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- Story Listed as: True Life For Adults
- Theme: Action & Adventure
- Subject: Crime
- Published: 06/10/2012
Pilot of the Plan
Born 1938, M, from Canon, GA, United StatesPILOT OF THE PLAN
By Michael D. Warner Copyright 2012
all rights reserved
The Guajira of Colombia's northern province lay quiet, its inhabitants asleep, facing a new day of plowing, tilling, weeding the flat fields and herding cattle in other areas. Total darkness. No man-made light visible. No moonlight penetrated the thick overcast. This night, the vast sparsely-populated South American landscape lay invisible to the eye. Nearest city is fifty miles distant through the blackness.
The cargo aboard my ship had been grown much farther away, high atop terraced slopes of the eighteen-thousand, seven hundred foot mountain, Pico Cristobal.
Colombian marijuana was harvested, dried, compacted in garbage compactors, wrapped in newspapers, packaged in twenty-kilo bales, bundled in black plastic trash bags, then trucked by ox-cart to a much lower elevation central point. There, roads were suitable for sturdy vehicles and the bales transferred to a modern stake-body flat bed truck.
The aircraft we flew this night was a Douglas DC-3 (Air Force C-47) cargo ship having a ninety-five foot wingspan, a fuselage sixty-five feet long. Rising to eighteen feet, three inches at her tail, she was a tail-wheel plane powered by two Pratt and Whitney R-1830-92 radial engines producing about twelve hundred horsepower apiece.
We had just slammed shut one of the two wide cargo doors on our DC-3 (C-47) aircraft when one of the locals made hand gestures indicating “policia” or “soldatos” were coming. He made a “Get the hell out of here, FAST!” signal, then turned and fled into the underbrush.
The 'helpers' in Colombia are of various tribal groups indigenous to the area and speak neither Spanish nor English. Hand signals were generally adequate for communication with clandestine visitors.
My copilot, and best friend Bobby, slammed shut the other door. We scrambled the full length of the ship up to the cockpit, jamming ourselves into our respective seats, simultaneously snapping seat belts latches and throwing switches.
I glanced at the ship's clock centrally mounted on the instrument panel. Two a.m. indicated the greenish-glowing small pointers of her luminous dial. My right hand was raised to the overhead console, index finger ready to press a toggle switch which would throw high voltage energy to the ignition system as soon as my copilot called the last blade of our pre-start engine rotation.
"Go!" he shouted.
I pressed the switch, toggled the fuel primer. My number two engine stuttered a couple times. When it coughed into life. I shoved the fuel mixture control into full rich. Thirty seconds later, number one was sputtering. In another seemingly long minute I had two well-running engines warming up for our take-off run.
We hurried through the before-take-off check list. From the corner of my eye I watched Bobby cross himself. Hey, devout or not, I always figured it can't hurt anything, especially when one is about to make an extremely overweight and totally illegal flight without benefit of a flight plan (nor insurance for that matter) over the deep Caribbean Sea in the middle of the night.
I slowly advanced the throttles to take-off power.
Sharp bursts of automatic weapons fire was partially overwhelmed by the roar of our two Pratt and Whitney R-1830 radial engines as I shoved my throttles forward to forty-eight inches of manifold pressure, achieving maximum take-off power.
I hauled back on the control column. Her nose began to rise.
"Gear up!" I screamed above the rumbling din.
My already knotted stomach tightened again approaching the far end of the airstrip as the abandoned stake-body truck's headlights blared directly ahead in the windshield then flashed beneath us and out of sight.
"Geeze!" Bobby shouted, "They're shooting at us!"
I couldn't turn to look, too busy flying the ship away from the north Colombian coast, hoping the dark silhouette our tail presented would give them less to aim at. I could turn back on course later.
Maxwell Air Force Base, Montgomery, Alabama
After cooling my heels for over an hour sitting in the crowded room, my name was finally called. I took a deep breath, rose from my seat and answered: "Here!"
The guard motioned me toward an office door.
