The Space Barons

1

“A Silly Way to Die”

MARCH 6, 2003.

This was not how Jeff Bezos wanted to die.

He was seated in the passenger seat of a ruby-red helicopter, surrounded by an eccentric cast of characters—a cowboy, an attorney, and a pilot nicknamed “Cheater” who was best known for being forced at gunpoint to fly into the grounds of the New Mexico state penitentiary to bust out three inmates. It was a little after ten a.m. The sun had burned off the last of the morning chill as the day was heating up fast. The breeze had picked up, and with four passengers, the fully loaded helicopter struggled to lift off out of a canyon near Cathedral Mountain in the warm, thin, high-altitude air of West Texas.

Instead of going up, the helicopter began cruising along the floor of the clearing, moving faster and faster but unable to gain lift above the tree line.

“Oh, shit!” Cheater exclaimed.

In the backseat, Ty Holland, the cowboy who was serving as a guide to take Bezos around the backcountry, looked up from the topographical map he’d been studying. Bezos was sitting directly in front of him in the passenger seat, holding on; Bezos’s attorney, Elizabeth Korrell, was seated next to Holland, behind the pilot. Cheater was jostling the controls, a grimace on his face, as he was “weaving and dodging between the trees,” Bezos recalled.

Holland had been worried about this. The wind picks up at this time of year, swirling across the dead, desiccated desert, scattering the tumbleweed and blowing great plumes of dust. It could be especially bad up here, some 5,000 feet above the desert floor, near Cathedral Mountain, a gradual, barren incline that rises into a towering butte that from a distance looks like an elephant. But it wasn’t so much the wind that was giving them difficulty. It was their weight, and the altitude, and the warm, thin air, all of which had conspired against them.

Just a few minutes earlier, Holland had urged them to get going to the next stop. But Bezos had wanted to walk around, take another look at the land, the view that carries some 80 miles to the Mexican border. The vista, miles upon miles of empty Texas desert, must have been soothing, especially for someone who led as hectic a life as Bezos. The run of the mountainside down into the desert plain, as desolate and dead brown as his hometown of Seattle was dense and lush green. The quiet of the vast expanse. Bezos had said something that morning about how he had spent summers as a kid at his grandfather’s ranch in South Texas. He clearly had an appreciation for this rugged, barren country.

Holland knew little of his charge other than he was a billionaire, and that he had made his money selling books and who knows what else over the Internet on a site known as Amazon.com. He also knew that Bezos’s quiet moment here at the base of Cathedral Mountain was being disturbed by a gathering breeze in the cedar trees with a sinister pitch that was making Holland nervous.

“We need to get out of here on account of the wind,” he’d said. “You can’t fly these helicopters up here with the wind.”

Now the helicopter was in trouble. And Cheater, the pilot, was frantically trying to gain control, working the controls as if he were riding a bucking bronco at a rodeo. But there was little he could do. Best just to hold the reins and brace for impact, Holland thought. The helicopter slammed down hard and one of the landing skids caught a mound of dirt, toppling it over. The chopper’s blades crashed into the ground, splintering into shards that could at any moment slice into the cabin.

Outside, the world turned upside down as the helicopter toppled into a lonely ribbon of a creek that just happened to be named “Calamity.” Inside the cabin, the passengers were jostled around like pinballs, ricocheting from the force of impact, then lurching sideways as the helicopter flipped over.

The chopper’s cabin lay partially submerged in the shallow creek, and water was beginning to gush inside. Somehow Holland ended up swallowing a mouthful. He did not want to survive a harrowing crash only to drown in a creek. He yanked desperately at his seatbelt. But somehow the mayhem of the crash coupled with the panic-fueled adrenaline made it impossible to undo. The seatbelt that had just saved him was now strangling him, pressing down on his chest and hips, ever tighter.

Bezos looked into the back of the helicopter to make sure Korrell was okay, but she had disappeared.

