Well, of course. That was crucial to the game, wasn’t it? I mean, there was no point making a plan to steal all that money if you couldn’t get away with it afterward.
Yes, ma’am. Could you tell me the details of that plan?
You don’t have to lean forward so intensely, Mr. Skinner. I never mutter. Do you find it hard to hear me?
Not at all.
That’s better. Now you just sit back in that comfortable chair and I’ll tell you about the escape plan. It really was quite a marvelous scheme. We all contributed to it. I was very happy that my own ideas fitted in so well.
Which ideas were those?
Well, the idea of the window, of course, and the boat.
Perhaps you’d better describe it from the beginning.
Well, now. Let me think. The first problem was to pick a day that would give us the best weather for it.
Partial clouds?
That and the probability of low mist over Long Island Sound. In any case we decided that of course we’d have to wait for a day when those conditions applied.
Isn’t it the case, however, that your husband made an appointment with Mr. Maitland, the banker, two days beforehand?
My husband didn’t make that appointment, Mr. Skinner.
Then who did?
My brother, I’m sure. I don’t know who else could have. But Charles didn’t even know about the scheme until the very morning they put it into effect.
How can you be sure of that?
Because I slept in the same room with Charles that night. In the same bed. If he’d known they were actually going to do this thing that day, don’t you think I’d have known it? Don’t you think at least he’d have been nervous?
He wasn’t nervous at all?
We’d all been a little nervous for months. We were upset by our—our plight, there’s no other word for it, really. But Charles was no more upset or nervous that night than at any other time in the preceding several months. We both slept very well, thank you. In the morning—about half past six—the phone rang, and it was Harold calling from the factory. He wanted to talk to Charles. I put Charles on the line, and I got off. Charles talked to Harold briefly and then told me he had to go out—Harold wanted to see him over at the plant. Charles left the house at about a quarter to seven, and that was the last time I saw him.
Did he seem particularly agitated when he went out?
No. I’m sure Harold didn’t spring it on him until he arrived at the factory. You see, Harold would have done it that way. He’d have known that Charles wouldn’t have gone along with it if he’d had time to think it over. He must have presented it to Charles as a fait accompli. Told him, “You have an appointment at ten o’clock with the banker, Maitland. You’ll have to get right in the car and go.”
And your husband would have gone? Just like that?
Well, we’d been discussing the plan every day for months. We’d rehearsed it in our talks, endlessly. The only thing we didn’t know was that it was real. That Harold had actually rebuilt the bomber and armed it with bombs.
Can we get back to the escape plan, please?
Certainly. We’d worked out the timing very carefully, taking everything into account. Everything. The plane was a B-17C, the long-range model, it could stay airborne at low speeds for up to eleven hours without running out of fuel. It would take off at ten o’clock precisely and arrive over Manhattan within the half hour. There was fuel enough to keep it in the air until nine o’clock that night.
The deadline given by your husband was three o’clock.
That was for the payment of the money. The deadline for the bombs was ten minutes past five.
That gave us a good margin of fuel—nearly four hours.
Go on, please.
Well, around three o’clock Charles would signal Harold by radio that the money had been delivered to his car. Then Charles would drive away with the money while Harold continued to circle over the city to give Charles time to get away with the money.
We know that much. Where did he plan to get away to?
The route was very carefully planned. Charles would cross the Williamsburg Bridge and take the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway to the Long Island Expressway and then drive east on Long Island to Route One Oh One, where he would turn south into the Williston Park area and allow himself thirty minutes to lose his pursuit. We assumed he would be followed, you see, in spite of our instructions, and we had studied methods of “shaking a tail,” as they call it. Naturally we realized there was no way to elude the pursuit permanently on the highways, but all we really needed was a few minutes’ invisibility. For Charles, that is. We’d done a good bit of reading—detective novels, mainly. Some of them are quite ingenious, you know. I’ve been addicted to Rex Stout and John D. MacDonald for many years. I was able to find passages in their books which gave us excellent techniques for escaping pursuit by the police or anyone else.
Remarkable.
How’s that?
Nothing, Mrs. Ryterband. Do go on.
Having eluded the police, Charles was to drive his car into a certain two-car garage. Naturally we hadn’t actually gone to Williston Park to select such a garage, but I have to assume that my brother actually did so at some point, without telling us. That morning he must have given Charles the address of the garage. There are a good number of householders in those areas who have garages but don’t have cars of their own, and who therefore rent out their garages to people who want to secure their own cars off the street. We’d talked about renting one of those garages.
So we can assume that’s what Mr. Craycroft actually did.
I’m sure you can, yes. In any case there was to be a second car waiting in that garage. There were to be watertight duffel bags in the second car. As soon as Charles arrived in the garage, he was to transfer the money out of whatever containers it was in, and repack the money into the waterproof bags. This was partly to protect the money, but it was also because we’d read about cases—kidnapping and that sort of crimes—where the police had actually hidden small transmitters in the suitcases that contained the ransom money, so that they could follow the suitcases by radio direction finders.
