Man Pleads Guilty in Bomb Threats

A 50-year-old loner and welfare recipient pleaded guilty Tuesday to six felony charges of endangering the safety of aircraft in flight in return for the federal government dropping its ongoing investigation into his past.

Over the last nine years, William Albert Risley, made 300 phone calls, all empty threats placed from pay phones throughout the country, warning that bombs had been smuggled aboard airplanes and that planes were about to be hijacked, according to federal authorities.

Officials estimate that his pranks have cost the airline industry over $1 million as frantic pilots were forced to reroute their flights or turn around and hurry back, and as extensive ground inspections were conducted on airport runways.

Last week, James Busey, administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, said the agency is taking steps to installing telephone tracking devices at FAA facilities to track bomb threats to airline flights. He said that about 600 bomb threats a year are phoned in to the various airline companies and airports in the nation.

“This guy is especially dangerous to an industry that relies on trust,” said Larry Burns, the prosecutor who brought the case against Risley. “Imagine your frame of mine if you’re the pilot. Imagine your distress if you hear there’s a bomb on board.

“It’s a highly volatile situation, and a pilot under that kind of stress trying to land a plane is likely to be more concerned about getting the plane down quickly to the ground than he is about ordinary safe-landing procedures.”

The prosecutor also noted the precarious position for the airlines, which must react instantaneously to the threats.

“They’re damned if they do and damned if they don’t,” he said. “But imagine if they didn’t take appropriate action and the bomb blew up in the air. Imagine the field day attorneys for the victims’ families would have with that. What jury isn’t going to award Ft. Knox in a case like that?”

Risley is scheduled to be sentenced on the bomb threat charges on July 2, when prosecutors plan to ask U.S. District Judge J. Lawrence Irving to impose a 10-year sentence, without parole.

In Risley’s case, Burns and FBI Agent Samuel N. Stanton gathered enough evidence to show a pattern in which the former graphics artist repeatedly used pay telephone booths to call the airlines and various airports.

In reams of tapes at the federal courthouse, which officials said were authenticated by a speech expert as Risley’s voice, the agitated man can be heard screaming and shouting about bombs in luggage, “wacko women” with firearms intent on hijacking planes, and even a vigilante group called the People’s Ad Hoc Committee to Stop the Airport Construction.

But while his voice is clear over the tapes, what remains unclear is why Risley was driven to make the calls.

“He never disliked the airlines,” said his mother, Geraldine Rubenstein. “Absolutely not.”