Days of Rage (74 page)

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On September 15, 1980, a full two and a half years after their indictment, W. Mark Felt and Edward S. Miller were finally brought to trial in a Washington federal court. The date had been delayed at least eight times; some in the capital, the few who cared, doubted that the two aging FBI men would ever face justice. Their onetime boss, L. Patrick Gray, the man who succeeded J. Edgar Hoover, was processed separately; the charges against him would later be dismissed altogether.

The proceedings, a kind of old-home week for the Nixon administration, were thick with the air of anticlimax. Nixon himself, in a rare public appearance, led a string of onetime White House and FBI officials who spoke in Felt and Miller’s defense. But there was no denying that, however dangerous the Weather Underground had been, the two FBI men had approved illegal activities in their efforts to apprehend its leadership. They were swiftly convicted. The men faced up to ten years in prison. Two months later the judge handed down their sentences: a $5,000 fine for Felt, $3,500 for Miller. Neither would serve jail time. The light-as-air sentences suggested the court’s skepticism of the whole affair. America yawned.

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Among the few Americans with a keen personal interest in the Felt-Miller trial was an attractive young couple living in a fifth-floor apartment at 520 West 123rd Street in Manhattan, a few blocks from Columbia University. The woman, in her mid-thirties, was named Christine L. Douglas. Until giving birth to her second son that February—a midwife handled everything right there in the apartment—she had held down two jobs, as a manager at Broadway Baby, an infant-clothing store at Eighty-second and Broadway, and waitressing at Teacher’s, a restaurant and bar a block away. The man, later described as an “aging hippie,” was named Anthony J. Lee. He worked as a teacher at B.J.’s Kids, a day-care center on West Eighty-fourth Street. The couple lived quietly. Neighbors remembered them kindly.

Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers had been underground for ten long
years. Neither has ever said much about that odd three-year interregnum following Weather’s breakup, a period in which they gave up making bombs and started a family. It appears they quickly left San Francisco, probably in 1977, and soon arrived in Manhattan, where they reestablished contact with their old underground friends, from Kathy Boudin to Brian Flanagan. Jeff Jones and Eleanor Stein had reunited and were living seven miles north, in the Bronx. For a time Dohrn and Ayers lived in a studio apartment on West Forty-sixth Street, where Ayers took a job at a health-food bakery. They moved uptown in 1979, taking a flat near Columbia.

Though they never quite believed it, no one was looking for them anymore. The FBI had all but stopped after the Squad 47 scandal. They had given up altogether once the fugitive warrant on Dohrn was dropped in 1979, after state prosecutors in Chicago, where she was still wanted on Days of Rage charges, indicated they wouldn’t extradite her if she was captured. All charges against Ayers had been dropped years before. The couple had been discussing surrender for months when Cathy Wilkerson turned herself in that summer. Wilkerson had been living alone with her infant daughter on Chicago’s South Side; she would end up serving a year in prison on charges related to her role at the Townhouse.

In mid-November, a week after Felt and Miller were found guilty, the couple piled into a blue station wagon and drove off. A week later their attorney, Michael Kennedy, telephoned a Chicago prosecutor and said Dohrn and Ayers were ready to surrender. On December 3 a crowd of reporters greeted them as they entered a Chicago courthouse. Forced to wait a half hour, they chatted amiably with the press. Inside Kennedy argued that Dohrn’s $300,000 bond be reduced, and the judge agreed, cutting it to $25,000. Afterward Dohrn read a statement suggesting that she had never abandoned her radical beliefs. “This was a time when the unspeakable crimes of the American government were exposed and resisted by unprecedented numbers of its own people,” she said. “Resistance by any means necessary is happening and will continue within the U.S. as well as around the world.”

Afterward Dohrn and Ayers moved into an apartment in a house in Chicago owned by Ayers’s younger brother. A month later they reappeared in court, where a judge gave Dohrn three years’ probation and ordered her to
pay a $1,500 fine. “I remember the night before they left to turn themselves in, my girlfriend and I had a dinner for them. We called it ‘The Last Supper for Joe and Rose,’” recalls Brian Flanagan, using a set of early code names. “It was gourmet food, fine wines, first-growth Bordeaux. And then they go off to Chicago, and the feds were desperate for them to turn themselves in. Bernardine had to pay the fine, and she paid it with a check. Priceless!”

