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

by Jeffrey Toobin

  DeFreeze designated two teams—an inside team, which would conduct the actual robbery, and an outside team, which would act as lookouts, detain the police, if necessary, and supervise the getaway. The inside team was the SLA core—DeFreeze, Mizmoon, and Nancy Ling—joined by their prized recruit, Patricia Hearst. Camilla Hall also went just inside the bank door. On the outside were Bill and Emily Harris, Angela Atwood, and Willy Wolfe. For communication during the robbery, DeFreeze gave each comrade a code number, from one (himself) to nine (Hearst). The plan was to arrive shortly after the bank opened, make their score, display Patricia, and leave. They didn’t want to get caught, so they knew they had to work fast. The goal was to be in and out of the bank in ninety seconds.

  —

  On the morning of the fifteenth, Camilla Hall, who was driving the inside team, took a meandering route that traversed Golden Gate Park. Patricia had not been outdoors (except inside a garbage can) in more than two months, and the sight of grass and trees was so beautiful to her that she almost wept. Fear, too, played a part. She was both terrified and electrified.

  The outside team parked across Noriega from the bank, and Hall stopped around the corner with the inside team. Camilla Hall began the action by opening the door to the bank, and then DeFreeze, Hearst, Ling, and Mizmoon filed inside. As she was walking through the front door, Ling accidentally dropped her ammunition clip in a great clatter and stooped to collect the bullets. DeFreeze stepped over her and shouted to the eighteen employees and six customers, “This is a holdup! The first motherfucker who don’t lay down on the floor gets shot in the head!”

  On the second floor of the bank, in a break room, Jim Smith, the branch manager, heard the commotion. At 9:51 a.m., he punched a silent alarm, which triggered two high-speed cameras with wide-angle lenses to begin shooting four pictures per second. (Spliced together, these photographs can resemble a jerky motion picture; in all, each security camera took about four hundred pictures of the robbery.)

  DeFreeze kept to his assigned role of standing by the front door. Ling gathered her ammunition and controlled the customers and employees, yelling, “SLA! SLA! SLA! Get down on the floor!” With balletic grace, Mizmoon vaulted over the partition that separated the customer area from the tellers. She stepped over the employees, who were prone on the floor, and started removing cash from the drawers. While Mizmoon extracted cash, DeFreeze found the bank security guard and removed the .38-caliber revolver from his holster. (One passerby thought the entire event was a scene from The Streets of San Francisco, which was actually shooting an episode nearby.)

  Everything was going perfectly—until Nancy Ling panicked. This was her pattern. In November, she had fired wildly at Marcus Foster and succeeded only in grazing him. In February, she had taken needless potshots at the students next door to Patricia’s apartment on Benvenue and missed again. This time, while Mizmoon was collecting the money and the employees and customers lay motionless, two new customers walked in the door. When Pete Markoff, a liquor store owner, and Gene Brennan, a pensioner, stepped inside, Nancy Ling started to blast her machine gun. Fortunately, her aim again proved less than lethal. She hit Markoff in the buttocks and Brennan in the hand, and they retreated, bleeding, to the sidewalk. (Both survived.)

  Inside the bank, Patricia’s fear translated into adrenaline. She took her place, as planned, in direct view of the security camera and tried to absorb the chaotic scene unfolding around her. She then remembered her assignment and tried to cock her carbine to shoot at the ceiling. But the bolt jammed as she pulled it back. (It seems that in tampering with the bullets to apply the cyanide, she had changed their shape, which blocked the gun’s proper functioning.) Panicking and worrying about disappointing her comrades, she blurted out, “This is Tania….Patricia Hearst.”

  Then, recovering her equilibrium, she joined the others in ordering the customers and employees not to move. “First person puts up his head,” Hearst said, “I’ll blow his motherfucking head off!”

