You're listening to Law and Order Criminal Justice System, a production of Wolf Entertainment and iHeart podcasts.

In the criminal justice System, landmark trials transcend the courtroom to reshape the law.

The brave man and women who investigate and prosecute these cases are part of a select group that is defined American history.

These are their stories.

December twenty ninth, nineteen seventy five, six thirty three pm, LaGuardia airport.

Ed Longo had come to pick up his brother in law, a routine errand the kind of thing you do without thinking.

When I arrived, I came through the store and I came and take a look at the monitor to see what time his flight was coming.

In the TWA terminal buzzed with post holiday chaos, Families clustered, baggage, claim couples, reunited children tugged at weary parents ready to go home.

I noticed I had a little time, so I came over and I sat down an area over here which no longer has the seats.

The seating area was less than one hundred yards away from a row of metal lockers.

I was sitting there and I decided to have a cigarette, so I got up and I walked down towards the lock area, which is used to be down there, when I noticed I had no matches, so I said that would I'm not going to smoke.

So I turned around and I sat down, and that's when the bomb exploded.

The floor buckled and ceiling panel snapped, a blast of smoke, and glass ripped through the terminal like a shockwave.

The glass killed eleven people and injured seventy five others.

Fluorescent lights flickered and vanished.

Screams echoed off concrete.

When I awoke, I was on the ground.

My leg was bleeding.

There was no windows left, nothing ceiling falling down.

I crawled out.

In a split second, what had been an ordinary Monday night turned into complete devastation.

The scene was very chaotic, everybody running around, a lot of mass confusion and a lot of people in the state of shock.

Where the baggage carousel once stood, there was only ruin, twisted aluminum, blood slick tiles, luggage scattered like confetti.

At the time, it was the deadliest terrorist attack ever carried out on US soil.

A retired police commander who worked on the case from the beginning called the LaGuardia bombing the most frustrating case of his career because, as he put it, there are eleven open graves out there crying for an answer.

I got a call, get out to La Guardia Airport.

There's been a bombing.

There was a thirty two foot crater in front of what was left of the building.

I was trying to figure out, am I dead?

Am I alive?

Where am I?

I'm Anethega Nicolazzi.

That's why terrorism works.

It doesn't care who you are.

From Wolf Entertainment and iHeart Podcasts, this is law and order criminal justice system.

Fifty years ago, a bomb tour through La Guardia Airport's baggage claim, impacting countless lives.

The deadly attack on December twenty ninth, nineteen seventy five also exposed the need for change.

In the aftermath, federal agents and the NYPD chased answers through wreckage and silence, trying to bring order to a crime scene designed for chaos.

My name is Neil Moran.

Back in nineteen seventy one, after graduating from college in May, I joined the FBI that August in the Clerical Program and assigned to various clerical duties throughout the office, and at that point it was a fairly good pathway into becoming an FBI agent.

For four years, Neil Moran worked behind the scenes.

It was a slow but steady route for him to become an agent.

They started to have a lot of classes and my name came up and I went to chronicle.

I was sworn in on May fifth, nineteen seventy five, and I spent four months at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, going through training.

That August, he got his first assignment New York City.

Sending a newly minted agent straight to the Big Apple was a bold experiment by the Bureau.

They had never before sent what were referred to as first Office agents back to the New York Field Division.

Basically, he really didn't know what to do with us.

What they devised was a program whereby they gave you six months on the very prestigious criminal squads.

Everybody wanted to be on a criminal squad.

Bank robberies, kidnappings, extortion, truck hijackings, organized crime.

Everybody wanted to work that stuff.

Nobody wanted to work at least as people in their twenties, like myself kind of the slow moving things, following Russians and people from communist countries around spy stuff.

The timing was no accident.

The threats were changing and fast.

I was fortunate enough to get a signed to a squad that, among other things, handled airplane hijackings, which were a regular thing in the nineteen seventies, as were bombings.

