Days of Rage

by Bryan Burrough

  • • •

  Ten days later, in the Chicago suburb of Glenview, a patrolman named Brian Bocca noticed a green Buick meandering through a residential neighborhood. It would stop, duck into a driveway, then slowly drive on. When the car made an illegal turn, Bocca pulled it over. Two men were inside. The driver, a Hispanic man in his thirties, produced an Oregon driver’s license bearing the name José Ortiz. Bocca thought it looked fake. When a second officer arrived, they glanced inside the car and saw a pair of long-nosed pliers and an alligator clip, common burglary tools. Ordering the men from the car, they searched it and found a pistol with the serial number removed.

  Both men were handcuffed and taken to the Glenview police station. Running their descriptions through computers at the National Crime Identification Center, officers were startled to discover that the driver’s description exactly matched that of Oscar López. By nightfall FBI agents were on the scene, and a fingerprint check confirmed it: López, the man behind the deadliest bombing campaign of the era, had been captured in a routine traffic check. Presumably, like Carlos Torres, he had believed that his false identity would hold. His passenger turned out to be a new FALN recruit.

  López had been living in an apartment on West Ainslie Street in Chicago since the Evanston arrests a year before. A search the next day uncovered guns, FALN communiqués, and, hidden behind a fake wall, six pounds of dynamite. Prosecutors scrambled to make a case, but despite a widespread belief that it was López who had masterminded the Fraunces Tavern attack, the FBI was unable to gather anything but circumstantial evidence. Instead, seven weeks later, he, too, was brought to trial on sedition charges, in a Chicago court filled with FALN supporters. The proceedings proved anticlimactic, ending in three days. López made an opening statement claiming to be a prisoner of war, with a “deep respect for human life,” then sat in silence, refusing to participate. There was an audible gasp when Freddie Mendez took the stand. He admitted everything. In a closing statement López denounced the trial as a “lie and a farce.” The jury took five hours to find him guilty.

  “You are an unrehabilitated revolutionary,” the judge said. “There’s no point in giving you anything less than a heavy sentence.” And with that he sentenced López to fifty-five years in prison. Still the FALN refused to die.

  22

  THE SCALES OF JUSTICE

  Trials, Surrenders, and the Family, 1980−81

  Six weeks after Joanne Chesimard’s jailbreak, a new decade dawned: the 1980s. The era of the underground radical seemed an increasingly dim memory. There were still stragglers who had yet to turn themselves in, most notably Bernardine Dohrn and the remains of Weather’s old leadership. Ray Levasseur was still out there robbing banks, but as far as the public was concerned, they were a lunatic fringe. What remained of the “armed struggle” movement was so obscure no one suspected that Mutulu Shakur and the Family even existed. They had managed to free Chesimard and Willie Morales without leaving a clue, at least none the FBI could find.

  But the Family had a problem, a serious one. When something pollutes a radical cell’s intellectual purity, whether it is allegations of sexism or racism, as happened with Weather, leftists call it a “corruption.” The Family had been deeply corrupted from the outset by a familiar scourge: illegal drugs, mainly cocaine. Shakur was a heavy user, as were a dozen or more of the hangers-on who lounged about the acupuncture clinic he opened in a four-story brownstone on West 139th Street in Harlem in the summer of 1980. Shakur, who lived on the upper floors with several others, including his wife, two former stewardesses, and his assistants, called it the Black Acupuncture Advisory Association of North America (BAAANA). Later, when the FBI caught wind of things, a telephone wiretap recorded eighty-three separate drug purchases during a single four-week period.

  Cocaine corrupted the Family at every turn. Because Sekou Odinga considered drug use counterrevolutionary, Shakur tried to keep his habit a secret, but it was no use; relations between the two steadily deteriorated. Money and guns were forever going missing from BAAANA’s safe, all swapped for cocaine. To buy more—and without telling Odinga or the white women, who wouldn’t approve—Shakur and his acolytes began robbing drug dealers and UPS trucks on their own. But it was never enough. Part of the problem was that BAAANA’s acupuncturists, schooled in Shakur’s revolutionary rhetoric, considered their work a public service; if customers couldn’t pay, and in Harlem they often couldn’t, they were treated for free. With little cash coming in, and much of it going for cocaine, the clinic lost money from its first day.

