Days of Rage (68 page)

Whatever his motivation, Shakur’s transformation coincided with the arrival in his life of a true revolutionary, a cool, stoic figure all but worshiped by would-be white and black revolutionaries alike. It was time for Sekou Odinga to come in from the cold.

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When Eldridge Cleaver was thrown out of Algeria in 1972, the Panthers with him scattered. Like Cleaver, Donald Cox found refuge in France. Michael Tabor ended up in Zambia. Only Sekou Odinga, the one Panther whose reputation actually grew despite the Algerian debacle, wanted to continue the struggle where it had begun, in the United States. Tall, quiet, and dark-skinned, with a pistol usually jammed into his belt in his role as Cleaver’s principal bodyguard, “Sekou,” one visitor to Algiers was quoted years later as saying, “is the most amazing of all the Panthers.” Odinga drew comparisons to “Shaft” and other blaxploitation heroes of the day. The word used most often was “badass.”

Odinga had long talks with the others before leaving Algiers; they knew
what he wanted to do. He was still a wanted fugitive, indicted in the Panther 21 case; they thought returning to the States was suicidal. But Odinga remained dedicated to Malcolm’s words. He still believed in the revolution. He left Algiers in the fall of 1972, drifting through Lebanon, Tanzania, and other African countries. Eventually, in the spring of 1973, he returned to the United States. “I flew back,” he recalls. “It was easy. Security wasn’t like it is now. You could use any small airport, go through Mexico or Canada.”

As luck would have it, he reached New York just a few weeks before the May 1973 shootout in which Assata Shakur, still known as Joanne Chesimard, was captured on the New Jersey Turnpike. He had met with her just weeks before. “Everybody was having a tough time,” he recalls. “But we were underground in a tough time. We were up against the strongest military power in the world; they were hell-bent on destroying us. Assata and them, they were being hunted. [She] and Zayd [Shakur], they were not expropriators. They had been pushed into doing things they didn’t know how to do. At the time we worked up some plans to do things together. It was very rough. But it was still doable.”

In fact, it wasn’t. From the moment Odinga returned to the United States, it seemed another group of BLA soldiers was killed or captured every month. When the final BLA member, Twymon Meyers, was killed, in November 1973, Odinga realized he was on his own. “I had organized my immediate future with them in mind, but Zayd and them got killed before we were able to do much,” he recalls. “That really stopped a lot of stuff.”

Years later the FBI would allege that Odinga and Mutulu Shakur carried out a series of armed robberies during the late 1970s. What they never learned, Odinga says, was that his revolutionary expropriations actually began much earlier, after the BLA’s collapse, in 1974. Odinga worked with his old friend Larry Mack and another black radical he declines to identify. “I couldn’t even tell you how many there were,” he says of the banks this group robbed. “At least ten before 1976. Connecticut, New Jersey, mostly New York. I remember ‘expros’ in Midtown [Manhattan], Long Island, Queens. I went back in twice to one in Queens. When the guard looked up and saw me for a second time, he just made this face and went, ‘Oh no, not again.’”

This group “fell apart” in 1976, Odinga says, after his main partner decided to retire. It was then that he renewed his acquaintance with Mutulu Shakur. Odinga, several years older, had known him since Shakur was “thirteen or fourteen,” Odinga says. “He would always come around. He liked my weed.” When Shakur approached him about forming an underground group in 1976, Odinga had all but retired from robbing banks. He had apartments in Pittsburgh and New York and had opened a legitimate business, selling African jewelry with Zayd and Lumumba Shakur’s father, who purchased their goods on trips to Africa. Odinga and Aba Shakur would drive south from New York, selling to shopkeepers, until reaching New Orleans, where they unfolded card tables on a street corner and sold what remained to tourists.

At first, Odinga recalls, he was skeptical about helping Mutulu Shakur rob anything. “Mutulu is a very good speaker, a good organizer,” he recalls, “and I think that was what he was cut out to do. The military stuff, that wouldn’t work out.” So Odinga sat out Shakur’s first robbery attempt, in late 1976. The target was in Pittsburgh, and while Odinga agreed to let Shakur use his apartment there as a staging area, he declined to take part. Instead Shakur recruited two friends from the Lincoln Detox crowd, Raymond Oliver and Chui Ferguson, an army veteran who had volunteered at Lincoln and now helped run a drug-rehabilitation clinic in Brooklyn. Ferguson, who suffered from back spasms, also happened to be one of Shakur’s acupuncture patients.

