Passenger Update - Larry Finegold
Just had a one-hour chat with Lawrence B Finegold, who was an assistant US District Attorney at the time of the hijacking, was returning from Vancouver where he was prepping with federal officials in a case related to the Alioto kick-back trial. Alioto was the mayor of San Francisco at the time.
Some basics:
1. Larry was sitting in Row 6, starboard side.
2. Doesn't remember anyone sitting near him. No one ahead of him in "First Class."
3. Doesn't remember passengers from the rear of the plane being called up to the front of the plane. Doesn't remember any announcement from the cockpit to that effect.
4. He does remember the Captain getting on the intercom near the end of the flight and advises everyone to get into the "tuck position" for landing. "His voice was so calm and reassuring that he could soothe anyone heading to the guillotine," Larry said to me, or words to that effect. (I didn't know Scotty had it in him!)
5. Larry has been interviewed "100s of times." Recently turned down an interview request from Oprah. Larry says just Google his name and DB Cooper and one will find all the interviews.
6. Apparently Jo has contacted Larry, but we didn't discuss it in detail.
Overview:
Larry remember circling Seattle for hours, and assumed it had something to do with problems with the aircraft. "might have been related to the landing gears. I just don't remember. It was really raining, too, so I thought it might have been weather-related."
Larry remembers the Captain telling the passengers that they were burning off fuel prior to the landing, so when they landed on a "far section of the runway," Larry got really upset when he saw a fuel truck waiting for them. He assumed the fuel truck was gogin to off-load more fuel!
"They care more about the fuel than they do the passengers!" Larry fumed.
After a bit of time of sitting in their seats while on the runway, the doors opened up, and Larry remember seeing an FBI agent that he knew from his court work enter the plane. They greeted, and Larry says that the agent told him that a "skyjacker was on board," and that he would tell him more later. Larry thinks he was the first passenger to know they had been hijacked. Larry doesn't think that anyone else realized a hijacking was on-going.
Larry remembers getting on a bus to get to the terminal, but doesn't remember the roll-call. He was also surprised to learn that there were two "Coopers" on board, Michael and Dan.
This points to a bigger dynamic. As a US ADA in Seattle, Larry was "walled off from the case" and isolated from other passengers and FBI interrogators so that his role as a potential witness would not be compromised. As a result, he had little interaction with FBI agents once they got to the terminal and the feds ascertain that the passengers were safe, and had little to give them that would help in the bigger issue of what to do with an active skyjacker with a bomb in a plane on the runway.
As a result, Larry does not know how the Group of Five were selected or how and where they talked to the FBI.
"I wasn't at the airport very long once we got to the terminal. I wanted to get home! remember, it was the day before Thanksgiving."
Along those lines, Larry is still pissed (mildly) at his brother for scary the daylights out of Larry's wife, because he called the wife and asked, "Isn't Larry supposed to be flying home from Portland today? It's that where the skyjacking started?"
Surprisingly, Larry has little interest in the DB Cooper case, and is more fascinated by other great case that he has handled, such as his prosecution of Murphy and Lewis in their defrauding Newsweek reporter Fleming about DB Cooper. Several weeks after DBC, Larry was summoned out to Sea-Tac again, this time to accompany his boss Stan Pitkins in the arrest and arraignment of Sibley in his skyjacking caper.
In a similar vein, Larry has few theories of what happened or why. He barely follows the case, and said laconically that he had heard that DB Cooper probably landed in some trees. ""I guess he died from that."
But he still has some emotion talking about how DB Cooper threatened a lot of people on Flight 305. "DB Cooper... caused a lot of heartache for people on that plane. Would they ever see their loved ones, again. Things like that. Thank God I was... unscathed. But the case has no special meaning for me."
Although born and raised in Seattle, Larry now lives in Arizona and Israel besides maintaining his home and private law practice in Seattle.
He is also very aware and concerned with malfeasance within the FBI and the criminal justice system. We spoke at length about the Innocence Project and matters related to the evidentiary problems at the FBI's National Crime Lab.
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