  By 1980 Mutulu Shakur had become a classic coke fiend, a big talker with white powder on his upper lip, always desperate to make his next big score. The irony was that the white women, the true revolutionaries, knew nothing of his drug problem—not Marilyn Buck, Silvia Baraldini, Judy Clark, Susan Rosenberg, or the latest to join the group, the onetime Weatherman and Townhouse survivor Kathy Boudin, who worked odd jobs while raising a newborn with her partner, David Gilbert. To a woman, they believed they were supporting the second coming of the Black Liberation Army. “I knew nothing about drugs, nothing,” Baraldini recalls. “I just thought Mutulu and those guys were hyper, you know, energetic, and they never slept. And I kept thinking, ‘Why are they so pumped up and excited all the time?’ I thought they were just on like a high metabolism. I didn’t know.”

  The robberies that followed the Chesimard jailbreak illustrated the degradation of the Family’s capabilities. The first, another armored car, came at lunchtime on February 20, 1980, outside a Korvettes department store in Greenburgh, a northern New York suburb. While Shakur and the women watched from getaway cars, Odinga, Tyrone Rison, and another Family member jumped the courier, handcuffed him, and forced him to lie on the pavement beside his vehicle. Unfortunately, the back door was locked, and another guard was inside. The trio punched, kicked, and threatened to shoot the hapless courier, but nothing would persuade the second guard to open the armored car. “Go ahead, kill him,” he shouted. “I don’t give a damn.”1

  Crestfallen, the Family withdrew without incident to the safety of a new safe-house apartment, in the suburb of Mount Vernon. Only then did Odinga realize the courier’s keys could have opened the car’s doors. They had surrendered too soon.

  Two months later, on April 22, they did much better. The target was once again an armored car, this time a Purolator truck outside a bank branch in Inwood, New York, on Long Island. They rammed it with a rented van, then disarmed the driver when he emerged. As Tyrone Rison stood in the road, warning off traffic with an M16, the others rifled the truck, making off with $529,000, by far their biggest haul to date.

  It was also the last successful robbery the Family was able to stage for more than a year. During the second half of 1980 much of its focus was directed toward a Brink’s armored truck that serviced a Chemical Bank branch in Nanuet, New York, just across the Hudson River from the northern reaches of Manhattan. The job was laboriously scouted by a onetime BLA fighter named Jamal Joseph, who as a teenager had been a protégé of Dhoruba Moore’s; after serving time for his role in the Sam Napier murder in April 1971, Joseph was back on the street, working intermittently with Shakur. But both times Shakur and his men set a trap for the Brink’s truck, it inexplicably failed to appear.

  It was during these scouting expeditions that some in the group first noticed the route of a second Brink’s truck. Shakur began spending time in the area, studying the habits of its three couriers. But the more he discussed a possible robbery, the more Sekou Odinga resisted. Any robbery in the Nanuet area, he argued, would entail a getaway along one of the area’s highways, many of which fed into the closest route back to Manhattan, the mighty Tappan Zee Bridge. There was no way to predict the traffic, and no way to escape it once it was encountered. Tyrone Rison termed the Nyack job “nothing but sure danger.” No, Odinga warned. It “was nothing but sure death.”2

  • • •

  On Sept
ember 15, 1980, a full two and a half years after their indictment, W. Mark Felt and Edward S. Miller were finally brought to trial in a Washington federal court. The date had been delayed at least eight times; some in the capital, the few who cared, doubted that the two aging FBI men would ever face justice. Their onetime boss, L. Patrick Gray, the man who succeeded J. Edgar Hoover, was processed separately; the charges against him would later be dismissed altogether.

  The proceedings, a kind of old-home week for the Nixon administration, were thick with the air of anticlimax. Nixon himself, in a rare public appearance, led a string of onetime White House and FBI officials who spoke in Felt and Miller’s defense. But there was no denying that, however dangerous the Weather Underground had been, the two FBI men had approved illegal activities in their efforts to apprehend its leadership. They were swiftly convicted. The men faced up to ten years in prison. Two months later the judge handed down their sentences: a $5,000 fine for Felt, $3,500 for Miller. Neither would serve jail time. The light-as-air sentences suggested the court’s skepticism of the whole affair. America yawned.

