Criminal - Haywire

Episode Date: October 23, 2026

Two days before New Year’s Eve in 1975, a bomb exploded at LaGuardia Airport in New York City. 75 people were injured and 11 people were killed. The bombing has never been solved. Elon Green wrote “The Forgotten Bombing of LaGuardia Airport” for Slate Magazine.  Bryan Burrough’s book is Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence. Tickets for our brand new live show, Don't Worry with Phoebe Judge, are on sale now! Learn more and see all of our tour dates at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠thisiscriminal.com/live⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Say hello on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. Sign up for our occasional newsletter. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts. Sign up for Criminal Plus to get behind-the-scenes bonus episodes of Criminal, ad-free listening of all of our shows, invitations to virtual events, special merch deals, and more. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop. Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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and he was from the Midwest. This is journalist and writer Elon Green. On December 29, 1975, Robert Dickman flew from Chicago to New York's LaGuardia Airport. His college roommate was from New York City, and he'd invited Robert to come visit him for New Year's Eve. His roommate had promised him a good time in New York. He would take him to Times Square and see the sights.

Robert's roommate had told him he would pick him up. But when Robert landed at LaGuardia, his roommate wasn't there yet. He called him at home, but nobody answered. Robert went a baggage claim to wait. He remembers he saw a man in a military uniform nearby. He started getting tired. It had been about two hours since he landed. He sat back, put his feet up on some luggage,

and passed out and was basically in and out of consciousness until approximately 6.30 in the evening. And then a bomb exploded. There was this real loud noise, and I was downstairs in operations, and I said, oh, my God, sounds like somebody just came through the building. And a commissary guy came running into operations, and he said, everybody got out.

Just out of nowhere, this huge explosion. I dove for the floor and covered up. As I was running through the terminal, people were running, and I noticed there was glass everywhere. Elon Green interviewed some of the survivors from that night. I ended up on my hands and knees. There were things, you know, falling from the ceiling, and you couldn't see out the windows because there was so much debris in the area. The concrete floor that we were standing on actually was buckled. It was cracked quite a bit through where the area, the terminal, the ticket boots,

you know, with everything, check in where we were standing. The ceiling in the baggage claim area was made of concrete, eight inches thick. But after the bomb exploded, there was a 12-foot wide hole in it. The windows had all broken in the explosion. People said it smelled like gunpowder inside. One witness said that the explosion was so loud, he thought a plane had hit the building. This one guy ran past me and he had blood all over him. There is a woman on the ground.

She was pregnant. And I'm like trying to calm her down, try to keep her from like going into shock or anything like that. I started heading out, got back out onto the sun. and noticed that there was blood on my hand, and I looked a little further, and I had the shrapnel hole in the side of my pants at my hip area. That's when things started going haywire for me. I had just gotten to the terminal. Ike Pappas, a reporter for CBS News, happened to be at the airport that night.

He was about to go on vacation. Here he is the next day on the morning news. Suddenly there was a whomp. The floor seemed to leap and I was knocked down. And a lot of smoke, a lot of dust, a lot of pulverized concrete. Couldn't see anything. People came running in from the other terminals and you say, I've got to get some help. So I went over to the telephone and by this time all of the receivers or the earpieces were knocked off the hooks.

I phoned the police and I said, I didn't get an answer the first time I tried again, and they said, we've got it, we've got it. They slammed the phone down. You can hear the voice I've got because I was trying to talk through all this dust. 75 people were injured by the bomb that night at LaGuardia, and 11 people died. It was the largest number of deaths from a bomb in New York City since 1920. A firefighter told the New York Daily News that it was, quote, the worst I've ever seen.

There was blood in people just all over. the place. The city's blood bank sent over 100 pints of blood to hospitals in Queens. The college freshman, Robert Dickman, was also taken to the hospital. He blew out his eardrum and was hit with a piece of debris and had to have surgery, but he survived. Firefighters and police brought bulldozers and drills to free survivors trapped under the collapsed concrete. I'm not even sure how to describe how destructive this was. It's almost easier to ask what was left. And the answer is not much.

What they found was just shards of the lockers sitting in the parking lot. There was sidewalks full of pools of blood. There was water geysering from the pot. pipes, glass everywhere. You know, I've done journalism now for a while and written about some extremely violent events, and this is one of the most violent events I've ever read about in my life.

