Another twenty years from that landmark day have passed. Janet and I are much older now. Our emotional lives have been largely restored, though we could never be the same.
When I grew up, I never had a house key. There was no need because we never locked our doors. There was never an issue with losing car keys, either, because we always left them in the ignition.
After the kidnapping, I became much more vigilant. That’s one way we changed. We’re careful. We lock everything. If I walk across the street, I lock the door behind me. If we’re home, I twist the deadbolts. We lock our cars inside our closed garage. Our home also has a top-line security system complete with emergency panic buttons at every exit.
I keep the office locked at all times as well, and long ago installed a number of surveillance cameras that run live feeds from outside entryways, the parking lot, and around the building. I still check the rearview mirror at traffic lights and stop signs, as if the kidnappers might pull up behind me again. I can’t help but alternate my route home from work. As for cars, we buy quality vehicles but nothing too flashy that might grab unwanted attention. Same with so-called “vanity license plates”—they’re just asking for trouble.
Oh, and don’t even think of buying “kidnapping insurance;” you’re advertising to be kidnapped. Your name and the amount of insurance gets seen not just by your broker but throughout the insurance company underwriting the policy. Bad move.
As for work, all my employees now undergo thorough and detailed background tests.
Bottom line: we don’t feel safe, and I doubt we ever will. It’s sad, but that’s the way it is.
One thing I refused to do, however, was to retreat from people who were different from me. That’s not safety; that’s something else, and I won’t accept it. Our housekeeper, handyman, personal bookkeeper, and many others who come in and out of our home happen to be from different racial and ethnic backgrounds, religions, and creeds. Some have been with us for decades, and I consider them friends.
Being portrayed as someone with discriminatory motives was one of the worst parts of the ordeal, post-release. It deeply upsets me. I was raised to treat people the same no matter their color or race. There are good people and bad people, and it has nothing to do with their immutable personal qualities. I raised my own children with those values. Yet, I often found myself in a brewing cauldron of racial tension during Williams’s trial and then again after his successful appeal. McCarty and McGuire did, too. It’s a shame.
We’ve had many people come and go at Acme Steel Partition. At the height of our business, we employed six hundred individuals. We treated everyone equally and with respect. In all those years since my father started the company, we were never once sued or cited for discrimination. It’s not who we are; it’s not what we stand for.
Rarely did we have bad apples at Acme Steel Partition. Charles Berkley was not the norm. We had good, loyal, upstanding people in our company—many of whom had been with us for a long time. My secretary has been with the company for thirty-five years. There have been so many nice, wonderful people that I’m just extremely grateful to all of them.
* * *
The missing ransom money is still a mystery.
The kidnapping case never came full-circle because the money was never found, and the other kidnappers escaped justice. To this day, Det. Sgt. McGuire views the case of the missing money as unsolvable. Given his “never quit” spirit, that’s saying something.
It always struck me that Williams never cooperated. He could never logically explain the ransom bills in his possession. That was the death knell of his criminal defense. His attorney, Donald Kane, had to know he’d never get out from under it. The FBI stopped him in California days after Charles Berkley went missing. Williams was on the run, agents found thousands of dollars in matching ransom bills in his possession, and he’d hidden thousands more in the wheel well of the mobile home.
A promise to return the rest of the money would have been the perfect bargaining chip in a plea negotiation. Why didn’t Williams give it up and walk away with a vastly reduced prison sentence?
He sat behind bars for years appealing his conviction and suing Nassau County and the New York state prison system. He clearly wanted out. He was serving twenty-five years to life, meaning he wouldn’t have been eligible for parole until he’d served a minimum of twenty-five years. Yet, he never turned state’s evidence. As far as I can tell, he never even thought about it. The D.A.’s office approached him years into the term and offered leniency if he’d give up the money, but he wouldn’t budge.
Williams also refused to talk about Charles Berkley or their accomplices. They never rolled on each other. I wondered why. Were they true believers in their militant cause? I never thought so. I’m sure they believed some of what they said, but the anti-imperialist, anti-Semitic hate was really just camouflage for a brutal extortion plot. That’s what I think.