I had anticipated my parole hearing for the past two months, but it had been inexplicably delayed. Finally, I would meet the parole board, answer the standard questions about having a place to stay with some kind of a job lined up and be awarded a release date.
The officer at the door ushered me inside. Then he closed it. I stood in the small office before a man who sat behind a battered wooden desk having several file folders scattered upon its top. He was frowning at the one he held in his hand.
"Mister Wilson?" he queried.
"Yes Sir, that's me."
His voice was flat, dispassionate. "We are going to continue your parole hearing until next time, about six months from now. As of now, you are not eligible."
He closed the file folder. "Any questions?" he asked.
I was taken completely by surprise. My three co-defendants in the case had already been approved for parole and were now in transit to a half-way house in Atlanta.
Stunned, I blurted: "Why am I being held longer than the other defendants in my case?"
"I can't reply to that," he told me. "We will see you again in about six months." He pressed a button on the console beside his right hand. The door opened, and the officer standing in it motioned me to exit the room.
PAUSE
When charged, I had been a non-violent first-offender, no previous record, and was a four year active duty veteran of our armed services, the father of five children and an airplane pilot. I had maintained a clean prison record. Yet, since first being incarcerated, I had been treated more like "Jack the Ripper".
Geeze, I recalled to myself. When we first went down, all the others had been sent to low security prison camps where an inmate didn't have to worry about getting stabbed. I had been segregated from the other four at the onset, sent to Leavenworth Federal Prison in Kansas, then to Terminal Island, California, and later on up the west coast to Lompoc, a Class Five federal joint, which had had more murders committed during the year I was there than the Atlanta Federal Pen did.
Finally, I had been sent to Maxwell Federal Prison Camp in Montgomery, Alabama, a much lower-security facility. And, this is where my parole hearing was taking place.
PAUSE
Laying in my bunk that night, I remembered my first entrance into a federal prison, Leavenworth, Kansas. It was a famous penitentiary and many crime movies had used its brick walls as backdrop for some of the gorier scenes. I stood there gaping at those walls from the inside, scarcely believing I wasn't dreaming a nightmare and that I was really on the inside.
All transferees are received by a prison facility and immediately placed in solitary confinement while they are evaluated for permanent placement into one unit or another. After spending three weeks in "the hole", I was taken before a supervisory guard. He glanced up from his desk, looked me over, then told me:
"Your arms are big enough. I'm putting you out in population."
"Look," I replied, "I just got here three weeks ago. I've got no idea about any of this or even what you're talking about."
"You'll be in a cell with six other inmates, is all," he said. "And, you can mingle and walk in the yard and go to the chow hall and all that stuff." He shrugged. "We got more men coming in and we need the room."
I was taken from the "hole" to the main prison population area then assigned a cell. I secured a bunk. The barred door was open and inmates were milling about.
Later that same day I met a cell-mate, a man roughly my age, heavy set with a beard, slightly shorter than me, who seemed glad to find someone to talk to. He had completed eight years of his fifteen year beef and was now in transit to a facility nearer his home where he might receive family visits.
You may well imagine I was real happy to talk to someone who knew the ropes. We were free to walk around the exercise yard. We talked. I learned he had been convicted of blowing up one half of a post office building somewhere down in Mexico ..the half which had housed a local DEA facility. No one had been injured but the building had been destroyed. Lucky for them they hadn't been in the office that morning.
He had been confined in Marion Federal Penitentiary, the only Class Six prison in the U.S. Federal system, a maximum-maximum security facility. This is where John Hinckley (Reagan's attempted assassin) was kept. Also, home to the famous "Unabomber", Ted Kaczynski of years past. (As far as I know, they both remain incarcerated.)
Weeks passed. I was transferred to spend a few months in Terminal Island, California then shipped up to Lompoc, a facility filled with the criminally insane. I mean, there were guys there who had received multiple life sentences for murders committed while in prison. See, the feds did not then have capital punishment.
An inmate serving two life sentences would kill another inmate and simply receive another life sentence. You can believe nothing in his world changed because of that. He never even missed the noon meal!
