The Vanishing-Suitcase Caper

Whatever Eddie wants, Eddie gets. He's a baggage handler for a major airline in Miami. He's very good at his regular job, sorting and loading incoming and outgoing passenger luggage. But he's excellent at his other job: For the past seven years, as the other handlers tell it, Eddie has assumed the unchallenged position as the best thief on the line.

The 27-year-old Eddie has what it takes to substantially supplement his income. He has that special feel, that right touch, that uncanny way of finessing the best out of a suitcase in less than 30 seconds. Very little gets by him. He knows when to look, what to look for and where to look for it. When it comes to spotting the good prospects, he isn't impressed by Gucci leather nor deceived by Woolworth vinyl.

Eddie doesn't steal bags, just their contents. For him, it's what's inside that counts: jewelry, expensive radios and tape decks, furs, negotiable securities, packets of cash stuffed inside dirty socks. He stays away from the obvious temptation of the normal assortment of "oversize" items: golf clubs, in-the-box television sets, skis.

Baggage has been one of the airlines' major headaches since the beginning of commercial flying. In the current era of deregulation, fewer and more crowded flights, soaring costs, sophisticated thieves and a growing number of crooked passengers, the baggage mess has mushroomed into a yearly loss of more than $110,000,000. As a result, more and more passengers have involuntarily become firm believers in the philosophy that there are really only two kinds of airline baggage: carry-on and lost.

Airlines claim they're trying to make things better. The major carriers all have installed some form of automated baggage systems. Eastern has an expensive laser-scanner sorting system in Miami; United has a computer voice-activated routing system in Chicago; American has a fancy push-button operation at LaGuardia.

When the systems work, they can move and sort upwards of 4000 bags an hour. When they don't--which is often--memories are rekindled of the madness once displayed by the computers at the mammoth Dallas/Fort Worth Regional Airport a few years back, when passengers and their baggage were regularly stranded for hours and baggage that wasn't chewed to bits got lost in a mountain of 2000 cases.

So sophisticated passengers often insist on keeping all their baggage, arguing that what the airlines don't lose they damage. In 1979 alone, TWA spent more than $2,200,000 just to fix bags it had ripped, slashed, stained, eaten or otherwise mangled.

Recently, Swissair--an airline with one of the best baggage reputations in the business--wanted to promote its diligence in reuniting the occasional lost bag with its owner. Ads in major newspapers and magazines claimed that Swissair had found an unidentified bag at the Zurich airport last September. The ad copy described the bag, then praised the airline for being efficient, thorough and caring. Less than a month later, the carrier ran a second, deadpan ad, announcing that 37 "owners" of the bag had responded before the actual owner was located.

According to the Civil Aeronautics Board, baggage complaints are second only to schedule problems in passenger gripes to the agency (according to the CAB's Consumer Complaint Report, on the domestic side, Delta, Southwest, Ozark and United have the fewest complaints; Pan American, TWA and Braniff the most). The CAB is currently considering raising U. S. airline liability for mishandling passenger bags from $750 to $1000 per passenger.

At Pan Am, they still talk about the Mazatlán disaster of 1973, when dozens of vacationers' bags that should have been tagged mzt were labeled Mazatlan/Sin (Mazatlán is in the Mexican state of Sinaloa). Not one bag made it off the plane in Mexico. The next day, Pan Am's offices received an urgent wire from the Paya Lebar International Airport in Singapore: "We seem to be holding an awful lot of bags here for a Mr. Mazatlan...." The luggage was ultimately returned to its irate owners.

It's been suggested that, if America really wants to dispose of nuclear waste, we should pack it in Louis Vuitton bags and check it in on a Braniff flight to Lima. Braniff won't comment publicly, but some of its employees in South America claim that the baggage-theft rate from Braniff's DC-8s and 747s serving the Continent is alarming. "It is not unusual on some of our flights," shrugs a Braniff station agent, "to lose 20 or 30 bags. These are not Braniff employees stealing them," he adds, "but ground people."

