Elvis Held Up a Plane on the Hunt for a Thieving Friend
Elvis Presley was quite generous with his friends, often buying them expensive gifts without reason. He relied heavily on his entourage and trusted them with his secrets. Because of this, he took it hard when they betrayed him. When Elvis suspected that one of his friends was stealing from him, he chased him down and arrested him as though he was a police officer.
Elvis suspected a friend was stealing from him
In 1973, Elvis hired a man the other members of his entourage referred to as “Fetchum Bill.” He soon joined the group on a trip to Las Vegas. Bill lost the $500 Elvis gave each member of the entourage and they began to suspect he was forging checks. Around this time, Elvis discovered some of his jewelry was missing.
“About this time, there were several rings of Elvis’s missing, and we suspected Bill,” bodyguard Sonny West said in the book Elvis: What Happened? by Steve Dunleavy. “Suddenly Bill comes up with one of these rings, a nineteen thousand-dollar, thirty-carat sapphire that had been given to Elvis by the Sahara Tahoe for creating an attendance record. He said he had found it in his briefcase. He said he put it there for safety and had forgotten about it. Elvis didn’t care about this particular ring, but the missing ring he really wanted was this big karate ring he had.”
Bill went home and Elvis’ bodyguards found the karate ring in a laundry chute. This made them even more suspicious of Bill.
Elvis chased his friend down
When Elvis’ bodyguards brought their suspicions to the singer, he flew into a rage.
“Elvis flared,” Sonny West recalled. “He jumped up and said, ‘We’re going out to the airport to get that sonofab**** right now.’”
As they arrived at the airport, they saw a jet readying for takeoff. Elvis pulled out the federal narcotics badge he received from Richard Nixon and rushed for the plane.
“He raced out on the damn tarmac as the plane was taxiing for a takeoff,” bodyguard Red West recalled. “Elvis just ran right up to the cockpit, and he flashed his badge that President Nixon gave him.”
The pilot, recognizing the badge and Elvis, lowered the gangplank and allowed the singer onboard. Bill was not there, so Elvis quickly exited and waved the plane on. While all this was happening, Sonny West found Bill in the airport.
Elvis later felt sorry for the man
When Elvis got to Sonny West and Bill, he “arrested” the latter and put him in the back of the car. Bill seemed worried they were going to dump his body in the desert. Instead, they drove him back to their hotel.
“I think he was relieved when we got back to the hotel,” Sonny West said. “I felt sorry for him, really, but he was a pretty spineless dude.”
At the hotel, Elvis shouted at him about stealing the ring. Once he got his anger out, though, he began to feel bad for Bill.
“We all felt sorry for him,” Sonny said. “Strangely enough, the guy who felt sorriest for him, after he got it out of his system, was Elvis … He was talking about hiring him back, but we talked him out of it because we could see a lot of problems down the road with Bill.”