  • • •

  Among the few Americans with a keen personal interest in the Felt-Miller trial was an attractive young couple living in a fifth-floor apartment at 520 West 123rd Street in Manhattan, a few blocks from Columbia University. The woman, in her mid-thirties, was named Christine L. Douglas. Until giving birth to her second son that February—a midwife handled everything right there in the apartment—she had held down two jobs, as a manager at Broadway Baby, an infant-clothing store at Eighty-second and Broadway, and waitressing at Teacher’s, a restaurant and bar a block away. The man, later described as an “aging hippie,” was named Anthony J. Lee. He worked as a teacher at B.J.’s Kids, a day-care center on West Eighty-fourth Street. The couple lived quietly. Neighbors remembered them kindly.

  Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers had been underground for ten long years. Neither has ever said much about that odd three-year interregnum following Weather’s breakup, a period in which they gave up making bombs and started a family. It appears they quickly left San Francisco, probably in 1977, and soon arrived in Manhattan, where they reestablished contact with their old underground friends, from Kathy Boudin to Brian Flanagan. Jeff Jones and Eleanor Stein had reunited and were living seven miles north, in the Bronx. For a time Dohrn and Ayers lived in a studio apartment on West Forty-sixth Street, where Ayers took a job at a health-food bakery. They moved uptown in 1979, taking a flat near Columbia.

  Though they never quite believed it, no one was looking for them anymore. The FBI had all but stopped after the Squad 47 scandal. They had given up altogether once the fugitive warrant on Dohrn was dropped in 1979, after state prosecutors in Chicago, where she was still wanted on Days of Rage charges, indicated they wouldn’t extradite her if she was captured. All charges against Ayers had been dropped years before. The couple had been discussing surrender for months when Cathy Wilkerson turned herself in that summer. Wilkerson had been living alone with her infant daughter on Chicago’s South Side; she would end up serving a year in prison on charges related to her role at the Townhouse.

  In mid-November, a week after Felt and Miller were found guilty, the couple piled into a blue station wagon and drove off. A week later their attorney, Michael Kennedy, telephoned a Chicago prosecutor and said Dohrn and Ayers were ready to surrender. On December 3 a crowd of reporters greeted them as they entered a Chicago courthouse. Forced to wait a half hour, they chatted amiably with the press. Inside Kennedy argued that Dohrn’s $300,000 bond be reduced, and the judge agreed, cutting it to $25,000. Afterward Dohrn read a statement suggesting that she had never abandoned her radical beliefs. “This was a time when the unspeakable crimes of the American government were exposed and resisted by unprecedented numbers of its own people,” she said. “Resistance by any means necessary is happening and will continue within the U.S. as well as around the world.”

  Afterward Dohrn and Ayers moved into an apartment in a house in Chicago owned by Ayers’s younger brother. A month later they reappeared in court, where a judge gave Dohrn three years’ probation and ordered her to pay a $1,500 fine. “I remember the night before they left to turn themselves in, my girlfriend and I had a dinner for them. We called it ‘The Last Supper for Joe and Rose,’” recalls Brian Flanagan, using a set of early code names. “It was gourmet food, fine wines, first-growth Bordeaux. And then they go off to Chicago, and the feds were desperate for them to turn themselves in. Bernardine had to pay the fine, and she paid it with a check. Priceless!”

  The excruciating irony that Bernardine Dohrn, the most-wanted underground figure of the era, could walk away virtually scot-free just weeks after two of her top FBI pursuers had been convicted of crimes against her was not lost on anyone involved. “The Weather Underground had done like a hundred bombings, and she was never prosecuted for one of them,” recalls Lou Vizi, the FALN investigator. “That’s amazing. I mean, absolutely amazing. You know who got prosecuted? Us. The FBI.”

  “What really galls me,” says Don Strickland of Squad 47, “is we did all this stuff, risking our lives every day, putting our lives on the line. And we end up being the villains! And these Weatherman scumbags end up being the fucking Robin Hoods!”