My kidnapping was mostly about money, not politics. That may have been part of their motive—a kind of justification for their despicable actions—but at the end of the day, they wanted money. And lots of it. They wanted to be rich. Williams himself was a capitalist real estate entrepreneur who lost his shirt in a failed business venture in South America. He came back to the U.S. complaining about the socialist government of Guyana. Rather than rebuild his business, Williams tried to steal from mine.
As much as he screamed about it, my being Jewish had nothing to do with his greed—envy maybe, but not his greed. He was a coward. The abuse was deeply personal, but it boils down to a crime of convenience.
I don’t think we’ll ever find out where the money is.
Charles Berkley died several years ago. Richard Williams died more recently. We know because we hired a forensic accountant to explore Williams’s financial activities. It’s something we’d been doing for decades, along with hiring private investigators to keep track of his whereabouts. Williams had been living in Jacksonville, Florida, with a retired school teacher whom he married while still in prison. He had $500 in a bank account. I could’ve attached it to the civil judgment, but it would’ve cost more than that just to get it.
There was $750,000 in cash in the ransom bag. Williams was arrested with $10,300 in matching bills on his person. Another $28,000 was found in the mobile home. He bought the mobile home for $20,000 in cash (plus a $500 tip), and we believe he spent another $100,000 on a home in Florida. Then there was the $10,000 donation to the Organization of African Unity, which I got back. The rest is unaccounted for.
We deposed Williams prior to the deal that sprang him from prison. We pressed him hard about the missing money. I asked Buddy Martin, our company accountant, to attend the deposition in the hopes that some piece of information would lead us to the money. That Williams would slip, and we could dig it up. But it didn’t happen. Whatever they asked him, Williams would just lie. It was nothing to him. Everybody knew it.
We tried many times and many ways. I spent a lot of money. I hired companies to help us track it down. We searched under Williams and Berkley’s names, their aliases, wives, girlfriends, and friends’ names—even their children’s. McGuire dedicated huge amounts of his personal time to cracking the mystery. He was so dedicated. For me it wasn’t so much about the money itself but what it might be used for; namely, funding future terrorist activities or fueling violent radicalism that might harm other innocents.
Still, we didn’t find anything. If money was left to their wives or kids, there was probably no way of getting it. Williams died with nothing in his estate. He and Berkley took the secret to their graves.
There were at least three kidnappers, maybe four. Perhaps they split the money and lived well for a few years. There weren’t computers in those days to electronically follow money. Unless they were caught red-handed, like Williams, the bills would circulate and recirculate beyond detection. And when the one-hundred-dollar bills became obsolete due to new bill designs, banks would trade them out for new ones, and the old bills would be destroyed. It’s a common practice meant to prevent counterfeiting.
Williams could have gone to Las Vegas and exchanged $5,000 for an equal amount in gambling chips, only to change them out again and receive new bills. The ransom bills would’ve been dispersed the same day, then exponentially more with each passing day making them impossible to trace in a short amount of time.
McGuire was convinced Williams used a large amount of the ransom to buy real estate. He searched county clerks of court offices around the country—New York, New Jersey, California, Florida—to see if he could identify any property ownership leads. He researched names, aliases, and anything else that he could think of.
McCarty thought the money may have been stashed offshore in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Williams’s father lived there, and he had traveled throughout the Caribbean extensively. Corporations and wealthy individuals have long sought tax shelters and opaque banking protections in the Virgin Islands.
There was good reason to believe it was Williams’s final destination. None of it could be proved, but McCarty hypothesized that Williams was heading for Mexico when he was arrested in Barstow, California. The mobile home he was driving pulled a four-wheel drive International TravelAll that could better handle rough terrain as he tacked further and further east.
Barstow is also a road junction where Interstates 10 and 15 intersect. If Williams took I-10 due east, he’d eventually land back in Jacksonville. He could hide out there or puddle-jump down through the Caribbean to the Virgin Islands.
