AIR RAIDER
Nick Popovich woke up with two black eyes, several missing teeth, and no shoes or wallet. His face was swollen “to the size of a watermelon” and he was pretty sure he had a few broken ribs. To make matters worse, he was in a Haitian prison.
How Popovich ended up there was a long story. He’d come to Port-au- Prince, Haiti’s hard-bitten capital, to track down a Boeing 720 jet owned by a small Caribbean airline. The company had skipped a few payments, and their lender, a U.S. bank, had hired Popovich to repossess it. Though the plane was only worth $600,000, the airport manager in Port-au-Prince demanded a million in “service fees.” Popovich tried to make a late-night getaway without paying, but a jeep full of kids with machine guns stopped him on the runway and, in his words, “beat the crap out of me.”
Popovich might still be in that prison today, if not for some fortuitous timing. Just a