  For FBI partisans, the only welcome news in the episode came the following April, when President Reagan announced he had signed full pardons for both Felt and Miller. Both men swiftly vanished from the public eye. Not for twenty-five years, in fact, would the world learn that Felt had been keeping a far bigger secret than anything to do with the Weather Underground. In 2005 he admitted he had been “Deep Throat,” the confidential source used by two Washington Post reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, to break the Watergate story.

  • • •

  One reaction to discussion of radical violence during the 1970s and early 1980s is that much of it was harmless; save for Fraunces Tavern, the policemen assassinated by the BLA, and the immolation of the SLA, not that many people died. But as the underground dwindled, its remaining members grew increasingly desperate, and dangerous. The single deadliest year for radical violence was in fact 1981, eleven years after the Townhouse. Seven people died, including young Alex McMillan in the FALN attack at JFK airport.

  Most met their fate at the hands of the Family, which, as 1981 dawned, was riven with internal disputes and, at least where Mutulu Shakur and his cocaine-addled acolytes were concerned, sloppier and more violent by the day. Cocaine use was so out of hand that Shakur had a friend draw up official antidrug guidelines, which were ignored. Sekou Odinga repeatedly confronted Shakur about his drug use; Shakur denied it. Worse, Odinga had invested money in the Harlem acupuncture center, and he suspected that that money too was going for cocaine. “Any kind of drug use bothered me,” he recalls. “There was scuttlebutt that certain people were involved in heavy drugs, that they were losing control. Everyone involved denied it. I will say a lot of money [I invested] disappeared. I kept wondering, what is really going on?”

  The May 19 women, especially Silvia Baraldini, brought tensions of their own. Baraldini and Marilyn Buck had grown to detest each other; both were immensely proud of their anointed positions alongside the black militants they revered, and each saw the other as a primary rival. Baraldini also despised Tyrone Rison, whom she thought insufficiently “political”—and rude. “Tyrone Rison was creepy,” she says. “He was so into guns. We avoided him at all costs.”

  In an effort to organize themselves, Shakur and Odinga formally split the Family into two teams. The first, which they dubbed the “Primary Team,” consisted of their best five soldiers—themselves, Tyrone Rison, and two of Shakur’s men, Donald Weems (aka Kuwasi Balagoon) and Mtayara Sundiata. The Primary Team handled all the gunplay and made all the decisions in private meetings. The second group, dubbed the “Secondary Team,” consisted of all the white women and anyone else they chose to rope into a robbery. Despite their strident feminism, the wo
men largely did as they were told.

  Tensions within the group grew after another pair of failed robbery attempts that winter, both in Danbury, Connecticut. One, on March 23, was one of Shakur’s side jobs; Odinga and Rison weren’t even told of it—they were on vacations, in fact—much less invited along. A Purolator truck, flush with cash from a Read’s department store, had just pulled up outside a brokerage office that afternoon when Shakur and his deputies Balagoon and Sundiata rushed it, guns drawn. The courier, Daniel Archambault, was intercepted in the parking lot and made to lie flat. The man behind the wheel, Joseph W. Dombrowskas, a Purolator veteran, looked up from his clipboard to see a black man pointing a shotgun at him. When he refused to open the door, the shotgun went off, blasting a hole in a side window and showering him with glass. When Dombrowskas pulled his pistol and returned fire, Shakur and the others ran. Afterward Odinga and Rison were incensed—at being excluded, at the lack of professionalism, at the unnecessary violence. Odinga prided himself on smooth jobs without gunfire; he couldn’t understand why Shakur’s people were growing trigger happy.

  It was inevitable that the Family’s increasing appetite for violence would turn deadly. It happened on the drizzly morning of Tuesday, June 2, 1981, outside a Chase Manhattan branch in the northern reaches of the Bronx. It was another armored-car job, one the group had canceled twice before at the last second, fearing, apparently incorrectly, that they had been spotted by police. Judy Clark was the lookout, alerting the Primary Team, all jammed into a yellow Plymouth station wagon, when the Brink’s truck was approaching the bank. When it appeared, Shakur pulled to a screeching halt beside and just behind it. Odinga jumped from the front seat, cradling a shotgun, and told the two couriers, William Moroney and Michael Schlachter, to freeze. They did so and followed his orders to lie on the pavement.