American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst

by Jeffrey Toobin

  Guns and bombs were his obsession and his downfall. DeFreeze was almost the opposite of a master criminal; he was most inventive in finding ways to get caught. In New Jersey, he tried to kidnap the black caretaker of a synagogue in hopes (he thought) of obtaining a ransom from the rabbi; in Cleveland, he was arrested coming out of a bank with two guns and a bomb; in Los Angeles, he was stopped carrying a pair of bombs on a bicycle; he paid a prostitute $10 for sex, then pulled a gun on her to get the money back. Remarkably, in light of this long series of crimes during the 1960s, DeFreeze never received much more than probation. After one arrest, in 1968, a court-appointed psychiatrist wrote that DeFreeze was an “emotionally confused and conflicted young man with deep-rooted feelings of inadequacy….His disorganization and impaired social adjustment seem to suggest a strong schizophrenic potential….His fascination with firearms and explosives makes him dangerous.”

  DeFreeze’s run of luck in sentencing finally ran out in 1969 after he pistol-whipped a Hawaiian tourist in Los Angeles and stole a check from her purse. He was caught when he tried to cash it two days later. At his trial, DeFreeze rejected the aid of a lawyer and represented himself, with predictably disastrous results. His defense was built around a rambling and largely incomprehensible explanation of how the victim’s check came to be in his possession. After his conviction, DeFreeze was given an indeterminate sentence: five years to life in prison. He was sent, fatefully, to a prison called Vacaville.

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  Vacaville was the original link that connected the eight kidnappers. They were all part of what was known, loosely, as the prison movement, and it was through this work that the SLA emerged most clearly as a case of metastasized good intentions. Vacaville was the closest prison to Berkeley, about fifty miles away, and as such it attracted the students and other activists who wanted to commune with inmates. About three dozen people from Berkeley and the surrounding areas made regular pilgrimages to Vacaville to tutor inmates and to learn from them. Several of these tutors and other visitors were young women; and prisoners, notably DeFreeze, welcomed the opportunity for contact with the opposite sex. In the relatively unstructured environment of Vacaville, there were chances for intimate exchanges between inmates and visitors; the frisson of forbidden encounters, especially those interracial in nature, gave these meetings an undeniable charge.

  It was true, too, that California prisoners confronted appalling injustices, starting with the system of indeterminate sentencing, under which convicts were sent to prison not for specified periods but rather for broad ranges of years. (DeFreeze’s sentence of five to life was typical.) A parole board, basically an arm of law enforcement, determined release dates. Inmates suffered the worst of all worlds—living in a punitive environment, free from rehabilitative services, while depending for their release on a quixotic process designed to determine whether they had been rehabilitated. Anger among prisoners simmered, then exploded.

  The prison movement had a superstar—George Jackson. Born in 1941, Jackson was nineteen when he received the classic indeterminate sentence of one year to life in prison. He never again saw the outside of prison walls. By the late 1960s, Jackson had become a leader among the inmates. Both handsome and powerful—he did a thousand fingertip push-ups a day—Jackson had affiliations with the Black Panther Party and founded his own gang, the Black Guerrilla Family. Revered by his fellow prisoners and loathed by his guards, Jackson became embroiled in the most notorious series of violent events in California prison history. On January 13, 1970, a prison fight at Soledad was silenced when a guard shot and killed three black inmates. Three days later, after the announcement that the guard had been cleared in the shootings, a different guard was killed in apparent retaliation. Jackson and two other inmates were charged with first-degree murder, and these defendants came to be known as the Soledad Brothers. Their case became a cause célèbre for the Left.

  During this period, Jackson became a voracious reader and loquacious letter writer. He steeped himself in the liturgy of the New Left: Marx, Lenin, Mao, and perhaps most notably Régis Debray, a young French philosopher whose work with Fidel Castro and Che Guevara led him to develop the “foco” theory. The idea behind foco was that revolutionary change could be led by small bands of “vanguard groups” that would inspire the broader population to rebel. Jackson began exploring these ideas, and meditating on prison life, in letters to his lawyer, Fay Stender, and others. As Jackson was awaiting trial for the murder of the guard, Stender arranged for publication of a collection of those letters under the title Soledad Brother. Jackson’s letters combined autobiography with a blazing indictment of American racism, which he wrote was “stamped unalterably into the present nature of Amerikan sociopolitical and economic life.” The book came garlanded with a rapturous introduction by the French intellectual Jean Genet, achieved best-seller status in both the United States and France, and marked Jackson as the rugged philosopher-king of the prison movement.

