Men Who Killed Qantas - Matthew Benns [34]
For the Qantas chief executive, Captain Robert Ritchie, the movie became a nightmarish reality at 12.20 pm on 26 May 1971. Captain Ritchie had been a major player in bringing Qantas into the jet age – now he faced losing one of those planes in the most horrific circumstances. Police officers at Sydney airport had received a call from a Mr Brown saying there was an altitude bomb hidden on a Qantas Boeing 707 that had just left Sydney for Hong Kong with 127 passengers and crew on board. If the plane dropped below a certain altitude the bomb would automatically explode. The police had been guided to a locker at the airport in which they found a vinyl bag containing a sample bomb and three letters. The first letter explained how the bomb would detonate at a certain altitude, the second that a similar bomb was on the Hong Kong flight and the third was addressed to Captain Ritchie. It demanded $500,000 in used notes before 4 pm. Mr Brown promised to tell Qantas how to find and defuse the bomb once he had the money. While police confirmed the airport bomb would work as promised, Qantas ordered the Hong Kong flight into a holding pattern above 19,500 feet while the crew methodically searched it for the bomb. Nothing was found.
Captain Ritchie faced an awful dilemma. The police did not want him to deal with an extortionist who had effectively hijacked the Qantas jet by remote control. But he did not want to lose the lives of the 127 people on his plane. He called Qantas finance director Bill Harding, who went to the Reserve Bank and returned with the money in bundles of $20 notes. Meanwhile, up in the sky, the plane was running out of fuel and would have to land by 7 pm. Captain Ritchie controversially chose to deal with the extortionist and pay out the money. He personally handed over the cash in two suitcases to a man in a yellow van outside the Qantas building in the middle of Sydney. Frustrated police officers found they were trapped in a lift that stopped at every floor of the building as Mr Brown calmly drove away. Once clear, he called Qantas and told them there was no bomb on the plane. It was an elaborate and expensive hoax. The plane landed safely, but where was Qantas’s half a million dollars?
Mr Brown was in fact a 36-year-old English migrant called Peter Pasquale Macari. He had been arrested in England on homosexuality charges and had absconded to Australia, where he had briefly run a fibreglass factory at Brookvale on Sydney’s northern beaches and driven a taxi. Those who knew him by the alias Peter King at the Bondi gymnasium where he regularly worked out described him as sly, witty, restless and generous. They also noticed, after the Qantas extortion, that he had a lot of money. So did his accomplice, 28-year-old Sydney barman Raymond Poynting.
Macari went on a spending spree. He bought a 1967 white E-type Jaguar with black leather upholstery for $5,000. Then he added to his collection a Mini Cooper for $1,900, a Morris Cooper ERW 306 for $800 and a Ford Transit van for $1,800. He paid $41,000 for a three-bedroom top-floor unit in Bondi with panoramic ocean views, and flew to the Gold Coast to get a sample of carpet he had seen and liked in a motel there. He put down a deposit on a $14,750 former butcher’s shop and residence in Annandale, in which he stashed some of the Qantas ransom money. Macari then sold the E-type to Poynting, who had already spent $4,300 on a tangerine Ford Flacon GT, and instead bought a 1967 Chevrolet Camaro. Ron Phillips, owner of the Five Dock car yard where Macari bought the car, told the Sydney Morning Herald: ‘It was what we call a pose car. A young bloke who wants to be noticed might buy it. As it drove past, you’d turn and look, that’s for sure!’1 Mr Phillips said Macari haggled the price of the car down by $500 to $5,500. The Camaro was hard to miss. It was iridescent blue with bone white upholstery and had red wall tyres on its US magnesium alloy wire wheels.
On 4 August,