Days of Rage (59 page)

Of all the issues that confronted Chicago’s Puerto Ricans, the most volatile was the situation at Tuley High. In late 1972, under Oscar López’s leadership, a group of parents organized and demanded that the school board replace Principal Fink with a Spanish-speaking administrator; they further demanded that a new school under construction be named after the Puerto Rican baseball star Roberto Clemente. When the board ignored its pleas, López led fifty protesters in a peaceful occupation of Tuley’s office and social room. They sent a delegation to meet with a member of the board; when a crowd of seventy-five policemen materialized outside, they agreed to leave the building.

They returned two days later to occupy the lunchroom. Again police arrived. This time López and the protesters refused to leave, and police resorted to dragging many of them outside. There the protesters, joined by dozens of angry students, proceeded to hurl bricks and rocks at the cops, who responded by arresting sixteen of them. The school had to be closed for the day. López led a delegation that met later that evening with the city’s deputy mayor, and this time the city listened. Five days after the melee, the school board gave in, removing Principal Fink and announcing that the new neighborhood school would be named after Roberto Clemente, a name it carries to this day.

How Oscar López and his allies at Tuley High morphed from earnest community activists into the murderous bombers of the FALN has never been explained. It happened quickly, that much is clear; barely eighteen months separated the Tuley protests from the first FALN bombings in New York. To this day many in law enforcement assume that at some point López and his circle were recruited by Puerto Rico’s leading revolutionary, Filiberto Ojeda Ríos, the MIRA mastermind. According to 1982 Senate testimony by Daniel James, a journalist who interviewed several Cuban defectors, Ojeda Ríos had returned to New York after jumping bail following his 1970 arrest in Puerto Rico. In 1974, working with Cuban agents assigned to the United Nations, he was said to have gathered a band of onetime MIRA sympathizers and melded them with new recruits, presumably including the López group, giving them training in bomb making, sabotage, and spycraft. This theory, while never proven, suggests that the FALN was at least initially a creature of Cuban intelligence. No one, however, has ever suggested that the Cuban government had an operational role in its bombings.

In fact, while Cuban intelligence may well have played a role in the FALN’s formation, there is evidence that another group was at least as influential: the Weather Underground. The two groups’ unlikely alliance, which has never been publicly explored, can best be understood in the context of Weather’s burning need circa 1974 to reassert its relevancy in far-left politics. Their partnership, it would appear, began with a single handwritten letter,
sent by a friend of Rafael Cancel Miranda, one of the nationalists imprisoned for their roles in the 1954 attack on Congress. After stays at Alcatraz and Leavenworth, Cancel Miranda in 1971 was being held at the federal prison in Marion, Illinois. A prison strike was under way, and in the letter he sought legal support from a group of radical attorneys representing Attica defendants. A volunteer named Mara Siegel read the letter. She and another attorney, Michael Deutsch, drove to Marion. “Mara and Michael went down to Marion and Rafael just blew them away,” remembers Elizabeth Fink, one of the Attica attorneys and a friend of everyone involved. “Then they started going to visit the others. And their stories just blew them away.”

Deutsch and Siegel, who later became an attorney at Deutsch’s People’s Law Office (PLO), agreed to take on Cancel Miranda’s appeal; the PLO later represented other Puerto Rican prisoners as well.
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Word of their cause spread quickly. Bill Ayers made the plight of Puerto Rico a major section of
Prairie Fire
. The FALN-Weather alliance, it appears, existed on both the underground and aboveground levels. Much of the public foundation was laid by Weather’s supporters in New York, among them Annie Stein and Julie Nichamin, an organizer of the radical tours of Cuba known as Venceremos Brigades.

“I was there when the call was put out for the 1974 Madison Square Garden event; that was written in Annie Stein’s apartment,” recalls Elizabeth Fink. “Julie Nichamin was the main person, she was the driving force, and she was totally hooked up to Weatherman. Judy Clark”—the onetime Weather cadre arrested in a Manhattan theater in 1970—“was there; no one was tighter with Weather than Judy. And a bunch of others. Everybody was there. It was all interconnected. This was in May 1974. Did we know there was to be an underground component? Honey, that’s all we were about. This was the revolution. It wasn’t unspoken. It was the politics. It was everything we were about.”