Braniff, which has been having substantial problems aside from baggage losses (namely, a monumental $131,000,000 loss in 1980 that cost its long-standing chairman, Harding Lawrence, his job), has now privately appealed to Peruvian authorities to monitor closely the loading and unloading operations in Lima.

•

A growing number of passengers seem to have decided that if the airlines can lose real bags, they can also permanently misplace nonexistent ones. Using a variety of schemes, passengers have managed to file phony claims and collect up to the $750 the CAB currently recognizes as the limit on liability.

"I've never seen a claim yet that didn't include at least one diamond watch or a Nikon camera," complains Joseph Daley, vice-president of public relations at Pan Am. "Some of these things get pretty ridiculous."

One scam simply involves palming an additional baggage stub from a willing skycap. Another is to buy the cheapest bag possible, fill it with newspapers and check it for a flight. Upon arrival at the destination, the passenger waits for the bag at the carrousel. When it appears, he grabs it long enough to remove the luggage tag from the bag and then replaces it on the carrousel. Then comes the irate claim at the baggage desk. In a matter of weeks, the passenger, having supplied the airline with a full description of the phantom bag and its expensive contents--often including receipts--will probably receive a check for $750. "It's a great way to pay for your vacation," says a 29-year-old housewife from Madison, Wisconsin. "Last year, we pulled it on Mexicana when we took our Club Med vacation. It worked like a charm."

Despite a bag-tracing and matching computer system run by Eastern in Miami (and used by more than two dozen airlines), the bogus claims continue to be honored. "Here's where the public really gets screwed," says one baggage official at American. "If you're flying first class and you're a repeat traveler and file a phony claim, the airline will usually pay right away. But it's the first-time flier who paid cash for his coach ticket and really loses his bags--that's the claim that gets denied."

Says Dick Fiorenzo, a veteran agent who moved from National to Pan Am when Pan Am took over his old airline: "The way I figure it, about 25 percent of the phony claims are going to slip through. They'll beat you. My last year at National, we had $2,000,000 in claims."

But not without a fight. "We've got good intuition down here," he says. "And we can often smell a bad claim."

The best-known bad claim was made in December 1978. National employees call it their Cinderella story. A particularly well-endowed woman flew from New York to Palm Beach, Florida, and National lost her bag. She filed a claim: mink coat, expensive jewels and other clothing--totaling a few thousand dollars.

Three weeks later, an employee in the airline's tracing center went through all the unclaimed bags and called Fiorenzo. "We've got that woman's bag," he boasted.

"How do you know?" Fiorenzo asked. "Is there a name on it?"

There was a long pause. "Not exactly," came the response. "I mean, there's no mink coat or expensive jewels inside, although the bag seems full."

"Then how do you know it's hers?" Fiorenzo demanded.

Another pause. "Well," laughed the agent, "there's a bra in here size 40-D."

That's all Fiorenzo needed. He hired an investigator, had the woman visited, ostensibly to verify ownership. The real mission: to confirm breast size. When the boobs matched, the woman quickly dropped her claim.

Still, a majority of the claims are very real. And too many passengers get left not holding the bag.

•

Airline statistics argue that legitimately lost bags have a high probability of being returned. It is the baggage theft problem that seems to plague airlines most.

Take the case of Marshall Harrison, for example. An elderly gentleman, Harrison had apparently perfected a scam to rip off bags from a host of claim areas at Los Angeles International. His M.O. was to pick out the bags he wanted, then go up to the security people (who normally ask for a claim stub) and plead forgetfulness. "He'd say things like his wife was waiting in the car, that they had come such a long way," says one security official, "and they'd always let him go through."

Then, in October 1979, Harrison's act was halted by a freak coincidence. A Continental Airlines baggage-service agent, David Scott, was at the Pan Am terminal to pick up two misrouted bags when he noticed Harrison removing those very bags from the building. Scott summoned the Los Angeles police and Harrison was arrested.