The excruciating irony that Bernardine Dohrn, the most-wanted underground figure of the era, could walk away virtually scot-free just weeks after two of her top FBI pursuers had been convicted of crimes against her was not lost on anyone involved. “The Weather Underground had done like a hundred bombings, and she was never prosecuted for one of them,” recalls Lou Vizi, the FALN investigator. “That’s amazing. I mean, absolutely amazing. You know who got prosecuted? Us. The FBI.”

“What really galls me,” says Don Strickland of Squad 47, “is we did all this stuff, risking our lives every day, putting our lives on the line. And we end up being the villains! And these Weatherman scumbags end up being the fucking Robin Hoods!”

For FBI partisans, the only welcome news in the episode came the following April, when President Reagan announced he had signed full pardons for both Felt and Miller. Both men swiftly vanished from the public eye. Not for twenty-five years, in fact, would the world learn that Felt had been keeping a far bigger secret than anything to do with the Weather Underground. In 2005 he admitted he had been “Deep Throat,” the confidential source used by two
Washington Post
reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, to break the Watergate story.

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One reaction to discussion of radical violence during the 1970s and early 1980s is that much of it was harmless; save for Fraunces Tavern, the policemen assassinated by the BLA, and the immolation of the SLA, not that many people died. But as the underground dwindled, its remaining members grew increasingly desperate, and dangerous. The single deadliest year for radical violence was in fact 1981, eleven years after the Townhouse. Seven
people died, including young Alex McMillan in the FALN attack at JFK airport.

Most met their fate at the hands of the Family, which, as 1981 dawned, was riven with internal disputes and, at least where Mutulu Shakur and his cocaine-addled acolytes were concerned, sloppier and more violent by the day. Cocaine use was so out of hand that Shakur had a friend draw up official antidrug guidelines, which were ignored. Sekou Odinga repeatedly confronted Shakur about his drug use; Shakur denied it. Worse, Odinga had invested money in the Harlem acupuncture center, and he suspected that that money too was going for cocaine. “Any kind of drug use bothered me,” he recalls. “There was scuttlebutt that certain people were involved in heavy drugs, that they were losing control. Everyone involved denied it. I will say a lot of money [I invested] disappeared. I kept wondering, what is really going on?”

The May 19 women, especially Silvia Baraldini, brought tensions of their own. Baraldini and Marilyn Buck had grown to detest each other; both were immensely proud of their anointed positions alongside the black militants they revered, and each saw the other as a primary rival. Baraldini also despised Tyrone Rison, whom she thought insufficiently “political”—and rude. “Tyrone Rison was creepy,” she says. “He was so into guns. We avoided him at all costs.”

In an effort to organize themselves, Shakur and Odinga formally split the Family into two teams. The first, which they dubbed the “Primary Team,” consisted of their best five soldiers—themselves, Tyrone Rison, and two of Shakur’s men, Donald Weems (aka Kuwasi Balagoon) and Mtayara Sundiata. The Primary Team handled all the gunplay and made all the decisions in private meetings. The second group, dubbed the “Secondary Team,” consisted of all the white women and anyone else they chose to rope into a robbery. Despite their strident feminism, the women largely did as they were told.

Tensions within the group grew after another pair of failed robbery attempts that winter, both in Danbury, Connecticut. One, on March 23, was one of Shakur’s side jobs; Odinga and Rison weren’t even told of it—they were on vacations, in fact—much less invited along. A Purolator truck, flush with cash from a Read’s department store, had just pulled up outside a brokerage office that afternoon when Shakur and his deputies Balagoon and Sundiata rushed it, guns drawn. The courier, Daniel Archambault, was intercepted in
the parking lot and made to lie flat. The man behind the wheel, Joseph W. Dombrowskas, a Purolator veteran, looked up from his clipboard to see a black man pointing a shotgun at him. When he refused to open the door, the shotgun went off, blasting a hole in a side window and showering him with glass. When Dombrowskas pulled his pistol and returned fire, Shakur and the others ran. Afterward Odinga and Rison were incensed—at being excluded, at the lack of professionalism, at the unnecessary violence. Odinga prided himself on smooth jobs without gunfire; he couldn’t understand why Shakur’s people were growing trigger happy.

It was inevitable that the Family’s increasing appetite for violence would turn deadly. It happened on the drizzly morning of Tuesday, June 2, 1981, outside a Chase Manhattan branch in the northern reaches of the Bronx. It was another armored-car job, one the group had canceled twice before at the last second, fearing, apparently incorrectly, that they had been spotted by police. Judy Clark was the lookout, alerting the Primary Team, all jammed into a yellow Plymouth station wagon, when the Brink’s truck was approaching the bank. When it appeared, Shakur pulled to a screeching halt beside and just behind it. Odinga jumped from the front seat, cradling a shotgun, and told the two couriers, William Moroney and Michael Schlachter, to freeze. They did so and followed his orders to lie on the pavement.

