Parked on Gary Bannister’s desk in his Northwest Roanoke office is a model Boeing 727-200, and its reflection in the glass almost makes it look as if it is flying over water.

For almost 10 years now, Bannister has wished mightily that not one, but two life-size 727s were winging over the Gulf of Mexico, coming home to him.

He thinks about it when he falls asleep each night and when he wakes up every morning. And then he heads to work to run a company that he says might be millions of dollars richer if not for one fateful deal.

“I’ve been in the aviation business for a long time, and I never had the first disagreement with a customer,” he said. “This thing with Fly, it just tore my heart out.”

Fly S/A Linhas Aereas was a fledgling Brazilian airline in the mid-1990s when Bannister’s company, Aircraft Inventory Corp., leased it two 727s.

Not long after, the lease payments stopped coming and Fly’s vice president claimed he had bought the jets outright.

Grand jury testimony in Roanoke in 1998 would indicate that a series of circumstances — including a well-positioned Brazilian brigadier general, forged documents and a suspicious fire — combined to cause the loss of the planes.

Despite a $28 million default judgment in Bannister’s favor in 2000, he is still fighting for his planes, with ongoing legal battles in the United States and Brazil. One of his Boeings sits cannibalized in Sao Paolo; the other grows rust in Rio de Janeiro.

They have both been neglected for so long that they cannot fly.

The sale that wasn’t

A mutual acquaintance introduced Bannister to Ricardo Luiz Burger, who seemed to be everything a savvy, well-connected businessman should be.

Burger’s father, Brig. Gen. Sergio Burger, had once headed up the Brazilian Departamento de Aviacao Civil, the equivalent of the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, and had served as a military attache to the Brazilian Embassy. He started Fly S/A Linhas Aereas, but his sons, Ricardo and the junior Sergio, ran the day-to-day operations.

The Burgers did not respond to e-mail or telephone interview requests for this article .

Bannister says Burger struck him as exotic, smooth-talking and seemingly trustworthy. In late 1994, the men talked business over Italian food at Luigi’s and in Bannister’s Roanoke County home before finally brokering a five-year deal.

In June 1995, Aircraft Inventory Corp. leased to Burger’s airline a 1973 Boeing 727-200 in exchange for a $450,000 security deposit and monthly lease payments of $80,000.

A year and a half later, Bannister also leased a 1980 Boeing 727 to Fly. He expected a $500,000 security deposit and monthly payments of $108,458.

The planes were estimated to be worth $3.9 million and $4.7 million, respectively.

“The day we signed the contracts, I was very happy with my client,” Bannister said.

The first clue that something was amiss came right after delivery of the second aircraft, in March 1997.

Fly failed to make the security deposit and never made another lease payment on either plane, Bannister said.

Now Bannister claims that even before Fly had received the second plane, a brew of deceit had been bubbling.

According to 1998 federal grand jury testimony in Roanoke, Ricardo Burger had connections in the Brazilian Aeronautical Commission and the Brazilian Embassy in Washington, D.C. Through them, he had bills of sale for both aircraft notarized.

Bannister claims the contracts were just photocopies created by superimposing the signature pages of other documents. A Brazilian judge would later declare the documents forged.

Embassy officials did not return e-mails and calls for comment.

None of the people involved in the transaction was charged with a crime, and none claimed to know how, in February 1997, the bills of sale were certified by the Brazilian Embassy and filed with the Brazilian Departamento de Aviacao Civil.

The planes, at least on paper, belonged to Fly.

From the ground up

The son of a railroad engineer in St. Albans, W.Va., Bannister was working in a chemical plant and scrimping for flying lessons on the side when he met and fell in love with Glenna James in the early 1960s.

His soft-spoken charm, like his ability to fly, lifted her off her feet. But that’s not what impressed her the most.

“He is just a really hard worker,” she said. “When we got married, my brother-in-law gave us $100, and that is the only thing that has ever been given to us.”

