The people of New Mexico had heard very little, if anything, about the group called the Republic of New Afrika. The revolutionary group started in Detroit in 1968, and later splintered off with the headquarters moving to Jackson, Mississippi. They had a significant presence in the San Francisco Bay area where they held their meetings at the black student union on the University of California Berkley campus. They were responsible for the death of at least three police officers in the late 60s and early 70s. When three of the San Francisco area members were headed to New Orleans for a meeting, they had an encounter with a New Mexico State Police officer who stopped them in their rental car resulting in the murder of the officer. Suddenly the awareness of the group was thrust on Albuquerque community in a big way.
There was initial speculation that perhaps the group had sympathizers in the Albuquerque area to help the men hide from authorities, but in its final investigation, the FBI was only able to show that two people assisted them. The mother of one of the fugitives (Dorothea Hill) let them stay one night in her home at 1700 Arno Street SE, seeming unwillingly, so she arranged for a friend of an acquaintance to take them off of her hands. This man, Johnny Earl Vines, offered up his apartment as a safe harbor. All evidence points to the fact that they stayed at that apartment for nearly three weeks before the noose began to tighten on them. After their names and photographs hit the local media, the heat was on. Tips about their whereabouts began to make it to the police and soon it was reported that authorities were focused on the apartments in the 3400 block of Gibson SE.
They left the apartment at 3429 Gibson SE and were dropped off in a vacant lot only thirteen hours before police raided the apartment where they had been holed up. Where they came up with an idea to hijack an airplane is left to speculation. Could they have been influenced by the fact that only three days prior to them making their move, a man in a business suit and going by the name of D. B. Cooper hijacked a Northwest Orient Boeing 727 out of Portland? After a quick stop in Seattle, the flight “Cooper” hijacked left for Reno, and enroute Cooper opened the rear door of the 727 and jumped out with a parachute and $200,000 in ransom money – never to be heard from again (except for some of the money that was recovered by the Columbia River years later). Another theory is that because they stayed for nearly three weeks with a man who fueled airplanes at the Albuquerque airport, they certainly could have gained plenty of intelligence about how easy it would be to commandeer an airplane at ground level because of the lax secured perimeter on the airport.
They knew enough to be aware that a TWA “red-eye” flight was scheduled to depart Albuquerque for Chicago around 1:30 AM. Sometime after midnight on Saturday, November 27, 1971, one of the hijackers called from a payphone at a nearby gas station for a tow truck. Victor Dugger was the owner and operator of an Albuquerque towing service named Dugger Wrecker Services, and the caller said that his car had broken down near the intersection of San Jose Avenue and Mulberry Street SE. When Dugger pulled up in his wrecker, a man was in the middle of the street flagging him down. The man hopped in the wrecker and immediately stuck a pistol in his side and ordered the driver to comply with his demands. About that time, two other men approached the wrecker and they, too jumped in. They had him drive around the neighborhood while they discussed their plans for hijacking an airplane at the airport. They knew the departure time and did not want to get there too soon.
Interviewed later, Dugger said he pulled into the postal facility on the west side of the airport. Although media reported that they busted through a fence, Dugger said in the interview that he simply drove over a large parking barrier by the postal facility and onto the tarmac. The Albuquerque airport was much smaller and simpler than it is today. The main terminal had four, ground-level gates and just south of that was a small square building they called the “gatehouse” which had four more ground level gates. The gatehouse was connected to the main terminal via an underground tunnel. There were no jetways at the airport and all of the airplanes were boarded using movable stairs.
This all happened prior to airline deregulation and only four large air carriers served the airport: TWA, Continental, Frontier and Trans Texas airlines. When the wrecker pulled up on the tarmac, they ordered Dugger to turn off his lights and park several yards from the main terminal so they could survey the situation. Because of the early hour (around 1:20 AM) it was very quiet at the airport, and they could only see activity around one TWA 727 parked at Gate Three. The flight deck was illuminated, and it appeared as if the pilot was completing paperwork. People were walking from the terminal and boarding the airplane via the movable stairs. The men ordered Dugger to drive over to the airplane, and when he was close, he stopped, and they jumped out and ran towards the airplane. They told him to stay put, but he didn’t. He drove up to the terminal and ran inside to alert the authorities of the hijacking.
The airplane they were hijacking was TWA flight 106 bound from Albuquerque to Chicago and then further planning to fly on to Washington, D.C. The flight crew consisted of Captain John McGhee, First Officer Robert Clark, and Flight Engineer John McFarland. The cabin crew consisted of Elizabeth “Betty” Caubre, Dianne Barrios, and Shirley Ann Harrell. All six of the crew members were based out of TWA’s Kansas City domicile.
