Page 11 - Nov21T

PHOTOS PROVIDED BY AUTHOR
by Stan Dunn
On October 16, 1972, Congressional Leader Hale Boggs of Louisiana and Congressman Nick Begich of Alaska mysteriously disappeared on a charter flight
between Anchorage and Juneau. The search for Boggs and Begich was expansive, involving 90 aircraft dispatched on 1,000 flights. The search area encompassed 326,000 miles of Alaskan wilderness. President Nixon instructed the Air Force to include the powerful SR-71 in the search. The Mach 3 Blackbird is capable of cranking through 10,500 feet of high-resolution film in a single sortie. From 80,000 feet, it can cover a great deal of real estate in a short period. None of it was enough to discover the final resting place of the Cessna.
Early in his political career, Hale Boggs had participated in the Warren Commission inquiry into the assassination of JFK. After his death, there was idle speculation that he had been killed by the mafia over his opposition to the single shooter theory. Nick Begich’s widow, Peggie, added fire to the mob motif when she quickly wed a leg breaker named Jerry Pasley. Pasley was a bartender from Tucson who had links to a semi-retired mob boss named Joe Bonanno. Peggie and Jerry’s courtship took a couple of months. The marriage lasted a little bit longer. By 1994, Peggie had long moved on and Jerry Pasley was in jail for murder.
A couple years into a life sentence, Pasley reached out to the FBI looking for a deal. He claimed that Peggie had met covertly with Joe Bonanno a month prior to her husband’s disappearance. Pasley also asserted that he had delivered a package to Alaska “the size of a bomb” on behalf of Bonnano. He surmised that Peggie had wanted Nick Begich killed in order to collect on a large insurance policy. He scurrilously claimed that Peggie had been involved in several affairs prior to Begich’s death.
Under questioning, Pasley had no answer for how Peggie would have gotten mixed up with Joe Bonanno. Neither could Pasley explain how the mob would have known to go after N1812H (the accident aircraft). The charter had been a last-minute affair. Nick Begich himself had not known the tail number prior to the flight. Pasley had the hallmark of a lifer trying to con his way into a reduced sentence. He had eight felony convictions, including two each for murder, kid- napping and aggravated assault. He was not a credible source. His babble was duly recorded and cataloged for the conspiracy theorists.
November 2021 / TWIN & TURBINE • 9