By Cheever Griffin
He’s a big man, six foot three maybe, with a soft frame and an even softer smile. His gray hair, dyed a sort of dull chestnut, lies neatly combed over his fleshy face, which is dominated by large, almost bulging blue-gray eyes. It is the eyes, suddenly distant and deep, that announce where he has gone.
Lester Perry is a 60-year-old sick ex-con who, unless his fortunes change dramatically, will live out the rest of his days in a step-away-from-the-street flophouse. He never imagined he would end up this way. Yet in hindsight it all seems to fit perfectly, for Lester Perry’s life has been two stories. How he came to hold a passenger airplane hostage on a July day in 1969 is a tale of lawlessness, extravagance, and finally desperation. What happened after that is a cautionary story about a man who ended up broke, alone, and scarred by the most awful of memories.
“His only answer to anything his kids did wrong…was to whip their ass,” Perry adds. “He never knew how to love us.”
“I didn’t really want to get married,” he says, “but I was from the old school of believing it was the morally right thing to marry her.”
These days, Hannon lives in Florida. “We had a good partnership,” he remembers. “Lester was really off-the-wall. But with his craziness and my attitude, we worked well together.”
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Asked if he ever had to use his weapon, Perry shakes his head. “That was the last thing I wanted to do.” He pauses for a moment. “I don’t know if I could’ve done it.”
