.

  “I will fall and die if you don’t let me go. Let me go!” he repeated.

  Guards briefly discussed releasing him. “Hell, no!” one shouted. No one would jump from the Empire State Building that day, he said. Then he called for backup.

  The NYPD officer posted on the observation level lent his handcuffs to a retired police detective working for the building’s private security detail, named Tim Donohue. Donohue locked Jeb Corliss to the suicide bars. Then the officer called in a 10-13, “Officer needs assistance,” and a 10-85, “Additional units needed,” on his police radio.

  Caught, Jeb changed tack, his priority shifting to self-preservation. If his parachute opened while he was handcuffed to the bars, a gust could rip his arms from his body. He conveyed those concerns with increasing desperation. “If my parachute opens, my arms will be severed from my body and I will die,” he said. “Please take my parachute. My arms will be ripped from my body and I will fall!”

  “What did you say?”

  “If my parachute opens while I’m handcuffed, my arms will be severed and I will fall and die.”

  The officer pulled out a knife and handed it to Donohue to cut the straps securing the parachute. Next they removed the rig and helmet and passed them over the bars, pieces of latex mask peeling from Jeb’s face.

  Uniformed police swarmed the deck and set up a large net to cordon off the hundreds of curious tourists.

  “Remove the handcuffs and I’ll climb back over,” Jeb offered. Police weren’t convinced he wouldn’t try to escape, and without a parachute, he could fall and die. After some discussion, they employed the nets used to cordon off the observation level, wrapping them around Jeb to secure him in place as they unscrewed a small section of the suicide fence. At 3:40 p.m., police pulled him back onto the deck and placed him under arrest. He and his ambition of parachuting from the Empire State Building were busted.

  In an interrogation room at the Midtown South precinct, on Thirty-fifth Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, Jeb met with two detectives, who read him his Miranda rights. Providing details of his plans, Jeb explained that he was an experienced BASE jumper with more than a thousand jumps. He said he had been plotting his Empire State Building stunt for years, developing plastic parts for his parachute to bypass metal detectors in the building’s lobby. He had paid $15,000 for the fat suit from a supplier for Hollywood films. He had timed traffic lights to avoid landing among moving cars. His stunt would have been “very safe,” he said, with little possibility for injury to pedestrians. The mood in the room was relaxed. One of the cops, a Detective Whelan, would testify later that he found Jeb “likable” and “professional.” Nevertheless, Jeb was charged with first-degree reckless endangerment, a felony. He was taken for the night to the Tombs, the Manhattan Detention Complex downtown on White Street, a clearinghouse for anyone arrested in the city. There, Jeb was placed in a cell with half a dozen other inmates. “To be put in a cell with a bunch of scary, gnarly people—it was disturbing,” he would remember. “It was not the kind of place I would normally hang out.”

  In the morning, Jeb posted $3,000 bail and stepped into a city that was not entirely prepared to treat him as a conquering hero. A girlfriend was waiting, and as a photographer snapped their picture, Jeb stuck out his tongue. The tabloids pilloried him on their front pages, the Post calling him a “Jumping Jerk” and the Daily News countering with “HOLY CHUTE! Dopey daredevil nabbed trying to dive off Empire State Building.”

  News coverage mentioned that Jeb had leaped from the Palace Hotel. As he headed uptown in a cab to collect his belongings, Jeb prepared for an angry reception and possible eviction. Once in the lobby, though, he was surprised when staff turned and began applauding.

  • • •

  Not everyone was in a mood for celebration. In the aftermath of his arrest, Discovery fired Jeb from Stunt Junkies and issued a public statement expressing disappointment “at his serious lack of judgment and his reckless behavior.” The office of Manhattan district attorney Robert Morgenthau prepared to put evidence before a grand jury to indict Jeb on felony reckless endangerment charges.

