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— A 1970s militant who carried out one of the most brazen airplane hijackings in U.S. history lived for decades in an idyllic Portuguese hamlet near a stunning beach with his Portuguese wife and two children, neighbors said Wednesday.
George Wright, 68, was taken into custody by local police Monday at the request of the U.S. government, which is seeking his extradition for escaping from a New Jersey jail after being convicted of killing a gas station attendant.
The Portuguese news agency Lusa, citing unnamed police sources, reported Wednesday that the former Black Liberation Army member plans to fight any extradition.
Until his arrest, life was sweet for Wright in Almocageme, 28 miles (45 kilometers) west of Lisbon. Fluent in Portuguese, he had no apparent profession but worked odd jobs, most recently as a nightclub bouncer, said two neighbors who spoke on condition of anonymity because they feared being ostracized for speaking out.
He also once had a stall at a nearby beach and ran a barbecue chicken restaurant in a nearby town.
Wright married a Portuguese woman, identified by neighbors as 55-year-old Maria do Rosario Valente, daughter of a retired Portuguese army officer, who as an occasional translator. They had two children — Portuguese-born Marco and Sara — now in their early 20s, who used their mother's last name when they registered for swim classes at the local pool
The couple lived in a small whitewashed house with terracotta roof tiles in this picturesque village, which lies close to broad Atlantic beaches. The house has a yellow door and window frames and a small garden in front. A gray Volkswagen that neighbors said Wright drove was parked on the cobbled dead-end street outside the house.
A woman who answered the door in Almocageme confirmed that she was Maria do Rosario Valente, but told an Associated Press correspondent she had no comment and then closed the door.
Wright possessed a Portuguese identity card — believed to be a fake — that said he was born in Guinea-Bissau, a former Portuguese colony in West Africa. The document, shown to The AP, bore the name Jose Luis Jorge dos Santos, an alias that U.S. officials said. The identity card puts the man's age as 68. It was issued in 1993 and expired in 2004.
Neighbors estimated the family had been in the village for at least 20 years but said the couple didn't mix much with neighbors. None of them witnessed Wright's arrest.
Almocageme gas station attendant Ricardo Salvador said Wright had business cards that gave his first name as George and many locals called him that. Most locals questioned by the AP said they assumed Wright was African, not American.
"He was a very nice guy," Salvador said. "He used to wave as he drove past and I'd shout out, 'Hey, George!'"
His gas station lies across the street from a police station. "I never imagined George was in trouble," said Salvador, 30.
A fingerprint on a Portuguese, ID card was the break that led a U.S. fugitive task force to Wright, who was arrested by Portuguese authorities and is being detained in Lisbon.
Portuguese police said they would not disclose any information about the case. The U.S. embassy in Lisbon referred all questions to the FBI.
Wright was convicted of the 1962 murder of gas station owner Walter Patterson, a decorated World War II veteran shot during a robbery at his business in Wall, New Jersey.
Eight years into his 15- to 30-year prison term, Wright and three other men escaped from the Bayside State Prison farm in Leesburg, New Jersey, on Aug. 19, 1970.
The FBI said Wright became affiliated with an underground militant group, the Black Liberation Army, and lived in a "communal family" with several of its members in Detroit.
In 1972, Wright — dressed as a priest and using an alias — hijacked a Delta flight from Detroit to Miami with four other BLA members and three children, including Wright's companion and their 2-year-old daughter.
After releasing the 86 other passengers in exchange for a $1 million ransom — delivered by an FBI agent wearing only swim trunks, as per the hijackers' demands — the hijackers forced the plane to fly to Boston. There an international navigator was taken aboard, and the plane was flown to Algeria, where the hijackers sought asylum.
The group was taken in by American writer and activist Eldridge Cleaver, who had been permitted by Algeria's Socialist government to open an office of the Black Panther Movement in that country in 1970. The Algerian president at the time professed sympathy for what he saw as worldwide liberation struggles.
The hijackers identified themselves to the Delta airplane passengers as a Black Panther group, police said at the time, adding that the hijackers smoked marijuana during the flight.
At the request of the American government, Algerian officials returned the plane and the money to the United States. They then briefly detained the hijackers before allowing them to stay. Their movements were restricted in Algeria, and the president ignored their calls for asylum and requests to return the ransom money to them.
The group eventually made its way to France, where Wright's associates were tracked down, arrested, tried and convicted in Paris in 1976. The French government, however, refused to extradite them to the U.S., where they would have faced longer sentences.
Wright remained at large, and his case was among the top priorities when the New York-New Jersey Fugitive Task Force was formed in 2002, according to Michael Schroeder, a spokesman for the U.S. Marshals Service, who worked with New Jersey's FBI and other agencies on the task force.
The New Jersey Department of Corrections (DOC) brought along all its old escape cases when the task force began operating, Schroeder said, and investigators started the case anew.They reviewed reports from the 1970s, interviewed Wright's victims and the pilots of the plane he hijacked. They had age-enhanced sketches made and tried to track down any communications he may have made with family in the U.S.
An address in Portugal was one of several on a list of places they wanted to check out, but Schroeder said there was nothing special about it.
"It was another box to get checked, so to speak," he said.
That changed last week, when details started falling into place with the help of Portuguese authorities.
"They have a national ID registry," Schroeder said. "They pulled that. That confirmed his print matched the prints with the DOC. The sketch matched the picture on his ID card."
By the weekend, U.S. authorities were on a plane to Portugal. And Monday, Portuguese police staking out Wright's home found him there.
Justice Department spokeswoman Laura Sweeney said Wright was arrested for purposes of extradition on the New Jersey homicide charge. He would serve the remainder of his sentence if returned to the U.S., she said.
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Samantha Henry in Newark, Geoff Mulvihill in Trenton, New Jersey, Pete Yost in Washington and Karen Zraick, Rhonda Shafner, Barbara Sambriski and Judith Ausuebel in New York contributed to this report.
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