Days of Rage

by Bryan Burrough

  After recovering from her self-inflicted gunshot wound following the Brink’s robbery, Marilyn Buck initiated one final chapter in her struggle against the U.S. government. Together with five other longtime underground figures, including Susan Rosenberg and the onetime Weatherman Laura Whitehorn, she formed the “Armed Resistance Unit,” which took credit for eight bombings between 1983 and 1985, including a November 7, 1983, bombing of the U.S. Senate. That bomb, left under a bench, demolished a corridor, blowing off Senate Minority Leader Robert Byrd’s office door. Buck was arrested in Dobbs Ferry, New York, in May 1985; the others were all rounded up as well. All drew lengthy sentences. All those still alive have been freed.

  Six members of Ray Levasseur’s United Freedom Front were convicted on conspiracy charges at a federal trial in Brooklyn in 1986. The highlight came when Levasseur, acting as his own attorney, cross-examined Edmund Narine, the would-be cabbie who lost his leg in the group’s first bombing, at the Suffolk County Courthouse in 1976. (The group was later put on trial in Massachusetts, on charges of seditious conspiracy; this time all were acquitted or had charges dropped, in 1989.) Richard Williams, who also drew a life sentence for the murder of Trooper Philip Lamonaco, died of complications from hepatitis in a federal prison hospital in 2005. Tom Manning and Jaan Laaman remain in federal facilities today. Carol Manning, friends say, works in a factory in Maine. Pat Gros, who left Levasseur in the 1990s, is now a grandmother and works as a paralegal in Brooklyn.

  Levasseur himself drew a forty-five-year sentence. He served his time at the federal prison in Atlanta and at the Colorado “Supermax” prison. After twenty years, a full thirteen of which were spent in solitary confinement, he was paroled in 2004. Today he lives with his second wife in a farmhouse they built in a field outside Belfast, Maine. Active in efforts to free underground figures who remain in prison, he turns seventy in 2016.

  A second contingent of FALN fighters launched a brief second series of bombings, mostly in New York, in the early 1980s. Surveillance of a number of FALN supporters in the Chicago area eventually led the FBI to Willie Morales. In early 1983 the Bureau alerted Mexican authorities that Morales was hiding in the city of Puebla, southeast of Mexico City. When police went to arrest him, however, they found that Morales had five bodyguards. A shoot-out ensued. One policeman was killed, and all of the bodyguards. Morales was captured, but a U.S. extradition requests was denied, and he was eventually released and allowed to immigrate to Cuba, where he lives to this day.

  Eighteen members of the FALN served lengthy prison sentences for their roles in the group’s two campaigns. In the mid-1990s a clemency campaign drew the support of former president Jimmy Carter and ten Nobel Laureates. In 1999, with his wife, Hillary, seeking the support of Hispanic voters for a senatorial campaign in New York, President Bill Clinton offered clemency to sixteen of those imprisoned; all but two accepted. Both the House and the Senate passed measures condemning Clinton’s action, which remains controversial in conservative circles to this day. Marie Haydee Torres, who (along with her husband) was not offered clemency, was released after serving almost thirty years, in 2009; today a friend says she lives in Miami. Carlos Torres was released from an Illinois prison in 2010. A crowd of five hundred supporters held a celebration in Chicago; an even larger crowd welcomed him on his return to Puerto Rico. Oscar López remains in a federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana. He comes up for parole every few years. His supporters—and there are many in the Puerto Rican and radical communities—campaign for his release. In 2014 the Puerto Rican Day Parade in New York honored him as a “Puerto Rican patriot” who “was not convicted of a violent crime.”

