Book Read Free

Days of Rage

Page 46

by Bryan Burrough


  Cueto and the NCHA, however, were only half the equation. Without dynamite and the expertise to use it, the FALN would never have sprung to life. For that it turned to its allies in the Weather Underground. Law enforcement for years speculated that Weather had played a role in the FALN’s formation. According to Charles Wells, a longtime member of the NYPD bomb squad, bombs built by the Weather Underground and FALN were of identical design. All of them, he explains, featured a single screw set into a clock at the “9”; the bomb detonated when the minute hand struck the screw.

  But the concrete evidence of Weather’s involvement came from its own bomb guru, Ron Fliegelman. “We gave them the training,” he acknowledged during a September 2012 interview. “We did that, sure. Was it me? I shouldn’t say. I don’t want to go there.”

  • • •

  By Thanksgiving 1976, with the startling disclosure that nearly a dozen suspects had some kind of affiliation with its NCHA charity, the headquarters of the Episcopal Church became the unlikely epicenter of the FALN investigation. Church officials initially gave the FBI free rein. In a search of the NCHA’s basement office agents found a receipt taped to the bottom of Maria Cueto’s desk. It was for a Smith Corona typewriter. Agents knew that the FALN’s communiqués had been typed on a Smith Corona. They hustled to the Brooklyn store that sold the machine but found nothing of use; the name on the receipt was an alias. The FBI lab had determined that the communiqués had been photocopied on a Gestetner copy machine; a search of Gestetner’s records indicated that such a machine had been sold to the NCHA in 1974, on the eve of the first bombings. It was now being used by another office, and it would take a round of subpoenas to get it.

  Lou Vizi, meanwhile, met with the church’s top bishops and found them happy to furnish the NCHA’s financial records. He sensed they were intimidated by Cueto and her people, whose political leanings were far to the left of their own. “They were appalled,” Vizi remembers. “These were very nice people who had been stampeded into this charity stuff by their own guilt. The church treasurer got all the records for me, but they were a mess. He said, ‘We tried a thousand times to use proper accounting methods with these people, and every time higher-ups would say, “Don’t come down too hard, we don’t want any problems.”’ So no one was paying too much attention to where the church’s money was going, there were no receipts for a lot of this.”

  The NCHA’s patchwork records, however, provided a trove of tantalizing leads. Some $53,000 of church money, for instance, had gone to a Puerto Rican school in Chicago José López had founded, where Oscar López and several other FALN members had briefly worked. The NCHA had even purchased airline tickets for Carlos Torres, López, and other FALN suspects. Matching these itineraries against the FALN’s attacks, agents felt they could establish a pattern of various suspects traveling to New York and Chicago within days of any number of FALN bombings. López, for one, had flown into New York the day before the first bombings in October and left shortly after.

  For the briefest of moments Vizi and Don Wofford felt they were on the verge of breaking the case. If Maria Cueto or her assistant, twenty-seven-year-old Raisa Nemikin, could be persuaded to cooperate, the entire FALN might be dragged into the sunlight. But when agents went to the women’s homes to question them further, both denied knowing anything about the FALN. Shortly thereafter they hired attorneys, an act that immediately sapped momentum from the FBI’s investigation. If the two women had to be pulled before a grand jury, it could start a process that might take weeks, if not months.

  Cueto was called to testify first, on January 10, 1977. She refused even to take the oath. When the judge ordered her to do so, she still refused and was jailed. Her attorney, Liz Fink, filed a series of motions asking for more time, and Cueto was released. Two weeks later Fink fired her first broadside, filing motions to quash all subpoenas in the case on the ground that they violated Cueto and Nemikin’s rights to freedom of religion. Citing the FBI’s notorious COINTELPRO programs, Fink argued further that the subpoenas were part of a systematic pattern of FBI harassment against Puerto Rican independence and radical groups.

