The Burglary

by Betty Medsger

  The burglars were not boxing fans, but they became fans of this match. All of them eventually grasped the idea that the match was going to be so special that it was possible nearly every sports-loving person in the country—maybe, they dared to think, even the people who lived in the apartments on the two floors above the FBI office—would be riveted to their televisions and radios that night.

  Their discussion of which night to break in became very exciting. The buzz of a neighborhood full of televisions and radios tuned to the fight might provide white noise sufficient to muffle the noise of footsteps and other burglary-in-progress sounds. People might be totally absorbed and not easily distracted by random noise. And if there was any chance that a Media FBI agent would be inspired to work overtime at night—during casing, not once did the burglars observe an FBI agent working at the office after 5 p.m.—the night of the Ali-Frazier fight surely would be the least likely one for such inspiration to strike.

  The possibility that noise generated by the fight could serve as a distraction struck the burglars as a great stroke of luck. Even the local police, they thought, might be so glued to their televisions and radios that evening that they would make few, if any, street patrols. That did it. They chose the night of the Ali-Frazier fight—Monday, March 8, 1971.

  Actually, the fight was projected to be a much bigger phenomenon than the burglars realized. During his exile, Ali had become a hero throughout the world because he placed his opposition to the war above his boxing career, because he was brash and bold in his defense of the rights of black people not only in the United States but also in the emerging independent countries of Africa. Even Nelson Mandela, the great South African antiapartheid leader, regarded Ali as a hero. In the middle of his long imprisonment on Robben Island in South Africa, Mandela later said, when Ali became a conscientious objector, he embraced Ali and saw him as a sym-bol of hope and courage. On a shelf behind Mandela’s desk in his home are framed photographs of two Americans—Barack Obama and Muhammad Ali.

  In December 1970, when the prohibition was lifted on Ali boxing, he immediately agreed to fight Frazier. Ali had defended the world heavyweight title nine times before he was shut out of the ring. Because he had not lost the title in a match, he and his supporters insisted he still held it. Frazier won the title in February 1970, but he knew he would not really be regarded as the heavyweight champion until he beat Ali. Frazier desperately wanted to fight Ali. He even enlisted President Richard Nixon in the effort, meeting with the president at the White House to get his assistance in helping Ali return to the ring. Frazier later described his conversation with Nixon: “I went down to DC to help Ali get his license back. President Nixon invited me up for tea: ‘Joe, if I do that, can you take him?’ I said, ‘You dust him off, I’ll beat him up.’ Nixon kept his word. So did I.”

  It was the most anticipated heavyweight title fight since Joe Louis defeated Max Schmeling in their 1938 fight at Yankee Stadium when the world was on the brink of World War II. Schmeling was not a Nazi, but Hitler used his previous victory over Louis to promote the Nazi belief in Aryan superiority. The win by Louis against Schmeling in 1938 in that perilous time was considered a great triumph by Americans, especially African Americans.

  Now another war hovered over the Ali-Frazier fight and also over the Media burglary. The strong cultural and political forces spawned by stances for and against the Vietnam War fueled both the burglary and the fight. Without the war, and the burglars’ fear that the government was suppressing dissent against it, they would not have been planning to break into an FBI office. Without the Vietnam War, Ali and Frazier would not have faced each other in 1971 under such extraordinary conditions. Ali, the most famous conscientious objector to the Vietnam War, was embraced internationally by people who opposed the war. Frazier, who supported the war, was embraced by people who supported it, including the president. Ali was reviled by politicians throughout the country—first for choosing to be a Muslim and then for refusing to serve in Vietnam. Frazier, the son of a South Carolina sharecropper who had fought his way to the championship, increasingly had become a symbol of conservative working-class Americans.

  Anticipation for the fight intensified as Ali, in interview after interview in early 1971, promised he would make a comeback the night of the fight. “On that night,” he playfully predicted, “they’ll be waiting everywhere—England, France, Italy. Egypt and Israel will declare a forty-five minute truce. Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran; even Red China and Formosa. Not since time began has there been a night like this. People will be singing and dancing in the aisles. And when it’s all over, Muhammad Ali will take his rightful place as champion of the world.”

  Ali’s playful exaggerations aside, he was at that time, according to journalist and book editor Peter Osnos, “arguably the most charismatic popular figure around the world.” In 2002, journalist Jack Newfield wrote that Ali achieved the distinction of being “the most famous face on the planet, and probably the most loved person, if a democratic election were held that included Africa, the Islamic world, America and Vietnam.”

  THE BURGLARS’ DEFAULT HEADQUARTERS was the Raineses’ home, a large gray stone house surrounded by tall, wide trees on Walnut Lane in the racially integrated Germantown neighborhood of northwest Philadelphia. Inside and outside, it looked solidly normal, old-fashioned, welcoming, and innocent. It did not look like a place where people perfected burglary skills and plans. Evenings often started with dinner at the Raineses’ house. Bonnie Raines seemed to be able to expand spaghetti magically to serve everyone as many helpings as they wanted. The dinners were pleasant occasions, especially for the Raineses’ three children. As far as the children were concerned, these new friends of their parents were part of their family during the three months burglary preparations were under way. They enjoyed the silly games and stories some of the burglars invented for them during those dinners. They especially enjoyed playing with Bob Williamson, who was warm and friendly with them. Most evenings, as dinner ended, a babysitter would arrive, and John and Bonnie and the other burglars would say goodbye to the children, drive to Media, usually two people per car, with each twosome armed with specific casing assignments for the evening.