  Of all those who went underground during the 1970s, few have gone on to more productive lives than alumni of the Weather Underground. Other than those who became involved with Mutulu Shakur, only Cathy Wilkerson served prison time, all of eleven months, on explosives charges related to the Townhouse. Most resumed more or less normal lives. Wilkerson remains a math instructor in the New York schools; she lives in Brooklyn with her longtime partner, the radical attorney Susan Tipograph. Ron Fliegelman worked as a special-education teacher in the New York schools for twenty-five years, retiring in 2007; today he and his wife live in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and are raising a son. Mark Rudd is a retired community college teacher in Albuquerque and gives talks about the sixties. Howard Machtinger lives in Durham, North Carolina, where he has worked as a high school teacher and at the University of North Carolina; he remains active in education reform efforts. Jonathan Lerner is a writer in New York. Russell Neufeld practices law in Manhattan. Robbie Roth taught social studies at Mission High School in San Francisco. Clayton Van Lydegraf died in 1992. Annie Stein died in 1981. Mona Mellis died in 1993.

  Several Weather alumni have risen to respected positions in their professions with very few knowing what they did in the 1970s. After attending law school, Paul Bradley, the pseudonym for one of Dohrn’s right-hand men, went on to a twenty-five-year career at one of the nation’s most prominent law firms. Today he lives in the Bay Area, where he advises a small start-up company or two; no one outside his family and other alumni has any clue that he spent years placing bombs in San Francisco–area buildings. Leonard Handelsman, a Weatherman in the Cleveland collective, went on to a distinguished career in psychiatry, becoming a full professor at Duke University, where he was medical director of the Duke Addictions Program. According to his longtime friend Howard Machtinger, who gave a eulogy when Handelsman died in 2005, no one outside his family knew of his life in the underground. Obituaries celebrated him only as a noted psychiatrist. Another Weatherman mentioned in this book became an accountant at a Big Four accounting firm in Vancouver. Today he is retired and active in local charities; he is not named here because of legal concerns. Another alumnus heads a children’s charity in Ohio, where an Internet biography indicates he has been appointed by three governors to sit on state task forces.

  Bernardine Dohrn has been a clinical associate professor of law at Northwestern University for more than twenty years. She has been active in efforts to reform the Chicago public schools and in international human rights activities. She has never disavowed her years as a Weatherman. Jeff Jones and Eleanor Stein were finally arrested in Yonkers, New York, in 1981 after the FBI received a tip on their whereabouts during the Brink’s investigations. Jones received probation on old explosives charges and became an environmental writer and activist in upstate New York, where he and Stein live today. Stein received a law degree from Queens College in 1986 and is today an administrative law judge with the New York State Public Service Commission. Michael Kennedy, who represented certain of Weather’s leaders, is today one of the most prominent attorneys in New York. Kennedy, who has served as a special adviser to the president of the United Nations General Assembly, lives with his wife, Eleanore, in a sumptuous apartment overlooking Central Park. Thanks to one of his old marijuana clients, he also happens to own High Times magazine.

  All these people, from Mark Rudd to Bernardine Dohrn, had been living upright lives for more than twenty years when the final underground fugitives, those of the SLA, were arrested. The most celebrated of these cases was that of Kathy Soliah, who had avoided capture for almost twenty-five years when, in 1999, she was twice profiled on the television show America’s Most Wanted. Following a viewer’s tip, the FBI arrested her in St. Paul, Minnesota, where she was living as Sara Jane Olson; she had married a doctor, briefly lived in Zimbabwe, and given birth to three children. Taken back to California in handcuffs, Soliah initially pled guilty to a pair of old explosives charges, then withdrew her plea, after which she was sentenced to two consecutive ten-years-to-life terms.

  The case generated a flurry of new interest in the SLA’s murder of Myrna Opsahl at the Crocker National Bank robbery in 1975, which had never been prosecuted. In 2002 charges of first-degree murder were filed against Soliah, as well as Michael Bortin and Bill and Emily Harris, all of whom had
been living quietly since brief jail sentences in the 1970s. Later that year police in South Africa arrested the last of the SLA fugitives, Jim Kilgore, who had been working under an assumed name as a history professor, married an American woman, and fathered two children. All five ended up pleading guilty; Emily Harris, now Emily Montague, admitted she had fired the fatal shot but insisted that the gun had gone off accidentally. The heaviest of the sentences was hers, eight years. By May 2009, when Kilgore was released, all had served their time. Today, of all those who joined the SLA, only Joseph Remiro remains behind bars, for the murder of Marcus Foster in 1973.

