Biography
Henry D. Jackson Jr. was a Detroit man who, with Louis Cale (also known as Louis Moore) and Melvin Cale, carried out the November 10-11, 1972 hijacking of Southern Airways Flight 49 from Birmingham — a 29-hour odyssey in which the hijackers collected a $2 million ransom, wounded the copilot, and threatened to crash the plane into the Oak Ridge nuclear complex before landing in Havana. Jackson and Moore had a pending police-brutality suit against the Detroit police, the grievance behind the act, though it is generally treated as a ransom hijacking. Cuban courts sentenced Jackson to 20 years, and he served about eight years in Cuban prisons before being returned to the United States in 1980, where he faced federal air-piracy prosecution and a further prison term.
The FAA distinguishes the Cuban September 27, 1973 sentence from a separate U.S. air-piracy sentence of 25 years on February 2, 1981. It records return to the United States on October 27, 1980, but does not establish exact admission or release dates for the U.S. custody period. The nominal sentence is not a completed imprisonment total. FAA chronology, PDF page 100.