  Buttressing these charges was a parallel set of filings by none other than Paul Moore, the progressive bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of New York. In an affidavit he echoed Fink’s charges and alleged that the subpoenas were designed to “prevent the church from funding progressive Hispanic groups.” To the FBI’s surprise, this was the first sign of a sharp split in church ranks, Moore and a group of liberal bishops on one side, some of the national leadership on the other. Behind the scenes, the halls of Episcopal headquarters were rife with rumors—that Cueto was the FALN’s secret kingpin, and that FBI agents had been allowed to rampage through file cabinets monitored only by, in the words of a Times reporter, “a half-blind custodian called Buggsy.”1

  On February 4 Judge Lawrence Pierce rejected the defense motions and ordered Raisa Nemikin to testify. Ten days later she took the oath but refused to say another word. Then, on February 18, just hours before Nemikin was scheduled to reappear, two powerful bombs exploded in Chicago, one outside the U.S. Gypsum Building, the other at the giant Merchandise Mart. No one was hurt, but water pipes burst at the mart, causing millions of dollars in damage. There was no communiqué, but the FBI felt certain it was the FALN attempting to send a message.

  That morning, in the Manhattan grand jury room, the federal prosecutor on the case, a Harvard Law graduate named Thomas Engel, bestowed immunity on Raisa Nemikin, meaning she couldn’t be prosecuted for anything she said. Engel asked Nemikin when she last saw Carlos Torres, what she knew about the FALN, and whether she knew anyone involved in the Fraunces bombing. After each question Nemikin stepped outside to consult with her attorney, then returned and refused to answer the question.

  In a hearing that afternoon Engel asked Judge Pierce to cite Nemikin for contempt and jail her until she answered his questions. Her attorney, the ubiquitous Liz Fink, called the demand “outrageous” and argued that her client’s rights were being violated. A ruling was postponed for eight days. Afterward Nemikin read a statement to reporters outside the courthouse in which she characterized the entire proceeding as a government vendetta against the NCHA and progressive Hispanics.

  That night, just before midnight, large bombs exploded outside two New York skyscrapers, the Gulf and Western Building and the Chrysler Building, where two men were injured by flying glass. A caller to WCBS radio directed police to a communiqué, which, after demanding the release of Puerto Rican political prisoners, ended with a new demand: “Stop the Illegal Use of The Grand Jury.” Up at the FBI’s offices, Wofford and Vizi smiled. Clearly they had struck a nerve.

  The following Monday, Fink unleashed a new legal broadside, alleging that her phones, as well as those of several of her radical colleagues, were being tapped by the government. The filing did just as Fink hoped, turning the attention of the judge and the newspapers toward allegations—apparently unfounded—of government wrongdoing. The proceedings began to slow down, with daily hearings and allegations and a series of press conferences on the courthouse steps. Friends and supporters began filling the courtroom, hissing and booing. The judge eventually ruled both Cueto and Nemikin in contempt and tossed both women in jail. Two weeks later, on March 20, the FALN responded, detonating bombs outside a New York bank and, for the first time, directly below the FBI offices on Sixty-ninth Street. One man struck by flying glass was taken to the hospital. A communiqué sent to the New York Post again protested the grand jury proceedings.

  While lawyers jousted, Wofford and Vizi pressed on. Maria Cueto’s jailing gave them an opportunity. When she vacated her Brooklyn apartment, the building’s landlord allowed agents to search it. Inside, the super remarked that Cueto had altered the bedroom closet, affixing hasps and locks and constructing three wooden shelves. Wofford and Vizi had an idea of what Cueto had used those shelves for. On March 22 the NYPD brought in a bomb-sniffing dog
, which, when shown the closet, became excited. A later analysis of the shelving, however, proved inconclusive. Despite this, Wofford felt sure Cueto had stored at least some of the FALN’s dynamite.

  Vizi, meanwhile, was supervising a review of every person associated in any way with Cueto and the NCHA. One man, a board member, was named Guillermo “Willie” Morales. He lived in Queens. An FBI surveillance team watched him on the street and managed to snap a photo. When Vizi saw it, he immediately recognized the face; it was the face in the sketch the FBI had gotten from the owner of the Bronx luggage store—the one who sold the bags holding FALN bombs. “Identical,” Vizi remembers. “It was absolutely identical.”