So it was, on the cold morning of December 6, 1976, that a new underground group came into being. It didn’t yet have a name, only a mission. After spending the night at Odinga’s apartment, Shakur and his two partners drove their rental car into downtown Pittsburgh and parked a half block from the Mellon Bank. Pistols jammed inside their coats, Shakur and Ferguson took positions outside while Oliver lingered down the block. After ten minutes a truck from the Cauley Armored Car Service coasted to a stop in front of the bank. Inside the truck was $1.44 million in cash, proceeds from a Kaufmann’s department store. When the two guards climbed out, Shakur and Ferguson drew their pistols.

At that point the robbery degenerated into black comedy. One of the guards
fainted. The other followed orders and spread himself against the outer wall of the bank. They were just about to handcuff the two and rifle the truck when Ferguson, who had been suffering from back spasms all morning, was hit by another. For a moment he lost control of his arms and his gun went off. Before Shakur could do anything, a police car appeared. All three men panicked and ran. Ferguson made it only a few hundred feet before being felled by yet another back spasm. Oliver was tackled by a pair of detectives. Only Shakur escaped.
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This was hardly the auspicious debut Shakur had hoped for. Afterward he pestered Odinga to help him, and in time Odinga relented—to a point. “The idea was, we would each recruit four to nine or whatever crew members, who would help do things, and from time to time we would do things together,” Odinga recalls. Each began with a single recruit. Odinga brought in Larry Mack, his old bank-robbing pal. Shakur recruited thirty-year-old Tyrone Rison, a onetime member of the Republic of New Afrika. A Vietnam vet who never lost his zeal for gunplay, Rison was a small man, five foot nine, earning him the nickname “Little Brother,” sometimes shortened to “L.B.”

Rison led an unremarkable life. He had a wife and children, lived in Queens’s Rockaway neighborhood, and worked as a physical therapist. Still, hungry for action and wholly in agreement with Shakur’s revolutionary patter, he eagerly signed up for the group’s first expropriation. It came, of all places, at a meatpacking plant called the House o’ Weenies on East 138th Street in the Bronx, three blocks south of Lincoln Hospital. On May 26, 1977, Odinga and Rison barged into the plant’s business office, fired a few shots in the air, demanded and received an armload of cash, then dashed away, spilling bills behind them. Shakur, at Odinga’s insistence, waited in the getaway car.

It was a start. For their next “action” Odinga identified a Citibank branch in the Westchester County suburb of Mount Vernon, just across the Bronx border. They cased the bank in detail. On October 19, Odinga and Mack burst inside, guns drawn, loudly announcing their intentions and ordering customers onto the floor. Running behind the teller cages, they relieved the cash drawers
of $13,800. Then Rison, who had been waiting outside in a gray getaway van with Shakur, scrambled inside and yelled, “Let’s go!” It was their smoothest job yet.

At that point not much about their crimes was revolutionary. There were no communiqués, no money given to the poor, no rhetoric whatsoever, in fact, except what they uttered among themselves. The FBI didn’t even know they existed. They were just stick-up men.

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What transformed Mutulu Shakur’s motley crew of mock revolutionaries from a collection of armed robbers happy to hold up a House o’ Weenies into hard-core felons destined to commit the most outlandish crimes of the era was its incorporation of a small band of white radicals—all fleeing the wreckage of Weatherman and affiliated groups, all still ferociously committed to carrying out “the struggle,” and all but a handful, as it happened, women.

This unlikely alliance began with Silvia Baraldini, the squat, prematurely gray radical who had risen from the Panther 21 defense committee to spearhead the Assata Shakur defense committee, assume a leadership position in the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee, and, after forcing its split in late 1976, co-found a new group, the May 19 Communist Organization.
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May 19 began as a handful of women, no more than fifteen by Baraldini’s estimate, most of them living in Brooklyn. Several, including the ex-Weathermen Judy Clark and Susan Rosenberg, had lingered on the fringes of the underground for years before joining the PFOC. After the split, “we went back to New York and we were kind of lost,” Baraldini recalls. “We had never led organizations before. We were the rank and file. We had never done this. It took time to regroup.”

Like Clayton Van Lydegraf and his Bay Area acolytes, a number of the May 19 women felt the seductive lure of the underground. It was Mutulu Shakur who made them see what a willing white woman could do for a black militant who couldn’t afford to draw attention to himself. Baraldini and Shakur had known each other for years, but in 1977 their relationship began
to change. Shakur began dropping by her apartment late at night, talking revolutionary politics, sometimes taking her for drives; their discussion always turned to the need to lend a hand to oppressed African Americans.