I'm Phoebe Judge. This is criminal. The commissioner of the New York City Fire Department said he thought the person who had set off the bomb at LaGuardia was, quote, someone who knew about explosives. It was no amateur. It's apparent. It was intended to kill and maim.

Police received a call that said there was a second bomb at the airport. Rescue efforts were halted, and parts of the airport were evacuated. But the bomb squad found no other bombs. Later that night, a bomb-sniffing dog signaled he had found something in a locker, but it turned out to be a package of sausages. There were no flights in a bomb-sniffing dog. out of LaGuardia for over 24 hours. Police officers were sent to the hospitals

to question survivors about what they might have seen. Some investigators thought it was possible that one or more individuals was supposed to be the target. One of the victims was said to have had ties to the CIA. Another was an FBI agent whose leg was blown off. In the days after the explosion, police collected all the debris. from the airport.

They used mesh screens to sift through pieces of stone, concrete, and other rubble for anything that might tell them about the bomb. Everything was taken to an airplane hanger at LaGuardia, where investigators looked through all the pieces. They determined that the bomb had been inside a luggage locker near baggage claim. Anyone could use them, even if you weren't flying. Investigators said they believed the bomb's timing device had been made. made from an ordinary wind-up clock and a 9-volt battery.

They thought the bomb had used plastic explosives, or TNT. It was the equivalent of 12 to 25 sticks of dynamite. Everything I've read and heard has indicated that at least back then, no conclusions could really be drawn about who had set the bomb by what was left in the debris. Three weeks after the bombing, police didn't have a lot of leads. A witness said they'd seen two men running away from the explosion. Detectives eventually tracked them down and questioned them. A police chief in Minnesota told the NYPD about a bomber in Minneapolis that he thought was connected.

A 911 dispatcher got a call the night of the bombing from a girl who said she had overheard two men talking about bombing the airport. But that turned out to be a hoax. People were calling in to news outlets and to, you know, to the NYPD and pointing the finger at people. Federal agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, and the FBI were sent to New York to help with the NYPD's investigation. The FBI was authorized to offer $50,000 to any of their informants who might have information. Eventually, 300 agents and 200 police officers were assigned to work on the case. Over the next two years, they would speak to almost 5,000 people. One of the agents that I talked to, he told me that the bombing of LaGuardia Airport was just a magnitude he had never encountered.

The agent said the worst he'd ever seen before this was the bombing at the bombing. Francis Tavern, 12 months earlier, in January of 1975. Francis Tavern is in the Financial District of Manhattan. It was built in 1719. It became a boarding house and a bar in 1762. Many American revolutionaries used it as a meeting place. The British Navy once shot a cannonball through the roof of the building. At the end of the Revolutionary War, George Washington

held a farewell dinner to his officers there. By the 1970s, it had become a historic landmark, and it was still a tavern. People who worked on Wall Street often went there. On January 24, 1975, at around 1.30 p.m., a bomb exploded in the building. 44 people were injured, and four people were killed. Shortly after the bombing, someone called the Associated Press and said they were from a group called the FAA.

A Puerto Rican nationalist group. The caller left instructions for the police to find a message from the group in a phone booth near Francis Tavern. The note said that the bomb was in retaliation for a CIA bombing in Puerto Rico earlier that month. At first, investigators thought the FALN might have also been responsible for the bomb at LaGuardia. But there is no evidence connecting them. The FALN would go on to set off more than 100 bombs in New York into the 1980s. In the 1970s, bombings happened a lot in the United States. The 70s, we forget, were crowded by left-wing radical groups,

many of them left over, most of them left over from the 1960s. This is journalist and author Brian Burrow. He wrote a book about bombings in the 1970s and the radical groups behind them, like the FALN and the Weather Underground. The anti-war movement, as we remember it began to fall apart under oppression from the Nixon administration as well as just it had kind of run its course in 71 and 72 and 73. These hardcore remnants being those who did not want to give up the fight, many of them, went underground and some of them began bombing things. Why bombs? That was the easiest way to get attention back in the years

before you could just put something up on the internet and suddenly the world and world media would see it. Back before all that, a common way to do it, was to blow up a bomb typically in a place where people would not get hurt and then release what was called a communique or basically a press release. Bombs became kind of exploding press releases, if you will. The Associated Press, the New York Times would have to go in and write some type of story off that about this bombing, whether it happened outside a courthouse or a power converter

or in an airport. Times reporters or New York Post reporters would go up to passers by. And the pastor's by would say, oh, what happened? And the reporter would say, oh, it was a bombing. And I'll never forget the one by a nice old Jewish lady outside. One of them, she's like, oh, another bombing. Who is it this time? According to the FBI, there were more than 2,500 bombings reported over a year and a half period between 1971 and 1972.