  After her pardon and release from prison in 1979, Patty Hearst, now known as Patricia Campbell Hearst Shaw, married one of her bodyguards, Bernard Shaw, and settled down to a quiet life as a socialite and heiress. Today she is perhaps best known for occasional acting jobs, most notably in a series of cameos and small roles in movies by the independent filmmaker John Waters. Her husband, with whom she raised two children, died in 2013.

  Hearst, like many of those who lived underground all those years ago, rarely speaks of her experiences today. Few do. Many have moved on; others will talk openly only with fellow radicals. When I put the question of legacy to Sekou Odinga, he heaved a heavy sigh and crossed his hands in his lap. He was sixty-eight the day we spoke. “Will I be remembered?” he asked. “I don’t really care. Let’s be real. What I care about are my children, and your children, and the children of tomorrow. I want them to study the past, and learn about it and carry on. Because America has only gotten worse. It has. At some point it’s gonna fall, because all empires fall. It’s on its way right now. There’s not going to be any America in fifty years. There’s not. And the youth of today has to be ready to pick up the pieces when that happens.”

  Sam Melville, and Jane Alpert, led the first significant radical bombing group, which detonated nearly a dozen bombs around Manhattan in the second half of 1969. Above, detectives nose through the wreckage of a Commerce Department office the group bombed in Foley Square that September.

  Bernardine Dohrn, brainy and charismatic, emerged as the queen of the 1970s-era underground: “La Pasionaria of the Lunatic Left,” as J. Edgar Hoover termed her. She spent much of her time underground in a beachside bungalow in Southern California, sometimes using a supporter’s small children as cover when scouting the Weather Underground’s bombing targets.

  Weatherman leadership at the notorious Days of Rage protest, Chicago, October 1969; left to right, Jim Mellen, Peter Clapp, John “JJ” Jacobs, and best friends Bill Ayers and Terry Robbins.

  Jeff Jones, the dashing Weatherman who orchestrated the disastrous “inversion” strategy that led to the group’s demise.

  March 6, 1970: New York firefighters work to extinguish fires after the deadly Townhouse explosion in Greenwich Village that left three Weathermen dead and forever altered the trajectory of the underground movement.

  Cathy Wilkerson, one of the Townhouse’s two survivors, became a West Coast bomb maker for the group.

  Ron Fliegelman, the Weather Underground’s unsung hero, perfected a bomb design and became the group’s explosives guru. He later fathered a daughter with Wilkerson.

  May 19, 1972: Pentagon officers guard the women’s restroom where a Weather Underground bomb exploded, destroying it.

  Clayton Van Lydegraf, the aging Communist who led the internal purge that destroyed the group.

  Mark Rudd, the hero of the 1968 Columbia riots who was marginalized after going underground and eventually surrendered in September 1977.

  Joanne Chesimard, a.k.a. Assata Shakur, at left, being led into a New Jersey jail, January 29, 1976. Hailed as the “heart and soul” of the Black Liberation Army—an overstatement, some say—Chesimard was an archetype for a string of machine-gun-toting blaxploitation-film heroines during the 1970s.

  Richard “Dhoruba” Moore, the BLA’s most important early organizer, escorted by New York detectives after his arrest, June 5, 1971.

  Twymon Ford Meyers, the young BLA gunman who may have been the underground era’s deadliest soldier.

  Deputy Police Commissioner Robert Daley and two New York police officials examine the East Village scene of the BLA’s gruesome murders of Officers Gregory Foster and Rocco Laurie, January 27, 1972. Chalk outlines on the sidewalk indicate the position of the officers’ fallen bodies.

