Days of Rage

by Bryan Burrough

  Back in the car, Rison, carrying an M16, was momentarily unable to open his door; a parked car blocked it. By the time Shakur inched the car forward, allowing Rison to exit, he was screaming and cursing. Emerging into the parking lot, Rison glanced at the two prone Brink’s couriers and inexplicably opened fire, raking both men with bullets. Schlachter was hit three times; he would survive. Moroney, who was fifty-nine that day, a thirty-eight-year Brink’s veteran, would not. He was shot four times, twice in the head. Odinga and the others gathered their wits long enough to grab several money bags, then drove off, at one point firing a burst of gunfire at a bakery truck whose driver was blocking their exit from the parking lot.

  The murder of William Moroney was a turning point for the Family. For the first time they drew the attention of the NYPD, which launched a full-scale investigation, assigning fifty officers from the Major Case Squad, the Central Robbery Division, and the Bronx Detective Division to pursue the robbers full-time. A nearby security guard, Willie Lee, sat with police sketch artists, and the resulting drawings of three of the robbers were published in the Daily News; they closely resembled Shakur, Balagoon, and Sundiata. Shakur was shaken; he had his hair braided in an effort to change his appearance. Both Rison and Odinga began talking about retirement. After the robbery the two hid out in rural Georgia, where Rison had purchased a house. Shakur gave him money to buy more land so all of them could build homes nearby.

  It wasn’t just the Primary Team that was running scared. Moroney’s murder also provoked an unprecedented revolt among the white women. “June 2, 1981, I’ll never forget that day: the day Tyrone Rison shot the guard,” says Silvia Baraldini, who was not involved in the robbery. “Everybody was very upset about that. Until then we had done everything possible to avoid violence. That had been our agreement. . . . I told [Shakur], ‘This cannot be ignored.’ We, the white women, decided a pause had to be taken. We said we would participate in nothing else until a meeting was held to confront these issues. But that didn’t happen, because people were scared. They scattered to the four winds.”

  Not until it was far too late would Baraldini realize that no one, least of all Mutulu Shakur, was listening to a word she said.

  • • •

  All this—the string of botched robberies, the murder of William Moroney, the accelerating spiral into rampant violence and drug use—played out against the backdrop of a year-long debate within the Primary Team over the wisdom of the ambitious armored-car robbery Mutulu Shakur was planning outside a Chemical Bank branch in the suburb of Nanuet, across the Hudson River in Rockland County, New York. Shakur had studied the job for months and was certain it could be their biggest haul ever, easily more than $1 million in free cash. Shakur was so excited he gave the robbery a nickname: the Big Dance.

  Money from the Big Dance, he assured a skeptical Odinga, would fulfill all their dreams. Odinga and Rison could retire in comfort if they wanted. Or they could join Shakur and Sundiata, who swore they planned to use their share of the proceeds to launch a true revolutionary assault, the planned bombing of a string of New York police precincts. Odinga had studied Shakur’s plans for the Big Dance in detail, however, and he believed it was a suicide mission. If they got caught in traffic, they would be sitting ducks. Worse, Shakur planned to stage the robbery in the late afternoon, when the Brink’s truck was ending its route laden with a full day’s cash; for Odinga, this was far too close to rush hour. “The plan actually made sense,” he recalls. “But it had to go perfectly. If just one thing went wrong, they were dead, and they had no backup plan. There was only one way in and out of that town, the highways, and they were going to use the highways. It was stupid.”

  For a time Odinga agreed to go along, though he and Rison secretly agreed to abort at the slightest hint of danger. They had actually attempted the Nanuet robbery no fewer than four times, once the previous fall and three times that May. Each time the truck either failed to show, or Odinga or Shakur bailed at the last minute; after the last attempt, Odinga said he would try no more. Each time Shakur urged him to reconsider, Odinga argued in favor of another bank, in the Bronx. The publicity and internal arguments that erupted in the wake of William Moroney’s murder did nothing to curb Shakur’s zeal for the job. By that fall he had decided once again to attempt the Big Dance, this time without Odinga and Rison. He and the other members of the Primary Team, Balagoon and Sundiata, thought the payoff was worth the risk. The white women, as usual, would do as they were told.