These bombings became so commonplace. People just kind of rolled their eyes. because 99 out of 100 didn't hurt somebody. And it's one reason I've argued that they were so easily forgotten because they were just kind of a part of a backdrop to a very troubled time in American cities. By the mid-70s, what you saw was an FBI that had basically thrown up its hands.

There was little sense of pressure politically and certainly from ordinary Americans out in Des Moines in Ohio. they were much more concerned about gas prices, about grocery prices, than some idiot radicals blowing up a building in the Bronx. It just drifted from being, you know, a top 10 national priority to one that you'd have to say was not in the top 50. Why are people not bombing things in the way that they did in the 70s? I mean, we certainly are in a rather fractured political climate. I am sometimes surprised that we've not seen a return to these types of tactics. specifically protest bombings.

I think two reasons. One, there is a sense that you can't get away with it, that essentially the FBI will track you down. You know, there's just, since the unibomber, certainly there just has not been much of a track record of successful protest bombings. The second thing I might cite is when you talk to people on the far left about this,

when you talk to the Bill Ayers and, you know, people who were in weather, you know, they are quite, specific, that they have told today's radicals that this was not the way. It, after all, did not work. There was no sense that it ever accrued the left any benefit and every reason to believe it only brought grief to their causes. After the bombing at Lawardia, someone called several newspapers and said that the

Palestinian Liberation Organization had set the bomb. But two days later, on December 31st, the PLO held a press conference and told reporters they had nothing to do with it. So whoever or whatever group was responsible, you categorically deny that it has any connection with the PLO. We not only categorically deny, but we condemn the act. You condemn the act? We condemn the act, that's right. In the weeks that followed, no one claimed responsibility for the LaGuardia bomb. Anybody and everybody were at least initial suspects in this thing,

because when there's no communicates explaining the rationalization behind a bomb, then everybody's a suspect. One police officer told the New York Times, quote, we're grabbing for straws trying to develop something. But then, nine days after the bombing, On January 7, 1976, a man named Walter Long walked into the NYPD's 10th Street Precinct in Manhattan and turned himself in.

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The newspapers began calling the person behind the bombs, the Sunday bomber. There was a third bomb in the Times Square subway station, and then a fourth bomb on the Staten Island Ferry. The last bomb went off on November 6th at the 125th Street subway station in Harlem. Over the weeks, 57 people were injured in the explosions, and one person was killed, a 15-year-old girl at the subway station. 600 detectives were assigned to find the Sunday bomber. A few weeks after the last bomb, police brought a 29-year-old man named Walter Long in for questioning. He'd been arrested before, including for robbery and rape. He had just escaped from a psychiatric hospital.

He used to work as a watchman at a construction site that had used dynamite and blasting caps. He was questioned for 20 hours. He told police that he had stolen explosives from his job, and he'd been nearby the site of the first four bombings. But he denied being the Sunday bomber. Police let him go. There were no more Sunday bombings.

No one else was ever charged. After the bomb and the Guardia went off, the NYPD looked through their bombing files and looked at people who had been, you know, suspected in the act of bomb making, and Walter Long was among the people whose names on the list. The NYPD and FBI released his name to the press and told reporters that Walter Long was not a suspect. but that he was, quote, high on their priority list of persons they wish to interrogate. And Walter Long saw the news reports and walked into the 10th Street precinct

holding a copy of the Daily News. And what did he say? He said he didn't do it. He was interrogated for some hours, and then he was let go. There was nothing to time to the bomb. In February of 1976, almost six weeks after the bombing, newspapers reported that the LaGuardia bombing was still a mystery.

