Pan Am to pay ex-workers after 15 years=20 By VINNEE TONG=20 AP Business Writer AP Photo/ED BETZ Business Video Advertisement NEW YORK (AP) -- In the 15 years since Pan American World Airways shut down= , Anthony La Pera had assumed he would never get paid for his leftover wage= s and accrued vacation. But La Pera and another 15,000 former employees can= expect to open their mailboxes one day this December and find that a check= has arrived, marking the end of the liquidation of an iconic airline. In July, a federal bankruptcy judge authorized the Pan Am Corp. to distribu= te the money it had secured in a settlement with the government of Libya. S= ending out those checks marks the end of a long process of winding down Pan= Am. "This is about as final as it can get," said Walter Curchack of the law fir= m Loeb & Loeb, which helped negotiate the settlement agreement on behalf of= Pan Am. The defunct Pan Am, which started in 1927 and helped create what was then a= new industry, shut down on Dec. 4, 1991, after declaring bankruptcy in Jan= uary of that year. Among the last, fatal blows it suffered was the 1988 bom= bing of Flight 103, a now infamous attack that ended with 270 dead when a b= omb exploded on board as the plane flew over Lockerbie, Scotland. =20 In 2003, Libya accepted responsibility for the bombing and agreed to pay re= stitution to the victims. Pan Am's payments come from a separate settlement= of a lawsuit its insurers brought against the Libyan government. The 68-year-old La Pera and other former employees recently received notice= s from Wells Fargo & Co., which is coordinating the distribution of approxi= mately 43 percent of Pan Am's settlement money to former employees. Those w= ho are eligible will get between 5 percent and 6 percent of what they were = owed when the airline shut down in 1991. For La Pera, that means he will get a check in the range of $1,250 to $1,50= 0, given that he was owed between $25,000 to $30,000 for accrued vacation a= nd back pay. "It's like found money, in effect, because nobody expected anything to come= out of this," he said. Buy AP Photo Reprints Richard Vieta, another former employee, remembers well the day the airline = shut down: It was his birthday. And after the company folded, he was one of= a small group of employees who remained to catalog and sell off pieces of = the airline. Vieta had worked at the airline nearly 30 years scheduling maintenance and = tracking aircraft parts. His last year, though, was spent at New York's Joh= n F. Kennedy International Airport's jet center and hangar No. 19, helping = an auctioneer sell off parts from the disassembled planes. "What I think Pan Am demonstrates is that these are the unrecognized victim= s of the industry's problems - people that did dedicate themselves to an em= ployer for a long time and basically got left out," Curchack said. Since the bankruptcy filing in late 1991, Curchack and others, including fo= rmer Pan Am lawyer Paul Rendich, have worked to secure a settlement. "This case has been literally, for the last 10 years, a sort of a matter of= honor to many of the people involved in it," Curchack said. "It's a vindic= ation in that there's some resolution for Pan Am and some of its employees,= who felt they were personally attacked by the bombing of Flight 103." Flight 103 was partially insured for $32 million in damage from acts of war= or terror; the entire plane was valued at $67 million. The insurers paid $= 32 million to Pan Am then pursued a civil case to recover damages from the = Libyan government on behalf of the airline. But because the civil lawsuit could not proceed until a related criminal on= e was resolved, there was little movement in the case for about a decade. In the meantime, two Libyan agents, Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi and Lamen K= halifa Fhimah, were prosecuted under Scottish law through a court at the Ha= gue for carrying out the bombing. In 2001, Fhimah was acquitted and al-Megr= ahi convicted of murder. As al-Megrahi's appeals wound down, representatives of the insurers and Pan= Am began speaking to Libyan negotiators and their French lawyers about a p= ossible settlement deal. The discussions intensified in 2004 and continued = into 2005 by phone and at meetings in London, Paris and Tripoli. Rendich, who had worked as a lawyer for Pan Am since the 1980s, said that a= t one point, the Libyans tried to pit Pan Am against its insurer and tried = to blame the airline's closure on economic factors unrelated to the bombing= . The two sides finally reached a deal on February 18, 2005, and the bankrupt= cy judge overseeing the case approved the deal a month later. Minus certain fees and the portion of the settlement that goes to the insur= ers, Pan Am Corp. will have about $31 million to distribute among former em= ployees, ticketholders, bank lenders, commercial vendors and other creditor= s. Even before the attack on Flight 103, Pan Am had wedged itself into the hea= rts and minds of many. Rarely do companies operating today generate the kind of pride and loyalty = heard in the voices of former Pan Am employees. They hold reunions and keep= in touch, even now. Some collect memorabilia, such as decades-old route maps and original fligh= t covers, which were mementos given to first-class travelers that depicted = planes or travel destinations. According to a posting on a Pan Am remembran= ce Web site, someone even tried to start a Pan Am golf club. When La Pera started working at Pan Am in 1962, he was paid $2.14 an hour. = As a crew scheduler, he monitored flights as they landed. Messages were sen= t by teletype and records handwritten to track them. He remembers looking forward to the end of his vacations so he could get ba= ck to work. "It was always exciting," he said. "The company, if you look at its history= , it had a lot of firsts. We had a part in it, and they made us feel a part= of it." Professor Bijan Vasigh of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University said Pan Am = indeed occupies a special place in history. "They actually dominated the world for many, many years," Vasigh said. "Pan= Am was one of the icons of U.S. air transportation." On the Net: Pan Am Liquidation Trust: http://panamliquidationtrust.com/=20 Pan Am historical Web sites: http://panamair.org/=20 http://www.panam.org/default.asp=20 =C2=A9 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. 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