  All that August and September Shakur made his preparations. He brought in several other of his BAAANA acolytes to help out. Marilyn Buck and Judy Clark agreed to drive trailing cars. “I was in Rome October 10 when I heard all this,” Silvia Baraldini recalls. “Susan Rosenberg called me. [She said,] ‘You have to come back. Things are bad.’ So I return and the situation is this thing has been planned, and there’s no going back. I couldn’t stop it.”

  • • •

  That Tuesday, October 20, 1981, was a special day for the three guards in the silver Brink’s truck, the last they would enjoy after fifteen years working together. Peter Paige, a forty-nine-year-old father of three, was being transferred to a new route; all three men were feeling a bit nostalgic. That morning at 7:30, as a crisp north wind whipped leaves in the armored truck’s wake, they headed down to a bank in Newark, the first stop in their daily run. At each stop Paige and his partner, Joe Trombino, hauled out the pushcart, rolled it inside, then returned to the truck laden with white canvas bags of cash as their driver, an easygoing forty-eight-year-old named James Kelly, filled out the paperwork on a clipboard in the front seat. Hopscotching their way up the west side of the Hudson, they had made seventeen stops when Kelly pulled the truck up in front of the Chemical Bank in Nanuet.

  Sitting across the street in a red Chevrolet van, Shakur cursed as he glimpsed only a single bag on the pushcart Paige and Trombino wheeled out of the bank. Once again he decided to hold off. As the Brink’s truck eased away from the curb, heading to its final stop, a bank inside the Nanuet Mall, Shakur fell in behind, furious, hoping they would hit pay dirt at the final stop. Everything was in place, maybe for the last time. A mile away, the ex-Weathermen David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin were waiting behind a department store in the switch vehicle, a U-Haul trailer. Marilyn Buck and Judy Clark were trailing the van in a tan Honda. This was not to mention the four cocaine-fueled armed robbers hunched behind Shakur in the van.

  Five minutes later the Brink’s truck coasted to a stop beside a rear entrance of the mall. It was 3:35. All across Nanuet and its adjoining suburbs, schoolchildren were piling into buses for the ride home. Fifteen miles away, traffic on the Tappan Zee Bridge was thickening. As Paige and Trombino rolled the pushcart inside for what would be their last stop together, Shakur idled the van in the parking lot, watching. On his nod, Kuwasi Balagoon jumped out and strode to a bench at a bus stop across from the armored truck.

  “If you’re waiting for the bus, we just missed it,” a woman named Barbara Bowles volunteered. “We have an hour to wait.”

  Balagoon sat beside her. Keeping one eye trained on the mall entrance, he remarked what a beautiful autumn day it was, how striking the multicolored leaves were. Just the other morning, he said, he had seen a tree so red it reminded him of the burning bush.

  “Oh, like in the Bible,” Bowles said with a chuckle.

  Balagoon fell silent as he studied the setup. There was scaffolding over the mall entrance. Two workers stood atop it. When Bowles asked if he knew what they were doing, he said, “No.”

  Balagoon was still staring at the mall when the Brink’s men reappeared, the pushcart before them, three bulging bags draped down its length. Making a split-second decision, Shakur floored the accelerator, and the red van surged forward, racing between rows of parked cars. As it did, the two Brink’s guards reached the back of the armored truck, Kelly mashed a button unlocking the rear door, and Trombino lifted one of the three
bags and tossed it inside.

  The van screeched to a halt beside the truck. Bedlam ensued. Three men in ski masks leaped out the back. Maybe it was the cocaine coursing through their veins, maybe the frustration of waiting all these months, but this time the Family shouted no warnings and took no prisoners. They just opened fire. Two men from the van hoisted automatic weapons and raked the truck with gunfire. As they did, Balagoon pulled a pistol and ran toward it, firing at the two guards. Trombino managed to yank out his pistol and fire a shot before a bullet tore into his shoulder, nearly ripping his arm off. Inside the truck, Kelly first thought he was hearing firecrackers. Spying the four men with guns, he yelled to Trombino, “Grab the shotgun!” Grasping his wound, Trombino hollered back, “I got no arm!”