“It started out with him asking me for small favors,” Baraldini recalls. “I rented cars for him, I gave him money. They were little things, nothing really illegal. I perceived it as helping a friend.”

Everything began to change one night in December 1977. Until that point Baraldini and the women of the May 19 Communist Organization, while committed to fighting racism and police brutality, hadn’t done much of anything. That evening was ostensibly a Kwanzaa party, in someone’s cramped Brooklyn apartment. But the true agenda revolved around a renowned radical the May 19 women had until recently known only by reputation: Marilyn Buck, famous in underground circles as the only white member of the BLA. It wasn’t entirely accurate—the BLA didn’t have any membership rolls—but in 1973 Buck had been convicted in a California federal court of illegally purchasing ammunition for the BLA, purportedly at the behest of Donald Cox, Eldridge Cleaver’s aide-de-camp. An attractive brunette, Buck was a Texas minister’s daughter who had emerged from SDS’s University of Texas chapter. While like-minded peers joined Weatherman, she headed instead to San Francisco, where she fell in with the Black Panthers and, later, the BLA. To hard-core militants who snickered at “toilet bombers” like Bernardine Dohrn, Buck was the genuine item, brave, resourceful, and utterly committed to the cause. One FBI agent called her “the white Joanne Chesimard.” “Marilyn was the queen,” recalls Elizabeth Fink, who was at the Kwanzaa party that night. “She was the white girl—the white girl of the BLA.”

The California court sentenced Buck to ten years and sent her to the federal women’s prison in Alderson, West Virginia. In 1977, having served four years, she was granted a furlough and headed to New York, where she bunked with her lawyer, Susan Tipograph, and befriended Baraldini. By the night of the Kwanzaa party, word had spread through the radical women of May 19 that Buck had no intention of returning to prison.

“I remember the discussion that night: Should Marilyn go back?” Baraldini recalls. “Marilyn was firm: She wasn’t going back. She needed protection. So some of us went along. We agreed to protect her. This was the first time any of
us supported someone underground. That meant money, apartments, ID; we did all that for Marilyn. This was a very big deal. It was taking the step into the unknown, the point of no return. And it was one of the biggest mistakes we made. It eventually put the FBI onto us. She only had eighteen months [left in her sentence]. But we couldn’t say no. This was Marilyn Buck. We couldn’t say no.”

Baraldini and her friends found Buck an apartment, the first of several she would use in the slums of East Orange, New Jersey. But Buck wanted more: She wanted to rejoin the underground. So Baraldini and Shakur arranged an introduction to the one man they all idolized, Sekou Odinga. “After Marilyn walked away from the joint,” Odinga recalls, “she told people she wanted to get involved with the struggle again. They reached out to people, who reached out to me.” They met at a hotel in the Washington, D.C., area. “We talked for about two or three hours,” Odinga continues. “She wanted to plug in. She made that clear. She gave me her history, the things she had done for the BLA, her understanding of the struggle, especially the African struggle. I kind of grilled her. I probably treated her unfairly. Her thing was, ‘Use me as you see fit.’ I was pleased with her answers. She passed.”

With the emergence of Baraldini and Buck, Odinga and Mutulu Shakur saw the potential for bigger and better things. They now had something the BLA hadn’t had: an aboveground support network. They called it “the white edge.” The group had no official name. Unofficially some began calling it “the Family.”

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As Mutulu Shakur’s band of armed robbers in the Bronx grew in confidence through the early months of 1978, the investigations into the FALN were going nowhere. None of the jailed suspects would say a word. Worse, on January 23 a judge freed Maria Cueto and her assistant, Raisa Nemikin. In May several other suspects, including the Chicano activist Pedro Archuleta and the Rosado brothers, were released; they posed on the steps of the Federal Courthouse, clenched fists raised.

The FALN bombings, meanwhile, continued. On January 31, eight days
after Cueto and Nemikin went free, two pipe bombs exploded in New York, one in a trash bin outside the Consolidated Edison building, the second beneath a police car five blocks north. No one was hurt; a caller took credit on behalf of the FALN. In the following days three more unexploded bombs were found, presumably intended to detonate along with the others. One was found by a group of boys in Harlem, who handed it to a passerby, who handed it to a construction worker, who helpfully disassembled it before handing it to a police officer.