“Where’s Elizabeth?” he asked, frantically.

There was no response. Then, they saw a hand rising from the water underneath Holland. During the crash, he had pinned the attorney underwater without even knowing he was on top of her. They scrambled to get her out of her seatbelt and her head above water. She gasped for breath. Her lower back was in intense pain. But she had survived. Miraculously, they all had.

They climbed out of the helicopter, one by one, gathering on the bank, taking stock. Bezos and Cheater had nicks and bruises from hitting their head against the dashboard. Korrell had broken her lower vertebrae. Holland’s arms and shoulder hurt like hell. He must have torn a muscle in the crash or the scramble to get that damn seatbelt off.

Looking down at the totaled helicopter, they realized how lucky they had been. The crash had amputated the rear tail boom. The chopper lay on its side in the creek, its top rotors scalped. Fuel had spilled out everywhere, so even though Korrell had nearly drowned, the water prevented the helicopter from catching fire. Nearby, the trees were mangled as if chopped by a gardener’s shears, the soil butchered—a scene altogether different from the serenity Bezos had been enjoying just a few moments before.

“It was harrowing. We were very lucky,” Bezos said later. “I can’t believe we all walked away from it.”

FROM THE START, Holland had thought flying in a helicopter was a bad idea. Not just because he had never been in one. Or that they’d be flying into some rugged, isolated country. Holland believed that the best way to look at property in the backcountry was by horseback, his preferred means of travel. “You can get a better idea of the country by riding on horseback than flying over it in a dang helicopter,” he thought.

But Bezos and his attorney “were in a big rush,” Holland recalled. The trip by horse could take days. They only had a few hours.

Holland had gone on this excursion as a favor to a friend who was a real estate broker. Bezos was looking to buy a ranch, and the broker had asked Holland to show him around. No one knew the country back here as he did, and he was happy to oblige. Holland figured that Bezos, now thirty-nine years old, was looking for a place to relax on weekends, run a few cattle, and pretend to be a cowboy. Maybe relive the childhood memories of summers on his grandfather’s ranch in South Texas.

Holland didn’t own a computer, let alone go on the Internet. “I knew exactly nothing about him or Amazon or Internet or any of that stuff,” he said.

Nearly a decade after Bezos had quit his job on Wall Street to sell books on the web, Amazon was starting to take off. In January 2002, the company had posted its first quarterly profit, $5 million. And it had continued to grow, branching out from books to music, toys, clothes, kitchen supplies, and electronics, as customers became more comfortable with using their computer to buy almost anything. In 2000, Amazon had sold 400,000 copies of the Harry Potter book released that year. Three years later, it had sold 1.4 million copies of the next installment, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

Amazon was thriving at a time when many others had collapsed in a stock market swoon that claimed countless so-called dotcoms.

“We’ve seen the worst of the shakeout,” an analyst told the Washington Post, after the company posted another profit in early 2003, a couple of months before the helicopter crash. “Now there are some behemoths starting to emerge.”

Amazon’s strategy was “get big fast,” luring customers with the convenience of the Internet and the low prices that the site was becoming known for. Despite the get-rich-quick hype that had surrounded so many Internet startups, Amazon took a slow and steady approach, keeping its prices low, offering free shipping, even while critics said it would never work.

In headlines during the late 1990s, Business Week had derided the company as “Amazon.Toast,” and Barron’s called it “Amazon.Bomb,” with an unflattering photo of Bezos, who showed it to an audience and said, “My mom hates this picture.”

But by early 2003, with sales in every major segment growing by double digits, Bezos was as confident as ever in the company’s approach. “It’s working,” he said. “It’s the right investment to make, and it’s in the long-term best interest of shareholders and our customers.”

The iPhone was still four years away from its debut, but he was confident that the Internet was really only just getting started. In a TED Talk weeks before the West Texas helicopter crash, he compared it to the early days of the electrical industry. The web in 2003 was about where the electrical industry was in 1908, he argued, when the electric socket hadn’t yet been invented and appliances had to be plugged into light sockets.