  After a few hours of casing, the burglars usually returned to the Raineses’ house and went upstairs to the attic on the third floor, their well-concealed training ground. As they climbed the stairs, they passed the three Raines children asleep in their bedrooms. The children were a vivid reminder of the serious implications to be faced if the burglary failed.

  The Media burglars had no idea, of course, that FBI agents conducted a lot of burglaries and that they too trained to be burglars in an attic. Classes for agents in how to break into homes and offices and conduct what the director called “black bag” jobs were taught regularly in the attic of the building where bureau headquarters were then located, in the Department of Justice Building.

  Anyone visiting the Raineses’ comfortable first-floor living room, as two FBI agents did several weeks after the burglary, would have found it difficult to imagine what took place in that attic late most evenings during that period. The conspirators tacked notes on the wall about observations made during casing. A large map of Media was placed on one wall. So were to-do lists. The attic was the only place where any of the burglars kept tangible information about their plans. Eventually, a diagram of the inside of the FBI office was added to a wall. They studied it very carefully, plotting how to move from room to room, file cabinet to file cabinet.

  The Raineses’ attic also was a place where some of the burglars crashed for the night when they worked very late, as they often did. John and Bonnie Raines dragged a few mattresses up to the attic, plus an old sofa and a couple of chairs, all bought at the secondhand furniture store a few blocks away on Germantown Avenue.

  SHORTLY AFTER intensive planning started, the group was briefly interrupted by a startling development. On January 12, the leader of the group, Davidon, was named an unindicted coco
nspirator in an indictment that resurrected the accusations J. Edgar Hoover had made in November that the Berrigan brothers, Philip and Daniel, and others were plotting to kidnap a high national official and blow up tunnels under federal buildings in Washington. Despite the fact that FBI investigators and Department of Justice prosecutors had decided not to pursue the case, the department reopened it in December after Hoover’s testimony and hastily presented it to a grand jury in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Six people, including Philip Berrigan, were charged as conspirators, and six other people, including Daniel Berrigan and Davidon, were named as unindicted coconspirators. The same officials who had considered the case baseless in the fall now, apparently in order to save Hoover’s face, had produced an indictment in which the defendants, if convicted of the kidnap conspiracy charge, could be sentenced to life in prison. At the time of the indictment, FBI officials were told by prosecutors—as revealed in the official files of the Media burglary—that Davidon might be indicted in the case at a later date, a possibility that he of course did not know.

  Davidon’s circumstances made the burglars’ situation somewhat surreal at this very early stage of the planning for Media. As they plotted in deep secrecy to burglarize an FBI office, the name of the leader of the group was reported prominently in national news stories for his alleged involvement in one of the most controversial criminal cases brought against antiwar activists during the Vietnam War.

  The Department of Justice went out of its way to draw attention to the indictment. Not that it needed to. Any indictment of priests, nuns, and others who were well known for being nonviolent antiwar activists and were being charged with conspiracy to commit violent crimes, kidnapping and bombing, was guaranteed to attract significant attention, with or without a push from the Department of Justice. Nevertheless, the day the indictment was announced, Robert L. Stevenson, on the staff of the department’s public information office, called reporters who covered the FBI and told them there would be a press conference very soon to announce a significant development. If measured “on a news scale of one to ten”—with ten the most sensational news—this story “would be twelve,” he told them. Stevenson was known to reporters for calmness, so they took his sensational alert very seriously. The atmosphere at the press room was so hyperactive as reporters waited for the press conference to begin that they agreed among themselves that only two announcements would cause that much excitement at the department: the arrest of leading Black Panthers or the retirement of Hoover, then seventy-six, as director.

  The indictment was a leading news story that evening and the next morning throughout the country and also abroad. It was reframed and reported again and again over the next few weeks. The rumor quickly spread that the high official the group allegedly was considering kidnapping was Henry Kissinger, then President Nixon’s national security adviser, one of the most prominent and powerful people in the Nixon administration and a key architect of Vietnam War policy.

  Davidon flew home from Puerto Rico the day after the indictment was announced. When the news broke, he was on the island of Culebra, with other pacifists, protesting the U.S. Navy’s use of that inhabited island for bombing practice. He left as quickly as possible because he was afraid the presence of someone just named in a controversial antiwar case might taint the efforts of local residents to convince the Navy to stop bombing their island. Immediately upon his arrival in Philadelphia, he met with reporters and, in his typical way, was direct and forthright about a conversation that he assumed was the basis for the charges in the indictment. He said he had participated in that conversation the previous August at the Connecticut home of the in-laws of one of the now indicted parties, Pakistani scholar Eqbal Ahmad.

