Until his arrest, Wright lived in the tiny town of Almocageme, 28 miles west of Lisbon. Fluent in Portuguese, he worked at odd jobs, most recently as a nightclub bouncer, said two neighbors.
He married a Portuguese woman, identified by neighbors as 55-year-old Maria do Rosario Valente, the daughter of a retired Portuguese army officer. They had two children - Portuguese-born Marco and Sara - now in their early 20s, who used their mother’s last name.
It was unclear how Wright ended up in Portugal or when he learned Portuguese, but his wife worked as a translator.
They lived in a small whitewashed house with terracotta roof tiles, a yellow door, and a small front garden in the picturesque village near Atlantic beaches. A gray Volkswagen station wagon that neighbors said Wright drove was parked on the cobbled dead-end street outside.
A woman who answered the door in Almocageme said she was Maria do Rosario Valente but had no comment.
Wright was convicted of the 1962 murder of gas station owner Walter Patterson, a decorated World War II veteran gunned down during a robbery at his business in Wall, N.J. His daughter, Ann Patterson, said she wants Wright sent back quickly to the United States.
“I’m so thankful that now there’s justice for Daddy,’’ she said yesterday. “He never got any kind of justice.’’
Wright had a Portuguese identity card that said he was born in Guinea-Bissau, a former Portuguese colony in West Africa. A photocopy of the document bore the name Jose Luis Jorge dos Santos, an alias that US officials said Wright used. The card listed his age as 68. It was issued in 1993 and expired in 2004.
Neighbors said the family had been in the village for at least 20 years but said the couple did not mix much with neighbors.
A fingerprint on Wright’s Portuguese ID card was the break that led a US fugitive task force to him. He was arrested by Portuguese authorities and is being held in Lisbon, but Portuguese police have repeatedly refused to release details about the case.
Eight years into his 15- to 30-year prison term, Wright and three other men escaped from the Bayside State Prison in Leesburg, N.J. on Aug. 19, 1970.
In 1972, Wright hijacked a Delta flight from Detroit to Miami with four other Black Liberation Army members . The hijackers with him were not the same prison escapees.
After releasing the plane’s 86 other passengers in exchange for a $1 million ransom - delivered by an FBI agent in swim trunks - the hijackers forced the plane to fly to Boston. There an international navigator was taken aboard, and the plane went to Algeria, where the hijackers sought asylum.