But Bannister, who is now in his mid-60s, wasn’t interested in working in a plant all his life. His real passion was in the skies, and had been since one day when he was 5 years old.

He and his buddy Earl had squeezed into the back seat of a Piper PA-18 flown by a local Air Force officer named Jock Southerland. In midflight, Southerland made a rapid descent over the West Virginia countryside, landed the plane and sprinted to a creek to save two boys trapped in the falls in their homemade skiff.

“He was just my hero,” Bannister said. “I was young and very much in awe of airplanes.”

As a young man, Bannister served in the Air National Guard and, after meeting his wife, started a flying club called Charlie West Air Service. He bought his first plane, a Cessna 172, at age 25.

Glenna Bannister didn’t consider that her husband’s passion would put dinner on the table until he got a job as a pilot for a textile company in Greensboro, N.C. He spent nine years flying executives and photographers from factory to factory.

At 35, Bannister moved his wife and two young daughters to Roanoke and went to work for Piedmont Aviation.

He sold Beech aircraft to corporations and private buyers, collecting framed photographs of himself shaking hands with the likes of Hank Williams Jr. in front of shiny new planes.

“I loved selling the aircraft,” he said. “It was my thing and I loved dealing with people.”

He bought his own airplane sales operation in Charleston, W.Va., in the late 1980s, but still yearned for something more. In his dreams, he didn’t see single-engine planes. He saw jets.

Aircraft Inventory Corp. was incorporated in 1992, and before long, Bannister had bought his first jet and set up headquarters in the former La Maison restaurant on Airport Road in Roanoke.

For the first few years, AIC was flying high and recording profits of $1.5 million to $2.5 million per year from buying, selling and leasing planes. Bannister planned to leave the company to his children when he retired.

Now, that goal still remains out of reach.

Legal dogfight

Over the past 10 years, Bannister has waged a two-pronged legal attack against Fly in Brazil and in the United States.

Brazilian attorneys first set out to prove that the bills of sale were forged. They asked to see the original documents, but even after the paperwork was supposedly found in the desk drawer of a Departamento de Aviacao Civil officer, Bannister had to acquire a court order to examine it.

Before his lawyers could look at the documents , they were lost in a suspicious fire at DAC offices, records show.

In February 1998, a Brazilian judge ordered the 1980 aircraft grounded at Sao Paulo, but custody was given to the DAC, records show. Bannister says that neither he nor his representatives were allowed to even approach the ramp where the plane was parked.

That’s when the plane was stripped of its engines, log books, maintenance records and other parts, he claims.

The 1973 plane was put under the protection of the Brazilian Air Force and grounded in Rio de Janeiro, where neglect robbed it of its airworthiness.

Fly agreed in April 1998 to pay back lease payments and return the newer Boeing to AIC, Bannister said. But at the last minute, the Burgers refused to sign the agreement.

If Bannister continued his push to reclaim the plane, Ricardo Burger said, he would “burn it to the ground and there would not be enough to haul off in a truck,” according to one of Bannister’s lawsuits.

Brazilian judges finally ruled that Bannister could have possession of the 1980 aircraft and ordered him to remove it within 24 hours.

It had no engines.

Back in Roanoke, the FBI got interested in the case, and in 1999, Ricardo Burger was indicted on criminal charges of wire and bank fraud and money laundering. But Roanoke officials had no authority to arrest him and bring him to America.

About this time, Bannister filed a claim with his insurance company for one of the planes, but it was denied.

In 2000, two events improved Bannister’s outlook.

First, a federal judge in Roanoke issued a $28 million default judgment against Ricardo Burger and his father after they failed to respond to a civil lawsuit Bannister had filed, alleging breach of lease and fraud.

Then, Assistant U.S. Attorney Sharon Burnham filed protective orders on two other 727s purchased by the younger Sergio Burger in Miami. The FBI claimed at the time that Ricardo Burger had fronted his brother the money to buy those planes in order to hide his own hand in the deal.

Fly was ultimately unable to use either plane. And in Bannister’s opinion, that may have had a crippling effect on the airline.