By the end of nineteen seventy five, Neil was a twenty six year old agent and still learning the ropes.

But on December twenty ninth, there was no more easing in.

It was dinner time and I was in my apartment in the Bronx having dinner, and I got a call from the office.

Get out to LaGuardia Airport.

There's been a bombing.

Members of the squad will meet you out there.

There wasn't time for questions.

I recalled the switchboard saying there's been a bombing at the TWA terminal.

That's exactly where I responded to baggage claim area.

Specifically, the blast had ripped through LaGuardia nearly ninety minutes earlier, but when Neil arrived at Transworld Airlines Terminal known as TWA, it still felt like it had just.

Happened when I got out there, New York City Fire Department, New York City Police Department, cast of thousands, just a chaotic scene, all kinds of layers of entry to try and get into the inner sanctum there where the terminal was a twa.

Marked entrances, were no more sirens, barricades and debris.

I just recalled dumping my car someplace and making my way as close as I could to hook up with the senior people on the squad.

What he found was a crime scene still in motion.

There's still a lot of moving parts here, There's bodies inside.

There was an extensive fire, smoke everywhere where, being very restricted as to where we could actually go.

There was no clear vantage point or full picture, only glimpses from the edge of the scene and guesses about what was unfolding inside.

We would see ambulances pulling away, continuing, lights flashing.

They said that there were fatalities, that the injured were being loaded into ambulances, the deceased were being loaded into the ambulances.

You know, it's important for the investigators to do their investigation, but the first priorities to get the deceased and injured out of there.

Outside, NYPD officers and federal agents gathered near the perimeter.

Inside, firefighters were still leading the effort, cooling hotspots, searching for survivors, and clearing a path through devastation.

I see a lot of debris being moved.

It was a mess.

It was a mess.

What was left of the TWA baggage claim was unrecognizable.

And outside of the police barriers, another kind of chaos was building.

There's just hundreds and hundreds of people.

Cars are parked everywhere.

Lights are illuminating the whole area.

That trying to keep the press out of there.

They're trying to keep onlookers out of there, and this is not an easy task when you're trying to rope off such a big area.

With the barricades barely holding and responders packed shoulder to shoulder.

The question wasn't just what happened, but who was in charge.

It's really waiting to see bosses from our job.

Bosses from the police department, bosses from the port authority, police bosses from alcohol, tobacco on firearms, bosses everywhere, And no secret that a lot of bosses from law enforcement don't get along.

So and every one of them wants to get inside first, exactly exactly.

While different commands jockeyed for control, the facts on the ground were only just beginning to surface.

No one knew how many people were dead, No one knew who did it.

All they had was a war zone at baggage Claim and a thousand unanswered questions.

What little information did make it out was catastrophic.

As a result of the metal which was later determined to be a bomb inside a locker, the shrapnel flying shrapnel had injured a lot of people.

In addition to that, there were multiple fatalities.

By dawn, LaGuardia airp Or it was still on lockdown, the scent of smoke lingered, the baggage claim was in ruins, the fire was out, but for agents like Neil, the real work was just beginning.

Key thing with.

Any kind of a crime scene, obviously, is to try and preserve the crime scene.

As cleanly as possible.

We already realized that with the fire and the number of personnel trampling on one thing or another, that the crime scene had been significantly compromised.

Everything is soaking wet.

Would have an uphill battle in trying to search for things like wires, battery wires, timers, things of that nature.

In a bombing investigation, every inch of ground matters.

The goal is always the same, locate the point of origin, recover blast components, and if possible, reconstruct the device.

But that process depends on one critical factor, preservation, and at La Guardia that was already slipping away.

Any kind of a foreign substance.

You want this crime scene preserved in its most pristine condition as opposed to having it doused with water.

I mean, and plus it's very cold, and I remember being there the next day and a lot of the stuff was frozen from the water and just a mess.

I mean, I have to say, the messiest set of.