On March 30, 1980, Scott (who had appeared as a witness against Harrison) again saw Harrison acting suspiciously on the sidewalk in front of the Continental terminal, about to move in on some bags resting in a skycap's cart. Scott detained Harrison until the police took custody of him and charged him with violation of his rather specific probation condition: He was not supposed to be at LAX without an airplane ticket.

Less than a month later, on April 19, Scott was on an airport service bus on his way to work when he again spotted Harrison removing two bags from the TWA baggage-claim area. Scott ran off the bus and detained Harrison again until an arrest could be made. This time, Scott received a commendation from the airline. Harrison was finally jailed.

"Whether it's internal or external theft," says a Continental spokesman, "we have a strong company policy that favors prosecution."

But most thieves are a little more slippery than Marshall Harrison. Mexicana, an airline with a relatively good reputation for in-flight service, as well as baggage handling, was hit hard recently with some serious thefts, especially in cities such as Guadalajara, where bags were frequently stolen. In 1980, the airline paid out more than 25,000,000 pesos (more than $1,000,000) in claims for lost or stolen bags, a huge increase over previous years. "It was a growing problem," says one top company official, "and we had trouble controlling it."

The situation has improved for the time being, though, since the Mexican government installed a new director of customs. Mexicana officials don't think that is pure coincidence--many Mexicana flights make intermediate stops en route to their destinations, and most of the thefts occurred at those stops. "We can't prove it," says an official, "but we're convinced that the bags were being ripped off by customs officials at places like Tampico and Monterrey. We were never given receipts for the bags that they pulled off the planes," he says. "More often than not, we never saw those bags again. The biggest problem was how could we complain to the government about this when it was the government stealing the bags?"

But often, it's the airlines' own employees doing the stealing. Take, for example, a recent Continental Airlines case. For well over a year, an unusual number of baggage claims were being presented by distraught Continental passengers who had boarded flights in Seattle. Soon the airline's security department began studying the claims, trying to determine a pattern. "We knew somebody was into our knickers," says Don Lohmeyer, Continental security chief, "and we were determined to catch him."

First, officials figured out the thieves' method of operation: The loaders placed Western Airlines bag tags on Continental luggage and had them sent as "interline" baggage to the Western bag area. Later they collected the bags themselves at the airport.

A surveillance team was soon positioned and, in November 1979, local police arrested two Continental baggage loaders and charged them with theft in the first degree--a felony in the state of Washington. When authorities went to the apartment of one, Leon Minter, they recovered more than $10,000 in cameras, tape recorders and jewelry, not to mention a host of empty bags, many of which still had tags on them.

Continental has been lucky. Since the Minter case, it has closely monitored interline baggage; and in 1980, it was able to reduce its claims, as well as the average claim amount, by 30 percent.

The FBI has been hip to the interlining scam for years but didn't become officially involved until 1975, when the thieves got so greedy at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport that the Feds were called in. So much was being stolen (to this day, the total hasn't been tallied) that the FBI dispatched two undercover agents posing as baggage handlers.

Two months later, more than 20 baggage loaders were arrested and charged with theft from interstate shipments. During the last month of their surveillance (October 1975), the agents added up more than $100,000 in items lifted from passenger bags. "This was quite an operation," says an agent who worked the case. "The ring had been in business, we later found out, since 1971. They had obtained the master keys to all kinds of luggage. If you can believe it, they especially liked to steal false teeth and bridgework that so many passengers seemed always to pack. They'd sell them for $100 a set because of the gold and silver they contained." Of those arrested, 13 were later found guilty.

"That's only one case," the G man says. "Interline thefts are happening every day; but unless the crooks get greedy, we never hear about them."

It wasn't long before the FBI heard about bag thefts again--this time at the hands of a rather ecumenical bunch of baggage handlers at Washington's National Airport. A Federal undercover agent posed as a fence willing to buy thousands of dollars' worth of clothing, jewelry, rare coins--even a $10,000 savings bond. A Federal grand jury indicted five baggage handlers from various airlines and charged them with possession of stolen goods.

"No bag was safe," said Thomas K. Berger, assistant U. S. Attorney handling the case. "It was a very smooth operation ... accomplished in a highly professional manner."