Anyway, I was a non-violent first-offender and was being handled like I was a really bad guy. White collar criminals, like bank vice-presidents who made fraudulent loans or who had embezzled thousands of dollars, were sent to the "pussy camps" as they were known, to serve an easy term of sentence working in an office or mowing grass or etc.
PAUSE
I tossed and turned in my bunk. What to do? Finally, I fell into a fitful sleep. When I awoke, I had a plan in my mind. I would demand justice be done. Yes, I would figure out how to file a law suit.
The so-called prison law library at the Maxwell Camp contained some ancient law books and some old case reports. I began reading. In a very few days I learned how to file a "writ of habeas corpus". This is a petition to a court demanding that the custodian (the federal prison in this case) prove that they are lawfully holding a prisoner.
The fact that they had already released my co-defendants was my main argument.
I filed my petition and a federal magistrate in Montgomery accepted it. Just days later, he granted a hearing, and afterward ordered my "immediate release" on parole.
Now, here is what had happened and why I had been treated much more harshly than my co-defendants: In 1976 I and my copilot, Bobby, had flown five thousand pounds of Colombian marijuana from the Guajira up into middle Florida.
PAUSE
Three fifteen p.m. Thursday, the thirteenth of May 1976 had become a hot Florida afternoon. Not a breeze stirred. Squinting down to my left through the mid-Florida Summer haze, I spotted the faded windsock dangling limply from its mast on the corner of the old hangar building. No airplanes were visible in the sky as far as I could see, so reducing power and banking into a gentle left turn, I called for half-flaps, rolled out to line up on my final leg, called for the landing gear and full flaps. We ran the ‘before-landing’ checklist, then double-checked for gear down, brakes tested and off. Glancing at the clock on the instrument panel, I saw I was within fifteen minutes of my intended estimated time of arrival. A bit early, actually.
Having flown over two-thousand miles, my copilot and I had been in the air for over thirteen hours when we landed at Williston, Florida, an ex-WW-II airfield having three runways. The ends of each runway connected to the ends of the others formed an equilateral triangle when viewed from above. Pine trees covering the interior of the triangle had grown tall over intervening years and none of the runways were visible from any other while on the ground taxiing. Undergrowth beneath the trees was thick, almost jungle-like.
We were to be met by a Ryder rent-a-truck which would take our cargo.. On a half-mile final I called for full flaps and double checked for gear-down. Touchdown was uneventful as the heavy ship found the pavement with her main wheels. I allowed her tail wheel to settle gently, letting her roll out two-thousand feet or a bit more, slowing easily on the long smooth runway, saving the brakes.
I turned onto the first available taxiway and moved my heavy ship slowly along looking for the truck. Minutes passed. I squinted in all directions but could see no truck. I grimaced. This wouldn't be the first time an operation had been botched.
I took a final look around, shrugging to myself. “Well, this is it,” I thought.
"Bobby," I shouted. "We gotta get outta here!" I turned the ship tightly at the next intersection onto a taxiway heading out to a runway.
I knew I had enough fuel to fly all the way to St. Louis if necessary. I figured we would just ditch the big ship somewhere along the way and then vanish into the scenery. We were both pretty tired but I guess adrenalin surged enough to keep us going.
Just then, Bobby pointed and shouted out: "There it is, over there!"
I looked where he had pointed. Sure enough, there was a big yellow truck nestled into the edge of the blackjack tundra. Pulling the throttles back to idle, I braked the ship to a halt and set her parking brakes. Then, Bobby and I hustled aft to open the wide double cargo doors.
As the doors swung open, I could see the truck now backing dangerously fast toward my ship. As Bobby and I leapt to the ground, I cupped my hands to my mouth, and shouted at the top of my lungs:
"STOP, YOU SON-OF-A-BITCH!"
The big truck slammed on her brakes, stopping short. Suddenly, myriad law-enforcement agents swarmed onto the scene. The next thing I knew, Bobby and I were face down on the hot asphalt tarmac laying prone, each with a twelve-gauge shotgun pressed against his neck.
