Mackoffs’ trip of a lifetime periled by death in India
Chicago attorney Benjamin S. Mackoff and Carol Mackoff retired after dinner on Nov. 26 to their hotel room in Mumbai, India, without eating dessert.
For the next 42 hours, they survived on candy and cookies from the mini-bar while terrorists prowled the Taj Mahal Palace and Towers Hotel in search of American and British tourists to murder.
Ben Mackoff, a partner in Schiller, DuCanto & Fleck and retired presiding judge of the Cook County Domestic Relations Division, will relate his perilous experience to colleagues of the Jewish Judges Association during a luncheon meeting on Tuesday, Feb. 10, in the ISBA Chicago Regional Office.
The Mackoffs told friends in October that they expected the journey to India to be the trip of a lifetime. Little did they anticipate the possibility that their lives might end before the tour was over.
Mackoff freely acknowledges that the decision to skip dessert probably saved them. They were scheduled to leave early the next morning for the return flight home.
Within a half-hour after they entered their room about 9:30 p.m. Nov. 26, they heard the explosions and gunfire that would result in the deaths of 195 people in Mumbai, including almost all of the hotel staff.
They remained secluded, sharing bottled water, with their luggage piled against the door and the peephole covered. During daylight hours, Mackoff read “Dead Heat,” a novel by Sir Richard Stanley “Dick” Francis.
The Welsh-born former jockey’s mystery about horse-racing includes, ironically, the bombing of a catered luncheon.
An Indian army squad rescued the Mackoffs at 3:30 p.m. Nov. 28 and guided them through the bloody carnage to a waiting ambulance. They flew home that evening without their luggage and were met by family in Chicago.
They had been accompanied on the tour, which began Nov. 6, by Ben Mackoff’s sister, Renee Pasikov, and Carol Mackoff’s friend, Sandra Kuzlik.
The itinerary included visits to India’s capital city of New Delhi and the historic Taj Mahal at Agra, and ended in Mumbai (formerly Bombay), the nation’s most-populated city at more than 18 million.
The Mackoffs enjoyed their encounters with the Indian people and felt that the terrorist attacks were no reflection on them.
“They were always very courteous,” Ben Mackoff told a reporter for the Chicago Jewish News. “All the way through the trip, they were a delightful people.”
In New Delhi, Mackoff met with Chief Justice K. G. Balakrishnan in his home for a discussion of their respective judicial systems.
Although India was emancipated from British rule in 1947 and became a democratic republic in 1950, the courts conduct and record all proceedings in English.
Justice Balakrishnan lamented that some corruption has crept into the legal system occasionally, but Mackoff said “he’s as clean as the driven sand.”
The two jurists discussed the advent of alternative dispute resolution, a favorite topic of Mackoff, who implemented court conciliation systems and now heads his law firm’s mediation service.
After their rescue in Mumbai, the Mackoffs noticed that doors of many hotel rooms across the hall had been blasted open. Terrorists may have thought that with more expensive seaside views, wealthy westerners were more likely to be in them.
“So our safety was just the result of random occurrences,” Ben Mackoff said.
Whether that is entirely true, the Thanksgiving weekend will have special meaning to the Mackoffs for many years to come.