You’d thought of everything, then.
My, yes. Don’t forget we’d been indulging ourselves with this game for months.
Yes, of course. Well, go on, if you don’t mind.
Yes. Leaving the original suitcases—empty of course—in the original “getaway car,” and transferring the money itself into duffel bags in the second car, Charles would then drive north on Route One Oh One to Port Washington, where the plan called for a rented fishing boat to be waiting at a particular dock. Again of course we hadn’t actually rented any boat or tied it up at any real dock. But again we’ve got to assume Harold did these things in secret.
Yes. I see.
The boat had to meet certain requirements. It had to have both sailing masts and fairly powerful engines. To increase its possible range of operation, you see. It didn’t have to be particularly fast, because we weren’t expecting to have to outrun anyone in it, but it did have to be seaworthy in terms of the open ocean, and it had to be fairly small and simple to operate because Harold was never interested in sailing, and that would leave most of the operation of the boat up to Charles and myself. Charles became an accomplished sailor, of course, during his days in Alaska and on the California coast. Until last year, in fact, we had our own twenty-four-footer on Long Island, but we were forced to sell it.
I see. This boat was to have been rented and tied up at a dock in Hempstead Harbor, was it? And Mr. Ryterband would take the money aboard the boat?
Yes. According to our plan it would then be nearly five o’clock, allowing for the time taken by traffic en route and the time used in evading pursuit and changing cars. So Charles would actually be on board the boat at some time between four thirty and four fifty. He would cast off and make for Long Island Sound under engine power, and as soon as he was out of Hempstead Harbor
, he would put up sail if the wind was with him. Otherwise he’d use engine power; there wouldn’t be time for tacking against the wind.
I see. Were you supposed to be on board with him?
According to the make-believe plan, yes, I was. As it actually turned out I didn’t even know they were putting the plan into action, so of course I had no idea there was a real boat, let alone that I should be there aboard it. I believe I know what actually happened in their minds, however.
Yes?
It was a perilous voyage they had in mind. I believe Harold intended from the beginning to leave me behind until they had reached their final destination. Then, I think, he hoped that he and Charles would be able to get a secret message to me, and that I would be able to join them.
All right. Let’s leave that subject for the moment and get back to their escape plan. You’ve placed Mr. Ryterband, with the money, aboard this boat in Long Island Sound. Now, what is Mr. Craycroft’s part in it? How do the two men make a rendezvous?
We had worked out the exact compass coordinates on the charts. At five ten—a bit more than two hours after the money was paid—Harold would discontinue circling over Manhattan Island. He would cross the East River above the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges as if he were going to make another circuit in his pattern, but once over Brooklyn he would continue to fly east and then northeast across the heavily populated areas of Long Island.
The idea being that there would be no point along his route where he could be shot down without risking the destruction of a populated area?
Yes. Exactly.
And then?
You have to understand that we’d made certain assumptions about the way the authorities would react to all this. If we were wrong, of course, it didn’t matter, but if we were right we had to be prepared for their countermeasures.
Can you explain that a bit more, please?
We expected the Air Force or the Navy to have armed planes in the air, ready to shoot Harold down at the first opportunity. If they didn’t put up such planes, of course, it simply made our scheme easier to carry out. But we had to assume they would have planes up.
I see.
That was why we’d decided that the key to the plan was to pick a day when there would be clouds over, Long Island Sound. And a degree of mist on the water.
Go on, please.
Flying eastward—northeastward—across Long Island, Harold would seek these clouds. He had an unlimited number of places to go into the clouds—he could do that at any point where the clouds overhung both the shore and the waters of the sound. The point was he had to leave land behind at a point where he wasn’t visible.
What about radar? Pursuit planes would be tracking on radar, wouldn’t they?
That was what the window was for.
You mentioned a window before. I confess it baffles me.
“Window” is a word used by air people to describe strips of aluminum foil which are dropped from an airplane to confuse radar. I have no idea what the derivation of the word is. But in any case our plan called for bundles of foil to be secured in the spare bomb racks of the airplane so that they could be released by my brother the moment he flew into the concealment of clouds above Long Island Sound. This wouldn’t prevent them from following him, of course, but it would prevent them from getting an accurate enough fix on him to shoot him down immediately. All he needed was a few minutes. In any case we assumed by this point that the pursuit wouldn’t be eager to shoot him down. Their objective would be simply to follow him, see where he landed the plane, and then arrest him on the ground. Once he’d flown away from the populated areas he was no longer a threat to them, you see? So we assumed they wouldn’t shoot him—just track him.
I don’t see how that helped your plans to get away.
Well, we were perfectly willing to have them follow the Flying Fortress. That was a diversion, you see.
A diversion?
