Days of Rage (65 page)

After the last meeting, in March 1976, everyone scattered. Levasseur and Gros returned to Calais. Picariello promised to look into stealing dynamite but ended up buying fifty sticks instead, from an underworld contact in Portland. He and Aceto met Coleman in a crowded parking lot, where they opened the back of their battered station wagon and, with a flourish, pulled free a blanket to reveal the explosives. Stunned, Coleman hurriedly closed the car, fearing that someone would see. Her concerns grew as Picariello and Aceto downed beers on the long drive north. At one point she suggested that maybe she should drive. It was then she realized she couldn’t do this anymore. “Dickie
and Joey were just too crazy,” she recalls. “They just seemed intent on doing whatever it took to get themselves thrown back into prison.”

Back in Calais things quickly unraveled. Coleman read a letter of resignation. The next morning Aceto stomped off to the bus depot and left for Portland. He cared little for bombings; he wanted to rob banks or kill cops. Levasseur didn’t bother attempting to dissuade Coleman, but losing Aceto was a risk: He might talk. They agreed to send Picariello to Portland to deliver a threat: If Aceto said anything about their plans, they swore to harm his family. In the event, Picariello and Aceto got to talking and ended up striking a deal. Picariello, who thought himself every bit as worthy a revolutionary leader as Levasseur, promised Aceto that if he would help him bomb something, Picariello would help him rob a bank. Maine would now have two genuine revolutionary cells; theirs, they decided, would be named the Fred Hampton unit, after the Panther leader killed in 1969.

That left the Sam Melville Jonathan Jackson unit with precisely four members—Levasseur and Gros, Tom and Carol Manning—and fifty sticks of dynamite. The defections didn’t matter to Levasseur. He had read a
Boston Globe
article mentioning long lists of parolees kept at the Suffolk County Courthouse in Boston. If they could destroy those lists, he reasoned, the authorities would be powerless to keep track of thousands of ex-convicts. That, he announced to the group, was exactly the kind of place they should try to bomb.

 • • • 

To this day, Levasseur won’t discuss that first bombing, but he doesn’t deny that he planted the device. Building bombs was never hard for him; he had helped his grandfather blow up tree stumps as a boy, and with diagrams in the
Dragon
and other radical manuals he found it easy to hook the blasting caps to a tiny Westclox wristwatch. In time he became so expert he authored his own hundred-page manual.

The bombing of the Suffolk County Courthouse on April 22, 1976, was a sensation throughout New England. News that twenty-two people had been
injured, including the would-be cabdriver, Edmund Narine, stunned Boston. Coverage took up several full pages in the
Globe.
Afterward Governor Michael Dukakis made a televised address to deplore the attack, then, with the city’s mayor, led a march of thousands of citizens through the downtown area, dubbed a “procession against violence.” The injuries, and the reaction to them, left Levasseur and the others stunned.

“There was time for them to clear the building, but they didn’t,” Levasseur says. “I was sick, all of us were, that we had hurt someone. Pat was really upset.” Recalls Pat, “I was just in shock. People were not supposed to get hurt. Everyone felt shitty.” She made Levasseur swear he wouldn’t hurt more people. He promised to try.

That first SMJJ communiqué, mailed to a Boston alternative newspaper, struck the same melodramatic notes Levasseur used in his diary and his letters to Gros. “This is but the sound before the fury of those who are oppressed,” it began, going on to list a series of demands to reform prisons in Maine and Massachusetts. “We wish to make it clear at this time, that if these demands are not justly dealt with, there will be further attacks against the criminal ruling class.”

Back in Portland, Dickie Picariello read reports of the bombing and knew it was Levasseur’s work. He wanted to bomb something, too. The problem was, Levasseur had his dynamite. Picariello telephoned Calais and begged for a few sticks, but Levasseur refused, insisting he didn’t have enough to share. Irked, Picariello took matters into his own hands. He and Aceto broke into an explosives warehouse in New Boston, New Hampshire, and stole fifteen cases of dynamite and blasting caps. On May 11 they walked into the headquarters of the Central Maine Power Company and wandered the halls until they found places to leave the two bombs they had managed to assemble. Afterward they called in a warning—the building was safely evacuated, and no one was hurt in the two explosions—and mailed a communiqué to the Augusta newspaper. Three days later they robbed a bank in the town of Orono.