  The shop owner had retired to Florida. Vizi mailed him a photo of Morales, then waited for a response from agents in Florida. “So he looks at it,” Vizi recalls, “and says, ‘It’s not him.’ I said to our guys, ‘Ask him what the difference is, I can’t see any difference.’ He says, ‘I can’t tell you exactly, but it’s not him.’” Irked, Vizi sent agents to interview Morales. They returned to report that Morales was nothing but polite, unworried, unruffled. He was just an activist helping a good cause, nothing like the uncooperative Maria Cueto. “We believed him, and I just kind of let it go,” Vizi recalls. “That was the biggest mistake I made in the twenty-five years I was in the FBI.”

  Because the very polite Willie Morales, agents would later learn to their dismay, turned out to be the FALN’s bomb maker.

  • • •

  With Maria Cueto and Raisa Nemikin sitting mute in a New York jail, prosecutors began pressing other FALN suspects. The Chicano activist suspected of stealing the group’s dynamite, Pedro Archuleta, had been found and was called before grand juries in Chicago and New York. He too refused to cooperate. He too was jailed. Once again the FALN responded, setting off nine tiny incendiaries at Macy’s, Gimbel’s, and Bloomingdale’s in New York on April 9. A communiqué cited the grand juries.

  It was a mark of the times that much of the public—at least the small slice paying attention to the proceedings—seemed far more willing to believe that the FBI was wiretapping radical attorneys than the frankly bizarre notion that two demure church ladies might be working for a terrorist group. Cueto and Nemikin, in fact, drew support from a variety of quarters. That spring hundreds of four-inch stickers began appearing on New York street signs and lampposts, especially in Hispanic neighborhoods. Each featured, against the backdrop of a Puerto Rican flag, a rifle, the letters FALN, and three sayings in Spanish: FREEDOM FOR PUERTO RICO, FREEDOM FOR THE 5 NATIONALIST PRISONERS, and END THE GRAND JURY. The FBI tried analyzing the stickers but couldn’t even discover who was posting them.

  Far worse, the National Council of Churches got involved, announcing that the FALN grand juries amounted to an illegal harassment of all churches and all Hispanics. A new group, Joint Strategy for Social Action, began rallying progressive ministers across the country, who responded by writing letters and newsletter articles of their own, all attacking the FBI for its illegal campaign against the churches. Supervisors at FBI headquarters, already reeling from John Kearney’s indictment, were in no mood for even a hint of further extracurricular shenanigans. Inspectors from Washington began appearing at Wofford’s and Vizi’s desks, demanding to know what laws they had broken. Suddenly every agent working the FALN case found himself on the defensive.

  Things were even worse in Chicago. There prosecutors had subpoenaed a half-dozen of Carlos Torres’s and Oscar López’s relatives, all of whom refused to testify and, as in New York, responded with legal motions alleging illegal government wiretapping. It took six full months for a judge to sort through it all, during which time the grand jury investigation ground to a halt. When a judge finally ruled in favor of the government that June, three of those subpoenaed, including López’s brother José López, were thrown in jail. The FALN responded with a rare daytime attack, on June 4, detonating a bomb on the fifth floor of Chicago’s City Hall–County Building, not far from the mayor’s office. Damages were estimated at $50,000. The following month a group of FALN supporters launched another counterattack, suing the FBI, the U.S. attorney general, and several individual agents for harassment.

  All of it—the internal bickering, the inability to find Torres and López, most of all the controversy over the Episcopal Church—convinced FBI headquarters that the situation was spiraling out of control. The answer, it was decided, was to install a single supervisor who could coordinate the disparate strands of the investigation. Roger Young, a trim, diplomatic forty-four-year-old inspector with a background in intelligence cases, drew the task. The first thing Young did was ask for the FALN file. What he received instead was several cartloads of files. Thumbing through them, he saw that supervisors had opened a new case on every FALN bombing, an obvious effort to avoid any criticism that they were spying on a domestic group. There was no single repository for FALN intelligence, no overarching analysis whatsoever.

  Much of his job, Young could see, would simply be building relationships between the far-flung field agents. No one knew anyone, which made it easier to ignore their requests. He called a conference of FALN agents in Virginia that June, only to have the most important office, New York, refuse to attend. Citing John Kearney’s indictment, New York supervisors said they were unsure whether such a conference was even legal under terms of the Privacy Act. They weren’t taking any chances that the ACLU would find out and start picketing the office.