That was in 1977. A year later, according to Aviation Week & Space Technology, Eastern airlines discovered it had paid $8,300,000 to travelers claiming lost, stolen or pilfered baggage--a whopping increase of 59 percent from the previous year. The airline also fired 73 employees that year for "dishonesty"--misuse of money, tickets, passes and baggage. By 1979, Eastern was offering a "maximum security" award--up to $5000--to any employee providing information leading to the dismissal or arrest of a co-worker for theft. Then the airline started a theft-awareness program at its Miami base. Eastern president Frank Borman also sent a letter of concern about theft to all Eastern employees.

Workshops and award programs--offered by a number of carriers--are not always successful. According to one TWA station agent, the airline has been hit hard by its own employees but has been reluctant to prosecute those it has caught, apparently fearing adverse publicity. Although TWA officials deny it, the airline was hard-hit for a time by serious pilfering of baggage being boarded for its flight 148, a daily nonstop from Las Vegas to New York's J.F.K. "The reason they were hitting that flight," says one TWA employee familiar with the story, "is that they knew it was loaded with high-rollers on their way back. They figured correctly that a number of bags would be loaded with valuable clothing, jewelry and lots of heavy silver dollars these people were bringing back as souvenirs for their grandkids or whatever."

In 1978, Western Airlines was having similar problems with flights out of Las Vegas. When the losses started mounting that summer, the baggage claims got traced to flights that had originated in Las Vegas. Western went directly to the FBI, and on September seventh, the agency installed special videotape cameras in the air ducts directly above the Western bag room at McCarran International Airport. "These people knew exactly how to rip off bags," says the FBI agent who broke the case. "They were lining up the large metal baggage containers in such a way that anyone coming through the doors into the bag room would see only the backs of the containers. They couldn't see the employees going through the bags. They had lookouts and signals, so they knew when to start and stop."

FBI agents concealed in a nearby room monitored the action, which was recorded on video tape for two weeks. On the morning of September 20th, another FBI agent checked a bag loaded with goodies for a flight he had no intention of making. A few minutes later, the agents arrested three bag loaders, charging each with theft from interstate shipment, a Federal offense.

All three pleaded guilty; all three received suspended sentences. Two received fines of $300; the third, a whopping $500. "Baggage theft from passengers is big business," says the agent, "and just about every one of our field offices is now working these cases."

"You bet it's big," says one of those arrested by the FBI in the Western Airlines case. "It was going on before I got there, and it's going on there right now. With me, [stealing bags] was more of a game, and I knew that eventually we would get caught. It became like a high," he says. "It became fun. Everyone knew I was doing it, and everyone I knew was doing it himself. Even the most honest Mormon boys out there on the ramp would steal five or ten dollars on occasion. The rest of us would steal whatever was available.

"I was supervisor of baggage on the day shift," he reports. "I worked for Western for nine years, and after all that time, nothing gets by you that you don't want to get by you. In Vegas, people would walk up and check 400 or 500 silver dollars in one bag. Hell, you just pick the bag up and you can tell how much is in there, just by one shake. On some days, we'd just pull in $100. Other days would be $1000 days. And," he confesses, "I used to think, God, this is terrible. It would frighten the poor passenger to death if he knew his luggage really had no security."

When he started work for Western, he was making $3.15 an hour. When he got busted, his salary was between $20,000 and $25,000. "But I got caught because my greed wouldn't stop. We hit one doctor and his wife on their way to Hawaii for several thousand dollars in jewelry and even some credit cards. Then there is all the dope we used to steal. There was a baggage guy named Jim who smoked dope, and the skycaps used to tell me he got all his shit from the bags. So one night I started watching him. Sure enough, he'd open up the luggage and you'd be amazed at how many people carried already-rolled-up joints and little Baggies of Colombian. But Jim didn't consider that stealing. We also had a guy in lost and found who had a collection of 40 expensive cameras--and they didn't consider that stealing, either."

