FBI catches Fugitive 40 years after hijacking

The FBI said Tuesday it had arrested convicted killer George Wright in Portugal — nearly 40 years after he escaped from prison and joined a radical group in forcing a plane to fly to Algeria, The Seattle Times reported.

The FBI agents were reportedly wearing swimsuits to ensure they were unarmed as they delivered $1 million cash to the hijackers. The criminals wore beatific looks, traveled with young children and were "polite as possible," a passenger on the ill-fated Delta flight recalled at the time.

Wright, now 68, was picked up outside his home in Portugal as he headed to a neighborhood cafe, according Michael Schroeder, a spokesman for the US Marshals Service in New Jersey.

Officials planned to request his extradition to New Jersey to finish serving his sentence of 15 to 30 years for shooting to death a gas-station employee during a robbery on the day after Thanksgiving in 1962. It was unclear whether Wright could also face trial for the hijacking, which made headlines with its radical perpetrators, record-setting ransom and wild costumes. News reports at the time said one of the hijackers — alleged to be Wright — wore priestly robes and hid his gun in a hollowed-out Bible.

It marked the apparent end of a life on the lam whose chapters harken back to an era when hijackings were a common tool of militants, when it was possible to board a plane without being patted down or putting your carry-on through X-ray machines, and when $1 million was enough to make five hijackers happy.

In August 1970, when the three men and two women of the Black Liberation Army commandeered the flight, $1 million was the most ever paid for the release of airplane hostages. The $50 and $100 bills were stuffed into a briefcase, which was tied to the end of a rope dangling out the jet window. After it was hoisted inside and all 101 passengers were freed, the Delta DC-8, which had been seized while on a flight from Detroit to Miami, left for Algeria.

Algerian officials seized the plane and the money and returned them to the US, but let the hijackers go. Several years later, four were captured in France, but the fifth remained missing.