There were seventeen agents from five different agencies that had never before worked together. Acting on an informer's tip, they had been waiting each Thursday for three weeks, cowering each day in the hot blackjack woods, dealing with rattlesnakes, briers and mosquitoes. All they had been told was that the smugglers would land during the month of May on a Thursday afternoon.
The unit's make up represented DEA, Florida Dept of Criminal Law Enforcement, U.S. Customs, Levy County Sheriff's Dept and Williston Police Dept.
But now all they had to show for their trouble was an idling airplane containing a large load of pot with no one on board, an empty truck containing no occupants and five men laying on the hot tarmac taxiway, two of which were pilots and three of which had drivers licenses.
See, each of the agents had believed that one of the others had started the "bust" when they heard my: "Stop, you son-of-a-bitch!" command. So, all had poured from their hiding places to assist in the capture. In fact, their true plan would have been to wait until some of the pot had been unloaded from the plane into the truck, then they would have caught the culprits "in the act" so to speak and would have had an air-tight case.
Although they had had more than three weeks in which to obtain a search warrant, no one had bothered to do so. And, so the state's case began.
PAUSE
After spending over three weeks in a county jail, someone made my $250,000 bail. A month or so passed then a Florida state attorney called me and told me I could come to his office and pick up my pilot's license.
PAUSE
"You're a very lucky man, Mister Wilson," the state attorney told me. "I'm returning you your pilot license."
He handed me an envelope containing my ticket and my medical.
"I told them not to bring me a bucket of worms for a case," he sighed. "I can't prosecute this one. It will self-destruct in ninety days. That's the speedy trial law in Florida now and I'm just gonna let it run out."
Pocketing the two pieces of paper, I expressed my appreciation.
"Mister Wilson," he added, staring closely at my face. "You were the pilot of the plane, weren't you?"
I fidgeted for a moment. Finally, I replied: "I can't answer that question, Sir."
"You are a lucky man," he repeated.
"I know, Sir," I answered, then turned and walked out of the office.
PAUSE
The Florida case self-destructed as promised. But, six months later, I found myself indicted by a federal grand jury. A disappointed DEA agent had scared a bricklayer who had been building a fireplace in the "main-man's" house and who had overheard plans for the smuggling trip into fingering him before a grand jury in return for immunity from prosecution.
A couple months later, our federal trial took place in Gainesville, Florida. Eight days later, the jury had acquitted the so-called "main man" and his associate and had turned loose two of the three truck drivers, keeping me, my copilot, the aircraft owner and the other truck driver who had rented the truck. This would satisfy justice, they figured. So, we all went down. We served our time, each in his own way. Only, mine was of the worst treatment throughout.
PAUSE
Because the "privacy act of 1974" a follow up of the "freedom of information act of 1966" had been passed by a congress still somewhat stunned by the apparent criminal shenanigans of former president, Dick Nixon, I was able to obtain copies of all information about me held by various government agencies. Names of other persons contained in my files were appropriately blacked out, to protect their privacy, I supposed.
Lo and behold! While perusing the report of my original rejection for parole, I came across an interesting typographic error. To wit: "Mr. Wilson has been described to us as 'pilot of the plan' and as such we feel should complete a longer sentence than his less culpable co-defendants, one the owner of the aircraft, another only a co-pilot, two others only truck drivers."
"Pilot of the Plan"
What had happened to the missing "e" which would have made it read: "Pilot of the Plane"?
Oh ho! So that's what happened to me. I had been treated like the ringleader, not a mere grunt pilot. All the solitary confinements, all the class five joints, then the denial of my parole ..all because of some dumb typing error?
But wait, I thought. Was it really an innocent typing error? I reflected back upon the eight day trial. There were originally nine of us charged in the case. The federal prosecutor had been bitter at losing the two top culprits. He had a lot less to show for his efforts with the "main man" and his associate now free to walk.
I frowned. Just supposing, I thought, he had me described as "pilot of the plan" on purpose. Hey, it would look like a simple typo, right? He would get more credit for nailing the "pilot of the plan" than just for incarcerating a run-of-the-mill pilot. Hmmm!
