Crumpling Them Up

Most times when people make demands—whether they use that word or not—they’re simply starting negotiations off. A list of demands is simply something to talk about.

And most demands, frankly, are bullshit.

If I’m known for anything outside of police and negotiating circles, it’s the negotiation I was involved in at New York City’s Kennedy Airport, where a hijacker had threatened to blow up a Lufthansa airliner if his demands weren’t met. The way the media had it, I took the list of demands the hijacker had, crumpled them up dramatically and confidently, and said, “Let’s start from scratch.”

Well, the media was wrong. I may have looked confident, but I was nervous as hell.

But I did crumple up the demands. I don’t advise that as a general rule in a negotiation—it can really piss people off—but in this case I did it to make a point. The demands weren’t just bullshit. They were a set of preconceived notions that were so far off the board, just so outrageous, that we couldn’t even use them to talk about. The hijacker wanted to fly out of JFK, wanted prisoners released, may even have wanted the poor of India and Africa fed, for all I know—like I said, I tossed them so I can’t get them and check.

And incidentally, it turned out later that the demands weren’t even the hostage taker’s. The FBI had come up with the list from . . . well, to be honest, I’m still not sure where.

Which is the first rule of dealing with demands: Make sure they come from the other side, and not your own assumptions.

You have to ask what the other side wants.

Otherwise you don’t know.

Which was what I did next in that negotiation. And instead of some long list covering everything from freeing criminals to feeding the poor, the demands came back as two things:

1. I want to surrender at the Lufthansa terminal.

2. I do not want my picture taken. If I see the press there, people will get hurt.

We talked a bit more than that, but basically that’s where we went. You can see right away that those demands are a heck of a lot more tangible than feeding the hungry of the world, though I don’t deny that feeding the hungry does have a certain nobility to it. Those are demands—needs, if you will—that can be worked on together and solved.