Posted on 12/21/2003 4:26:34 PM PST by sarcasm
There it is.
A perfect fit, tucked in between the two luggage carousels shuffling out the suitcases on conveyer belts to all these people who have flown into New York City, the capital of the world.
Which locker will it be? One up high? Right down low? One in the middle?
Yes, that will be good.
The timer is set, a simple alarm clock. The battery is Eveready. The explosive is big.
When it happens, the cause will be known—splashed on the news, television, radio, Time magazine. Then people will understand.
Slip two quarters in the slot, listen to them drop to the bottom with a clink. Check the package one more time, then close the door, turn the key and disappear into the bustle.
In a cab/at home/walking down the street, the news is announced: An explosion has ripped through the Trans World Airlines Terminal at LaGuardia Airport. There is blood and chaos everywhere. Eleven people are dead.
My God, what have I done?
Replace a few details here and there—maybe change night from day, switch the motive from political to personal—and most of the people involved in the case believe this is how it went down that day.
An Unsolved Terrorist Attack
In 1975, bombs were going off twice a month in the city. And it wasn't just one enemy behind the blasts. It seemed like everyone with a cause and a grudge had a bomb and was willing to use it. But when a bomb went off in a row of lockers at LaGuardia Airport on Dec. 29, and no note, no letter to the papers, no call to 911 followed—to claim the blast in the name of freedom for Puerto Rico, for Cuba, for Palestine, for American blacks or left-wing whites—the entire city was scared, confused and desperately searching for answers.
At the time, it was the bloodiest terrorist attack in the history of New York. Eleven dead, 75 injured. Its death toll remains higher than the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, than all of the city's sporadic bombings of the 1970s put together.
Yet there are no more answers today than there were the second it happened. Flatlined leads, pointed fingers and frustrated cops? Yes, we have those. In bunches. Was the timer set wrong, as simple as mixing up 6:33 a.m., when the blast would have injured few, with 6:33 p.m., when hundreds of people were milling about the terminal? Did the ultrasonic frequencies of the airport set it off? Someone jostling a nearby locker? Or did whoever planted it want it to go off at that exact time, so as to do maximum damage to the city of New York?
Time for Bombs
Today, with all the color-coded warnings and active threats looming over New York, the city lives day to day on the edge of terror. Yet, the last terrorist attack in New York—though far more horrific and deadly than anything prior—occurred more than two years ago, and there hasn't been another attack, or even a credible threat, since then.
In 1975, however, 32 bombs were set off within the city limits, most planted by terrorists. In February, the FALN, a group seeking independence for Puerto Rico, had culminated a year-long bombing campaign by killing four people at Fraunces Tavern in downtown Manhattan. A bomb went off in front of the Venezuelan Consulate in February. Four bombs shattered midtown office buildings on a late night in April. Another hit a bank in Rockefeller Center in June.
The city was certainly not the only target. Starting on Aug. 27, after an eight-month freeze, the IRA unleashed a vicious assault against fashionable London locales, exploding 10 bombs within a two-month period. At the end of November, while double-checking the restroom of an airliner preparing to depart Miami International Airport for the Bahamas, a maintenance man found a bomb. Then four bombs went off in Miami on Dec. 3. Two more a day later. A bomb went off at UCLA on Dec. 6. The next day, six bombs rocked Youngstown, Ohio.
According to the FBI, there were 1,088 bombing incidents in America that year, compared to 742 in 1973, and 893 in 1974, bringing with them $27 million in damages. But few of the bombs were fatal: In all 1,088 incidents, there were only 326 injuries and 69 deaths.
With the bombings came hundreds of menacing bomb threats, phony threats, and even phony bombs, like the one found at the 59th Street station IRT line in October, which snarled the commute for hours.
The Hand of Fate
On Dec. 29, LaGuardia Airport was buzzing with post-holiday travel. TWA flight 416, out of Indianapolis, had arrived on time at 5:58 p.m. Unusual, as the flight was habitually late.
Nancy Higgins got off that plane and checked in with the limousine company to arrange a ride to her family's home in Connecticut. She was told she would have to wait 30 minutes. She was annoyed.
Suitcase in hand, she turned from the limo counter and spied a wall of red lockers, three high, two across, near the luggage carousel where most of the passengers had just collected their bags.
She walked over to the lockers.
"Fifty cents," she thought to herself, frowned and decided she could deal with her bag for a half hour. So the 31-year-old librarian from Bloomington, Ind. bought a New York Times, walked over to the large plate-glass windows overlooking the road, and began to read.
She spotted Donald Kochersperger, a 57-year-old engineer with whom she had often shared a limo back to Connecticut. She thought about going over to him, but didn't.
Outside, limo driver Frank Musicaro had collected his passenger—headed for Wantagh—and was calling the dispatcher for his next assignment. Patrick Callahan, a lawyer from Indianapolis, was with his partner Steve Cline, waiting for a limo to see a client in Connecticut. Edythe Bull had missed her first limo to Connecticut, and was buying a ticket from Edgar Cooper of Westchester Limousine Service. LaGuardia was the first stop of a trip around the world for Bull, a 72-year-old from Brevard, N.C. Connecticut artist Enoch Stamey was also waiting for a ride up north.
Nancy Higgins looked up from her paper every few minutes to check the clock.
6:28.
"I was rather annoyed."
6:31.
Callahan walked outside and looked down the road to see if the limo was coming. Disappointed, he went back inside and leaned up against a column.
6:32.
At 6:33, hell arrived at Gate 22.
Ripped from the lockers and the carousel conveyer belts, shards of metal were thrown like javelins in all directions, slicing arms and legs clean off. Yards of 30-foot-tall windows that lined the terminal were obliterated, showering glass on the limo drivers and their fares. Smoke billowed. The ceiling fell. Those who were still standing scrambled.
"My brain was hanging out of my head," remembers Higgins. "I remember someone, presumably holding me, [and me] throwing up." She then went into shock.
A concrete fog enveloped the room.
"My ears, it was like a thousand cymbals going off," the lawyer Callahan remembers today. He stumbled out the door, where his partner noticed his arm bleeding. Callahan, in turn, stared at his partner's singed hair.
Kochersperger, the engineer, and Musicaro, the limo driver, were dead. Bull, the would-be world traveler, Cooper the limo ticket salesman and Stamey the artist were dead.
Did a plane crash into the building? Was it a gas explosion? The gunpowder smell choking the air made it clear to some that it was a bomb. Limbs had been tossed about the room. Published reports told of an employee finding a head on the sidewalk. The most repeated words of the next news day? "Mutilated," "Chaos," "Puddles" and "Blood," "Blood," "Blood."
"There was a young doctor with his foot that was severed. Looked like it was done in a butcher shop, it was so pristine," recalls Frank McDarby, then a detective in the arson/explosion squad, which arrived on the scene 20 minutes after the blast. "He looked like he was doing okay—he died before he got to the hospital."
A 6-inch-thick reinforced concrete ceiling yielded a hole you could drive a bus through. Clothing was everywhere. Bits of luggage. Locker fragments warped like pieces of damp cardboard. The luggage carousel splintered into a thousand jagged wire hangers. Dirt. Fistfuls of concrete. Insulation.
And then there was the water.
"It was a gruesome, gruesome scene, 'cause the pipes broke," remembers Ken Dudonis, a bomb squad officer at the scene. "There was an inch of water mixed with all that blood. It was like you're walking through tomato soup."
Water poured out of a hole in the ceiling, and met the water from the sprinklers. What five minutes earlier was the luggage claim area at Gate 22 of LaGuardia Airport had been transformed into a murky crimson swamp.
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