  By midsummer 1977, despite Roger Young’s best efforts, energy was fast ebbing from the FALN investigations. The grand juries were getting nowhere; Maria Cueto, Raisa Nemikin, and a half-dozen others were stuck sitting in jail, utterly mute. In New York the FALN squad was reorganized and rolled into a new, enlarged bomb squad. Supervisors transferred; new ones arrived. Several new cases—bombings by the Jewish Defense League, anti-Castro Cubans, Croatian separatists—each drew a stream of agents away from pursuing leads on the FALN.

  Out in the streets, no one cared. Inflation was rising, cocaine and other drugs were rampant, crime was out of control; on the radar of an American’s daily worries in 1977, the FALN registered not at all. Among workaday Americans, few gave a whit about Puerto Rico, much less its independence. Bombs had been exploding in the United States for a decade now and would probably be exploding for decades more: Who cared whether they were planted by crazy Puerto Ricans, crazy blacks, crazy hippies, or crazy aliens from outer space? They were just bombs, a new fact of American life.

  Nowhere was this sense of resignation more evident than in New York, a city that seemed to be entering its death throes. Gotham’s financial crisis had devolved into a new ring of urban hell. When police went on strike, someone posted a sign near LaGuardia Airport that read, WELCOME TO FEAR CITY. Every night fires burned out of control in the Bronx. On July 13 the city suffered a massive blackout, leading to widespread looting. Yet even then all anyone wanted to talk about was the crazed murderer stalking young lovers in the outer boroughs—the “.44 Caliber Killer,” some called him, others “Son of Sam.” In the early hours of Sunday, July 31, he opened fire on a couple necking on a quiet Brooklyn street, killing the girl, his sixth murder victim.

  Between bombings, riots, blackouts, and serial killers, the last shreds of civilization appeared to be disintegrating. The city, it seemed, was slowly being lowered into its grave. From Staten Island to Riverdale to Kew Gardens, most New Yorkers found it easy to ignore the distant thud of the FALN’s bombs. Like muggings and garbage and heroin and the homeless, they were simply part of life in a dying city, a softly throbbing bass line deep in the rhythms of a funeral dirge.

  • • •

  A wilting summer heat was already rising from the sidewalks of Manhattan on the morning of Wednesday, August 3, 1977, when a slender young woman—a girl, really—walked into the Employment Services office at Mobil Oil headquarters on East Forty-second Street a little before nine. It was three days after Son of Sam’s lat
est killing; FRIGHTENED SUBURBS ON GUARD, blared the Post’s front-page headline. The girl, who wore a straw hat and enormous sunglasses, asked the receptionist for a job application, took one, then sat at an empty desk to fill it out. She wrote her name as “Sandra Peters,” then paused and glanced around the room, smiling at one or two other job seekers. After a moment the girl rose and returned to the receptionist, saying she needed more information before she could complete the form. Then she turned to leave—until the receptionist stopped her, saying she needed the form back, completed or not. The girl smiled, returned the form, then walked out. No one noticed the umbrella she left hanging from a coatrack.

  Fifteen minutes later and a block away, a man walked out of the U.S. Defense Department’s twenty-first-floor office in the Christian Science Building, at the corner of Madison Avenue and Forty-fourth Street. In the hallway he passed a co-worker just as she glanced at a windowsill and noticed a lady’s handbag tucked awkwardly behind the Venetian blinds. Curious, the two took the bag inside their office and tried to open it, thinking they might find a driver’s license and return it to the owner. But the zipper wouldn’t work; it appeared to be glued shut. A supervisor, Thomas J. Sweeney, walked over to help. Someone produced a cigarette lighter, and Sweeney applied it to the zipper, attempting to melt the glue. It worked. Sweeney unzipped the bag and, to his astonishment, found himself staring at a tangle of wires and an alarm clock. He called for everyone in the office to move to the opposite end. All fifteen people were crouching behind desks at a far set of windows when, twenty seconds later, at 9:37, the bomb exploded, blowing a hole in a concrete wall, shattering windows, and sending the office door careening into the hallway. Miraculously, no one was hurt.

 

‹ Prev