Circumstances that I ever had to sift through debris for an extensive period.

It made our job, obviously that much more difficult.

With the additional damage and conditions of worsening.

The area was fortified to protect whatever potential evidence still remained.

People were going to be standing there throughout the night to try and preserve it is as much as possible and wait for the next morning, which we all got out there fairly early and began the task of trying to sift through degree organizing morning.

The focus had shifted from search and rescue to evidence collection.

Investigators from the NYPD, FBI, and port authority combed through the debris looking for anything that could tell them how this happened.

Ourselves in the police department set up like a staging area, if you will, in the body of the baggage area.

We all had gloves on.

It was freezing cold, dressed in layers and hats and bringing stuff up and then just meticulously sifting through things to look for evidence.

There's clothes, remnants of suitcases, debris, shrapnel from the lockers, concrete from pillars inside.

It was fairly significant blast debris everywhere.

And then amid the wreckage something unmistakable the remnants of twenty five sticks of dynamite along with.

Copper wire but encased in plastic, common component used in constructing a bomb with a timer.

And it worked.

A bomb went off with such force that it ripped apart the ground level locker room and baggage area of the main terminal.

Eleven people lost their lives and seventy five others were injured.

People were burned, lost limbs, some thrown across the terminal by the sheer force of the blast.

Others were left unrecognizable.

One of the natures of their wounds, their injuries from shrapnel, wongs.

Apparently the explosion actually impelled building material, metal, glass.

That kind of thing.

This wasn't a message, It was a massacre.

Fifty years is a long time fact, and witnesses age, memory shift, and paper records disappear.

Finding first hand accounts became a race against time.

And then you're trying to get eyewitness accounts.

And I also played a role, as did dozens and dozens of other agents in interviewing witnesses.

People were calling the office.

It was a flood of tips, names, and rumors.

We had a roster of twa employees and anybody who was on duty at that point, or people that had called in and said they were there or saw something when they were there.

All those leads are run down.

In the days after the attack, investigators were chasing leads in every direction for any definitive answers for this unprecedented violence.

Bomb fragments were recovered from the blast center, mangled yards of a suitcase, pieces of a triggering mechanism, and chemical residue from the explosive experts at a nearby army base helped analyze it.

It was clear this wasn't crude, It was powerful and designed to kill, but the forensic evidence stopped short of pointing to a suspect.

There were no fingerprints, no traceable serial numbers, just the signature of someone who knew what they were doing.

The bomb had been placed inside a coin operated locker in the TWA baggage clean The person who planted it understood the timing.

It was two days after Christmas, the busiest travel week of the year.

The bomb had been positioned for maximum impact.

Both physical and psychological agents then turned to the locker system itself, but in nineteen seventy five, those lockers didn't require a name or ID, just a coin, no way to trace who had used it.

There were no surveillance cameras to turn to, at least none that captured the locker area, no high tech for rents tools to lift microscopic DNA.

The trail, if there ever was one, was going cold fast.

Whoever planned it didn't publicly claim responsibility, as was sometimes the case with terrorist attacks.

There were some theories.

There was no clear cut group that emerged that may have been responsible.

The Croatians were also a very active group back then, committing a lot of bombings.

They were of interest.

Here again is FBI historian John Fox.

There have been a couple of major accusations, some suspected fal and others suspected Croatian nationalists.

There was a lot of back and forth in Yugoslavia at the time, and there was a group of Croatian separatists who were engaged in terrorist type activities.

Croatian separatists were one possibility, but terrorism expert Michael Jensen recalls they were just one piece of a much larger puzzle.

This really was the era of mass bombing campaigns in the United States, and the FBI had a very very long list of usual suspects to go through to try to figure out who did this, including the FALN, the Jewish Defense League, the Palestine Liberation Organization, you name it.

There was any number of groups that could have been responsible for this attack.

And for many of them, the logic behind targeting the US followed a familiar pattern.