That was why we needed the cloud cover. As soon as he was concealed inside a bank of cloud above the waters of the sound, Harold was to drop an inflatable emergency raft out of the plane, and then he was to jump out of the airplane and parachute into the water. The strips of window would confuse the radar of pursuing planes, and they wouldn’t know he had jumped out of the plane. Naturally they would think he was still flying it. The plane would be set on automatic pilot, and would continue to fly a northeasterly course out over the Atlantic Ocean until ultimately it would run out of fuel and crash in the ocean. That wouldn’t happen until more than three hours later, of course, which gave us at least three hours before any suspicions could be raised.
Remarkable.
Yes, it was really very ingenious, I think. Harold would parachute into the water, climb into the rubber life raft and paddle to the rendezvous on the middle of the sound, where he would meet our fishing boat and climb aboard. We hoped to have a ground mist to at least partly conceal this part of the plan, but it wasn’t absolutely essential; the only vital part of the weather requirement was that he had to bail out in clouds, so that he couldn’t be seen when he left the airplane.
The boat would then take them where?
By stages down the coast to Florida and then ultimately to Mexico, where we understood it was possible to obtain new false papers for a price.
And then?
To South Africa, where we intended to set ourselves up in the aircraft business under new names.
It was an incredible plan, Mrs. Ryterband. There’s one detail that puzzles me just a little. If Mr. Craycroft phoned the bank on Monday, how did he know the weather conditions on Wednesday would be suitable?
I can only imagine that he had studied the extended forecast, which as I recall called for partly cloudy conditions throughout most of that week. If the weather had not obliged—if there’d been an important change by Wednesday morning—I’m sure he’d simply have called the bank, canceled the appointment and waited for another opportunity.
Was the Merchants Trust Bank a particular target for any special reason?
No. Any of the major banks would have done as well. We chose the Merchants Trust mainly because it wasn’t too far from the lower East Side Highway, which meant that Charles wouldn’t have far to drive before he could get across the bridge into Brooklyn and away on the expressway.
Did it occur to any of you how bulky five million dollars in cash would be?
We worked it out very carefully, Mr. Skinner. Assuming there would be a random selection of bills in denominations from one hundred dollars down to ten dollars, we calculated a total of approximately thirty-five thousand bank notes. They would be used bills—we specified that. We actually went to the bank and cashed a check for two hundred dollars and changed it into one-dollar bills. Then we weighed the two hundred bills on a postal scale. It was almost exactly eight ounces—half a pound. I’m not sure our scale was exactly accurate—it was quite old—but at least it gave us a working figure. Four hundred bills to the pound. That meant the total would weigh about ninety pounds. Not more than one hundred pounds, in any case. Wrapped in banded stacks of five hundred bills each—about two inches thick, each stack—we calculated seventy stacks. You could fit it all into one large suitcase or two ordinary suitcases. Charles was always a big man, powerful in build—he never went to fat. It was no great effort for him to carry two fifty-pound suitcases, one in either hand. We even tried it, with suitcases filled with books from my library shelves.
Extraordinary.
You needn’t be so surprised, Mr. Skinner. We thought of everything. Everything.
Maitland (Cont’d)
There’s a point of confusion you may be able to help us clear up.
I’ll be glad to if I can.
Who suggested that you get the money up?
(Laughter) Everybody did.
No, I mean, who suggested it first?
I don’t really remember, Mr. Skinner. I do know this much. Everybody was suggesting it. I was the one who had already done something about
it.
At what time?
Starting at, oh, I’d say about eleven o’clock. Ira Rabinowitz—my security chief—was in the office, and he was on one line talking to the police. I was on the other line to one of the executive vice-presidents, Mr. Prince, asking him to find out what our cash availability situation was. I told him we had to raise the money. I think he’ll confirm that for you, if there’s any question of it. While I was on the interphone with Prince, two police officers came into the office—
Patrolmen Weinstein and Criscola?
I suppose so. I didn’t get their names, or didn’t remember them. They were in uniform.
Police records show they arrived in your office at ten fifty-seven.
Then that’s when I was talking to Prince.
I see. Then in your own mind you had decided almost instantly that you were going to pay the ransom?
Mr. Skinner, that man was right in front of me in my office. Willard Roberts, Ryterband, whatever his name was. I’d seen his eyes, heard his voice. And I had seen that plane from my window. There wasn’t the slightest doubt in my mind that he meant what he was saying. He had me cold. I was under duress. No man in my position could even think about risking the lives of thousands of innocent people for the sake of an armload of paper money.
But it must have occurred to you that they might have been bluffing. That perhaps the bombs weren’t real—or that perhaps they didn’t intend to use them, regardless.
It crossed my, mind. But it wasn’t a chance I was about to take. Hell, Mr. Skinner, if I’d taken a chance like that I’d have been a pariah for life—whether I’d been right or wrong. No. I had no choice. No choice at all.
It has been suggested that you weren’t committing your own money. That the money belonged to the bank—its depositors and stockholders and the like.
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