Days of Rage (73 page)

In the meantime agents, hoping to grab López and Morales, gathered the suspects’ wallets, sorted through all the identification they could find, then spread across Chicago checking addresses. They found nothing for three long days, until they finally checked the address on Lucy Rodriguez’s driver’s license, which turned out to be the Milwaukee safe house. López and Morales were long gone, but inside agents found their files and weapons and FALN communiqués. That search led, in turn, to the Torres apartment in Jersey City, where agents found blasting caps and other bomb paraphernalia.

By then the FALN’s supporters, including Carlos Torres’s father, Reverend José Torres, had appeared in Evanston. That Sunday, two days after the arrests, they demonstrated outside police headquarters, waving Puerto Rican flags and chanting, “The fight continues.” Someone called a New York newspaper and said the FALN would kill one police officer every day until Torres was released. Nothing came of it.

The next day, Monday, April 7, all eleven prisoners had to be dragged into an Evanston courtroom. Outside, fifty supporters chanted, “Drive the Yankees to the sea, Puerto Rico will be free!” The group’s attorney, the noted radical Michael Deutsch, refused to recognize the court’s authority, insisting his clients were captured combatants. “I am a prisoner of war!” Torres shouted as he was dragged from the courtroom. “Viva Puerto Rico Libre!”

Every arraignment, every court appearance, meant more of the same: shouting, spitting, demonstrators. The wheels of justice, however, ground forward. Haydee Torres, wanted for the Mobil bombing, went to trial first, that May in New York. She drew life. That summer the rest were tried on various state charges, including conspiracy to commit armed robbery. All, like Torres, refused to mount a defense. All were found guilty, drawing sentences from eight to thirty years each.

Federal prosecutors in Chicago, however, weren’t satisfied. One, Jeremy Margolis, argued that the defendants should be tried under a “seditious conspiracy” law so obscure it had been used only twice—against the Puerto Rican nationalists in the 1950s-era attacks in Washington. As luck would have it, President Carter had just granted clemency to those same defendants
the year before, suggesting that the Justice Department wouldn’t look fondly on an identical prosecution. But Margolis was tenacious, and after winning Washington’s approval, he won indictments against all ten FALN defendants that December.

The trial commenced in Chicago in February 1981. The courtroom was patrolled by bomb-sniffing dogs. The defendants, sitting in shackles, regularly interrupted the proceedings, shouting insults at the judge. At one point they began a hunger strike. None of it mattered. After barely a week of testimony, the jury found them all guilty. The judge handed down stiff sentences. Carlos Torres got seventy more years. The others drew sentences of between thirty and ninety years apiece. As the judge read their sentences, the prisoners hurled insults and threats. “If I weren’t chained, I’d take care of you right now!” Carmen Valentín shouted. “There will soon be judges, marshals, members of the jury, prosecutors, agents, all of you—some of you will be walking on canes and in wheelchairs!”

No one was satisfied: None of the defendants had been charged with the FALN’s deadliest bombing, at Fraunces Tavern. The prisoners themselves were unrepentant. Their supporters, especially those in Chicago, were alive with rumors and fanciful plans to somehow rescue them. Freddie Mendez, who struck a deal with prosecutors before the trial, claimed that one involved kidnapping the son of the new president, Ronald Reagan, and exchanging him for the prisoners.

And the violence, more than a few FBI men guessed, was far from over. Oscar López and Willie Morales were still at large, still able to recruit militants to the cause, still able to build bombs. Police suspected they were behind the explosion of two powerful pipe bombs in a locker room at New York’s Pennsylvania Station at the height of rush hour a few days before Christmas. No one was hurt, but the station had to be evacuated, forcing thousands out into the cold and snarling rail service throughout the region. A caller directed police to a communiqué in a trash can, which took responsibility on behalf of the “Puerto Rican Armed Resistance,” a previously unknown group. “It would appear that, if they are not connected, they have the same aims as the FALN,” the NYPD operations chief, Patrick Murphy, told reporters.4

The incident was all but forgotten for five months. Then, on the morning
of Saturday, May 16, 1981, someone calling on behalf of the same group phoned the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, claiming that three bombs, including one aboard a Pan American flight leaving for Guatemala, would go off at JFK airport in fifteen minutes. The flight, which was already taxiing, was recalled and evacuated. As passengers spilled out, a twenty-year-old Pan Am handyman named Alex McMillan walked into a nearby men’s room and noticed a bag on the floor. A ticket agent entered a moment later, and when McMillan pointed out the bag, the agent went for security. McMillan lingered in the bathroom, however, and when the bomb exploded, he absorbed what police called the “full force” of the explosion. He was dead by nightfall.