That's a fairly common story in the history of terrorism is that ethno nationalists organizations that are seeking independence will launch attacks not only in their own countries, where they're trying to separate from, but also in the countries that they feel are supporting the authoritarian rulers that are denying them their independence and their freedom.

If this was political, like so many bombings of the time, one would expect some group, some one to be taking credit.

But without a name, without a message, there was nothing to hold onto.

For weeks, investigators had little more than debris and speculation.

No group stepped forward, and no hard evidence surfaced.

Back in New York City's FBI Field office, leads were still being chased and coming up cold.

It's chaotic in the office.

Bosses tearing his hair out.

People are assigning leads.

What do you have going on?

I need you to run out to Queen's.

I need you to run up to the Bronx.

I need you to run to Manhattan.

I need you to run to Jersey to interview this twa employee.

So we're just plugging holes.

Witnesses were interviewed.

A few thought they saw someone leave a suitcase unattended.

Others said it was a man moving quickly, but the descriptions were vague and inconsistent.

No composite sketch, ever, led to a break and then came the silence.

Days turned to weeks and then months.

No manifestos, no phone calls.

The silence became its own kind of clue and its own dead end.

But then something unexpected happened.

There was a call into CBS News Radio eight eighty and there was a claim of responsibility and my boss, he wanted me to go up to fifty seventh Street.

They had a tape.

They said that they would be happy to provide the FBI with the tape with no subpoena, So they were going to make a copy and turn it over to me.

So my boss said, get up there and get that tape.

Would this be it?

They pressed play on the recorder, kind of.

Like a muffled voice, and you heard words.

To the effect that we weren't home or a bombing at the KWA and terminal.

They were claiming to be an offshoot of the Palestine Liberation Organization the PLO, which was very active at the time and in the news all the time.

For a moment, it seemed like a break, a name, and a possible direction, but a strong disclaimer from the PLO soon followed.

The allegation that the PLO was connected to this crime did not reach until about four hours after the explosion, which means that somebody was there watching and then planning and came out with this allegation.

So, whoever or whatever group was responsible, you categorically denied that has any connection with the PLO.

We not only categorically deny, but we condemned the act.

Like all leads before it, this one collapsed almost as soon as it surfaced.

But this was the seventies.

There were no digital trails, no advanced forensics, and no proven algorithm to connect the.

Dots, no voice recognition back in nineteen seventy five.

And tracing the tape back to a verifiable source was just one more task in an already frantic rotation.

The more time that goes by from December twenty ninth, the more the investigation trail gets stale.

Other than that claim of responsibility, there was no clear cut group that emerged that may have been responsible.

And without hard evidence, investigators were left chasing theories.

One that had come up earlier began to gain more traction.

Some believe that this attack was committed by a Croatian nationalists because the US was supporting Yugoslavia and was denying them that are access to their freedom.

It was still just a theory, but a name started surfacing, whispered in FBI field offices, scribbled in margins of case files, the name that made their Croatian angle suddenly feel more plausible.

Zvonko Busich.

On September tenth, nineteen seventy six, twa flight three point fifty five out of LaGuardia bound for Chicago lifted off from the very same airport a bomb had struck just nine months earlier.

On board were more than eighty passengers, business travelers, families, civilians headed into the weekend.

What none of them knew was that among them sat a man with a radical plan, a suitcase, and a deadly message.

Busich was a Croatian nationalist.

At thirty years old, he'd come to the United States in the nineteen seventies with a mission to fight for an independent Croatia free from Yugoslav rule.

And that morning, Busich, along with his American born wife Julienne, and three co conspirators, stood up midhas flight and hijacked the plane.

He claimed they had a bomb on board, and more chillingly, he warned that a second device had already been planted in the heart of New York City at Grand Central Terminal.

Their demand published a political manifesto in major American newspapers outlining Croatia's suffering under the Yugoslav regime.

