LV businessman has tough trip home from N.Y.

Kevin Ferguson

Friday, Sept. 14, 2001 | 10:10 a.m.

Las Vegas businessman Jeff Jonas just wanted to do one thing Tuesday: Get back from New York to see his family.

Trying to hail a cab in the heart of the New York disaster zone was nearly impossible.

"Every time a cab pulled up, three people approached it," Jonas recalled on a cell phone interview Thursday while driving a rented car through the Kansas City, Mo., area.

Jonas, president of Systems Research & Development, had meetings scheduled most of Tuesday in which he was supposed to pitch his security software to major financial institutions in and around the World Financial Center, a building that was linked by an overpass to the World Trade Center.

But his schedule cleared quickly when the World Trade Center was destroyed by two terrorist attacks just before 9 a.m.

Jonas rode under the Trade Center overpass a few minutes before the first plane slammed into the building. He just missed viewing the tragic event. He had a 9 a.m. meeting a few miles away.

During that meeting on the 40th floor of another building, reports of terrorist attacks came in every few minutes.

"They just bombed the Pentagon!" Jonas recalled somebody saying as the messenger poked his head into the meeting. "All of a sudden, we figured we should get out of the building. Our building could be targeted."

Down on the street, people were screaming and sirens echoed constantly, said Jonas.

An Arab-American man wearing a turban offered him a ride in his taxi. But all of a sudden, the cabbie was one of the least popular drivers on the street because of his Arab heritage.

"Nobody wanted to get in his cab. But I figured I'd take a chance," Jonas said.

As Jonas opened the door, two women pulled up in another car and offered the stranger from Las Vegas a ride. He jumped in their car.

That situation clearly defined the mood in New York Tuesday: heightened racial tension, fear of more attacks and camaraderie among people who appear to be alike.

"There were rumors of car bombs planted all over town," Jonas said.

Jonas later asked why the women offered him a ride.

One of the women said: "You were about to get into a car with a guy in a turban."

The two women, one of whom was the director of public relations for a major New York magazine, drove him to their apartment in Northern Manhattan and provided him with a meal.

"It was amazing how people were helping each other during the crisis," Jonas said.

Jonas, who has five kids in Las Vegas, ranging in age from 6 to 17, struggled to reach his family Tuesday. His cell phone kept cutting out.

His wireless voice mail kept getting clogged with message after message, all seeking confirmation that he was all right.

Getting off Manhattan Island was no easy task.

Most New York cabbies and bus drivers wouldn't go west across the George Washington bridge in the direction of New Jersey because eastbound traffic was shut down.

"They weren't allowing people to drive back onto Manhattan Island," Jonas said. "It was stop and go traffic, and you saw buses turning off before the bridge and a long line of people walking across the bridge."

He finally got a cabbie to drive him off the island, but the driver wouldn't take him as far as he wanted to go, which was Washington, D.C.

Jonas said he wanted to drive to Washington, D.C., because all rental places he called in New York were out of cars.

A colleague he was with was trying to get to Washington Dulles International Airport because he had a car there. Meanwhile, Jonas' co-workers in his Las Vegas office phoned a rental business at Dulles to see if it had rental cars available, and it did.

The taxi driver agreed to take him as far as Delaware for $650 and so Jonas started calling people on his cell phone he knew in Washington, begging for someone to drive two hours north to pick him up.

A Washington, D.C., colleague he met with in New York on Monday agreed to pick him up in Deleware, and drive him back to the nation's capital. There, he rented a car and headed West.

Late Thursday afternoon, Jonas received a call on his cell phone from a casino executive, whose company uses his software to catch cheating gamblers.

It was shortly after the federal government lifted the suspension on air travel.

The executive said a corporate jet was coming to pick him up in a small airport in Salina, Kan.

While driving on a deserted highway in the middle of America, Jonas looked at his map. Salina was 7 miles away.