  California prisons shuddered with violence in this era. In 1970–71, nine guards and twenty-four inmates were killed inside prison walls, and George Jackson’s own story came to its perhaps inevitable conclusion as well. On August 21, 1971, someone smuggled a gun to Jackson in San Quentin. He freed several of his allies from solitary confinement, and then his group took six guards and two white inmates as hostages. Five of these men, three guards and the two inmates, were later found dead in Jackson’s cell, with their throats slit. Scores of heavily armed law enforcement officials converged on the prison. “It’s me they want,” Jackson told a comrade, and then he walked into the prison courtyard, where he was killed instantly by a marksman’s bullet. Two thousand people attended his funeral. (In a characteristic gesture, the Weather Underground set off bombs at a pair of California Department of Corrections offices to commemorate Jackson’s death.)

  A year later, Jackson’s final book, Blood in My Eye, was published posthumously. It became the bible of the Symbionese Liberation Army.

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  A tall, awkward twenty-year-old Berkeley student named Willy Wolfe provided the link between the black Vacaville prisoners and the white student radicals. At the time, Wolfe knew little about politics and nothing about prisons. Yet this young man—little more than an overgrown boy, really—served during his time in Vacaville as the catalyst for the creation of the SLA. Wolfe also became a central figure in the life of Patricia Hearst.

  After his first year at Berkeley, Wolfe moved into a rambling, broken-down old house at 5939 Chabot Road, in a rough neighborhood of Oakland. The house operated as a kind of commune, with a shifting roster of politically attuned residents. The owner’s girlfriend ran a food cart called Peking House, which was usually stationed near the Cal campus, so the house itself came to be called by the same name. Wolfe went to Vacaville for the first time in March 1972, to write a term paper for a class in African American studies. He stayed on to become a tutor, and he brought his friends and roommates along with him. Wolfe’s fellow Vacaville tutors, who came to include Russ Little, Joe Remiro, Nancy Ling Perry, and Mizmoon Soltysik, went on to form the core of the SLA.

  The white visitors congregated at the prison’s Black Cultural Association, which was a self-improvement club of sorts that offered classes on African American history and culture, among other subjects. In this respect, the BCA was a fairly typical establishment response to the black power movement—an attempt by prison authorities to allow black inmates to express ethnic pride in a productive, nonthreatening manner. Its meetings had a Pan-Africanist flavor. They opened with a clenched-fist salute to the flag of the Republic of New Africa and a chant in Swahili. As in the outside world, many black inmates at the time changed their “slave names” to those that reflected an African or Muslim affinity. Here, in that spirit, Donald DeFreeze became Cinque M’tume.

  It wasn’t long, though, before it became apparent that the visitors were not doing tutoring in any conventional sense but rather clandestine political organizing. They smuggled in
banned books, like Blood in My Eye, and talked about revolution with the prisoners. They all gravitated toward DeFreeze—now known as Cinque, or Cin—who reigned over them with a Delphic near silence. “Follow black leadership” was a well-known phrase in the counterculture at this time, so Cinque’s white visitors paid him considerable deference.

  They also grafted their fantasies about Jackson onto the less deserving DeFreeze. In prison, Cin began working his way through the same reading list as Jackson did a few years earlier, and there were other parallels between their lives. Both were African American men, of similar age, who spent most of their lives enmeshed in the criminal justice system, and both viewed themselves as self-taught intellectuals and revolutionary leaders. But DeFreeze amounted to a junior varsity Jackson. In almost every respect, DeFreeze was a lesser man—not as intelligent, not as good-looking, not as strong, not as charismatic, not as competent. To paraphrase Marx, if George Jackson was tragedy, then Donald DeFreeze, as Cin, was farce.