As the criminals ran up the stairs with guns in their hands, they encountered TWA employee Ronald Simpson who was leaving the aircraft after talking to the captain. Simpson had just fueled the airplane, and they forced him back into the airplane where one of the hijackers grabbed the nearest flight attendant and held a knife to her throat. They told the crew that they were hijacking the airplane and demanded to be taken to Africa with a fueling stop in Atlanta. The crew informed them that this model of airplane was not designed for intercontinental flight and that they would not make it to Africa. Flight attendant Betty Caubre was first accosted by Charlie Hill who held a serrated steak knife to her throat. He said, “Do as I say, this is no butter knife.” To which she retorted, “And I am not piece of bread.” That made Hill laugh, and he lowered the knife. This seemed to make the man she later learned was Finney, very angry and he waved his pistol at the flight attendants and said that he would shoot them if they resisted and mentioned he had already killed a man and he would kill again.
Betty Caubre lied to the men and said she had been to Cuba twice before and suggested they go to Cuba where the government was known for giving asylum to hijackers. One of the hijackers turned to the fueler, Simpson, and ask him if he had ever been to Cuba before. When he said “no”, the fugitive said, “Well there is always a first time for everything.” Even though Simpson had already disconnected his fuel truck, he lied and told them he would have to go out and disconnect if they would ever be able to leave the gate. The leader asked the crew if they were ready to leave and the captain informed them that the flight engineer had gone inside to use the restroom, and they needed him back before they could leave. When the flight engineer returned, they let him inside the airplane and at the same time allowed Simpson to leave to take care of the fuel truck. He later told the police that he was a ‘gun nut’ and was able to identify the pistols held by the armed men. He said that one of the hijackers was armed with a government Model 1911 45 ACP pistol and the other had a six-shot 38 caliber revolver. He only saw a serrate knife with the third hijacker.
Although the police arrived immediately, the captain radioed in to have them pull back to avoid any violence. There were three late passengers, but airport security guard Joseph Parra was told that armed men were hijacking the airplane. Parra would not let the three late passengers out the terminal to board the flight.
As the airplane was readying for takeoff, Caubre was sitting next to Goodwin in the first-class section and pulled a package of cigarettes out of her purse and offered one to the hijacker. He accepted and then she put one in her mouth and lit it. Goodwin said to her, “You can’t smoke during takeoff.” To which she replied, “I’m on a plane being hijacked, I imagine I can smoke it I want.” Later while Caubre was serving the very nervous passengers, she offered the three hijackers each a beer. She knew that the Michelob beer was the only one on the airplane in bottles, and after they each finished, she took their bottles and then surreptitiously placed each bottle into a sick sack so the FBI could dust them for fingerprints later. She didn’t know the hijackers’ names, so she invented nicknames for them and put initials on each sack to identify which man had used which bottle. She put the initials A, C, and M on the sacks - the “a” was for academic (Goodwin), “c” was for comic (Hill) and the “m” was for murderer (Finney). The hijackers had adopted African names, and they referred to each other by those names. Finney was known as Masheo Sundiata, Goodwin was Antar Ra, and Charles Hill went by Fela Olatunji.
Even though Captain McGhee later told investigators that they had enough fuel to go to Cuba and return to Florida, He lied to the men and said they would need more fuel. He was hoping to use a fuel stop as a way they could bargain for the hijackers to release the passengers in exchange for fuel. They decided on Tampa and the hijackers insisted they remain on the runway after landing, thus shutting down the Tampa airport. There was one problem with fueling on the runway, Tampa had recently installed an underground fuel system at the terminal and none of the airlines used fuel trucks anymore. So, they had to make arrangements to borrow a fuel truck from nearby McDill Air Force Base. A young, 24-year-old ramp supervisor named Sam McClure volunteered to go out to the airplane to fuel it on the runway. He said he would only do it with the condition that no FBI agent or police accompany him.
McDill AFB, also provided the authorities with a bus to carrying the passengers from the runway to the customs office where the FBI would debrief them. The forty-three passengers exited the airplane via the rear door and airstair (the 727 was one of the few airplanes with this feature).