  The robbery took just about as long as planned, and the SLA group inside the bank stepped over the bleeding body of Pete Markoff and got into the getaway car, still driven by Camilla Hall. The SLA’s two vehicles raced about ten blocks away, where the comrades had earlier stashed the other two rental cars. The group made the change into the switch cars and drove carefully, well within the speed limit, back to the apartment on Golden Gate. Seven comrades raced up to the third-floor apartment to count the loot, while Mizmoon and Emily Harris drove the two cars to a parking garage on the other side of town, where they left them.

  Inside the apartment, a raucous celebration began. Angela dumped the bag of money on top of a blanket spread out on the floor. As she began to gather the cash into a heap, Angela stuffed a $20 bill in her mouth and said, “It looks so good I could eat it!” Once Mizmoon and Emily returned, the group began the count. The total was $10,660.

  Someone thought to turn on the radio, to check on the coverage of their triumph, but they found only music: the O’Jays’ hit “For the Love of Money.”

  PART THREE

  11

  COMMON CRIMINALS

  Euphoria prevailed. In the small apartment, the comrades gazed happily at the disorderly pyramid of the oppressor’s cash. The security guard’s gun boosted the SLA arsenal. The pigs seethed. The public gawked at villains they could not see. The tinny AM radio blared danceable soul. For a day or two, it was very heaven to be young and a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army.

  The comrades’ strike inside the bank had gone according to plan and taken just about ninety seconds. Photographs from the security camera surfaced almost immediately in the news media, and the images of Patricia wielding her military-style M1 carbine became nearly as famous as the one of her in front of the SLA flag. Close examination would reveal that her dark hair was really a wig—a 1970s-style flip—but there was no question about the identity of the woman in the photograph. Closer study would reveal Willy Wolfe’s Mexican charm. Patricia’s expression was blank, as usual, but she went through her paces with a confident swagger. Her short dark raincoat looked rakish. Like her comrades inside the bank—the frenetic Nancy Ling, the athletic Mizmoon Soltysik, the regal Donald DeFreeze—Patricia radiated outlaw glamour.

  The SLA had shocked the world and gotten away with it. The haul was massive. For the first time, they felt rich. The injuries to bystanders were inconsequential and irrelevant (at least as the comrades saw it). The police were concentrating their search in the area where the SLA abandoned their cars—in other words, miles away from the safe house on Golden Gate. No one had noticed they had switched cars. As usual, DeFreeze had no real plan about what to do next, much less in the long run, but for the moment the SLA thrived.

  At this point, DeFreeze and the others treated Patricia as a full-fledged comrade, for better or worse. She and Willy Wolfe operated as a couple, in the sense that any SLA pair was a couple. They slept together and regarded each other as partners, but they also honored the SLA prohibition on sexual exclusivity. They were expected to participate in comradely sex with others who sought them out. In this context, Patricia and Bill Harris had sex for the first time in the Golden Gate apartment.

  The heiress was even treated as an equal when it came to the proceeds from the bank robbery. DeFreeze wanted to avoid the risk that the police might seize the full $10,000-plus take, so he split it into chunks of $1,000 and gave one to each comrade, including Patricia. In the event that they had to take off in different directions, following a police raid, DeFreeze wanted to make sure that they would all have means to support themselves until they could regroup.

  The prized trophy from the robbery was the security guard’s .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver. The SLA already had plenty of guns, thanks largely to the collection Remiro and Little had amassed before they were arrested. But this weapon was liberated directly from a pig, so DeFreeze took some time before deciding what to do with this precious spoil of the class war.

  Patricia
could never be sure how the mercurial field marshal would react to anything, so she had worried after the robbery that she would be punished for failing to shoot her gun into the ceiling. She needn’t have been concerned.

  With some ceremony, DeFreeze presented the security guard’s gun to her. “This is for you, Tania, your personal sidearm,” DeFreeze said. “Keep it on your person at all times and learn how to use it.” Unlike the shotgun that Patricia was given in Daly City, the Smith & Wesson came loaded with ammunition. Henceforth, like all the other comrades, Tania would always be packing heat.