When it came to acts of pure craziness, the baggage loaders protected one another. "We had this one guy," says the former Western supervisor, "who was fired one day because he took a set of golf clubs that was coming in off a flight and broke them. He just took them out of the bag individually and broke all the clubs, one by one, and then put them on the baggage-claim belt and down they went to the public areas where everyone could see them. Well, some of the boys came to me and said we had to get this guy off the hook. He filed a union grievance, of course, so when the arbitration hearing came up in Los Angeles, I went there as the cornpone, country, short-haired, clean-cut all-American supervisor to say how amazed and astounded I was to hear that this man had broken anything. Why, this man had worked for me for five years. I must have been convincing," he laughs, "because the company rehired him. A year later, he was fired with me after the FBI bust."

•

Authorities are still laughing about what they call the Jack-in-the-Box Caper. The scam seemed as simple as it was complicated. According to Federal officials who literally stumbled onto the case, the plot was hatched when ramp servicemen in Los Angeles decided to come up with a novel method for ripping off passenger bags and registered mail. Instead of stealing them when the bags were checked in or later, at their destinations, why not steal them at 33,000 feet?

Two TWA servicemen and a friend bought themselves a 5' x 4' x 5' steamer trunk, added an oxygen tank, foam padding, flashlight, food and clothing. They then marked it Musical Instruments and waited for the right flight. They decided to hit Eastern Airlines flight 82, departing at 7:50, nonstop for Atlanta, one morning in April 1980.

At the appointed hour, William DeLucia, a 13-year TWA veteran, slid into the trunk. His colleague David McCulley flew ahead on a previous flight to wait at the destination. Lloyd Santana, who was not an airline employee, then checked DeLucia, along with four suitcases--all empty--as baggage on the flight. Santana then boarded the Eastern L-1011 for the four-hour flight to Georgia.

En route, DeLucia got out of the trunk, switched destination tags on the four suitcases from Atlanta to Kansas City, rifled suitcases and took six sacks of registered mail and shoved his selections into his own suitcases. Then he returned to the trunk.

When the plane landed in Atlanta, everything went fine until the baggage from the flight was being unloaded. An Eastern baggage handler inadvertently released a lever that opened the end of the trunk, exposing DeLucia's feet. When McCulley and Santana went to claim their "instruments," they were arrested. All three were charged with mail theft--a felony. At the end of their 16-day trial, DeLucia and McCulley were both sentenced to seven-year prison terms. Santana received a six-year sentence. All three have appealed.

•

Still, as costs for losses soar and the airlines get tougher on security, internal baggage thefts seem to continue unabated. "Sure, they've gotten tougher," says Tim Riley (not his real name), a baggage loader for Eastern Airlines at Miami International. "They started the reward system. Big deal," he laughs. "They even thought they'd boost company morale by making us all stockholders of ten shares each. But many of us feel that they're still not paying us enough," says the nine-year veteran and part owner of his company. "With the number of bags we move here in Miami and the frequency of our operations, we can pretty much take anything we want," he boasts. "You want leather jackets, we know where to get them. If you want a specific size, you may have to wait a day or two. Appliances or stereos are a breeze," he adds, "since so many latinos come to Miami just to buy shit to take home with them. Besides," he says, "with more than 60 carriers in and out of here, there's lots of interlining and plenty of opportunity. For a while," he reports, "a lot of the guys carried master keys to the expensive bags. Then the rich folks started checking in cheap shit, so we don't even need keys anymore. So we go by the weight and the feel. After a while, you just know which are the good bags. And," he argues, "we're not just doing it for kicks. Many of us look at what we're doing as our own hedge against inflation."

Folks like Tim seem to be sprinkled throughout Eastern's wide route system. "The airline is having theft problems in San Juan, Miami and at J.F.K.," says a longtime Eastern employee at the airline's St. Louis facility. "At Miami, there were a number of curbside baggage rip-offs involving skycaps employed by Eastern. The airline may not want to talk about it, but it is trying to solve the problem."