NYPD bomb Squad officers raced to Grand Central to investigate the claim.

They found the device.

It was real and it was lethal.

When the bomb was moved to a firing range in the Bronx to be diffused, it detonated.

And I just remember going to bed that night and waking up the next morning and heard that a police officer was killed, and it happened to be Brian Murray.

Neil couldn't believe it.

He just met Brian a few months earlier.

Brian Murray was only twenty seven years old when he died.

A member of the New York City Police Department's Elite Bomb Squad unit, he was killed as he worked to deactivate the bomb.

He left behind a wife and two children, two and four years old.

Another officer was also seriously wounded.

Back on the plane, Busage and his team diverted the aircraft to Paris, ultimately releasing passengers and stages.

When they finally surrendered, it was on French soil.

There were strong efforts to try to connect him to the LaGuardia pot after his arrest.

In these other two cases.

The similarities were clear, the use of a locker in a busy transit hub.

Here was someone with the motive, the ideology, and the operational know how.

So investigators started to look closer, but the evidence they'd need for an arrest never materialized.

He always denied having any knowledge or the involvement in the LaGuardia bomb plot, and federal authorities were never able to prove a connection.

And then came an even stranger theory.

There have been some arguments that in fact, it wasn't Croatian nationalists at all.

It might have actually been Yugoslavian authorities that orchestrated that attack.

In that version, the bombing wasn't the work of separatists.

There are some that believe that Yugoslavia was ultimately behind this attack, that it was a false flag operation meant to generate a lot of hostility and anger towards Croatian nationalists.

Meaning it would have been staged by Yugoslav intelligence in an effort to discredit the very movement usage was fighting for.

So in terms of his actual involvement.

That remains a mystery to this day.

And just like that, the trail split and eventually turned to dust, from one a nationalist willing to hijack a plane for his cause, to the other an unsolved bombing that still has no claim perpetrator, no indictment, and no closure.

There are no documentaries, no public memorial for the eleven people who never got to finish their trip home.

And I can tell you from having worked on many unsolved cases over the years, that for the families, the investigators, it wasn't just the violence that lingered, it was the silence that followed it.

Here's social psychologist Ari Kruglansky explaining what those open cases leave behind.

People call it in psychology lack of cognitive closure.

You have lack of closure, or you have an uncertainty something is unresolved.

It's a very very difficult experience to have this lack of closure, to have this idea that you were diminished.

Random event has happened to you, and it can happen again, and there is nothing you can do about it.

Some wounds begin to heal with time.

This one can't until there are answers.

These are people that suffer a lot, and presumably they would be also more vulnerable to all kinds of narratives that tell them what to do to alleviate their suffering.

The Leguardia bombing didn't just leave behind wreckage and grief.

It exposed a response that wasn't as unified as it could have been.

Each agency had a piece of the story, but no one could see the full picture.

Terrorsts were evolving, they were more coordinated and more lethal.

Law enforcement needed to adapt and respond accordingly.

Bureau had resources, but in the absence of federal statues specific to this kind of attack, the local authorities, the NYPD often took the lead.

Here's FBI historian John Fox again.

The New York Police Department actually led to task force investigating that bombing at the time because it was largely a local matter.

Federal law would eventually expand, and of course, bombings of planes and things like that would fall to the FBI, but it took some time for that change to happen.

The Laguardian investigation exposed the limits of working together without a clear framework, especially across overlapping jurisdictions that began to change, interestingly, with a different kind of crime.

On a somewhat separate but interrelated matter, there were also a lot of bank robberies going on, and in nineteen seventy nine, the FBI and the New York Police Department agreed to work even more closely together to try and solve especially serial bank robberies, because some of these even were being traced to some of these radical groups.

You know, they would rob banks to fund their other activities, And in nineteen seventy nine we created a bank Robbery task Force.

That task force became a testing ground and within a year it led to something even bigger.