  —

  The bank robbery cleaved Patricia Hearst’s public image along the lines of the larger divisions in the country. In small circles of the Left, she became a folk hero—a renegade who had traded the life of an aristocrat for that of a renegade. The Barb celebrated Patricia’s apparent conversion under the banner headline “PATTY FREE!” “Patty Hearst has said her last goodbye to America’s ruling class, to a life of privilege, wealth and power, and has joined the guerrillas of the Symbionese Liberation Army in their war against the ‘fascist corporate state,’ ” the paper wrote. “Her decision to commit herself to armed struggle was clearly her own, based on her own observations and experiences while being held hostage.” Ads in the paper offered posters of the famous Tania photograph. When the Women’s Collective of the Weather Underground placed a bomb in the federal building in San Francisco, its communiqué said the action was “inspired by the SLA.”

  Patricia herself achieved a kind of perverse stardom. The sheer strangeness of her situation and the mystery about her true feelings made her an almost irresistible antihero. The more the establishment turned against her, the more she found favor in the counterculture.

  At the same time, the establishment was transforming her image from victim of the radical underground to enemy of the state. Especially in San Francisco, the mood had soured on the protesters and the loudmouths and especially the criminals who were turning their city into a battleground. Through the early months of 1974, the Zebra killers continued to stalk white victims. Joseph Alioto had been elected as an old-fashioned liberal—Hubert Humphrey considered him as a running mate in 1968—but the mayor could not abide the descent of his city into lawlessness. After another Zebra murder on April 16, the day after the Hibernia robbery, he announced that the police would take a new “extreme” measure. Henceforth, they would stop all black men who resembled a generic sketch of the Zebra killers. Worse yet, the police would give “Zebra cards” to all blacks who passed inspection—an ugly echo of the pass laws in apartheid South Africa. In response, civil rights protests enveloped city hall. A federal judge halted the police crackdown after a week: the killers remained on the loose.

  Now, in addition to the Zebra and Zodiac threats, as well as run-of-the-mill mayhem plaguing the city, there was the robbery of the Hibernia Bank. Two carloads full of revolutionaries, provisioned like an invading army, had besieged a local bank in a quiet neighborhood. Far from fearing exposure, the bandits sought it, placing their unmasked faces in direct view of the cameras. They sprayed automatic weapons fire at innocent bystanders, who were, by some miracle, only injured rather than killed. Even for San Francisco, this kind of quasi-military operation in broad daylight represented a new low. It was intolerable behavior in a civilized society and the latest problem for the mayor to address. Alioto ordered the police “to activate a special investigative team to devote full-time to tracking down the kidnappers of Miss Hearst.” He called the SLA “killers, extortionists, and third-rate intellectuals” and insisted, “We have indulged them long enough.” As the historian David Talbot wrote of this moment, “The city seemed to crackle with madness.”

  Even San Francisco politicians turned on Patricia. She might have been a kidnap victim at the beginning, but now she looked like a rich kid who had decided to take out her grievances on the establishment. At a press conference, Attorney General Saxbe asserted that Patricia “was not a reluctant participant” in the bank robbery. Thus, in his view, she and her SLA allies were “common criminals.” Evelle Younger, the California attorney general, went even further. He berated the FBI for being “timid” in its search for Patricia. “I think the moment of truth has long since passed for Patricia Hearst,” he said.

  Back in Hillsborough, Randy and Catherine tried to hold an increasingly precarious and lonely middle ground. Unlike the Berkeley radicals, the Hearsts couldn’t embrace Patricia’s transformation into a celebrity outlaw, and unlike the establishment politicians, her parents couldn’t reject her as a criminal. Rather, in a driveway news conference to respond to the denunciations, the Hearsts continued to insist their daughter was a victim. “Mr. Saxbe is not aware of all the facts in this matter. Despite his point of view, our daughter is still a kidnap victim,” Randy said. Still, Randy sensed the public shift against Patricia. “No matter what she says and does, as long as she is under the control of the SLA, we know she is not acting of her own free will….Whatever legal problems are in her future, we will be there for her.”