The key to the FALN’s early success was help provided by the National Commission on Hispanic Affairs and its director, Maria Cueto. Described as a quiet, determined single woman, Cueto refused to talk to investigators and to the end of her life refused to discuss the FALN. Years of investigation created suspicion, but found little concrete evidence, of her involvement. But her attorney was Elizabeth Fink, and after Cueto’s death, in 2012, Fink confirmed her onetime client’s key role in the FALN. According to Fink, it was Cueto who arranged to name a half-dozen FALN members, including Oscar López and Carlos Torres, to positions on the NCHA’s board, which allowed her to quietly pay them thousands of dollars in Episcopal Church monies that, in essence, funded the FALN’s birth.

“Maria was the quartermaster of the FALN, the person who arranged the money, the travel, the person who arranged everything, who made everything happen,” Fink recalls. “The church had this special house in Greenwich, Connecticut, and I know the FALN had meetings there. Remember, Maria was doing all this with the FALN at the same time she was running this amazing social-action ministry, helping Hispanics.”

Cueto and the NCHA, however, were only half the equation. Without dynamite and the expertise to use it, the FALN would never have sprung to life. For that it turned to its allies in the Weather Underground. Law enforcement for years speculated that Weather had played a role in the FALN’s formation. According to Charles Wells, a longtime member of the NYPD bomb squad, bombs built by the Weather Underground and FALN were of identical design. All of them, he explains, featured a single screw set into a clock at the “9”; the bomb detonated when the minute hand struck the screw.

But the concrete evidence of Weather’s involvement came from its own bomb guru, Ron Fliegelman. “We gave them the training,” he acknowledged during a September 2012 interview. “We did that, sure. Was it me? I shouldn’t say. I don’t want to go there.”

 • • • 

By Thanksgiving 1976, with the startling disclosure that nearly a dozen suspects had some kind of affiliation with its NCHA charity, the headquarters of the Episcopal Church became the unlikely epicenter of the FALN investigation. Church officials initially gave the FBI free rein. In a search of the
NCHA’s basement office agents found a receipt taped to the bottom of Maria Cueto’s desk. It was for a Smith Corona typewriter. Agents knew that the FALN’s communiqués had been typed on a Smith Corona. They hustled to the Brooklyn store that sold the machine but found nothing of use; the name on the receipt was an alias. The FBI lab had determined that the communiqués had been photocopied on a Gestetner copy machine; a search of Gestetner’s records indicated that such a machine had been sold to the NCHA in 1974, on the eve of the first bombings. It was now being used by another office, and it would take a round of subpoenas to get it.

Lou Vizi, meanwhile, met with the church’s top bishops and found them happy to furnish the NCHA’s financial records. He sensed they were intimidated by Cueto and her people, whose political leanings were far to the left of their own. “They were appalled,” Vizi remembers. “These were very nice people who had been stampeded into this charity stuff by their own guilt. The church treasurer got all the records for me, but they were a mess. He said, ‘We tried a thousand times to use proper accounting methods with these people, and every time higher-ups would say, “Don’t come down too hard, we don’t want any problems.”’ So no one was paying too much attention to where the church’s money was going, there were no receipts for a lot of this.”

The NCHA’s patchwork records, however, provided a trove of tantalizing leads. Some $53,000 of church money, for instance, had gone to a Puerto Rican school in Chicago José López had founded, where Oscar López and several other FALN members had briefly worked. The NCHA had even purchased airline tickets for Carlos Torres, López, and other FALN suspects. Matching these itineraries against the FALN’s attacks, agents felt they could establish a pattern of various suspects traveling to New York and Chicago within days of any number of FALN bombings. López, for one, had flown into New York the day before the first bombings in October and left shortly after.

For the briefest of moments Vizi and Don Wofford felt they were on the verge of breaking the case. If Maria Cueto or her assistant, twenty-seven-year-old Raisa Nemikin, could be persuaded to cooperate, the entire FALN might be dragged into the sunlight. But when agents went to the women’s homes to question them further, both denied knowing anything about the FALN. Shortly thereafter they hired attorneys, an act that immediately sapped momentum from the FBI’s investigation. If the two women had to be pulled before a grand jury, it could start a process that might take weeks, if not months.