Another theory involves John Wesley Ford, a university professor and Florida resident who allegedly helped Williams purchase his mobile home. Ford made at least one real estate purchase around the same time. Was he one of the kidnappers? There wasn’t enough evidence to indict him along with Williams and Berkley, but McGuire strongly suspected his involvement.
I would’ve liked to know more about Berkley’s involvement. He worked for me for all those years, and I never would’ve imagined him capable of such depravity. I knew Williams was the Keeper, but was Berkley in the tenement apartment? He fingered me as the target but what else, exactly?
Today, the ransom money would be worth more than $4 million. It’d be an enormous boon for current and future members of my family, but I believe it’s gone. McCarty and McGuire do too. It’s not buried in a treasure box or hidden between a canvas painting and its frame. It’s gone. I only hope it wasn’t used to hurt other people or support terrorist activities outside the country.
* * *
Today most people don’t mention my kidnapping to me, but it used to be unavoidable. We had to learn to deal with people making inappropriate comments or bringing it up as a topic of conversation at awkward and uncomfortable times.
“Do you know what happened to Jack and Janet years ago? Jack was kidnapped. Isn’t that wild?”
It’s such a personal thing to be abused like we were. I tried not to let it bother me and ignored those moments the best I could. But given the national attention my case received and the size of the ransom, it’s inevitable that people are curious. Perhaps this book will help answer many of their questions.
Janet and I vowed to spend our remaining days working part-time, traveling, and enjoying life together. We’ve been through so much, and we’ve dealt with severe health issues. But I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that the kidnapping still hovers like an apparition. To this day we never go eight hours without checking on each other, talking on the phone, each knowing the other is safe. If business travel or life has us in separate locations, we talk frequently…that terrifying week in 1974 left a permanent scar.
There’s an old picture of Janet from the newspaper the night I was released near JFK. It still brings tears to my eyes. Her fear, anger, and compassion for me reside in her expression. That old black and white clipping, now patinaed with age, shows in one faded look the hell she endured. Today I marvel at her strength in pushing past the pain to defiantly live a life of joy and gratitude.
As for our children, Marc, Michael, and Jaime, I am thankful to say that they are all living healthy, successful lives—and have made us proud grandparents! I wish I could say that the trauma I endured didn’t affect my ability to be emotionally available and strong for my children throughout every phase of their lives, but that wouldn’t be honest. Even my daughter, Jaime, who had not been born when my kidnapping occurred, has experienced that pain in the form of my emotional distance at times. It wasn’t for a lack of love; to the contrary, it was because I was afraid and unsure how to love freely. I never even told her about my abduction. When she was in middle school, and her class was reading the book, The Face on the Milk Carton, Jaime shared with her mother that she was so troubled and upset by the book’s subject matter, that Janet had to tell her what had happened in our family. Her dad had been kidnapped. Later, she stumbled on an old news article about it while researching microfiche in the library. I had hoped to protect her innocence and sense of safety. Naïve? Maybe. But I know my intentions were pure and rooted in love for her.
My pain elevator goes down farther than I want my children to know. It’s not a ride I want to take them on. I can descend into the abyss at the mere press of an emotional button. They don’t need that.
* * *
Janet and I made an everlasting pact to seek joy, make memories with our children and grandchildren, and savor the smiles in between. It took many years and countless therapy sessions to get to this point, but we’re here now. Together.
In the closet I vowed to hang on for my wife and children, but I still marvel at how Janet mustered the courage to walk straight into danger on the slim chance that doing so might bring me back home alive. I don’t know how she did it. She had the kids. She had the weight of all those FBI agents, police detectives, the media, our family, our friends, and the terror of dealing with militant criminals all on her shoulders. Yet she never wavered—not even when the FBI tested her resolve. Ending the horror all hinged on her. And she did it. My loving, beautiful Janet.
She is just as radiant today as she was on August 21, 1965—the day we were married. I look at her daily and wonder how I got so damn lucky. I wouldn’t be here without you, Janet. You saved my life. I love you.