A Bureaucrat Berserk

It was 1:45 a.m. at the almost deserted Houston Intercontinental Airport. Inside the terminal, Stanley Hubbard, 34, was routinely checking in a dozen sleepy-eyed passengers for an Eastern Airlines flight to Atlanta. Suddenly the four men at the end of the line snapped menacingly to life. They rushed past Hubbard toward the entrance of the 727 jet. Instinctively Hubbard pursued them. Five shots rang out, and Hubbard slumped to the floor dead, clutching the raincoat that he had grabbed from one of his assailants. Beneath the plane, an Eastern refueler, Wyatt Wilkinson, 26, was startled to hear the roar of the engines ahead of schedule. He raced into the airport terminal and came across Hubbard's body. After calling for an ambulance, he ran back to the plane and pounded on its closed door. Three shots pierced the door, two of them striking him in the arm. Security guards ran up, but it was too late. Amid a fusillade of bullets, the jet took off--headed for Havana.

It was the week's second skyjacking, the other being the bold abduction of a German plane that forced the release of Arab terrorists (see THE WORLD). In a season of ever more daring and dangerous aerial piracy, the Houston affair was perhaps the most bizarre to date. The leader of the hijackers was Charles Tuller, 48, a federal bureaucrat gone berserk. Going along for the ride were his two sons, Bryce, 19, and Jonathan, 18, and a friend of theirs, William Graham, 18. Only the week before, Tuller & Sons and Graham, two of them posing as telephone repairmen, had entered a bank in Arlington, Va., and tried to hold it up. They were interrupted before they could get away with any money, and in the gunfight that followed, both the bank manager and a policeman were killed. After the bandits made their escape, the FAA sent out a warning to airlines that they might try to hijack a plane. But the airlines get so many alerts of this kind that it is hard to act on all of them. Even if he had recognized them, the solitary, unarmed ticket agent would hardly have been a match for the terrorists.

Rage. Tuller's associates at the U.S. Commerce Department were dumbfounded. They considered him to be a mild-mannered humanitarian who worked hard to help blacks in his $26,436-a-year job with the Office of Minority Business Enterprise. Their first reaction was that the work had been too much for him. Said his boss, John Jenkins, a black: "The frustrations build up in a man and can break him down. The system grinds you down." In addition, Tuller had a severe case of diabetes. Last month he submitted his resignation on grounds of ill health.

But there was more to Tuller than met the eye of his colleagues. He was a man, say acquaintances, who was consumed with an inner rage that often erupted in uncontrollable anger, in a stream of obscenities and threats to people around him. The rage seemed to have originated in a searing childhood trauma. At the age of nine, he was escorting his four-year-old brother across a highway and failed to notice a truck; it struck and killed the younger boy. Tuller's father held him responsible, and even on his deathbed reminded him of his guilt. In return, Tuller nursed a seething hatred for his father. In time, this hatred was transferred to his wife, who divorced him last year, to his sons, whom he alternately bullied and pampered, and to the "system" that he believed oppressed and crushed people like himself.*

He became a fanatical partisan of black Americans. They, like him, were victims of injustice, and he never let them forget it. As a technical-assistance officer with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 1971, he made a trip to Houston to work out a plan for hiring more minorities in the construction trades. It was a tense situation, because Chicanos felt that they were being excluded in favor of blacks. Playing the role of the overbearing bureaucrat, Tuller brushed aside Chicano demands and presented a program for blacks only. Even blacks were outraged. Fumed Pluria Marshall, head of Houston's Operation Breadbasket: "You guys in Washington think you can just concoct plans for what's best down here. We don't need you, so get the hell out!" Tuller became irate and cursed out both minorities. Blacks and Chicanos later claimed that Tuller had tried to involve a Houston architect in a $50,000 kickback scheme. Tuller denied the charge, but his superiors were informed. He was removed from Texas and promoted to a different job in the EEOC.

As a friend of the Tuller boys tells it, the family began to plot the bank robbery last winter. They collected guns and cased the bank. Bryce Tuller and Graham were even sent into the Army for a while to learn how to shoot; once they did, they went AWOL. Neighbors reported strange goings on at their home in Alexandria--loud arguments, the flashing of knives and guns. A lumbering St. Bernard dog called Stage terrorized local children. Police discovered a marijuana garden growing in the Tullers' backyard.

The four planned to escape to the wilds of Canada after the robbery and live off the loot for the rest of their lives. It was only when the scheme went awry, apparently, that Tuller thought of hijacking a plane. Since he had been reading Che Guevara and admired the Cuban Revolution, Havana seemed a logical destination. Once aboard the hijacked jet, he harangued the passengers with his political notions. "This fascist Government has got to fall!" he ranted. "These fascists have done nothing but keep the little man down. The only way you can be free is with this!" he shouted, waving his Luger. Putting the weapon to the head of a newsman, Ron Pinkney, he demanded: "What's the matter, black man? Are you afraid to die? Blacks who do not fight and give into the white man are slave niggers." He turned on a white man and asked him what he did for a living. When the man replied that he worked for IBM, Tuller flipped again. "I didn't like your looks when you got on!" he screamed. "I should have killed you then!"

When the plane landed in Havana, Cuban authorities took the four men into custody. They rarely return American hijackers, but when the U.S. State Department asked for their extradition, the Cubans did not say no. Instead, they requested more details on the charges against the men, suggesting that even Cuba may be no refuge for revolutionaries of the likes of Tuller & Sons.

* For an account of the typical hijacker's personality and a leading psychiatrist's view on how to deal with it, see BEHAVIOR.

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