Alex McMillan became the FALN’s sixth innocent victim. That evening police found a second bomb, unexploded, inside a vinyl bag outside Gate 18. A third was found before dawn in a women’s restroom. Later that day an anonymous caller to the
Daily News
tied the incident directly to the FALN trials, saying it was “to protest the imprisoned people being held in Chicago.” The next action, he promised before hanging up, “will be to eliminate President Reagan.”

Monday brought a wave of bomb threats across the New York area, at the Chrysler and Empire State buildings, Grand Central Terminal, and Newark Airport, among many targets; more than a few New Yorkers were reminded of the mass evacuations following the 1977 FALN bombings. Two bombs turned up, mailed to the Honduran consulate and the U.S. mission to the United Nations; upon examination, they proved identical to the JFK bombs, all the same design as those built by the FALN and Ron Fliegelman. The next day someone claiming to be an FALN spokesman called the
New York Post
and said the bombs were the work of Willie Morales. The caller promised “a lot of bloodshed” should anything happen to the FALN prisoners in Chicago.

 • • • 

Ten days later, in the Chicago suburb of Glenview, a patrolman named Brian Bocca noticed a green Buick meandering through a residential neighborhood. It would stop, duck into a driveway, then slowly drive on. When the car made
an illegal turn, Bocca pulled it over. Two men were inside. The driver, a Hispanic man in his thirties, produced an Oregon driver’s license bearing the name José Ortiz. Bocca thought it looked fake. When a second officer arrived, they glanced inside the car and saw a pair of long-nosed pliers and an alligator clip, common burglary tools. Ordering the men from the car, they searched it and found a pistol with the serial number removed.

Both men were handcuffed and taken to the Glenview police station. Running their descriptions through computers at the National Crime Identification Center, officers were startled to discover that the driver’s description exactly matched that of Oscar López. By nightfall FBI agents were on the scene, and a fingerprint check confirmed it: López, the man behind the deadliest bombing campaign of the era, had been captured in a routine traffic check. Presumably, like Carlos Torres, he had believed that his false identity would hold. His passenger turned out to be a new FALN recruit.

López had been living in an apartment on West Ainslie Street in Chicago since the Evanston arrests a year before. A search the next day uncovered guns, FALN communiqués, and, hidden behind a fake wall, six pounds of dynamite. Prosecutors scrambled to make a case, but despite a widespread belief that it was López who had masterminded the Fraunces Tavern attack, the FBI was unable to gather anything but circumstantial evidence. Instead, seven weeks later, he, too, was brought to trial on sedition charges, in a Chicago court filled with FALN supporters. The proceedings proved anticlimactic, ending in three days. López made an opening statement claiming to be a prisoner of war, with a “deep respect for human life,” then sat in silence, refusing to participate. There was an audible gasp when Freddie Mendez took the stand. He admitted everything. In a closing statement López denounced the trial as a “lie and a farce.” The jury took five hours to find him guilty.

“You are an unrehabilitated revolutionary,” the judge said. “There’s no point in giving you anything less than a heavy sentence.” And with that he sentenced López to fifty-five years in prison. Still the FALN refused to die.

22

THE SCALES OF JUSTICE

Trials, Surrenders, and the Family, 1980−81

Six weeks after Joanne Chesimard’s jailbreak, a new decade dawned: the 1980s. The era of the underground radical seemed an increasingly dim memory. There were still stragglers who had yet to turn themselves in, most notably Bernardine Dohrn and the remains of Weather’s old leadership. Ray Levasseur was still out there robbing banks, but as far as the public was concerned, they were a lunatic fringe. What remained of the “armed struggle” movement was so obscure no one suspected that Mutulu Shakur and the Family even existed. They had managed to free Chesimard and Willie Morales without leaving a clue, at least none the FBI could find.