Back in the car, Rison, carrying an M16, was momentarily unable to open his door; a parked car blocked it. By the time Shakur inched the car forward, allowing Rison to exit, he was screaming and cursing. Emerging into the parking lot, Rison glanced at the two prone Brink’s couriers and inexplicably opened fire, raking both men with bullets. Schlachter was hit three times; he would survive. Moroney, who was fifty-nine that day, a thirty-eight-year Brink’s veteran, would not. He was shot four times, twice in the head. Odinga and the others gathered their wits long enough to grab several money bags, then drove off, at one point firing a burst of gunfire at a bakery truck whose driver was blocking their exit from the parking lot.

The murder of William Moroney was a turning point for the Family. For the first time they drew the attention of the NYPD, which launched a full-scale investigation, assigning fifty officers from the Major Case Squad, the Central Robbery Division, and the Bronx Detective Division to pursue the
robbers full-time. A nearby security guard, Willie Lee, sat with police sketch artists, and the resulting drawings of three of the robbers were published in the
Daily News
; they closely resembled Shakur, Balagoon, and Sundiata. Shakur was shaken; he had his hair braided in an effort to change his appearance. Both Rison and Odinga began talking about retirement. After the robbery the two hid out in rural Georgia, where Rison had purchased a house. Shakur gave him money to buy more land so all of them could build homes nearby.

It wasn’t just the Primary Team that was running scared. Moroney’s murder also provoked an unprecedented revolt among the white women. “June 2, 1981, I’ll never forget that day: the day Tyrone Rison shot the guard,” says Silvia Baraldini, who was not involved in the robbery. “Everybody was very upset about that. Until then we had done everything possible to avoid violence. That had been our agreement. . . . I told [Shakur], ‘This cannot be ignored.’ We, the white women, decided a pause had to be taken. We said we would participate in nothing else until a meeting was held to confront these issues. But that didn’t happen, because people were scared. They scattered to the four winds.”

Not until it was far too late would Baraldini realize that no one, least of all Mutulu Shakur, was listening to a word she said.

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All this—the string of botched robberies, the murder of William Moroney, the accelerating spiral into rampant violence and drug use—played out against the backdrop of a year-long debate within the Primary Team over the wisdom of the ambitious armored-car robbery Mutulu Shakur was planning outside a Chemical Bank branch in the suburb of Nanuet, across the Hudson River in Rockland County, New York. Shakur had studied the job for months and was certain it could be their biggest haul ever, easily more than $1 million in free cash. Shakur was so excited he gave the robbery a nickname: the Big Dance.

Money from the Big Dance, he assured a skeptical Odinga, would fulfill all their dreams. Odinga and Rison could retire in comfort if they wanted. Or they could join Shakur and Sundiata, who swore they planned to use their
share of the proceeds to launch a true revolutionary assault, the planned bombing of a string of New York police precincts. Odinga had studied Shakur’s plans for the Big Dance in detail, however, and he believed it was a suicide mission. If they got caught in traffic, they would be sitting ducks. Worse, Shakur planned to stage the robbery in the late afternoon, when the Brink’s truck was ending its route laden with a full day’s cash; for Odinga, this was far too close to rush hour. “The plan actually made sense,” he recalls. “But it had to go perfectly. If just one thing went wrong, they were dead, and they had no backup plan. There was only one way in and out of that town, the highways, and they were going to use the highways. It was stupid.”

For a time Odinga agreed to go along, though he and Rison secretly agreed to abort at the slightest hint of danger. They had actually attempted the Nanuet robbery no fewer than four times, once the previous fall and three times that May. Each time the truck either failed to show, or Odinga or Shakur bailed at the last minute; after the last attempt, Odinga said he would try no more. Each time Shakur urged him to reconsider, Odinga argued in favor of another bank, in the Bronx. The publicity and internal arguments that erupted in the wake of William Moroney’s murder did nothing to curb Shakur’s zeal for the job. By that fall he had decided once again to attempt the Big Dance, this time without Odinga and Rison. He and the other members of the Primary Team, Balagoon and Sundiata, thought the payoff was worth the risk. The white women, as usual, would do as they were told.