The Skyjacker’s Tale
WHODUNIT BECOMES WHERE ARE THEY NOW?
In the early 1980s, airline hijackings were fairly common; an average of one every 11 or 12 days. So what makes the taking of American Airlines flight 626 on New Year’s Eve, 1984, worth its own documentary?
Not too much, really, except that the hijacker, Ishmael LaBeet, had been convicted of eight murders in a massacre that took place in 1972 in the U. S. Virgin Islands — and that he is now living as a free man in Cuba, while his co- convicts are either dead or still imprisoned for the crime.
Director Jamie Kastner catches up with LaBeet, now in his late 60s and going by the name Ishmael Muslim Ali, in the island nation. Not surprisingly, Ali says he is innocent of the crime for which he spent 12 years in jail in America.
He was being transported back to serve the rest of his sentence in the U. S. Virgin Islands when he pulled a gun and demanded the pilot take him to Cuba.
The pilot, passengers and prison guards tell the story of the hijacking, after which Kastner rewinds to Ali’s early years, which included a stint in the U. S. Army ( he fought in Vietnam), involvement with the Black Panthers in New York in the late 1960s, and an eventual return to his birthplace in the Caribbean territory.
The soft- spoken Ali says his life at the time involved “selling a little weed” and robbing tourists at gunpoint: “I stuck up so many tourists I wouldn’t know where to start.” So when he heard about eight people murdered at the Fountain Valley Golf Course in 1972 he went into hiding, sure the authorities would suspect him.
Speaking of rounding up the usual suspects, Kastner then tracks down various cops and attorneys to discuss the arrests, interrogation and trial.
It was a shoddy affair, marked by torture, some of it freely admitted by the police. As one defence lawyer notes: “The question wasn’t who done it. The question was how were these confessions obtained?”
But while The Skyjacker’s Tale shines an unfavourable light on the trial, it does little to suggest Ali’s innocence, other than the word of the man himself. No other suspects are proposed, and the question of whether the crime was racially motivated or just a robbery- gone- wrong is raised but not pursued.
Warming relations between America and Cuba suggest that Ali may soon face extradition to the U. S. and sentencing for the hijacking, something many of the players in this case say they want. Kastner’s documentary, for all its attempts to raise doubts, won’t have many viewers disagreeing with them. ∂∂½
QUESTION WAS HOW WERE THESE CONFESSIONS OBTAINED?