Quote, there are scores of clues, but almost no hard evidence. The 500 city police bomb and arson experts and FBI agents initially assigned to the case have been unable to find a motive. One of the major problems with the ability to investigate a case like this, you know, if a witness had seen the bomb put into the locker, what they would have seen was a person carrying, most likely, a piece of luggage, putting that luggage in a locker.

That is not something that anybody would remember. And because of the lack of security cameras, nobody knows when the bomb was placed in the locker. And if you don't know when the bomb is placed in the locker, it's very hard to discern what the bomb was supposed to do, when it was supposed to go off. In fact, one of the investigators, in a very candid moment, told the newspapers that it could have been meant to go off

at any time in the prior 12 hours. That's far too big of a window to identify who a perpetrator could possibly have been. And the bomb went off in what was essentially the public area prior to security. After the LaGuardia bombing, many airports temporarily took their baggage lockers out of service. O'Hare Airport employees were so nervous that they collected money and fed quarters into the lockers so no one else could use them until the airport officially decided to close them. The Secretary of Transportation wrote a memo to President Gerald Ford about increasing security at airports across the country.

A few years earlier, in 1972, the FAA had instituted universal baggage screening with metal detectors and x-rays. Now, the FAA said they would begin working on a way to also detect explosive materials in baggage. An airport security expert told the Associated Press that he thought airports should no longer allow people into the terminal without a ticket. The Secretary of Transportation recommended random bag searches,

but airport officials were resistant. In the mid-70s, this was a time when air travel was competing with other methods of travel, And so the airlines were trying to bring in as many people as they could, and they wanted as little friction as possible with the experience. And they were trying, like, mad to prevent security measures from being instituted. One official at the Nashville airport said, short of handcuffing everyone when they come in here, how far can you go?

For months, the investigative, into the bombing at LaGuardia stalled. And then, nine months after the bombing, investigators had a new lead. On September 10, 1976, TWA Flight 355 left from LaGuardia for Chicago. 90 minutes after takeoff, a passenger stopped a flight attendant and gave her a note.

It said there were five bombs on the plane. And the bombers were a group of Croatian nationalists. Svanko Busich, his wife, and several compatriots. At the time, Croatia was part of Yugoslavia. Busich very much wanted Croatian independence. And his demands included that flyers with his essentially declaration of independence be dropped over major cities and also that the statement be run

in a number of major American papers, including the Herald Tribune and the New York Times. The hijacker said that if their demands weren't met, they would set off a bomb at Grand Central Station in the middle of New York City. We'll be right back. Thanks to Fetch Pet Insurance for their support. You might know I have a dog.

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and free shipping for your first box plus free dessert for life. Go to homechef.com slash criminal. That's homechef.com slash criminal for 50% off your first box and free dessert for life. HomeShuff.com slash criminal. Must be an active subscriber to receive free dessert. On September 10, 1976, a group of hijackers, led by a man named Zvonko Bucic, took control of TWA Flight 355 on its way from LaGuardia to Chicago. He demanded that the plane reroute to Montreal and then Newfoundland, where some of the passengers were allowed to leave.

The plane took off again, this time for Iceland. TWA followed Zvanko Bucuch's demands. They dropped thousands of flyers about Croatian independence from helicopters and planes in Paris, London, Montreal, Chicago, and New York. The New York Times, L.A. Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, and International Herald Tribune, all published The Hijacker's Letter about Croatian Independence. The NYPD's bomb squad was sent to Grand Central to try and find the bomb that Bucic said he had left there.

They found it inside a baggage locker, just like the LaGuardia bomb had been. Bomb squad officers took it to a firing range in the Bronx, where the NYPD had a 25-foot crater, which they used for diffusing bombs. Four officers from the bomb squad went into the crew, crater to try to disarm the bomb. The plan was to use something called an activator, a remote-controlled device, to cut the wires. But amid the attempts to deal with this bomb, it exploded, it detonated,

and immediately killed Brian Murray, a young member of the bomb squad. Several officers were also injured. One lost two of his fingers and was blinded in one of his eyes. Brian Murray's widow later said, quote, It was senseless. He died for nothing. When TWA Flight 355 landed in Paris, French police shot the tires of the plane, so it couldn't take off again. After 12 hours on the runway, the hijackers surrendered.