PAUSE
Thirty six years have elapsed since that trial took place and I still wonder about my being labeled: "Pilot of the Plan".
THE END
Pilot of the Plan(Michael D. Warner)
PILOT OF THE PLAN
By Michael D. Warner Copyright 2012
all rights reserved
The Guajira of Colombia's northern province lay quiet, its inhabitants asleep, facing a new day of plowing, tilling, weeding the flat fields and herding cattle in other areas. Total darkness. No man-made light visible. No moonlight penetrated the thick overcast. This night, the vast sparsely-populated South American landscape lay invisible to the eye. Nearest city is fifty miles distant through the blackness.
The cargo aboard my ship had been grown much farther away, high atop terraced slopes of the eighteen-thousand, seven hundred foot mountain, Pico Cristobal.
Colombian marijuana was harvested, dried, compacted in garbage compactors, wrapped in newspapers, packaged in twenty-kilo bales, bundled in black plastic trash bags, then trucked by ox-cart to a much lower elevation central point. There, roads were suitable for sturdy vehicles and the bales transferred to a modern stake-body flat bed truck.
The aircraft we flew this night was a Douglas DC-3 (Air Force C-47) cargo ship having a ninety-five foot wingspan, a fuselage sixty-five feet long. Rising to eighteen feet, three inches at her tail, she was a tail-wheel plane powered by two Pratt and Whitney R-1830-92 radial engines producing about twelve hundred horsepower apiece.
We had just slammed shut one of the two wide cargo doors on our DC-3 (C-47) aircraft when one of the locals made hand gestures indicating “policia” or “soldatos” were coming. He made a “Get the hell out of here, FAST!” signal, then turned and fled into the underbrush.
The 'helpers' in Colombia are of various tribal groups indigenous to the area and speak neither Spanish nor English. Hand signals were generally adequate for communication with clandestine visitors.
My copilot, and best friend Bobby, slammed shut the other door. We scrambled the full length of the ship up to the cockpit, jamming ourselves into our respective seats, simultaneously snapping seat belts latches and throwing switches.
I glanced at the ship's clock centrally mounted on the instrument panel. Two a.m. indicated the greenish-glowing small pointers of her luminous dial. My right hand was raised to the overhead console, index finger ready to press a toggle switch which would throw high voltage energy to the ignition system as soon as my copilot called the last blade of our pre-start engine rotation.
"Go!" he shouted.
I pressed the switch, toggled the fuel primer. My number two engine stuttered a couple times. When it coughed into life. I shoved the fuel mixture control into full rich. Thirty seconds later, number one was sputtering. In another seemingly long minute I had two well-running engines warming up for our take-off run.
We hurried through the before-take-off check list. From the corner of my eye I watched Bobby cross himself. Hey, devout or not, I always figured it can't hurt anything, especially when one is about to make an extremely overweight and totally illegal flight without benefit of a flight plan (nor insurance for that matter) over the deep Caribbean Sea in the middle of the night.
I slowly advanced the throttles to take-off power.
Sharp bursts of automatic weapons fire was partially overwhelmed by the roar of our two Pratt and Whitney R-1830 radial engines as I shoved my throttles forward to forty-eight inches of manifold pressure, achieving maximum take-off power.
I hauled back on the control column. Her nose began to rise.
"Gear up!" I screamed above the rumbling din.
My already knotted stomach tightened again approaching the far end of the airstrip as the abandoned stake-body truck's headlights blared directly ahead in the windshield then flashed beneath us and out of sight.
"Geeze!" Bobby shouted, "They're shooting at us!"
I couldn't turn to look, too busy flying the ship away from the north Colombian coast, hoping the dark silhouette our tail presented would give them less to aim at. I could turn back on course later.
Maxwell Air Force Base, Montgomery, Alabama
After cooling my heels for over an hour sitting in the crowded room, my name was finally called. I took a deep breath, rose from my seat and answered: "Here!"
The guard motioned me toward an office door.
I had anticipated my parole hearing for the past two months, but it had been inexplicably delayed. Finally, I would meet the parole board, answer the standard questions about having a place to stay with some kind of a job lined up and be awarded a release date.