The six crewmembers and three hijackers then left Tampa for Havana, landing at 8:49 AM EST. The entire ordeal for them was around seven hours. Once on the ground in Havana, Cuban soldiers entered the airplane armed with automatic weapons and immediately disarmed the hijackers. They quickly escorted them off to a detention facility. The hijackings had become so commonplace back in the late 1960s and early 1970s that Cuba had the drill down pat. The flight crew was questioned briefly and then taken to a downtown Havana hotel, where they spent the night and returned to the airplane the following morning and departed for the states. Cuban hijackings were out of control back them, and diplomatic efforts using the Swiss embassy as a mediator resulted in a memorandum of agreement between the two countries to return hijackers signed in February 1973. That agreement basically ended the rash of hijackings to Cuba, but it didn’t come soon enough to prevent the hijacking of TWA 106.
The three men were detained for a short time, and then moved to a facility where they were housed with other like-minded hijackers and fugitives. They lived frugally, and all efforts by the United States to get them extradited failed. In 1996, Bill Richardson, the ex-governor of New Mexico, put his success at getting hostages released to the test in an attempt to get the Castro regime to turn over the remaining hijackers to New Mexico authorities. By this time there were only two of the Albuquerque fugitives left, as Ralph Goodwin died in a drowning accident in 1973. But not only was Richardson unsuccessful, the Cuban government made matters even worse and refused to even allow him to speak with the two remaining hijackers. This a frustrating for Richardson as several members of the news media had already interviewed both Finney and Hill. Unfortunately for Richardson, the tensions between Fidel Castro and the Clinton administration were at an all-time high in 1996.
Finney died from throat cancer in 2005, most likely from his years of smoking unfiltered Cuban cigarettes. Then in 2015, President Obama began discussing opening up diplomatic relations with Cuba. This sparked a new wave of activity around the extradition of the only remaining hijacker, Charlie Hill. Then New Mexico governor, Susana Martinez, worked feverishly in an attempt to get Charlie Hill returned to the US, but Cuba refused to budge. California congressman Jerry McNerney, who was a passenger on the hijacked flight while attending the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, also worked through Secretary of State John Kerry in an attempt to secure the return of Charlie Hill. Just like Richardson before him, he struck out.
Bob Rosenbloom’s widow, Linda, passed away in November 2023, never having the opportunity to see any of her husband’s killers brought to justice. It was probably an even bigger slap in the face that several new outlets went to Cuba to interview Hill in 2015, including a CNN interview splashed all over TV. A lot of the information from the criminals in those interviews was self-serving lies or exaggerations, so I won’t bother repeating any of it. The reality is that Hill will probably die in Cuba, just like his other two criminal accomplices.
Bob Rosenbloom was a very good man, loved by many, well-liked by his peers, and admired by his supervisors. It is his memory that I hope to preserve with this story. Rest in Peace Officer Rosenbloom, you made the ultimate sacrifice. Your courage will forever serve to inspire us.
The Albuquerque Sunport circa 1970. There were four ground level gates at the main terminal and four ground level gates at a satellite building called the “gatehouse”. There were no jetways and passenger boarding was done using movable stairs and passengers reached the gatehouse via an underground tunnel.
Victor Dugger, owner of Dugger Wrecker Services, was called to an abandoned vehicle at the intersection of Mulberry Street SE and San Jose Ave SE. His wrecker was carjacked by three armed men, and he was forced at gunpoint to drive the four fugitives to the Albuquerque Sunport, where they hijack an TWA flight 106 (Albuquerque Tribune).
Aircraft fueler and TWA employee Ronald Simpson had just fueled a Boeing 727 and was leaving the airplane when the hijackers forced him back inside. He eventually convinced the fugitives that he had to go out and unhook his fuel truck and they allowed him to leave (Albuquerque Journal).
The hijacked airliner landed at Tampa International Airport and the hijackers forced the crew to remain on the runway while they took on fuel and released the passengers, before leaving for Cuba with the six crew members. The small bus pictured was borrowed from McDill AFB to transport passengers to the terminal.
The news media interviewed the crew of the hijacked airplane when they returned to the United States. Pictured from left to right are four members of the six-person crew: flight attendants Shirley Ann Harrell, Betty Caubre, captain John McGhee, and first officer Robert Clark (Albuquerque Journal).
Michael Robert Finney was interviewed twice by the news media while living in Cuba before he died of cancer in 2005. This photo was taken during an interview with Gary Moore of the Miami Herald on October 30, 1980 (Miami Herald).
Charlie Hill, the last living hijacker, received a lot of media attention (including a few TV interviews) after President Obama began reestablishing diplomatic relation with Cuba in 2015. There were several unsuccessful attempts to have him returned to the US to face justice (CNN).
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