  Gunfire exploded across the mall parking lot. Peter Paige, shot in the throat, fell to an adjacent sidewalk and was dead within minutes. One of the attackers fired two blasts into the windshield, showering Kelly with glass and blowing him against the seat, where he fell unconscious. One of Shakur’s men, Sundiata, jumped from the van and, along with the others, stepped over the fallen guards and snatched up six blood-smeared money sacks; all told, they contained nearly $1.6 million in cash. The sacks were so heavy Sundiata broke three fingernails lifting them. The attackers were in such a rush they failed to notice more money sacks inside. They left behind $1.3 million.

  It was over in forty seconds. The red Chevy van and its occupants, all uninjured, roared off across the parking lot. Inside, Shakur and his men were jubilant, shouting, “We did it! We did it!” As they disappeared into afternoon traffic, Kelly came to. He staggered into the back of the Brink’s truck, where blood lay so thick on the floor he later compared it to chocolate pudding. Stepping out the back, he cradled Trombino’s head as a group of bystanders ran up, asking what they could do. Over and over and over, Kelly kept saying, “They shot my friends. They shot my friends. They shot my friends.”*

  • • •

  While Mutulu Shakur readied for the robbery by cleaning guns and studying escape routes, David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin had been preoccupied with a more prosaic concern: finding a babysitter. Leaving Gilbert’s green Toyota outside the sitter’s building on West 108th Street that morning, Boudin had taken fourteen-month-old Chesa upstairs and dropped him off, promising to be back by five o’clock, even though the robbery was set for four, on the eve of rush hour. On the sidewalk she ran into a friend who volunteered to take Chesa on a play date in Central Park later. Boudin said that would be nice.

  The couple had been underground for eleven years. Like almost all the Weathermen, they hadn’t actually done much for ten of those years, not since their narrow escape from San Francisco FBI agents—“the Encirclement”—back in the spring of 1971. Gilbert had spent much of his time idling in Denver, though he later took credit for the bombing of a Puerto Rican bank branch in New York in 1975. He had actually gone aboveground for a time after Weather’s demise, eventually joining Boudin in New York when she decided to begin helping Baraldini and the other May 19 women. After surviving both the Townhouse and the Encirclement, Boudin seems to have split her time between San Francisco, New York, and Boston, where she is believed to have helped out in several minor bombings. By 1980 she and Gilbert were squabbling new parents, living separately in New York, keeping their revolutionary dreams alive by helping Shakur and Odinga rob banks.

  This was the first robbery they had joined—though Boudin, who took a job at a car-rental agency, had secured cars for several jobs—and she was nervous as Gilbert drove into the Bronx. They parked outside the offices of Kingsbridge Moving and Storage on 230th Street and rented an orange-and-silver U-Haul truck. From a burlap knapsack Gilbert lifted out several rolls of contact paper, which they hung inside the rear windows so no one could see inside. They then drove up the Hudson, crossing the river at the Tappan Zee Bridge, and were at the rendezvous point, the rear loading dock of an abandoned Korvettes department store, three hours before the robbery.

  Boudin was deeply frightened. Guns scared her. As they waited, she couldn’t sit still. Gilbert assured her everything would be fine. Finally, just before four o’clock, he suggested she walk around to the back of the truck and make sure everything was in place.

  Just then Mutulu Shakur’s red Chevy van swerved around the back of the store. Inexplicably, Shakur stopped the vehicle a hundred feet short of the truck. Gilbert, his rearview mirror obstructed for about thirty seconds by Boudin, didn’t see the van. When he finally did, Boudin hopped back inside, and Gilbert—despite having been strictly admonished never to move from his designated position—drove over to the waiting van. By all accounts, this was the group’s fatal error. The spot where Gilbert had parked could not be seen from nearby homes. But the spot Shakur chose could. Afterward more than one observer remarked that it was just the kind of sloppy error Sekou Odinga would never have made.

  A single, unpaved lane, Main Drive, ran into the back of the Korvettes parking lot. A single house, separated from the lot by a chain-link fence, afforded a view of not only Shakur’s van but Gilbert’s U-Haul truck—and now a third car, the tan Honda driven by Judy Clark. And, as fate would have it, at that very moment a college student named Sandra Torgersen glanced up from an economics paper she was writing and peered through the living room of the house on Main Drive. Out in the parking lot she saw a black man with a rifle standing beside the van. A half-dozen other people, blacks and whites, men and women, were scurrying about, transferring what appeared to be heavy burlap bags between cars.

