Ep 3-Man Plans. God Laughs.

Bangkok, June 1972. A twenty-nine-year-old lieutenant in the Royal Thai Police walks his fiancée and his seven-year-old daughter onto a Cathay Pacific flight. He makes sure they're seated over the wing. He seats them, and gets off the plane.

Under the seat in front of them is a cosmetics case. Inside it, two pounds of explosives.

He'd taken out insurance policies on both of them.

He thought the plane would go down over open water. The wreckage would sink. No bodies, no fragments, no case.

Man plans. God laughs.

This is Episode 3.

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Transcript

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At some point, he was standing at a counter somewhere in Bangkok. It could have been a flea market, maybe inside a store. Hell, it could have been the back of a van. I don't know where a guy would buy a cosmetics case in that part of the world in 1972. And I don't know shit about Bangkok, then or now. I just know he was there. And I doubt he put much thought into it. Picked one up, put it back, turned them over. Eventually, I think I'll get her this one. It was for his daughter. There's no record of him buying the case, so I can't say that's how it happened, but he had to at some point. It was his weapon of choice. His name was some Chai Chai Asset. I'm not sure I'm pronouncing it right, but I honestly don't care. He means nothing to me. Apparently, he was a lieutenant in the Royal Thai Police Aviation Division. I bet it didn't take much to get there, Ben. But he probably thought the uniform made him a man. It didn't. It made him a guy in a uniform. He was 29. He had an ex-wife and a seven-year-old daughter. Her name was Santaya. I can't for the life of me understand how a man could kill his own daughter. Much less 80 other people. I guess the only thing that mattered to him was that they would all die so he could get a bunch of money. He worked out of Don Moang Airport, which gave him access to just about everyone who could tell him how to bring down a plane. Pilots, engineers, other cops doing aviation training rotations. The whole world of commercial flight was a few hundred yards from his desk, and the uniform got him in any door he wanted. Where in the plane would you put a bomb? The wings, somebody said. He asked an engineer at the airline what a blast inside the cabin would do, and the engineer told them. They remembered the conversations, they testified to them later. Don Moang was also where he got the C4. An instructor from a police aviation training course handed it to him and he didn't hand it back. Two pounds of that stuff. C4 is a military plastic explosive. Looks like a block of beige clay. You can drop it, you can hit it, you can set it on fire, nothing happens. It doesn't go off until the blasting cap fires into it, which means it doesn't go off by accident. It goes off because somebody decides it should. He decided. They found four cosmetics cases in his house. Two of them had holes drilled in the side. Those in the know said the holes were probably for detonator wires. And then there was one more, the one he drilled for his daughter, and for the woman who was going to carry it on the plane. She was his courier. His first attempt was a hostess at a bar in Pot Pong. He offered her 30,000 baht to take his daughter to Hong Kong on a shopping trip. She agreed, but she asked him for 5,000 up front as a test. He balked, she declined, and so she lived. He needed somebody who would trust him. The first one wouldn't trust him for a transaction. The second was going to have to trust him for a marriage. Her name was Some Wong. She was twenty. She worked nights at the 24-hour cafe, the kind of place you'd find at the edge of a war. She'd moved in with him about six weeks before. He told her she was going to Hong Kong for a few days. His mother would meet her on the other end with $500, take his daughter along, treat her, have a good time, he'd join them after. She said yes to all of it, the proposal, the trip, the case. He took out two travel accident insurance policies, one on his daughter, one on his fiancee. He stood to collect 3.1 million baht, about 225,000 US dollars, should the unthinkable happen. Except the unthinkable is for people like us. To him, it was very much thinkable. He'd thought it, he'd planned it, he'd packed it into the cosmetics case. In Saigon in the days after the crash, Cathay Pacific flew the bereaved families in to identify the bodies. They were in the airline offices on the morgue, shrieking or pounding the walls, or sitting in awful silence with death still in the room. He was there too. He was asking if anybody had found the case. Not his daughter, not his fiance, that goddamn cosmetics case. My lord, what a fucker. And it worked like a charm, except for that pesky trial that got in the way. All the evidence was there, the smoking gun, the bodies, the testimonies, lock, stock, and barrel. And he walked. The day of the flight, June 15th, 1972. He walked them in, uniform on, fiance at his side, little girl at his hip. When it was time to check in, the seats he wanted were already taken, 10E and 10F, right over the wing. Those were the ones he needed his fiance and his daughter to sit in. Those and that one piece of carry on. He pushed, he argued, he told them his daughter wanted to be over the wing for a better view. Eventually he got the superintendent onto the plane to ask the Japanese man sitting in 10E if he'd mind moving five rows back so this Thai policeman's little family could have those seats, you know, for a better view. Which anyone who's ever sat over a wing knows is no view at all. It's a flapping metal shield. I wonder if Sentaya was holding his hand the way seven-year-olds do before they're about to get on a plane. His fiancee stowed the case under the seat in front of her, careful with it because it was hers. They sat down and he walked off the plane and back to his car. I've replayed this moment in my mind a thousand times. Did he turn around and look at her one last time? Did he feel relief, anticipation? Did he second guess? Did he hug her goodbye? Did he puke? I have a cousin who's a federal prosecutor. After 9-11, he was the first general counsel for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism. He'd know what's a category of crime and what isn't. He told me something that gnawed at me. This kind of crime, take out a policy on somebody, put them on a plane, blow the plane out of the sky, collect the money. It's not a thing. Wait, what? Of course it's a thing. We've all heard of it, right? Apparently not. Even though we stand in that box at security, arms up, getting scanned, half convinced this is exactly what they're looking for, in the entire history of aviation, it has basically never happened. Except it did in 1972. Apparently there's a very thin line between never and that one time. I didn't buy his other theory at first. Sounded like Hollywood, like somebody was trying to make a movie out of a movie. And then I thought about it. Some chai, I don't think he had it in him. I don't think he sat in his apartment one night and dreamed up an insurance bombing from scratch. He got it from somewhere. In 1970, they made a movie called Airport. Bert Lancaster, Dean Martin, and Helen Hayes won an Oscar. It was a huge hit. It's about a guy who takes out a life insurance policy on himself, packs a bomb in a case, and plans to set it off over the ocean. Why the ocean? Because the wreckage would sink. No investigation, his wife collects. Two years later, a 29-year-old Thai cop did almost the same thing. Except he took the policies out on his fiancee and his daughter, and he stayed on the ground. At least the guy in the movie went up with the plane. Call it a perverse kind of chivalry. Our guy had none. He killed 81 people for money. For fucking money. My cousin doesn't believe in coincidences. He had me pegged as the kind of guy who doesn't either. And he's right. I can't prove he saw airport. Nobody can. But the case, the insurance, the ocean. One was fiction. The other. That son of a bitch did it. Fact of the matter is, he's a mass murderer. But I digress. He set the timer for somewhere over the Pacific Ocean. Open water. Deep water. The wreckage sinks, no bodies, no fragments, no case. The insurance company pays. That was the plan. But of course, man plans. God laughs. There's a delay at the gate. Then the plane is in the air, climbing east out of Bangkok. His little girl is at the window, his fiance beside her. Lunch is being served. The case securely under the seat in front of them. And the timer is running.