A bizarre competition thus developed between the two rival revolutionary cells. Levasseur struck next. Early on Monday, June 21, he left a small bomb in a grocery sack beside the front door of the Middlesex County Courthouse in Lowell, Massachusetts. It exploded at 6:16 a.m., showering a janitor with
broken glass. They had called in a warning ahead of time, then made a second call to claim responsibility and direct police to a communiqué taped inside a pay phone in nearby Lawrence. It called for reforms at Tom Manning’s alma mater, the Walpole State Prison.

In Boston FBI agents didn’t know what to think: In two short months New England had suffered three bombings from what appeared to be two separate groups. To confuse matters further, there was already a Sam Melville Jonathan Jackson unit in California, an offshoot of the New World Liberation Front. Reached by reporters, Jacques Rogiers claimed he was “ninety-nine percent certain” the Boston bombing had been done by an NWLF “combat unit.” Determined to sort things out, the FBI assembled a task force. They quickly picked up a tip that Dickie Picariello was involved.

FBI agents began watching Picariello’s Portland apartment just as the strange contest between the two underground cells reached its climax. The occasion was Sunday, July 4, 1976, the American Bicentennial. Still working out of his apartment in northern Maine, Levasseur had an action scheduled, but it was Picariello and Aceto who planned something spectacular: a series of bombings of eight separate targets, including courthouses, post offices, and an Eastern Airlines passenger jet. The drama began early on the morning of Friday, July 2, when the two, along with another Maine ex-con, planted bombs at a National Guard Armory in Dorchester, Massachusetts, at the Essex County Superior Courthouse, and under an Eastern Airlines Electra prop jet at Boston’s Logan Airport. The plane was destroyed, the buildings were damaged, but no one was hurt. Agents watching Picariello’s flat inexplicably failed to see him leave.

Nor did anyone see the trio of ex-cons later that Friday when, just before midnight, they detonated yet another bomb, outside the post office in Seabrook, New Hampshire, heavily damaging the building. But on the third night, the Saturday before Bicentennial Sunday, agents spotted Picariello, Aceto, and two partners as they left Portland, heading south. They followed the four to a state police barracks outside Topsfield, Massachusetts, where they watched as two men got out, apparently with bombs at the ready. When the agents moved in, Aceto led them on a high-speed chase, eventually losing control of his car and crashing into a stone wall. Inside agents found
guns and forty-six sticks of dynamite, most of it rigged as bombs.
*
The others were arrested later.

That same night Levasseur left a bomb outside a branch of the First National Bank of Boston in the town of Revere.
^*
It blew up the next morning without incident, but such was the media furor over the Picariello-Aceto bombings and arrests, almost no one in New England noticed: The
Globe
gave the bombing a tiny story on an inside page. Levasseur was incensed, since his communiqué, the group’s third, marked a sharp change in their public face. For the first time he had put aside his calls for prison reform and, having studied and admired the FALN’s work, authored a florid call for Puerto Rican independence and the release of all Puerto Rican “political prisoners.” No one cared.

His irritation, however, was quickly overcome by fear. It was only a matter of time, he knew, before Aceto talked. And so, picking up Gros and their baby, he and the Mannings did the only thing they could: They ran.

 • • • 

Their new home, the first of many to come, was a squalid flat in the New Hampshire village of Suncook. Levasseur took a midnight-shift job in a tannery, scraping and cleaning rancid, bloody cowhides. The Mannings found a place in Vermont. As yet, neither Levasseur nor Tom Manning had been identified publicly, but they knew that Joey Aceto was talking. FBI agents were fanning out to talk to everyone. Family. Friends. The SCAR people. The ex-cons. It was only a matter of time, Levasseur knew, before their faces would be staring out from the bulletin boards of every post office in New England. They were now cut off from anyone they had ever known.