  The conversation, Davidon told reporters, occurred at a time of great hopelessness in the peace movement, including for the few activists from the Catholic peace movement who had gathered there that Sunday afternoon for dinner. One of them suggested they should brainstorm about stronger nonviolent ways to protest the war. Several ideas, he said, were expressed in a conversation that lasted less than thirty minutes. Davidon recalled that someone suggested a small number of people could make a citizens’ arrest of an official closely associated with decisions about the conduct of the war, someone like Henry Kissinger. It was suggested he could be taken to a meeting of antiwar intellectuals who would confront him with his “war crimes” and then release him unharmed. Two of the women present, he said, immediately pronounced the idea preposterous. Even Ahmad, who had originally spun the possibility, rejected it a few minutes after he suggested it. All of them readily agreed that the possibility of violence accidentally occurring during such an action was too great. The idea was rejected by all, Davidon said, nearly as quickly as it was suggested.

  That Davidon was named in the indictment did not seem to make the burglars even pause. Their understated response to Davidon’s situation was the first of several instances in which they faced circumstances that could have been regarded as serious impediments to moving ahead. Now, as later, they acknowledged the situation but were neither consumed nor deterred by it. Neither Davidon nor other members of the group seemed to be very concerned that the leader of the group was an unindicted coconspirator who should be assumed to be under close surveillance by their target, the FBI.

  Perhaps it was fitting that at this stage of their planning Davidon taught the burglars telephone techniques to use while planning the burglary. His basic advice was simple: be natural but careful. He remembers that during the early days of planning one of the burglars said something like this to him during a phone conversation: “I really shouldn’t tell you this on the phone …” As the conversation continued, Davidon remembers searching for his most relaxed voice and then casually saying, “Look, tell me anything you want to on the phone.” At the next meeting of the group, he turned the incident into a lesson and strongly advised them not to show any suspicious behavior on the phone, never to reveal important information, and never to sound fearful or conspiratorial. “Sound perfectly normal” was his mantra for phone manners for burglars. They used phones as little as possible to communicate with one another about important matters during the weeks they were planning the burglary. They usually made their plans for next steps at meetings. Inevitably, though, they had to be in touch with one another by phone about changes in plans.

  Davidon’s approach to talking on the phone while planning a burglary was similar to his approach to all other aspects of the burglary: “I was careful in ways that were inconspicuous.” For instance, “I didn’t know I was being tapped, but I was suspicious about it and acted accordingly and advised others to do the same.…We were very careful.” When years later he requested and received files the FBI had kept on him, he learned what he had suspected—that during the months when the Media burglary was being planned he “had only tapped phone conversations.”

  Despite the constant surveillance Davidon was under before and during that time, he was not arrested in connection with any of the draft board raids in which he had participated. He, his wife, Ann, and numerous AWOL soldiers had talked on the Davidons’ tapped home phone while making clandestine arrangements for these soldiers to stay with them while they considered their next steps as conscientious objectors. All of those conversations were recorded and transcribed, word by word, by the FBI, including conversations of Media burglars about meetings and other matters related to the burglary. Apparently the meaning of the carefully transcribed conversations had eluded the FBI. During that time, Davidon used his phone to arrange to rent a car and a motel room for the night of the burglary. At least three of the burglars were recorded talking with Davidon and his wife. Even the conversations of his young daughters, Sarah, then age five, and Ruth, age seven, with their little friends were transcribed. Davidon received the lengthy transcripts years later in response to his Freedom of Information Act request.

  WITH THE DATE of the burglary set, the burglars focused in early January on developing a comprehensiv
e plan for casing. They approached casing with what they considered simple common sense. They were not frequent readers of mystery novels, with clever burglars’ tricks stored in their memories. But they were smart. For them, the burglary was a problem-solving exercise. They relied primarily on simple logic: They figured out what they needed to do to accomplish their goal. There were, of course, no manuals on the thinking person’s approach to successful burglary. This was a make-it-up-as-you-go project.

  The overall strategy of casing was to become thoroughly knowledgeable about what normally happened near and inside the place to be burglarized. Casing was deadly dull, tedious and boring, the burglars all agree. But it was the most important part of preparing for the burglary. Discoveries made while casing revealed actions the burglars should take and actions they should avoid. From the outset, they realized discoveries made then would determine whether the burglary would take place.

  The burglars started with the premise that they could not protect themselves against all irregularities—say, the rare instance when a Media FBI agent returned to the office to work after standard working hours—but they should be able to case so well that they could protect themselves against predictable events. For example, they should not plan to leave the FBI office, suitcases in hand, around the time when they knew from observation that a particular resident of the building usually arrived home after working an evening shift. The irregularities were numerous and troubling. Because of the open hallway and stairwell inside the building, for example, the burglars could not protect themselves against being seen by residents who lived in one of the apartments on the two floors above the FBI office. One of the residents might at any time leave their apartment in the middle of the burglary to go out to buy a quart of milk. They tried to be thorough, leaving as little as possible to chance, but they knew surprises could happen. Later that realization became more than an intellectual exercise.