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  On December 11, 1972, Cin was transferred from Vacaville to Soledad prison. There his positive disciplinary record earned him an assignment working at a training facility for guards, off the main prison campus. Alone on duty, on March 5, 1973, DeFreeze walked through an open door, scaled a six-foot chain fence, and vanished. He headed for the Bay Area, about 130 miles north of the prison.

  Hitchhiking and walking, DeFreeze made his way to the one place he knew he would be welcome: Peking House, in Oakland. Given his friendship with the residents, it was an obvious destination for him but not, apparently, to the authorities. Prison officials noted DeFreeze’s escape but made virtually no effort to find him. Over the next few months, DeFreeze would take steps to avoid his nonexistent pursuers, but he was, essentially, a free man.

  Still, he was worried that he’d be caught in Peking House, so he asked Russ Little to help find him a new place to live. Little steered his friend to another activist who had been an occasional visitor at Vacaville—Patricia “Mizmoon” Soltysik. Within a few weeks, DeFreeze had moved in with Soltysik in Berkeley, and the pair were soon lovers as well as co-conspirators. (Mizmoon, who was bisexual, had just broken off a relationship with Camilla Hall, who was devoted to her.) A few months later, Nancy Ling moved in too, and Cin became romantically involved with her as well.

  Patricia was to learn much later that the union of DeFreeze, Soltysik, and Ling marked a peculiar turning point for the inchoate SLA. The future members had met through Willy Wolfe’s efforts to teach and organize at Vacaville prison. But once the half a dozen or so protagonists assembled in the Bay Area in early 1973, their relationships became personal as much as political. They were, in short, a veritable counterculture Updike novel, their romantic attachments a bewildering roundelay. Everyone slept with everyone—except for Wolfe. This was in keeping with the broader cultural moment, which was the decade or so after the ascendancy of the birth control pill and before the advent of AIDS. But the polymorphous intimacy of the SLA was both a reflection of its brief, fierce intensity and a reason for its downfall.

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  Inside Vacaville, the future comrades had spun their revolutionary fantasies insulated from the realities of life on the outside. But now DeFreeze, though nominally free, disappeared into a well of rage and paranoia. Closeted with Mizmoon, who worked in the Berkeley Public Library, and Ling, who alternated waitressing with sex work in San Francisco, he imagined himself the leader of an actual movement. He even gave it a name. He envisaged a fruitful alliance of different ideas and people—a symbiosis. He turned this noun into an adjective: “Symbionese.” Their goal would be freedom—thus, “Liberation.” And he would wage war against the status quo with an army. For a symbol, DeFreeze adopted a seven-headed cobra, with each head representing one of seven principles of African heritage—unity, self-determination, collective work, cooperation, purpose, creativity, and faith. Cin had learned these concepts in his studies with the BCA, in Vacaville, and they are a perversion of the same ideas that underlie Kwanzaa, the African American holiday that takes place around Christmas. Nancy Ling, the in-house propagandist for the SLA, even drew up a constitution, dated August 21, 1973. “The Symbionese Liberation Army has selected the Seven-Headed Cobra as our emblem because we realize that an army is a mass that needs unity in order to become a fighting force,” Ling wrote. “It is a revolutionary unity of all people against a common oppressor.” She went on, using a phrase that would recur in all SLA communications, “And with the venom of our seven heads we will destroy the fascist insect who preys upon the life of the people.”

  The fanaticism of DeFreeze, Mizmoon, and Ling meant little without the help of people who were willing to put their revolutionary ideas, however half-baked, into action. That was where Russ Little and Joe Remiro came in. Both boasted of proletarian roots. Little, a Floridian, called himself “a white Southern cracker” and claimed that he received his first shotgun at the age of seven. But Little overstated his backwoods origins for effect. His background was middle class—his father was a civilian electronics mechanic at Naval Air Station Pensacola—and Russ grew up with the paradigmatic ambition for all-American boys of his generation: he wanted to be an astronaut. Russ graduated near the top of his high school class, won a scholarship to the University of Florida, and majored in engineering.