  New York police and fire engines responding to the FALN’s bombing of the Fraunces Tavern restaurant, which killed four diners, January 24, 1975. Oscar LÓpez, top left, was the FALN’s mastermind, a onetime community organizer in Chicago who orchestrated dozens of bombings and armed raids in New York and Chicago between 1974 and 1980. Marie Haydee Torres, bottom left, was convicted of planting the deadly FALN bomb at Mobil Oil headquarters in New York in 1977. Willie Morales, top right, survived an accidental explosion that blew off nine of his fingers and much of his face in July 1978. His subsequent escape from Bellevue Hospital’s prison ward was one of the underground’s crowning achievements.

  February 22, 1974: Hundreds of Oakland residents line up for the Randolph Hearst family’s initial food giveaway, part of the ransom the Symbionese Liberation Army demanded for the release of Hearst’s daughter, Patty.

  Patty during a 1972 vacation in Greece.

  A surveillance-camera photo of Patty Hearst in her first appearance as an SLA soldier during the robbery of a Hibernia Bank branch in San Francisco, April 15, 1974.

  The eight members of the SLA’s first incarnation. Donald DeFreeze, the escaped prisoner who styled himself “General Field Marshal Cinque,” stands in the middle of the back row.

  A woman and her children flee the SLA shoot-out in South Central Los Angeles, May 17, 1974.

  Ray Levasseur, a French Canadian radical, led the most unusual of the 1970s-era underground groups: two blue-collar couples (later three) and their children who detonated bombs and robbed banks up and down the East Coast between 1976 and 1984.

  Police and fire officials examine the damages from the group’s first bombing, of Boston’s Suffolk County Courthouse, 1976.

  Several members of the group as portrayed in an FBI circular around 1982.

  Levasseur in 1989.

  Sekou Odinga, perhaps the most respected militant of his age, masterminded more than a dozen bank robberies and took part in a pair of daring jailbreaks during an underground career that spanned thirteen years.

  His partner Mutulu Shakur, was the cocaine-addled head of “the Family,” the ragtag alliance of black and white radicals that staged the era’s bloodiest raid, the $1.6 million robbery of a Brink’s armored car in suburban Nanuet, New York, October 20, 1981.

  Marilyn Buck, the only white member of the Black Liberation Army, walked away from a federal prison to become Odinga and Shakur’s aide-de-camp.

  Buck, together with Silvia Baraldini, formed the nucleus of the band of radical women the Family nicknamed “the white edge.”

  The U-Haul trailer and a police cruiser pockmarked by bullets fired in the shoot-out following the Brink’s robbery.

  Those who joined the underground struggle met a variety of fates. Assata Shakur, lives in Cuba. She remains a wanted fugitive today.

  Dhoruba bin-Wahad, is an activist living in the Atlanta area.

  Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, and their son, Zayd Dohrn, outside a New York federal courthouse in 1982.

  Ayers, is an author, activist, and retired professor of education at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

  Silvia Baraldini, right, lives in Rome.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book, like so many others, is built on the kindnesses extended by so many people, from friends and family to research assistants to my fellow writers and historians. I have been very fortunate to work
for and with some of the most talented people in media and publishing. Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair magazine, where I have had the privilege to write for twenty-three years, remains the very best in the business, probably one of the best ever. For twenty-one of those years I have worked with the same amazing editor, Doug Stumpf, whose patience I have probably tested more during this book than all my other books combined. His assistant, Jaime Lalinde, has been invaluable, and is surely on his way to a long career in this business. Andrew Wylie, my agent now for a startling twenty-six years, is unsurpassed; it is a rare gift to work with an agent this prominent and this capable, yet who rarely fails to return a message inside ten minutes. Andrew’s colleague Jeff Posternak has overseen my daily hand-holding for years. I could not do this without Jeff. In Los Angeles, Brian Siberell at the Creative Artists Agency has been Days of Rage’s biggest proponent. Thanks to you all.