Eastern has refused comment. Last year, when The Atlanta Journal ran a major story claiming that Eastern's new $22,000,000 baggage system at Hartsfield Atlanta International Airport wasn't working, the airline angrily removed all advertising from the paper. Still, Eastern didn't deny the facts contained in the story. (At this writing, the system is still not operating properly.)

In Denver, a number of airlines are monitoring baggage-loss claims to try to break a theft ring. In Maui, where the attitude of airport officials is so laid back that just about anything can happen--it does happen. At Chicago's O'Hare, at Houston and Detroit, a number of airlines are using "beeper bags," suitcases rigged with radios that begin transmitting as soon as they are opened. But despite such measures, luggage still gets snatched. At many airports, airlines use a chaotic honor system and thieves merely drive up to the terminal, pick out a few bags and drive off. So much for honor.

Then, of course, there's J.F.K. "Security at this terminal is very bad," admits one customer-service agent for TWA. "We keep telling management that when bags pile up here, people can just walk out with anything. It happens a lot. But management won't listen. They feel it's cheaper to pay claims than to hire someone to guard the bags."

But J.F.K. pales in comparison with London's Heathrow Airport. Consider the plight of British Airways passenger Derek Mayhew. In 1977, homeward bound from business in the Arabian gulf, he boarded a British Airways L-1011 jet in Bahrein and discovered--much to his pleasant surprise--that, by a freak reservations foul-up, he would be the only passenger aboard the 250-seat widebodied jet.

He was wined and dined all the way back to London. Upon landing at Heathrow, an army of baggage loaders lined up to shepherd his lone suitcase. You guessed it: The bag didn't arrive until three days later.

Mayhew can consider himself one of the lucky ones. At least he got his bag. Heathrow now enjoys the reputation among passengers and airlines as the airport with the worst baggage record in the world. More baggage gets lost, stolen or pilfered at Heathrow than anywhere else.

At first, the British poked fun at the luggage madness. When Concorde service was introduced a few years back, British Airways promoted it heavily with posters throughout England that proclaimed, Breakfast in London, Lunch in Washington. Within a few days, almost every poster carried an additional, graffiti promise: Luggage in Brisbane.

Now, according to official court records, what the airlines don't lose out of Heathrow gets stolen directly by baggage handlers. The baggage problem has assumed nightmarish proportions. The British press now matter-of-factly refers to the airport as "Thiefrow," and Scotland Yard has set up a permanent squad of investigators at the airport to try to counter the problem.

Authorities report that a large amount of luggage does come back from other British Airways cities, but it usually returns with no identification whatsoever. In fact, so many refugee bags pile up at Heathrow that the airline has regularly sent vanloads of the stuff to an auction house in Wimbledon to be sold to the highest bidder.

Neither British Airways nor the British Airports Authority would comment on the situation. "They're afraid of the publicity," says one Scotland Yard detective. "But the crime is rampant and the airport seems to breed it.

"The majority of people who come to work here as baggage loaders," he says, "are honest guys when they start. But they have got caught up in this vast machine. It starts off one day when someone comes up to the new loader and says, 'Thank you very much; there's a drink.' And he opens his hand and, lo and behold, he's got five or ten pounds. It takes a very strong person, when he's not picking up a lot of money anyway, to turn around and say, 'I don't want it,' and turn away."

The loaders at Heathrow like to concentrate on flights coming in from troubled countries. "Those are the flights," says a detective, "that are loaded with people trying to take currency out. And you'd be amazed how many of them will pack it in suitcases. And these loaders will be in a bag within seconds." On outbound flights, planes headed to Geneva are popular targets.

One of the loaders is assigned the role of "money-changer." "His own job," says the detective, "is to take money out of the airport. Recently, we stopped a bag loader in Kensington. He was carrying a duffel bag absolutely full up with every denomination and currency you could possibly imagine. It was in the thousands."

