On March 7, 1974, 40-year-old General Foods executive Gabriel Anthony Caporino of Yorktown Heights, New York, vanished while on a business trip in New Orleans. He stayed at the Intercontinental Hotel on Canal Street and told his family by phone that evening he planned to drive a rented blue 1974 Mercury Montego to the French Quarter to listen to jazz and fly home the next day. He never boarded that flight.

His hotel room was left with partially packed suitcases, gifts for his family and a return plane ticket. Four days after his disappearance, three people described as in their twenties and of hippie appearance used his credit card at a Sears to buy a camera and clothing, presenting his Allstate insurance card and a forged signature. About ten days after he was last seen, his rental car was found abandoned at Spain and Rampart streets, wiped clean of fingerprints with the keys left in the door lock.

Caporino’s family say he was a devoted husband and father with no reason to disappear, and they contend the investigation was hampered by misleading information from a General Foods security director who was a former FBI agent. He was legally declared deceased in 1979, but the disappearance remains unsolved. Did anyone in New Orleans in March 1974 notice a blue 1974 Mercury Montego or those people using a credit card?