  A fierce legal battle lay ahead. His very freedom at stake, Jeb hired Mel Sachs, a flamboyant figure in New York courtrooms who had represented Mike Tyson, Lil’ Kim, David Copperfield, Derek Jeter, and comedian Jackie Mason. Sachs wore bow ties, rimless eyeglasses, and three-piece bespoke double-breasted suits with watch pockets occupied by a gold timepiece. An amateur magician, he sometimes used the watch to demonstrate sleight of hand to jurors, making the point that things were not always as they seemed—that eyewitness testimony could be flawed. Comfortable in front of cameras, Sachs appeared as a legal analyst on shows for Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Larry King, and Greta Van Susteren. Journalists and clients visiting his office found a framed sign on the wall reading HAVE FAITH IN GOD AND MEL SACHS.

  Jeb had few, if any, advocates among BASE jumpers. “He did the Eiffel Tower and then he did New York, the Empire State Building, and put that up,” Helliwell would say about video footage of Jeb’s stunts. “It was like Oh God, Jeb, you don’t need to make yourself famous by burning all these objects.”

  “He was coming really close to what we used to call a glory hound,” DiGiovanni would say. “There’s other BASE jumpers in New York and other BASE jumpers jumping all the time in New York. He made it tough on those guys. What happened to the next guy who went to court? I don’t know if Jeb ever thought of that. There’s a lot of guys who were down on him because of that. To a lot of guys at that time, that wasn’t what BASE was about. You go out and you jump. You love it. You don’t do it to make yourself famous.”

  The following summer, Jeb returned to Switzerland. Wrung out emotionally, stepping from a cliff was like stepping from a curb. A doctor diagnosed adrenal fatigue, a condition similar to the battle fatigue experienced by soldiers returning from combat.

  His problems paled, though, compared with those of others around him. In Switzerland, Karina was critically injured while flying a wingsuit when her parachute lines snarled in a tension knot and she collided with a rock at sixty miles an hour, snapping her legs like matchsticks, sustaining more than twenty open fractures in her femurs and knees. She lost seven pints of blood before a rescue helicopter whisked her to a hospital. She regained consciousness after two days. Doctors explained that she was lucky to be alive. They said she would likely never walk again. When Jeb arrived at Karina’s bedside, he told her that the accident had probably saved her life.

  “How’s that possible?” she asked.

  Jeb sa
id that, given the direction Karina was headed in the sport, she probably would have eventually been killed if she were to continue.

  Back in New York, ten days after Karina’s accident, on August 30, 2006, Mel Sachs died from complications related to pancreatic cancer. With Jeb’s legal defense in disarray heading into grand jury testimony, the district attorney’s office pressed him to plead guilty and bring a swift end to the case. Instead he hired Mark Jay Heller, a flamboyant and controversial figure in New York courtrooms who had once represented “Son of Sam” David Berkowitz. Impish, with arresting blue eyes and slicked-back hair, Heller had been suspended from practicing law for five years during the 1990s after a disciplinary committee charged him with deceit, puffery, abusive treatment of clients, fee gouging, neglect, and willful failure to return unearned retainers to his clients. The panel accused Heller of being a “menace to the public” and “shockingly cavalier and abusive.” He admitted to professional misconduct, but a decade later he had been reinstated and was seeking high-profile clients. Jeb qualified. When a grand jury handed down an indictment on October 7, Heller’s client was facing felony reckless endangerment and the possibility of seven years in prison.

  Weeks later, at State Supreme Court in Manhattan for a hearing, Heller told Justice Michael R. Ambrecht in a brusque New York accent that his client had a right to risk his own life, and that he had made more than one thousand jumps around the world without injuring anyone else. He added that there was no law against jumping off a building in the state anyway. Then Heller said that it was the officers who showed depraved indifference to Mr. Corliss’s life by handcuffing him to the suicide bars. “If the parachute opens,” he said, “the thrust of it would separate him from his limbs.” Afterwards, Jeb emphasized for reporters: “This is completely absurd that people are coming down on me this way, because my life is mine.”