  But like so many of his generational peers, Little experienced a personal transformation at college. He took a philosophy class, taught by a Marxist graduate student, and changed his major to philosophy. He started writing for an underground paper. He was appalled by the killings of the student protesters at Kent State in 1970. Still, even then, Little only managed to rouse himself to wander the West Coast with a girlfriend, Robyn Steiner, surviving off food stolen from grocery stores. They slipped into Peking House out of lethargy more than commitment, and Little turned to prison work out of guilt that he was doing so little for the revolution. He was, in short, always more hippie than killer.

  Remiro, on the other hand, was more of a killer. Unlike his friend Russ Little, Joe Remiro was a true proletarian, a son of pre-gentrification San Francisco. His father emigrated from Mexico and drove a laundry truck for a living; his mother horrified her Italian parents by marrying a Mexican. They lived in the Sunset District, then heavily conservative and Catholic, and turned their son over to the nuns for his education. Joe took to the discipline, if not the book learning; he barely graduated from high school. One day, Remiro walked by an early anti–Vietnam War protest at the City College of San Francisco, and he taunted the demonstrators. They taunted him back and dared him to enlist, which he did the next day. “I was gung-ho, man,” he said later. “I wanted to kill a commie for Christ in those days.”

  He frequently had the chance to kill. In Vietnam, Remiro was assigned to a long-range reconnaissance patrol, which meant that he was sent on lengthy forays deep into enemy territory. He described his duties this way: “They go through an area and they kill everything living—dogs, cats, women, children, anything. When they’re through, there’s not supposed to be anything alive behind them.” When he completed his first tour of combat duty, he signed up for another, and he wound up serving through the most intense period of the war, from 1966 to 1968. When Remiro returned to the States, he was diagnosed with what was then called PVS—post-Vietnam syndrome. A later generation would call the malady post-traumatic stress disorder. “I lost my way somewhere in Vietnam,” Remiro said much later, “and lost my empathy for other human beings.”

  Back home in San Francisco, Remiro self-medicated with whatever he could buy from dope dealers. He worked odd jobs. Girlfriends came and went. His political views hardened. He was neither a Democrat nor a democrat but rather a combatant. “The revolution don’t have nothin’ unless they have an organized military,” Remiro said. “Unless you have military tactics and strategy and trained theoreticians—military theoreticians. Discipline is a necessary evil.” He believed the coming cataclysm would leave many casualties. The “revo
lution is horrible to look forward to—years and years of urban guerrilla civil war in America—horrible to so clearly see it coming and know how many fine people will be killed.”

  Military service had left Remiro with one useful skill, especially for a self-professed revolutionary. He became an expert in all matters relating to guns: how to build, modify, dismantle, and fire virtually any kind of firearm and to train others to do the same. For this reason, Remiro became the unofficial paramilitary trainer for the counterculture in the Bay Area. He often took trainees to the Chabot Gun Club, in the hills above Berkeley. One day, a Cal law student and a friend happened also to be on the club’s range. “That afternoon I noticed a group of three or four men shooting at the far left of the range, dressed in camos and shooting what I thought was an M-1 Carbine,” he recalled. “Sometime while my attention was on my own target, I heard someone to my left let loose a three-shot burst that sounded like a fully automatic weapon, something illegal in California at the time.” The law student and his friend “looked at each other and we each mouthed the words, ‘Auto?!?!’ ” In light of the dangerous and unlawful firepower nearby, the pair decided to depart the premises posthaste. The man with the machine gun was Joe Remiro, and the student was Lance Ito, who later became the judge in the criminal trial of O. J. Simpson.

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  DeFreeze fancied himself a leader of the African American people, even though the Symbionese Liberation Army never had a single black member, except for himself. He disdained conventional politics, even during the spring of 1973, when a genuine African American political crusade was taking place in front of him. Bobby Seale, of the Black Panthers, who could scarcely be accused of moderation, was running a serious campaign for mayor of Oakland. (He came in second but lost the runoff to the incumbent.) Unwilling to share the tiny spotlight of Ling and Soltysik’s attention, DeFreeze ignored Seale’s campaign in favor of his own self-indulgent, and doomed, crusade.