But the Family had a problem, a serious one. When something pollutes a radical cell’s intellectual purity, whether it is allegations of sexism or racism, as happened with Weather, leftists call it a “corruption.” The Family had been deeply corrupted from the outset by a familiar scourge: illegal drugs, mainly cocaine. Shakur was a heavy user, as were a dozen or more of the hangers-on who lounged about the acupuncture clinic he opened in a four-story brownstone on West 139th Street in Harlem in the summer of 1980. Shakur, who
lived on the upper floors with several others, including his wife, two former stewardesses, and his assistants, called it the Black Acupuncture Advisory Association of North America (BAAANA). Later, when the FBI caught wind of things, a telephone wiretap recorded eighty-three separate drug purchases during a single four-week period.

Cocaine corrupted the Family at every turn. Because Sekou Odinga considered drug use counterrevolutionary, Shakur tried to keep his habit a secret, but it was no use; relations between the two steadily deteriorated. Money and guns were forever going missing from BAAANA’s safe, all swapped for cocaine. To buy more—and without telling Odinga or the white women, who wouldn’t approve—Shakur and his acolytes began robbing drug dealers and UPS trucks on their own. But it was never enough. Part of the problem was that BAAANA’s acupuncturists, schooled in Shakur’s revolutionary rhetoric, considered their work a public service; if customers couldn’t pay, and in Harlem they often couldn’t, they were treated for free. With little cash coming in, and much of it going for cocaine, the clinic lost money from its first day.

By 1980 Mutulu Shakur had become a classic coke fiend, a big talker with white powder on his upper lip, always desperate to make his next big score. The irony was that the white women, the true revolutionaries, knew nothing of his drug problem—not Marilyn Buck, Silvia Baraldini, Judy Clark, Susan Rosenberg, or the latest to join the group, the onetime Weatherman and Townhouse survivor Kathy Boudin, who worked odd jobs while raising a newborn with her partner, David Gilbert. To a woman, they believed they were supporting the second coming of the Black Liberation Army. “I knew nothing about drugs, nothing,” Baraldini recalls. “I just thought Mutulu and those guys were hyper, you know, energetic, and they never slept. And I kept thinking, ‘Why are they so pumped up and excited all the time?’ I thought they were just on like a high metabolism. I didn’t know.”

The robberies that followed the Chesimard jailbreak illustrated the degradation of the Family’s capabilities. The first, another armored car, came at lunchtime on February 20, 1980, outside a Korvettes department store in Greenburgh, a northern New York suburb. While Shakur and the women watched from getaway cars, Odinga, Tyrone Rison, and another Family
member jumped the courier, handcuffed him, and forced him to lie on the pavement beside his vehicle. Unfortunately, the back door was locked, and another guard was inside. The trio punched, kicked, and threatened to shoot the hapless courier, but nothing would persuade the second guard to open the armored car. “Go ahead, kill him,” he shouted. “I don’t give a damn.”
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Crestfallen, the Family withdrew without incident to the safety of a new safe-house apartment, in the suburb of Mount Vernon. Only then did Odinga realize the courier’s keys could have opened the car’s doors. They had surrendered too soon.

Two months later, on April 22, they did much better. The target was once again an armored car, this time a Purolator truck outside a bank branch in Inwood, New York, on Long Island. They rammed it with a rented van, then disarmed the driver when he emerged. As Tyrone Rison stood in the road, warning off traffic with an M16, the others rifled the truck, making off with $529,000, by far their biggest haul to date.

It was also the last successful robbery the Family was able to stage for more than a year. During the second half of 1980 much of its focus was directed toward a Brink’s armored truck that serviced a Chemical Bank branch in Nanuet, New York, just across the Hudson River from the northern reaches of Manhattan. The job was laboriously scouted by a onetime BLA fighter named Jamal Joseph, who as a teenager had been a protégé of Dhoruba Moore’s; after serving time for his role in the Sam Napier murder in April 1971, Joseph was back on the street, working intermittently with Shakur. But both times Shakur and his men set a trap for the Brink’s truck, it inexplicably failed to appear.

It was during these scouting expeditions that some in the group first noticed the route of a second Brink’s truck. Shakur began spending time in the area, studying the habits of its three couriers. But the more he discussed a possible robbery, the more Sekou Odinga resisted. Any robbery in the Nanuet area, he argued, would entail a getaway along one of the area’s highways, many of which fed into the closest route back to Manhattan, the mighty Tappan Zee Bridge. There was no way to predict the traffic, and no way to escape it once it was encountered. Tyrone Rison termed the Nyack job “nothing but sure danger.” No, Odinga warned. It “was nothing but sure death.”
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