The officer at the door ushered me inside. Then he closed it. I stood in the small office before a man who sat behind a battered wooden desk having several file folders scattered upon its top. He was frowning at the one he held in his hand.
"Mister Wilson?" he queried.
"Yes Sir, that's me."
His voice was flat, dispassionate. "We are going to continue your parole hearing until next time, about six months from now. As of now, you are not eligible."
He closed the file folder. "Any questions?" he asked.
I was taken completely by surprise. My three co-defendants in the case had already been approved for parole and were now in transit to a half-way house in Atlanta.
Stunned, I blurted: "Why am I being held longer than the other defendants in my case?"
"I can't reply to that," he told me. "We will see you again in about six months." He pressed a button on the console beside his right hand. The door opened, and the officer standing in it motioned me to exit the room.
PAUSE
When charged, I had been a non-violent first-offender, no previous record, and was a four year active duty veteran of our armed services, the father of five children and an airplane pilot. I had maintained a clean prison record. Yet, since first being incarcerated, I had been treated more like "Jack the Ripper".
Geeze, I recalled to myself. When we first went down, all the others had been sent to low security prison camps where an inmate didn't have to worry about getting stabbed. I had been segregated from the other four at the onset, sent to Leavenworth Federal Prison in Kansas, then to Terminal Island, California, and later on up the west coast to Lompoc, a Class Five federal joint, which had had more murders committed during the year I was there than the Atlanta Federal Pen did.
Finally, I had been sent to Maxwell Federal Prison Camp in Montgomery, Alabama, a much lower-security facility. And, this is where my parole hearing was taking place.
PAUSE
Laying in my bunk that night, I remembered my first entrance into a federal prison, Leavenworth, Kansas. It was a famous penitentiary and many crime movies had used its brick walls as backdrop for some of the gorier scenes. I stood there gaping at those walls from the inside, scarcely believing I wasn't dreaming a nightmare and that I was really on the inside.
All transferees are received by a prison facility and immediately placed in solitary confinement while they are evaluated for permanent placement into one unit or another. After spending three weeks in "the hole", I was taken before a supervisory guard. He glanced up from his desk, looked me over, then told me:
"Your arms are big enough. I'm putting you out in population."
"Look," I replied, "I just got here three weeks ago. I've got no idea about any of this or even what you're talking about."
"You'll be in a cell with six other inmates, is all," he said. "And, you can mingle and walk in the yard and go to the chow hall and all that stuff." He shrugged. "We got more men coming in and we need the room."
I was taken from the "hole" to the main prison population area then assigned a cell. I secured a bunk. The barred door was open and inmates were milling about.
Later that same day I met a cell-mate, a man roughly my age, heavy set with a beard, slightly shorter than me, who seemed glad to find someone to talk to. He had completed eight years of his fifteen year beef and was now in transit to a facility nearer his home where he might receive family visits.
You may well imagine I was real happy to talk to someone who knew the ropes. We were free to walk around the exercise yard. We talked. I learned he had been convicted of blowing up one half of a post office building somewhere down in Mexico ..the half which had housed a local DEA facility. No one had been injured but the building had been destroyed. Lucky for them they hadn't been in the office that morning.
He had been confined in Marion Federal Penitentiary, the only Class Six prison in the U.S. Federal system, a maximum-maximum security facility. This is where John Hinckley (Reagan's attempted assassin) was kept. Also, home to the famous "Unabomber", Ted Kaczynski of years past. (As far as I know, they both remain incarcerated.)
Weeks passed. I was transferred to spend a few months in Terminal Island, California then shipped up to Lompoc, a facility filled with the criminally insane. I mean, there were guys there who had received multiple life sentences for murders committed while in prison. See, the feds did not then have capital punishment.
An inmate serving two life sentences would kill another inmate and simply receive another life sentence. You can believe nothing in his world changed because of that. He never even missed the noon meal!
Anyway, I was a non-violent first-offender and was being handled like I was a really bad guy. White collar criminals, like bank vice-presidents who made fraudulent loans or who had embezzled thousands of dollars, were sent to the "pussy camps" as they were known, to serve an easy term of sentence working in an office or mowing grass or etc.