It proved so successful that the next year, in April of nineteen eighty, we decided to formalize a memorandum of understanding between the FBI and the NYPD about investigating terrorism cases together, creating what becomes our first Joint Terrorism Task Force.

At its core, the Joint Terrorism Task Force, or the JTTF as it's known, was built on a simple yet powerful premise combine the bureau's resources and reach with NYPD's street level experience and knowledge.

We the FBI agreed to provide space, it and certain things nypds supplied people and their own expertise.

We worked by co locating NYPD detectives with FBI agents, and these detectives were provided access to FBI intelligence, and it became very successful because we could truly pool together our expertise and access.

That access made all the difference.

For the first time, federal intelligence and local law enforcement operated not just in parallel, but worked together in sync.

And we worked out how we would handle the information, how we would handle do you prosecute this in a state or local level, do you prosecute this at a federal level?

How do we deal with sharp inform and information?

Because protecting their identities of your sources of information is incredibly important.

The Joint Terrorism Task Force Agreement enabled us to do this so successfully that it became the model for creating these kinds of organizations and other jurisdictions as well.

For agents like Neil, who had worked side by side with the NYPD in the Mayhem of LaGuardia, the JTTF wasn't just a good idea, It was long overdue.

It was huge.

I worked on a task force with the police Department.

To me, it was the best thing that happened to the FBI to have the new York City Police Department and other agencies eventually come over and be housed in FBI space.

It's a group effort, and the FBI has good sources.

The police department has good sources.

Two heads of better than one.

Police department has a different way of doing things.

The FDI's got a different way of doing things.

When you're out there, it's really a breath of fresh air to work with people from other agencies.

Out of frustration came a new kind of force, unified, relentless, and built to fight a new kind of war, and American law enforcement assembled a new kind of machine to fight it, the Joint Terrorism Task Force.

But just as that machine was finding its rhythm.

New movements were really starting to emerge in the United States.

One was the modern white power movement.

The FBI is now saying there was a nationwide white supremacist terror group called the Order, using spectacular robberies to bankroll a campaign of hate and assassination.

The next wave wasn't about independence, it was about dehumanization and domination, and the face of domestic terrorism was about to change again.

Not New York, but in backwards armories, gun shows and extremist newsletters.

And police in Denver believe the June murder of a popular radio personality there may have been a racially motivated assassination.

Talk show host Alan Berg was shot twelve times while he was standing in the driveway of his home six months ago.

Berg, who was Jewish, was an outspoken critic of racism and anti Semitism, calling himself the man you love to hate to receive numerous death threats on his talk show.

Next Time on Law and Order, Criminal Justice System.

White power, white supremacist organizations.

These were much more violent organizations than their left wing predecessors.

Four of them get together, they hit a cash career from a Continental armored truck and on this one they get about forty thousand dollars.

They've just robbed an armored truck.

David Lane was a klansman, a supremacist, so Burg takes him on.

He doesn't intellectualize the guy.

He just ripsel and I believe that was the night that they decide they're going to kill him.

Law and Order Criminal Justice System is a production of Wolf Entertainment and iHeart Podcasts.

Our host is Anna Sega Nicolaze.

The show was written by Cooper Mall, executive produced by Dick Wolf, Elliot Wolf and Stephen Michael at Wolf Entertainment on behalf of iHeart Podcasts.

Executive producers Trevor Young and Matt Frederick, with supervising producer Chandler Mays and producer Jesse Funk.

This season is executive produced by Anna Sega Nicolazi.

Our researchers are Luke Stantz and Carolyn Tolmidge.

Editing and sound designed by Trevor Young and Jesse Funk.

Original music by John O'Hara, original theme by Mike Post with additional music by Steve Moore and additional voice over by me Steve Zarnkelton.

Special thanks to Fox five in New York for providing archival material for the show.

For more podcasts from iHeart in Wolf Entertainment, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows.

Thanks for listening.