“If you really do believe it’s the very, very beginning,” he said, “then you’re incredibly optimistic. And I do think that’s where we are.”

With Amazon’s success, Bezos’s wealth was growing rapidly. Fortune magazine reported in 2003 that with Amazon’s stock price tripling, his net worth grew by $3 billion to a total of $5.1 billion. He vaulted to number 32 on the list of wealthiest Americans, ahead of New York media titan Michael Bloomberg and the Koch brothers, who ran a vast manufacturing and investment empire.

March 2003 was, then, a good time to go looking for real estate. To allow himself a measure of freedom to indulge his true passion, even if he rarely spoke of it.

BEZOS DIDN’T SAY anything about why he wanted to buy land in this hideaway corner of Texas, full of rattlesnakes, mule deer, bighorn sheep, and not much else. Holland, a stolid, soft-spoken rancher who spent as much time around cattle as people, didn’t ask. Bezos struck him as a “different breed of cat,” one he couldn’t relate to.

Suspicious as Holland was about the helicopter, he was also wary of its pilot, Charles Bella, who was something of a legend in his hometown of El Paso. He had a handlebar mustache and a penchant for fistfights and profanity. His nickname, “Cheater,” came from his days of racing cars: sore losers had accused Bella of cheating and the nickname had stuck. “It turned out to be a compliment,” he told a magazine in 2009. He’d been hired by Hollywood to fly in several movies, including Rambo III and a Chuck Norris flick called Lone Wolf McQuade. In addition to his work as a helicopter pilot, he kept a gaggle of exotic animals—including a bear, timber wolves, mountain lions, and an alligator—at his home. The local game warden would call on him from time to time, once telling the El Paso Times that “Cheater has a way with animals. He can go into a cage with injured mountain lions, and they turn into pussycats.”

What he was best known for, though, was the prison break. In 1988, he had flown his Gazelle helicopter—incidentally, the same one he flew in Rambo III—into the prison, freeing three inmates. After a two-hour chase, he was arrested and charged with conspiracy. But F. Lee Bailey, the famed criminal lawyer who would go on to be part of O. J. Simpson’s defense, represented him and mounted a vigorous defense that led to his acquittal.

The morning of the prison break, Cheater claimed, a woman had hired him to look at some real estate, just as Bezos later would do. She was dressed in bright red pants and a floral print shirt. That morning, she had taken several guns from a roommate, leaving her a note that read, “Katie, I’m taking your guns because I need them more than you do.”

Soon after they took off, she took out one of the guns, a .357 magnum, pointed it at Cheater’s head, and demanded he fly into the prison to free her boyfriend, a convicted murderer serving a life-plus-sixty-years sentence, and two of his friends.

She was obese, Cheater recalled, about 250 pounds. “I’m thinking I’m in deep shit because if this ol’ gal thinks that guy loves her, she won’t stop at nothing, because she’ll never find another guy,” he told Texas Monthly years later.

He said he tried grabbing at the gun, but his hand was sore from a fistfight days before and he couldn’t wrest it free. They landed on the prison ball field near first base, where the three prisoners were waiting. They scrambled aboard, one hanging on to the helicopter skid, while guards fired from the prison tower. Cheater wasn’t sure what to do.

“Her boyfriend is slapping me on the head with a gun saying he’s gonna blow my head off if I don’t get going,” he recalled. “The engine is already up to the max. I’m pulling it all the way through the temperature range. It should have exploded. And finally they shove this one guy off the skids and one of the guys in the helicopter jumps off and runs alongside it and he climbs back in when we start to take off.”

The chopper barely cleared the fence, and they were off. Soon they had bigger problems. The feds were in pursuit, chasing them down in a Black Hawk helicopter for nearly two hours until it was clear there was no escape. Cheater finally landed at the Albuquerque airport.