Jackie Again
(Another happy hijacking)
by Philip Goutell
© 2023 Philip Goutell
Jackie again (Another happy hijacking)I'm going out on a limb to say this but, when a truck gets hijacked, it's not a random event. A number of people are involved so I would guess. It was no secret that stuff went on at JFK. It handled a lot of air cargo and a lot of money changed hands daily, mostly in an orderly but not necessarily legal manner. Still, hijackings were something else.
The field, at least the cargo area, was patrolled by FBI. How do I know? One morning I was getting my truck, a Ford Econoline van, and Eddie, mentoring me, took my shoulder and pointed me toward a plainly dressed, middle aged man who seemed to be looking through some overgrown grass for a lost golf ball. "FBI," Eddie told me. To me it meant nothing, just a point of interest. I knew very little about the inner workings at JFK; Eddie's lifetime had been working the field.
But I did know something about the theft of cargo. As a young army officer, during the Vietnam war I had worked cargo ships in the port of Quy Nhon. Once we had a ship with PX cargo and, when the hatches were opened, we were staring into empty holds. The stevedores on the West Coast had done a job and left only hundreds of cans of Beenie Weenies scattered across the deck. The good stuff - the stereos and electronics - probably hadn't made it to open water.
Air cargo that came to us at JFK was mostly trucked into the city. If it was international, it had to clear customs first. Then it was ready to go. The roads into the city from JFK tend to be busy and traffic is often bumper to bumper. These are not rural roads. Thus I was surprised one morning to hear that one of our trucks had been hijacked on the Grand Central Parkway which is four lanes of heavy traffic. This seemed to me pretty unlikely. The truck, with driver and helper, was said to have been forced off the road by a car (???) and taken over. Nobody had been hurt but the truck, well marked with our company name in big letters, was gone. I knew the driver, Jackie, by name and by sight, having sometimes worked with him. Nobody was saying much about the incident other than it had happened. It wasn't a big, big deal like the Lufthansa heist a few years later. That involved $5 million in cash and gold and got publicity for a number of years. I don't even know what was on our truck. Human hair wigs for orthodox Jewish woman were our big item at the time and they were valuable, but it may have been something else.
I quit my job at JFK to go back to grad school. Now my only connection with cargo theft was a small store across the street from my apartment in Manhattan that got restocked periodically by deliveries from a white van in the middle of the night. In the morning the neighborhood ladies would all be asking, "Vinny, what do you have for me today?" None of this involved me or my wife although once, when a mob war was in progress, a neighbor asked my wife if she would mail a few letters for her. Her husband - The Watcher - couldn't return to his post on the street until the war was over. It was that kind of neighborhood.
At the time I had been living on mostly GI Bill money which was running out. And grad school wasn't doing it for me. I had decided, somewhat insanely, to throw it all over and become a writer ... and make money (?). But I did need a job to keep the wolves away. I went to the NYU student employment service to see what they might have. Two opportunities were available: part-time work in a bank and part-time work loading trucks. Based on my experience in the transportation industry, I thought the trucks would be more agreeable and I might even get some overtime pay. That would never be possible in a bank. The student employment person looked surprised by my choice but gave me the address. I went for the interview.