  “Mom, there’s a man with a gun outside,” Sandra yelled to her mother, Roxanne, who was busy in the basement. As Roxanne scurried up the stairs, Sandra grabbed a pen and paper and hustled out into the yard, hoping to scribble down license plate numbers. By the time she reached the fence, only the red van remained. It appeared abandoned. Sandra ran back inside and called the police. “I just saw something strange happen behind Korvettes,” she told the dispatcher. Quickly she described the black men with guns and, crucially, all three vehicles: the van, the U-Haul, and the Honda. Police from all over Rockland County were already converging on the robbery site. Within minutes descriptions of the three vehicles were broadcast widely.

  • • •

  Police in the scenic village of Nyack, splayed atop high cliffs lining the Hudson River at the western end of the vast Tappan Zee Bridge, knew what to do when there was a robbery in Rockland County: block all routes to the bridge. When word of the Nanuet Mall gunfight was broadcast at 3:56 p.m., a young officer named Brian Lennon was sipping coffee in the Village Donut Shop on Main Street. Lennon’s radio burbled, and a superior ordered him to block the entrance to the New York Thruway at Route 59, a mile west of the bridge. Lennon leaped into his patrol car and made it to the highway entrance in three minutes. The police band was exploding with orders and information, and by the time Lennon pulled his cruiser across the single-lane entrance to the Thruway, he had heard a description of the getaway cars.

  The moment he stepped into the road, a shotgun in one hand, three vehicles were lined up in front of him. As luck would have it, the first was the gang’s tan Honda. Judy Clark was behind the wheel, Marilyn Buck at her side. The second car was a BMW driven by a woman named Norma Hill, who, with her elderly mother beside her, needed to get to the dry cleaner’s in time to dress for a dinner she and her husband were hosting that night at the Rainbow Room atop Rockefeller Center. Officer Lennon barely noticed either car. His eyes were trained on the orange-and-silver U-Haul truck directly beyond them. As he pointed his shotgun toward the truck, a pair of Nyack police cars pulled up behind it.

  Officers emerged from both. One was Waverly Brown, an air force veteran who was the only black man on the Nyack force; everyone called him “Chipper.” The second was a tall, thin sergeant named Edward O’Grady, a red-haired Vietnam veteran. Both stepped onto the road behind the U-Haul, guns drawn. A detective named Arthur Keenan followed.

&n
bsp; Ahead, Officer Lennon waved Clark’s Honda through. Glancing into her rearview mirror, acutely aware of the drama unfolding behind her, she pulled to the side of the road fifty feet beyond Lennon’s cruiser, stepped out, and peered back at the roadblock. Norma Hill slowed her BMW to ask what was going on, but Officer Lennon dismissed her with a wave of his hand. “Move on,” he said.

  Staring at the U-Haul as it inched forward, Lennon raised his shotgun and pointed it directly at the dark-haired woman sitting in the passenger seat. It was Kathy Boudin. At the wheel sat David Gilbert. Behind them, hidden under a blanket, crouched Mutulu Shakur and four very excitable armed robbers carrying M16s and shotguns. As he drove, relaying reports on the traffic to Shakur, Gilbert had been doing yoga-inspired breathing exercises to stay calm. Beside him Boudin was coming unglued. The guns, the blood, the machismo—it was all too much for her. She desperately wanted to get back to the babysitter’s.

  When Officer Lennon motioned with his shotgun, Boudin opened the passenger door and stepped out, hands held high. Almost immediately she doubled over, as if in pain, shying away from Lennon’s weapon. Gilbert calmly stepped out of the van as well, hands over his head. He walked around the vehicle and joined Kathy on the grassy roadside, where the three officers and Detective Keenan trained their guns on them.

  The three officers exchanged glances. No one spoke the obvious. The Nanuet Mall attackers had been black men. This couple was white. The difference lay at the heart of Mutulu Shakur’s plans and always had. David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin believed they were aiding a black revolutionary army. They were risking their lives for that one simple, foolish belief. To Shakur, who cared far more for cocaine and cash than for some imaginary black revolution, they were simply white faces, “crackers,” whose sole use was in distracting the police.