The Tribune

By ERIC WIBERG

ON November 20, 1980, a Bell Jet Ranger helicopter owned and flown by Florida real estate developer and father of four, George Snow, was lost along with critical news footage aboard between Congo Town, Andros, and Miami. The passengers included NBC cameraman Randy Fairbairn, TV crew member Dan Cefalo, and ABC newsman Joe Dellasera. Although the actual cause of the chopper’s loss is still not known 46 years later, this civilian accident is included in this series because it’s likely that the helicopter’s fate during that week was influenced by the drug trade.

Circumstances around the release of parts of the chopper at Grand Bahama a few weeks after the crash and other information cast a questionable shadow on an already terrible tragedy.

It’s difficult to imagine one horrific event wedged between more horrific events, but that appears to be the case here. The Cold War raged between US and USSR with Cuba as a proxy. Cuban airmen had recently sunk the HMBS Flamingo and killed Bahamian sailors using MiG jets. Due to fishing disputes, Cubans in the US were planting limpet mines on the hulls of Bahamian fishing and mailboats in the Miami River and sinking them.

The US was arming the Bahamas.

The Soviet Union was arming Cuba.

And to make matters worse, Castro had recently released 100,000 from his jails and sent them into the US in what was known as “The Mariel Boat Lift,” an event that became the basis for the movie Scarface.

It was an anxious time.

Haiti’s de facto dictator Baby Doc Duvalier’s secret police--the TonTon Macout--were terrorising and starving their people. The first boatloads of escapees fled Hispaniola for the US. Many made it only as far as the Bahamas, with more land per person than Haiti. For Haitians, it was a land of milk and honey.

Some, though, were simply dumped on uninhabited Cayo Lobos – “Wolves Rock” – an abandoned Bahamian lighthouse almost in sight of Cuba. One Haitian smuggler’s sloop even abandoned 116 passengers on the small cay for months, including many women in need of medical help.

According to some accounts, the smugglers decided the passengers were too difficult and the danger of interception by either the US or Cuban military was too high. Months passed, and the Bahamian response was to pretend it wasn’t happening. But then--sensing a big story that would finally reveal the evils of Duvalier’s regime, and fearing that any Haitians sent back would likely be tortured and killed--the US mainstream news channel NBC decided to send a team of journalists to Cay Lobos.

George Snow, a helicopter pilot, stepped in to solve the logistics problem, as he had with Mariel Boat Lift coverage. He staged at remote Congo Town airport in Andros, had the TV stars show up at dawn, had his helicopter waiting for their fuel, transferred jet fuel, took the stars and crew to Lobos, and then brought them back to Andros. There the stars and the footage would take a Lear jet back in time to appear on the evening news. Midlevel team members would take a chopper to Miami, and less urgent folks would fly commercial, then onward, with their stories.

In Andros, the news team and chopper crews encountered trouble: Haitians attacking Bahamian personnel. At 3:45pm they witnessed a brutal counterattack, which they recorded at great risk to themselves. A Boca magazine article by Gaspar Gonzalez form the Dec/Jan 2011/12 issue and posted on the official website of the Snow Foundation details the incident.

“Snow was behind the controls of his helicopter, waiting for them to return. Gunshots rang out. The news crews on the ground ran back to their respective choppers, which then climbed and hovered just above the lighthouse. Bahamians continued beating the Haitians. Soldiers then started waving their rifles in the direction of the choppers. Snow and the other pilots got the hell out of there - fast. They’d seen enough. They were also transporting the lead story for that night’s newscast. The Haitians, they knew, would eventually be rounded up, put onboard the Lady Moore and returned to Haiti, where Duvalier would deal with them. All the choppers made it back to Congo Town for refuelling. The air was thick with electricity—a storm was rolling in—and apprehension.”

“We had shot some controversial scenes that the Bahamian government wasn’t going to like,” said a journalist named Kathy Willens, who made a point of pocketing the film she’d shot in her clothes and loading a blank roll, just in case someone tried to open her camera and expose it. Everyone was anxious to get out of the Bahamas.

Ike Seamans took the remarkable footage shot by his crew and hopped the Lear [in Congo Town] back to Miami to make the tight broadcast deadline. Joe Dalisero, a news video technician in need of a lift home, took Seamans’ place aboard the Ranger. Willens returned to South Florida on a commercial flight out of Nassau.

“See you in Miami!” she shouted to Snow. But a massive electrical storm and a number of other factors doomed the escape plan. Neither the helicopter nor any of the people in it were ever seen again.

Strangely, a numbered piece of a helicopter--a few feet long and tall—appeared in Grand Bahama weeks later. It was found by a German tourist, who, for some unknown reason, fled when approached by Snow’s sons looking for their father. Coast Guard spokesman Carol Feldman said the copter had survival equipment aboard, including an eight-man life raft and flotation devices, and that the search was concentrated around Andros Island, Grand Bahama Bank, and the Florida Straits.

Some witnesses in Andros told authorities they had found three living persons. Then they changed their story to two living persons. Then to three dead persons and a chopper around Williams Island, where it was felt the helicopter was shot down or went down due to weather or mechanical failing. There was no debris. Unreliable drug smugglers claimed to have sunk the helicopter, but no explanation or theory was ever proven.

The flights themselves were a wild gambit to feed the public with a richly-textured story about the plight of Haiti and Haitians. The disappearance of Snow, his helicopter, and the others on board meant that they became the story. A mystery that’s still unsolved.

The Foundation site provides further details. “The search sputtered to a close around Thanksgiving. On November 29, there was a break: the piece found was 3 feet long and 2 feet wide, the tan-coloured hunk of metal included the numbers ‘069.’ The missing helicopter’s registration number was N10696. It was a piece of Snow’s Bell Jet Ranger.”

And what of the Haitians on Cayo Lobos? They were rounded up aboard the former mailboat Lady Moore (since sunk off Andros) and returned to Haiti, where no doubt few survived long. It was likely that their deaths were used to show their countrymen what happens if you try to leave Haiti. They and the ships that moved them have become footnotes to a dark chapter in regional history.

That history is still clear in the mind of thirty-four-year Royal Bahamas Defence Force (RBDF) veteran Commodore Tellis Bethel.

“Haitians primarily sought refuge in Miami aboard unseaworthy wooden sloops,” he said. “The operators of these vessels engaged in the lucrative business of human smuggling for a fee. Unfortunately, operators sometimes left their passengers stranded on cays, and, in some cases, deceived them into thinking they had arrived at their destination if they suspected law enforcement was in the area.

“Unfortunately for Snow, it's uncertain what happened. Most likely engine failure or fuel shortage. His chopper had to fly some 200 miles from Florida before refuelling in Congo Town, then resuming his trip to tiny Cay Lobos, over 100 miles on the northern edge of the Old Bahama Channel, some 20 miles off Cuba's north-central coast. Some reports state that his aircraft did not meet Instrument Flight Rules [IFR] standards, and was therefore unable to be monitored by US flight authorities.”

“Considering patrol operations by US and UK forces,” Bethel continued, “I question what assistance Cuba was able to provide? Perhaps relations with Cuba may have been too tense for the US to seek technical assistance from them. Was it possible that the Cuban radars had observed Snow's helicopter, as the incident occurred near their airspace? Overall, it was a risky operation for Snow, combined with daring and a desire to help.”

The mystery remains unsolved to this day. Perhaps Snow and his passengers should be considered victims of a drug era filled with deceit, tragedy, and violent international conflict. Even for people and global organisations trying to shed light and transparency on those things.