Ironically, the safest bags in and out of Heathrow seem to be the ones headed for (or coming from) Ulster and Tel Aviv. For antiterrorist security reasons, the bags are specially banded with plastic as they pass through an X-ray machine. Once banded, it's impossible to pilfer the bag without breaking the band. "Even at that point," says Lee Silverman, El Al Israel spokesman in London, "we continue to watch the bags at Heathrow. British Airways may have upwards of 3000 cases lying around their terminal. You won't see that here."

In 1977, Scotland Yard went to the British Airports Authority and suggested that a similar program of baggage banding be used throughout Heathrow. "They deliberated for almost two years," one agent reports. "Finally, they put in a total of two machines, hardly adequate to handle the situation. And to staff it," he laughs, "they put one bloke on a stool, rather like Perry Como, and he'd help someone only if they asked his help. It was hopeless. The individual airlines wouldn't cooperate with us," he adds, "because they said the machines would cause delays. Soon the two machines fell into disrepair and were vandalized by airport staff."

Scotland Yard's only hope to catch the thieves now is an aggressive undercover program. In 1979, the plain-clothed baggage unit worked 202 separate cases of passenger-bag thefts with property valued at more than £680,000 (about $1,400,000). By 1980, the squad began to show promising results: At this writing, more than 100 baggage-handling cases, most involving employees of British Airways, are awaiting trial. In fact, the Yard made so many bag-theft arrests at one point last year that the remaining Heathrow baggage loaders staged a short work stoppage. They claimed they were overworked because so many of their colleagues had been either suspended or arrested on theft charges, or both.

In 1976, a Middlesex Crown Court judge, in sentencing an airport loader for stealing, said, "We have to deal at this court with airport loaders, handlers and other people who seem to steal all the time. I sometimes wonder if they do much else. The place has literally become a cesspool."

Four years later, Old Bailey judge Brian Gibbens was trying a case of 29 British Airways loaders for theft. "It was a strange case," he says. "The defendants all claimed as defense that it was impossible to be honest at Heathrow."

Gibbens admits, "I believe there was a lot in what they had to say."

•

Where does that leave the passengers? Usually, face to face with something called the Warsaw Convention, an old (1934), outdated international agreement that attempts to limit the liability of the airlines. It is not a Polish joke. In fact, the airlines invoke it hundreds of times each day in baggage-claims cases.

"Passengers clearly need to know their rights," says San Francisco attorney Gerald Sterns, an expert in aviation law. (See Laurence Gonzales' Airline Safety: A Special Report, Playboy, June and July, 1980.) "If the airline denies their valid claim, or if what they have lost exceeds the $750 limit, the passengers should see a lawyer."

But while baggage claims number in the millions, law cases involving lost, damaged or delayed baggage are few. "There are two reasons for this discrepancy," argues Thomas Dickerson, a New York attorney specializing in the brave new world of travel law. "Consumer and attorney ignorance."

"Travelers who file baggage claims," he argued recently in the magazine Practical Lawyer, "are ignorant of their rights. They assume that the air carrier will handle their claim in good faith. Usually, however, the carrier will send a sympathetic letter, explaining that it is not liable for all or part of the claim and will offer a sum that is nowhere near the actual loss. Most claimants will believe the statements of the carrier and will settle."

Not always. Recently, the Warsaw Convention was challenged by Henry and Joan Eifert, whose luggage was lost on an Air-India flight to London. The couple filed a claim and Air-India agreed (under the terms of the convention) to pay according to the weight of the missing baggage--a settlement that amounted to only $200.

When the Eiferts took their case to court, Judge Louis DiTrani, the lowest-ranking judge in Maryland, essentially found the treaty unconstitutional. Although Air-India attorneys argued that the Eiferts had been adequately compensated under the Warsaw terms for international travel and pointed out that the convention is a long-standing agreement signed by more than 100 nations, DiTrani was unmoved.

Air-India, he ruled, should have paid the couple according to the true value of the luggage. Mrs. Eifert expressed in layman's language the message of DiTrani's decision. "I dread to think," she told the courtroom, "that an airline has the privilege to just toss out your bag, help themselves to what they want, ship your empty bag ... and then treat you like a complete nincompoop."

DiTrani's ruling alarmed Federal officials, who are now watching the case closely.