They were alone. From Debray’s and Marighella’s revolutionary texts Levasseur knew that his little group had fallen victim to every guerrilla cell’s
main vulnerabilities: the danger of early days and the danger of extreme isolation. He pored over his books to find out what to do. He started with identification, the foundation of every underground life. He had secured his first fake driver’s license in Calais, simply calling the motor vehicle bureau and asking for a duplicate in the name of a man he read had died in a motorcycle accident. It was easy: At the time Maine licenses didn’t have photos. The only problem was, the dead man had the wrong color eyes and happened to be three inches too tall. What they needed, Levasseur saw, was solid photo IDs, something to stand up to a policeman’s perusal. In Suncook he began doing as the Weathermen had: visiting courthouses to harvest the birth certificates of dead infants, then using them to secure Social Security cards and driver’s licenses. Gathering IDs, in fact, would become the one constant in their lives for years to come. When anyone in the group had spare time, they used it to “build ID.” Eventually Levasseur alone would build more than a dozen identities.

With no hope of outside support, they began stockpiling materials for a life underground that would be self-sufficient and sustainable: programmable Bearcat scanners, one for each household and car, the better to monitor the police; more reliable cars, one for each of them, to replace the junkers everyone was driving; plus bulletproof vests, guns, ammunition, dynamite, and a place to store it all. Neither Levasseur nor Manning had anywhere near the money that was needed, nor was manual labor likely to raise it anytime soon, so after much agonizing, they decided to mount another expropriation. To prepare, Levasseur and Gros moved a second time, to an apartment in Manchester, New Hampshire. She found work as a waitress. He picked apples alongside Mexican migrant workers. He declines to identify the bank he and Manning robbed that fall, only saying that it was in Manchester. “I just walked into the place, by myself, with two guns, and I end up on the counter, covering the whole place myself,” Levasseur recalls. “Talk about vulnerable.” Manning drove the getaway car. They got away clean, with between $15,000 and $20,000.

The next step was to secure a new source of dynamite; the old sticks were starting to sweat, and Levasseur worried that they might be unstable. And so, shortly after midnight on November 10, 1976, the two men found themselves
crawling on their bellies through a field outside the town of Bow, New Hampshire, wearing backpacks laden with pistols and hacksaw blades. Their target was McGoldrick Mine and Quarry Supply. They sawed through a fence and made off with a hundred pounds of dynamite sticks.

Levasseur then rented the first of a series of safe-house apartments the group would use, this one in Nashua, New Hampshire. They stored the dynamite there, and many of their guns, along with notes Levasseur had begun compiling on prospective bombing targets. They changed the locks and sprinkled talcum powder inside the door when they left, the better to see whether anyone had entered in their absence. Finally, on December 12, a month after the dynamite theft, they left a large, twenty-stick bomb outside a Union Carbide building in Needham, Massachusetts. Levasseur called in the warning, then a later claim of credit, but to his dismay the bomb failed to explode. Newspaper coverage the next day carried the first public identification of Levasseur and Tom and Carol Manning, who had been indicted on the 1975 bank jobs.

Fearing pursuit, Levasseur had everyone move yet again, this time to the Connecticut mill town of New Britain, southwest of Hartford. Gros and Levasseur rented an apartment above a Puerto Rican social club; the Mannings, one nearby. The men took construction jobs. Gros found work as a temp; Carol Manning babysat. Levasseur and Tom Manning began taking weekend trips to reconnoiter targets, driving their own cars and communicating via walkie-talkie. After several months Levasseur found the next target: a W. R. Grace chemical factory in Marlboro, Massachusetts. Grace had been accused of exploiting its Latin American workers, and the building was barely ten miles from the town of Clinton, where President Carter was holding a town hall meeting that March. Levasseur built the bomb, a large one, and left it outside the plant gate on the evening of March 12, 1977. It blew up at 8:24, shattering more than a hundred windows. Afterward they called in credit to United Press International, directing police to a communiqué slipped inside a Boston phone booth. Not till later that day, however, did they learn that while the W. R. Grace logo adorned the factory, Grace had sold it nine years before. They had inadvertently bombed the Ideal Roller and Graphics
Company, which made printing presses. “We screwed up there,” Levasseur recalls. “That was pretty stupid.”

Between actions, life for the couples began to slow in New Britain. Their various fake IDs held up; there was no sense that the authorities had their scent. Gros made friends at her office job, and for the first time she and Levasseur found themselves nervously attending the odd office party. She and Carol Manning did their best to construct the illusion of domesticity. Gros baked bread and made maple syrup. Carol refused to participate in any more actions; like Pat, she felt that raising her child—two-year-old Jeremy—was far more important than what they always euphemistically called their “political work.”