Final chapter in the DB Cooper saga?

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For several days in May 2013, the Hollywood sting operation surveilled the grandfather at the condominium he sometimes shared with his ex-wife in the tony San Diego district of Bankers Hill. A $30,000-a-week private security group, armed because they deemed their subject a hostile threat, watched his movements aboard the 45-foot cruiser Poverty Sucks, docked nearby. They tracked him at his boat shop, Coronado Precision Marine. And they followed him to his local P.O. box. When they felt confident that they'd clocked his routine, they sent in Tom Colbert, the veteran newsman who'd hired them. He wore a wire and a hidden camera in his glasses.

They'd opted for an ambush after their target, a decorated Vietnam veteran whose extensive training included psy ops, didn't bite on Colbert's original cover plan: to lure him with the offer of consultant work on a fictitious TV show about a group of mercenaries, in the vein of The A-Team or The Expendables. "I'd thought, 'Why don't we try to do our own Argo?'" he recalls. Colbert had grown convinced that this old U.S. Army soldier with a distinctive criminal record, Robert W. Rackstraw, was in fact D.B. Cooper, who in 1971 skyjacked a Boeing 727 and then — with $200,000 in ransom money — parachuted from the plane into the Pacific Northwest night and enduring American myth.

At the boat shop, Colbert got straight to it, rolling out a chart the size of a table, which drew links between Rackstraw and the ransom. "Why are you in the middle of this, Bob?" Colbert said, before switching gears to a sales pitch, offering a pair of $10,000 cashier's checks made out in Rackstraw's name if he'd sign over his story rights for a planned documentary and accompanying book. Colbert, a figure with a long history in Hollywood's true stories business, explained that he already had enough material for his project to make it viable, but he'd much prefer Rackstraw's participation. There'd be further paydays when the movie and book were released. The catch: "I wanted him to come clean," says Colbert. "Several attorneys told me the most he was going to get was two to three years. I told him he might get time served and probation. He'd wear an ankle bracelet and never have to buy a beer again the rest of his life."

Rackstraw wouldn't commit. So Colbert later emailed with a harder sell, advising that if he didn't get on board, he and everyone who knows him would be hounded forever. But if Rackstraw gave in, Colbert would "work to keep your neighborhood media-free and peaceful. Sign away and I'll make it all happen."

Instead, Rackstraw turned his attorney on Colbert. This exchange would be the only direct contact between the symbiotic pair. But their spiraling feud over Rackstraw's alleged identity, and the possible fame and fortune to be gotten in the telling, would persist for another six years. Only Rackstraw's passing in July — of a heart condition, at 75 — would change their deadlocked calculus.

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