Passengers and crew were released. No one on board had been hurt. Zvonko Bucic and the other hijackers were arrested and brought back to the United States. They were questioned by the FBI. And they get him into interrogation, and he is very quickly asked if he had anything to do with the LaGuardia bombing of December 29, 1975, because after all, the bomb at Grand Central had been left in a public locker. And in a shock, I would think, he admits that, in fact, he had been at LaGuardia Airport on December 29th a mere hour before the bomb went off.

But he denied having anything to do with it. And in fact, he said that he did not hear about it until he got home to his apartment in the Upper West Side. So he doesn't deny that he was at LaGuardia. but he says, listen, it wasn't me. Yes, an FBI agent said to me, it's an incredible coincidence. Zvanko Busech was also questioned separately by the NYPD. He told them the same thing.

But when they asked him a second time, he said he heard about the explosion on his way home while he was in a taxi. When a detective asked why he had changed his story, he said it was because he hadn't slept for days. In the middle of the NYPD's interrogation, a federal agent came into the room and said that he had to take Bucic to a hearing

before a federal judge. The NYPD didn't get to interview him again. Zvanko Busich was convicted of air piracy, conspiracy, and causing a death from air piracy. He was sentenced to life in prison. The NYPD said that, they were still investigating whether he had also been involved in the LaGuardia bombing, but, quote, at this point, we have nothing concrete.

In 2008, after 31 years in prison, Zvanka Abusage was released. He was 62. He and his wife, Julie, moved back to Croatia to a small town by the ocean. He wrote in a statement to the New York Times, quote, rumors that Julie or I had something to do with the LaGuardia bombing have haunted us for over 30 years. We would welcome a process that would allow us to put these unsupported and reckless rumors to rest once and for all.

No one has ever been arrested in connection with the LaGuardia bombing. What were some of the theories that investigators had as the years went on? I mean, one of the incredible things about the case is the lack of any kind of theories. This isn't one of those cases where the investigators will tell you, we know who did this, we just can't pin it on him. They truly don't know. And that means they also don't know why it was done. One of the things about this bombing is that to some,

degree, the closer you look at it, the less you know. This was such a high-profile act, and it was so heavily investigated, and to not even have any real suspects is kind of amazing. But then you have to think back to the bombing of Wall Street in 1920. You know, this is Wall Street, the center of American commerce. Well, that bombing hasn't been solved either. Elon Green told us that when he started researching the LaGuardia bombing,

he would talk about what he was working on with friends. Almost none of them had ever heard of it. At one point, he had lunch with a few former district attorneys of Manhattan, and he said they didn't remember it. Why does no one know about this story? I think part of it is that the 70s

in New York City, that was a decade when I think the city was as truly nuts as people think it was. I think that so many just strange, violent things happened during that decade that it simply doesn't stand out. This was an era when bombs going off were basically white noise. I also think probably the event that put the nail in the coffin for this story were the crimes of David Berkowitz, the son of Sam. The son of Sam murders began the summer of 1976. David Berkowitz was eventually arrested in August of 1977. I think that once he began killing people around New York, it sort of blew all the other stories out to see, and this story went with it. I also think people don't remember it because it's without resolution.

Nobody knows who did it. It's very hard to write about something that lacks any kind of resolution. It's much easier to write about a solved case than an unsolved case. Elon says that the only people he talked to who remembered the bombing were the survivors and family members of victims from that night. You know, there's that movie about the guy who wakes up and nobody's heard of the Beatles. I mean, I sort of feel like for them, that's kind of what it must be like to go through life. And nobody has heard of this phenomenally bloody act of terrorism that happens in the middle of New York City.

Are they hoping it will be solved? I mean, do they have any hope left? I'm sure that there is some part of them that hopes it will be solved, but I don't think any of them have ever really thought it will be because, you know, cases go cold very quickly. And law enforcement agencies often will not pick them back up unless there's external pressure, whether it's from the press or directly from family members.

And I don't think that that ever really happened. I don't think that there has been anyone in the last 50 years whoever advocated for this case. It's been allowed to be forgotten. Criminal is created by Lauren Spore and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Robertson,

Jackie Zegico, Lily Clark, and Lena Sillison. This episode was fact-checked by Katie Cedarborg. Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Simonetti. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at This Is Criminal.com. Elon Green wrote The For Forgotten bombing of LaGuardia Airport for Slate Magazine. We'll have a link in the show notes. You can sign up for our newsletter at This Iscriminal.

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