Jack Petachi was a United States Air Force (USAF) pilot forced to cooperate by the criminal organisation SPECTRE after he was made addicted to heroin. The character was loosely based on the Thunderball novel character Giuseppe Petacchi and appeared in the non-Eon 1983 James Bond film Never Say Never Again, portrayed by the late Irish-American actor Gavan O'Herlihy.
Biography[]
Sent to a health clinic outside London to get back into shape, James Bond witnesses a mysterious nurse named Fatima Blush giving a sadomasochistic beating to a patient in a nearby room. The man's face is bandaged and after Blush finishes her beating, Bond sees the patient using a machine which scans his eye. Blush and her charge, a United States Air Force pilot named Jack Petachi, are operatives of SPECTRE, a criminal organisation run by Ernst Stavro Blofeld. Petachi has undergone an operation on his right eye to make it match the retinal pattern of the US President, which he uses to circumvent iris recognition security at an American military base in England. While doing so, he replaces the dummy warheads of two cruise missiles with live nuclear warheads; SPECTRE then steals the warheads, intending to extort billions of dollars from NATO governments. Blush murders Petachi using a snake to cover SPECTRE's tracks. While James Bond later kills Fatima Blush, that was not connected to her murder of Petachi. Jack Petachi's death is later avenged by his sister, Domino, who kills Blush's superior, Maximillian Largo (who also was her lover).
Behind the Scenes[]
Never Say Never Again represented the high water marm of a long legal battle between United Artists and Kevin McClory. For more information see: the controversy over Thunderball.
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