Cueto was called to testify first, on January 10, 1977. She refused even to take the oath. When the judge ordered her to do so, she still refused and was jailed. Her attorney, Liz Fink, filed a series of motions asking for more time, and Cueto was released. Two weeks later Fink fired her first broadside, filing motions to quash all subpoenas in the case on the ground that they violated Cueto and Nemikin’s rights to freedom of religion. Citing the FBI’s notorious COINTELPRO programs, Fink argued further that the subpoenas were part of a systematic pattern of FBI harassment against Puerto Rican independence and radical groups.

Buttressing these charges was a parallel set of filings by none other than Paul Moore, the progressive bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of New York. In an affidavit he echoed Fink’s charges and alleged that the subpoenas were designed to “prevent the church from funding progressive Hispanic groups.” To the FBI’s surprise, this was the first sign of a sharp split in church ranks, Moore and a group of liberal bishops on one side, some of the national leadership on the other. Behind the scenes, the halls of Episcopal headquarters were rife with rumors—that Cueto was the FALN’s secret kingpin, and that FBI agents had been allowed to rampage through file cabinets monitored only by, in the words of a
Times
reporter, “a half-blind custodian called Buggsy.”
¹

On February 4 Judge Lawrence Pierce rejected the defense motions and ordered Raisa Nemikin to testify. Ten days later she took the oath but refused to say another word. Then, on February 18, just hours before Nemikin was scheduled to reappear, two powerful bombs exploded in Chicago, one outside the U.S. Gypsum Building, the other at the giant Merchandise Mart. No one was hurt, but water pipes burst at the mart, causing millions of dollars in damage. There was no communiqué, but the FBI felt certain it was the FALN attempting to send a message.

That morning, in the Manhattan grand jury room, the federal prosecutor on the case, a Harvard Law graduate named Thomas Engel, bestowed immunity on Raisa Nemikin, meaning she couldn’t be prosecuted for anything she
said. Engel asked Nemikin when she last saw Carlos Torres, what she knew about the FALN, and whether she knew anyone involved in the Fraunces bombing. After each question Nemikin stepped outside to consult with her attorney, then returned and refused to answer the question.

In a hearing that afternoon Engel asked Judge Pierce to cite Nemikin for contempt and jail her until she answered his questions. Her attorney, the ubiquitous Liz Fink, called the demand “outrageous” and argued that her client’s rights were being violated. A ruling was postponed for eight days. Afterward Nemikin read a statement to reporters outside the courthouse in which she characterized the entire proceeding as a government vendetta against the NCHA and progressive Hispanics.

That night, just before midnight, large bombs exploded outside two New York skyscrapers, the Gulf and Western Building and the Chrysler Building, where two men were injured by flying glass. A caller to WCBS radio directed police to a communiqué, which, after demanding the release of Puerto Rican political prisoners, ended with a new demand: “Stop the Illegal Use of The Grand Jury.” Up at the FBI’s offices, Wofford and Vizi smiled. Clearly they had struck a nerve.

The following Monday, Fink unleashed a new legal broadside, alleging that her phones, as well as those of several of her radical colleagues, were being tapped by the government. The filing did just as Fink hoped, turning the attention of the judge and the newspapers toward allegations—apparently unfounded—of government wrongdoing. The proceedings began to slow down, with daily hearings and allegations and a series of press conferences on the courthouse steps. Friends and supporters began filling the courtroom, hissing and booing. The judge eventually ruled both Cueto and Nemikin in contempt and tossed both women in jail. Two weeks later, on March 20, the FALN responded, detonating bombs outside a New York bank and, for the first time, directly below the FBI offices on Sixty-ninth Street. One man struck by flying glass was taken to the hospital. A communiqué sent to the
New York Post
again protested the grand jury proceedings.

While lawyers jousted, Wofford and Vizi pressed on. Maria Cueto’s jailing gave them an opportunity. When she vacated her Brooklyn apartment, the building’s landlord allowed agents to search it. Inside, the super remarked that Cueto had altered the bedroom closet, affixing hasps and locks and constructing three wooden shelves. Wofford and Vizi had an idea of what Cueto had used those shelves for. On March 22 the NYPD brought in a bomb-sniffing dog, which, when shown the closet, became excited. A later analysis of the shelving, however, proved inconclusive. Despite this, Wofford felt sure Cueto had stored at least some of the FALN’s dynamite.