PAUSE
I tossed and turned in my bunk. What to do? Finally, I fell into a fitful sleep. When I awoke, I had a plan in my mind. I would demand justice be done. Yes, I would figure out how to file a law suit.
The so-called prison law library at the Maxwell Camp contained some ancient law books and some old case reports. I began reading. In a very few days I learned how to file a "writ of habeas corpus". This is a petition to a court demanding that the custodian (the federal prison in this case) prove that they are lawfully holding a prisoner.
The fact that they had already released my co-defendants was my main argument.
I filed my petition and a federal magistrate in Montgomery accepted it. Just days later, he granted a hearing, and afterward ordered my "immediate release" on parole.
Now, here is what had happened and why I had been treated much more harshly than my co-defendants: In 1976 I and my copilot, Bobby, had flown five thousand pounds of Colombian marijuana from the Guajira up into middle Florida.
PAUSE
Three fifteen p.m. Thursday, the thirteenth of May 1976 had become a hot Florida afternoon. Not a breeze stirred. Squinting down to my left through the mid-Florida Summer haze, I spotted the faded windsock dangling limply from its mast on the corner of the old hangar building. No airplanes were visible in the sky as far as I could see, so reducing power and banking into a gentle left turn, I called for half-flaps, rolled out to line up on my final leg, called for the landing gear and full flaps. We ran the ‘before-landing’ checklist, then double-checked for gear down, brakes tested and off. Glancing at the clock on the instrument panel, I saw I was within fifteen minutes of my intended estimated time of arrival. A bit early, actually.
Having flown over two-thousand miles, my copilot and I had been in the air for over thirteen hours when we landed at Williston, Florida, an ex-WW-II airfield having three runways. The ends of each runway connected to the ends of the others formed an equilateral triangle when viewed from above. Pine trees covering the interior of the triangle had grown tall over intervening years and none of the runways were visible from any other while on the ground taxiing. Undergrowth beneath the trees was thick, almost jungle-like.
We were to be met by a Ryder rent-a-truck which would take our cargo.. On a half-mile final I called for full flaps and double checked for gear-down. Touchdown was uneventful as the heavy ship found the pavement with her main wheels. I allowed her tail wheel to settle gently, letting her roll out two-thousand feet or a bit more, slowing easily on the long smooth runway, saving the brakes.
I turned onto the first available taxiway and moved my heavy ship slowly along looking for the truck. Minutes passed. I squinted in all directions but could see no truck. I grimaced. This wouldn't be the first time an operation had been botched.
I took a final look around, shrugging to myself. “Well, this is it,” I thought.
"Bobby," I shouted. "We gotta get outta here!" I turned the ship tightly at the next intersection onto a taxiway heading out to a runway.
I knew I had enough fuel to fly all the way to St. Louis if necessary. I figured we would just ditch the big ship somewhere along the way and then vanish into the scenery. We were both pretty tired but I guess adrenalin surged enough to keep us going.
Just then, Bobby pointed and shouted out: "There it is, over there!"
I looked where he had pointed. Sure enough, there was a big yellow truck nestled into the edge of the blackjack tundra. Pulling the throttles back to idle, I braked the ship to a halt and set her parking brakes. Then, Bobby and I hustled aft to open the wide double cargo doors.
As the doors swung open, I could see the truck now backing dangerously fast toward my ship. As Bobby and I leapt to the ground, I cupped my hands to my mouth, and shouted at the top of my lungs:
"STOP, YOU SON-OF-A-BITCH!"
The big truck slammed on her brakes, stopping short. Suddenly, myriad law-enforcement agents swarmed onto the scene. The next thing I knew, Bobby and I were face down on the hot asphalt tarmac laying prone, each with a twelve-gauge shotgun pressed against his neck.
There were seventeen agents from five different agencies that had never before worked together. Acting on an informer's tip, they had been waiting each Thursday for three weeks, cowering each day in the hot blackjack woods, dealing with rattlesnakes, briers and mosquitoes. All they had been told was that the smugglers would land during the month of May on a Thursday afternoon.