“I feel it put Fly out of business,” he said. “It was only a matter of time before all the water leaked out of the drum.”

By early 2003, Fly was behind on its bills, according to Gianfranco Beting, a Brazilian airline historian and consultant.

Beting, who maintains a Web site dedicated to the Brazilian aviation business, interviewed Ricardo Burger’s brother for an article in October 2002. He was 36 at the time.

In the interview, Sergio Burger said the airline owned four jets and was acquiring a fifth.

But not long after, Fly’s operations dried up, Beting said. When he contacted the Burgers for a story about the airline’s demise, they refused to talk, he said.

“The company is no longer flying and, from my own observations, they are not very talkative at the moment,” he said. “They ran out of business and they really didn’t pay anyone.”

New hope takes flight

Today, Bannister has fresh hope in the form of new legal teams in Roanoke and Brazil.

In Brazil, he is working with a law firm that specializes in international issues. Attorneys there say it is doubtful that the Burgers or Fly have the money to pay the $28 million judgment. So they hope to hold the Brazilian government accountable for the loss.

The firm’s plan is to show that the documents were forged by DAC employees, that civil servants working for Brazil in Washington, D.C., facilitated the theft and that the DAC is responsible for one plane’s cannibalization.

In late 2005, Bannister met with a federal judge in Brazil who decided to allow a team to survey the damage to the 1980 plane. The team will file a report indicating how much it will cost to bring the plane back to airworthiness, Bannister said.

After that, the Brazilian firm will file a lawsuit against the government in Brazil seeking the cost of repairs, loss of income and other damages. Bannister hopes the same path can be taken for the 1973 aircraft.

In Roanoke, attorneys Bill Poff and Fielding Douthat Jr. refiled Bannister’s civil lawsuit, hoping a judge will reaffirm the earlier judgment. They have waited for months for Ricardo and Sergio Burger to be served with summonses in Brazil.

“They just don’t respond,” Bannister said. “They just thumb their noses at the courts and everyone else.”

Spokespeople for Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Roanoke, and Sen. George Allen, R-Va., said the legislators have contacted officials in Washington, D.C., and Brazil on Bannister’s behalf, but their efforts have been in vain.

“I think this incident has put his business at risk,” said Allen’s legislative director, Paul Unger, “and it’s a complicated and disappointing tale that he has to tell of how he was taken advantage of.”

Although Bannister praises his legislators, he is unhappy with his own government for what he perceives as a lack of assistance, and he wishes more people had been indicted in connection with the forgery and notarization.

“I’m disappointed that our U.S. attorney here has not gone after the people in Washington who committed this crime, who were in on the conspiracy,” he said.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Roanoke declined to respond to Bannister’s criticism.

Bannister now estimates that he is out between $30 million and $50 million. He guesses he has made more than 60 trips to Brazil in the decade-long effort to win back his planes. He has also hired a law student in Brazil whose duties include keeping an eye on the jets.

Aircraft Inventory Corp. was forced to find additional ways to generate capital, such as leasing engines and other used aircraft parts. Bannister also owns Cedar Ridge Apartments in Southwest Roanoke County, so he continues to make a living despite spending much of his time dealing with legal matters and playing catch-up.

“I shudder to think what this business would have been worth today had those people not stolen my airplanes and stopped the flow of cash,” he said.

The Bannisters’ daughters have grown up with the case looming large in their father’s mind. Perhaps because of them, he spoke surprisingly little about it at home, his wife says.

“I don’t know how Gary did it,” his wife said. “He got up every day and went to work and tried to keep it away from us, and somehow we got through it and we’re still getting through it.”

Although they are grandparents now, the Bannisters may never be able to retire for financial reasons.

Bannister shakes his head at retirement anyway, and it isn’t just about the legal cases that linger on.

Sitting in his office surrounded by model airplanes, he gets a little boy’s gleam in his eye.

“I don’t know what I’d do if I went home and sat down,” he says. “I’d like to buy a couple more airplanes.”