  —

  The bank robbery underlined the continuing failure of the FBI search for the kidnappers. In the seventy days between the kidnapping and the bank robbery, the SLA had been taunting the authorities, and now they were embarrassing the bureau. Far from covering their tracks, the rotating cast of SLA spokesmen had been boasting about their successes. Their names and faces had been publicly known for weeks. And as the Hibernia operation illustrated, the group had remained in the Bay Area, right under the noses of dozens of FBI agents working the case. Yet law enforcement had made basically no progress since day one.

  The FBI maintained a stoic public profile about its investigation, insisting that unspecified progress was being made. On his nightly pilgrimages to Hillsborough, Charlie Bates, the San Francisco special agent in charge, made similar claims, promising Randy and Catherine that the SLA would soon make a mistake that would lead to its capture. But behind the scenes, the sad truth was that the FBI had no idea where Patricia and the comrades were. Under J. Edgar Hoover, the bureau had placed special reliance on the use of informants, whether of Communists or of bank robbers. But the FBI had no entrée into the tight-knit world of the SLA. Agents had photographs and fingerprints of the comrades but no way to identify their location.

  Bates was the public face of the investigation, but his subordinate Monte Hall supervised the day-to-day work. A World War II veteran from the hills of Pennsylvania, Hall had a no-nonsense style and a belief in the power of numbers in an investigation. With every available agent at his disposal, Hall cleared out nearly an acre of space in the FBI offices at 450 Golden Gate Avenue and created a series of labor-intensive assignments for his agents. Recognizing that the SLA was moving from place to place, Hall established a “water gas” program, where his men would track down and interview all tenants who signed up for new apartment rentals and utility services. It yielded nothing. Hall also learned of DeFreeze’s passion for plum wine, so he sent agents to liquor stores to look for regular buyers of what he thought was an exotic beverage. Plum wine turned out to be sold in five thousand outlets in the Bay Area, so this line of inquiry was similarly unfruitful—as were, of course, the insights of the Swamis 1, 2, and 3. On another occasion, Hall received a tip that a major SLA operation was imminent. At great expense, he rented a Bell Ranger helicopter to provide surveillance over San Francisco. When nothing materialized, Hall gave FBI clerical employees free rides to thank them for their hard work.

  Perhaps the most bizarre FBI initiative came from its enduring faith in the power of informants. A prisoner at Vacaville put out the word that he could locate the SLA, but only if he were given a few days of freedom. The FBI persuaded the California authorities to give the man a furlough, and the bureau even supplied him with a car, though it rigged the vehicle so that it could not travel at a very high speed. The bureau employed an elaborate ruse to persuade the inmate to return to prison rather than flee. Shortly after he was released
from custody, agents took him to a trailer that had been fitted out to look like a medical clinic. A man in a white coat told the would-be informant that he was injecting him with a slow-acting poison. He would die if he did not return in a week for the antidote. Agents also put a transponder in the inmate’s car so they could track his movements. One night they lost him—only to find him, several hours later, making out with a woman in the car. In any event, the fake-poison story was apparently good enough to make the man return to prison, though his adventure outside prison walls produced no useful evidence about the SLA. As the agents later acknowledged, he had just conned them into giving him a few days of freedom.

  The man who would ultimately decide whether Patricia would be charged in the bank robbery was Bates’s counterpart in the Department of Justice—James Browning Jr., the U.S. attorney in San Francisco. The job of top federal prosecutor in a big city is usually a patronage plum awarded to a close ally of the home-state senators of the president’s party. But Browning had obtained the job in an unusual way. A veteran street-level prosecutor in the relative backwater of San Mateo, Browning had won the appointment simply by writing a letter to Senator George Murphy, the senior Republican in the state in 1970. At forty-one, tall and lean, thoroughly apolitical, Browning had the instincts of a trial lawyer. If the evidence was there, he’d charge anyone—including Patricia Hearst.