"It's a very interesting case," he says, "and some might interpret it as precedent-setting. What I didn't say," he cautions, "was that the Warsaw Convention was unconstitutional. I don't have that authority, although I might point out that the U. S. never participated in the Warsaw Convention. We just accepted it. But what I did say was that the plaintiffs had a right to contract. That they had a right to expect that their goods would arrive in a safe and sound condition and that if they didn't, they would be entitled to payment based on value, not weight."

Some would argue (as Air-India did) that a valid contract existed at the time of the sale of the tickets to the Eiferts, and, in fact, the contract was reprinted on their tickets. "Sure," DiTrani concedes, "it was printed on the ticket. But who reads that? I feel that the airline has an obligation to point these things out to passengers."

DiTrani's decision was sustained on appeal. But then Air-India asked for reconsideration in the case. It is now pending in circuit court. And the Eiferts have still not been reimbursed.

In the 1979 case of Greenberg (no relation to this writer) vs. United Airlines, a Kings County, New York, court also ruled that the small-print ticket notice of an airline's limited liability for baggage loss was not sufficient notice to passengers. "The format [on the ticket]," wrote the judge in the case, "is perfectly calculated to obscure from a domestic traveler's view the presence there of an applicable limit of baggage-loss liability.... [The] defendant," he concluded, "has set before the traveler a morsel of nourishment hidden in a banquet of dust."

One sure way to avoid the hassle of litigation is to insure your luggage for "excess valuation" at the time you check in for a flight. No airline advertises this option; some have even tried to deny its existence. But "excess valuation" is available to any passenger wishing to insure his luggage beyond the $750 domestic-liability limit or the international weight assessments. It's also unbelievably cheap: It costs approximately ten cents per $100 of valuation. (One note of caution: Some airlines will still want to exclude antiques and jewelry from the valuation. But then again, anyone who would check baggage containing jewelry or antiques is not terribly bright, anyway.)

In the meantime, attorney Dickerson is eagerly looking forward to January 1, 1983. That's the day the CAB will virtually be deregulated out of business--and, with it, a host of Government tariffs and exclusions the airlines have used for years to deny or reduce baggage claims.

"The airlines like to put the onus of a failure to settle a claim properly on some Governmental authority," says Dickerson. "And the people who have their bags lost or stolen are the ones getting ripped off. In fact," he adds, "most middle-class bag claims are never litigated, because most people cannot afford to go to a lawyer to find out that they do, indeed, have rights. That's where the legal system has failed."

As it stands now, if a domestic passenger checks a bag with mink coats, cameras or other expensive items and the bag is lost or pilfered, the airline's maximum liability under current tariffs is still only $750 per passenger. "It doesn't matter how valid your case is," says Dickerson, "even if you can prove that an airline employee stole your bags. You'll still get only $750 as a top-end figure. But by 1983, domestic-air-carrier liability will be based upon common law and not on a tariff system. Passengers will finally be able to recover their losses based on real or depreciated value, not an arbitrary dollar figure."

Already, Dickerson is after the international airlines that continue to compensate baggage losses by an arbitrary weight equation. "The airlines have clearly been bullshitting the public on this one," he claims.

According to Article 22 of the Warsaw Convention, the maximum amounts that air carriers are required to pay for baggage claims is 250 francs per kilogram of checked baggage. "At the time of the signing of the convention," Dickerson reports, "the franc contained 65 and a half milligrams of gold. Until recently, carriers considered the gold content of the franc and the price of gold in converting the liability to dollars."

But here's the rub. In 1974, the CAB stated that international carriers must upgrade their dollar limitations to reflect the changing price of gold. Still, despite a huge escalation in the price of gold, the carriers are still sticking to $20 per kilo (or $9.07 per pound) as their liability limit.

Dickerson is testing that in a current case, Ackerman vs. Air France. "If I win it," he says, "it's going to cost the airlines a lot of money, and something tells me a lot more bags will start arriving intact--and on time.

"Until then," he cautions, "pack light."