The unit's make up represented DEA, Florida Dept of Criminal Law Enforcement, U.S. Customs, Levy County Sheriff's Dept and Williston Police Dept.
But now all they had to show for their trouble was an idling airplane containing a large load of pot with no one on board, an empty truck containing no occupants and five men laying on the hot tarmac taxiway, two of which were pilots and three of which had drivers licenses.
See, each of the agents had believed that one of the others had started the "bust" when they heard my: "Stop, you son-of-a-bitch!" command. So, all had poured from their hiding places to assist in the capture. In fact, their true plan would have been to wait until some of the pot had been unloaded from the plane into the truck, then they would have caught the culprits "in the act" so to speak and would have had an air-tight case.
Although they had had more than three weeks in which to obtain a search warrant, no one had bothered to do so. And, so the state's case began.
PAUSE
After spending over three weeks in a county jail, someone made my $250,000 bail. A month or so passed then a Florida state attorney called me and told me I could come to his office and pick up my pilot's license.
PAUSE
"You're a very lucky man, Mister Wilson," the state attorney told me. "I'm returning you your pilot license."
He handed me an envelope containing my ticket and my medical.
"I told them not to bring me a bucket of worms for a case," he sighed. "I can't prosecute this one. It will self-destruct in ninety days. That's the speedy trial law in Florida now and I'm just gonna let it run out."
Pocketing the two pieces of paper, I expressed my appreciation.
"Mister Wilson," he added, staring closely at my face. "You were the pilot of the plane, weren't you?"
I fidgeted for a moment. Finally, I replied: "I can't answer that question, Sir."
"You are a lucky man," he repeated.
"I know, Sir," I answered, then turned and walked out of the office.
PAUSE
The Florida case self-destructed as promised. But, six months later, I found myself indicted by a federal grand jury. A disappointed DEA agent had scared a bricklayer who had been building a fireplace in the "main-man's" house and who had overheard plans for the smuggling trip into fingering him before a grand jury in return for immunity from prosecution.
A couple months later, our federal trial took place in Gainesville, Florida. Eight days later, the jury had acquitted the so-called "main man" and his associate and had turned loose two of the three truck drivers, keeping me, my copilot, the aircraft owner and the other truck driver who had rented the truck. This would satisfy justice, they figured. So, we all went down. We served our time, each in his own way. Only, mine was of the worst treatment throughout.
PAUSE
Because the "privacy act of 1974" a follow up of the "freedom of information act of 1966" had been passed by a congress still somewhat stunned by the apparent criminal shenanigans of former president, Dick Nixon, I was able to obtain copies of all information about me held by various government agencies. Names of other persons contained in my files were appropriately blacked out, to protect their privacy, I supposed.
Lo and behold! While perusing the report of my original rejection for parole, I came across an interesting typographic error. To wit: "Mr. Wilson has been described to us as 'pilot of the plan' and as such we feel should complete a longer sentence than his less culpable co-defendants, one the owner of the aircraft, another only a co-pilot, two others only truck drivers."
"Pilot of the Plan"
What had happened to the missing "e" which would have made it read: "Pilot of the Plane"?
Oh ho! So that's what happened to me. I had been treated like the ringleader, not a mere grunt pilot. All the solitary confinements, all the class five joints, then the denial of my parole ..all because of some dumb typing error?
But wait, I thought. Was it really an innocent typing error? I reflected back upon the eight day trial. There were originally nine of us charged in the case. The federal prosecutor had been bitter at losing the two top culprits. He had a lot less to show for his efforts with the "main man" and his associate now free to walk.
I frowned. Just supposing, I thought, he had me described as "pilot of the plan" on purpose. Hey, it would look like a simple typo, right? He would get more credit for nailing the "pilot of the plan" than just for incarcerating a run-of-the-mill pilot. Hmmm!
PAUSE
Thirty six years have elapsed since that trial took place and I still wonder about my being labeled: "Pilot of the Plan".
THE END
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