Days of Rage (77 page)

An areawide alert immediately went out; roadblocks were set up all across southern Vermont. Speeding south from Brattleboro on Interstate 91, Levasseur passed a pair of state troopers parked on the median; they didn’t notice him. Listening to the police scanner bolted beneath his dashboard, he realized he now had police behind him and ahead of him, at a roadblock being thrown up at the Massachusetts−Vermont state line. He would never make it through. A moment later he spied a rest stop, the last one in Vermont before the border. He veered into it, parked the car out of sight, and sprinted into the woods.

It was as desperate a moment as he had faced since going underground six years before. Thrashing through the underbrush, he had only the dimmest idea where he was heading. He tried to bear south, toward Massachusetts, aware that if the state police found his car at the rest area, they would soon be after him with dogs and helicopters. He ran through the woods for two hours, seeing no one. Several times he thought he heard dogs. At one point he spotted an airplane above the trees. After about ten miles he came upon a road. Keeping to the trees alongside it, he reached a general store—and a pay phone.

Gros took the call in the kitchen. Her car was in for repairs. Thinking quickly, she phoned a neighbor, borrowed his battered pickup, and, with her three daughters in tow, drove into Massachusetts, where an hour later she spied Levasseur loitering nervously at the general store. The neighbor’s truck was so old that the horn blew whenever she hit the turn signal; Levasseur was apoplectic when she pulled up with the horn madly honking. “What the fuck are you doing?” he demanded.

They made it back to the farmhouse safely, and by the next evening they were gone. Jaan Laaman helped them pile some of their things into Gros’s car; later, when they were sure the police hadn’t found the house, they returned and took the rest. Laaman took two dozen boxes of Levasseur’s magazines and books and stowed them in a self-storage unit outside Binghamton, New York. Piling the kids into the car, the couple headed for the Mannings’ farmhouse in Pennsylvania and, within days, rented a place of their own in the town of Germansville.

Once they were settled, Levasseur drove to New Haven with Tom
Manning to caucus with Laaman and Richard Williams. It had been a close call. There was much to discuss, but to Levasseur’s surprise, the new recruits seemed more interested in asking for more money; they had already run through their share of the New Britain proceeds. He couldn’t understand how this could be but agreed to hand over cash at the next meeting. There was something else, though, something he couldn’t put his finger on. It was something about Williams. “Richard was always late, always antsy, always wanting to leave early,” Levasseur recalls. “I got irked. Afterward I remember telling Tom, ‘He doesn’t seem right. What’s going on with him?’”

They knew Williams had once had some kind of drug problem and sometimes drank too much. Levasseur laid down strict rules about chemical use. Alcohol and marijuana were tolerated in moderation; anything harder was strictly forbidden. It made people sloppy, and sloppiness was something he wouldn’t tolerate. Once, after Williams had gotten drunk at a group gathering, Levasseur had ordered him to do five hundred push-ups as punishment. According to Gros, it was Tom Manning who unraveled the mystery of Williams’s behavior when he visited his Cambridge apartment and glimpsed drug paraphernalia in his bathroom.

Levasseur got in touch with Laaman, told him to meet him in New Haven, and confronted him there. Yes, Laaman admitted, Williams was a heroin addict. Worse, Laaman had known and hadn’t told the others. Levasseur and Manning returned to Pennsylvania deeply shaken. They didn’t dare tell the women. “Ray and Tom knew the girls would go nuts,” says one intimate. “So they held off telling them awhile. Eventually, you know, they had to try and explain it, so they said Richard had come out of the prison struggle, that it was a symptom of his struggle against the system.”

Discovery of a junkie in their midst prompted a series of soul-searching discussions among the Levasseurs and Mannings. They couldn’t simply expel Williams; he knew too much, and they needed men. “Ray didn’t know what to do,” Gros recalls. “We couldn’t just kill him. Because we didn’t do that. What [were we going to do], bury him in the woods?”

After much discussion, Levasseur and Manning agreed that Williams would be taken into the Manning home, where he would undergo an
impromptu course of revolutionary rehabilitation. Manning asked his landlord for permission to have a friend stay with the family a few weeks, and in early December Williams arrived in a moving van, forlorn and repentant. He was still there on December 14, when Manning took his wife to a doctor’s office in Kingston and helped her give birth to a boy they named Jonathan.

 • • • 

Things were just settling down for the Levasseurs and Mannings as Christmas approached. On the morning of December 21, Levasseur rose early, threw on a pair of overalls, and drove to Philadelphia, where he planned to scout banks. At the Manning home, Tom stepped out into the cold morning air and walked through new snow to his blue Chevy Nova with Williams, who had overcome the worst of his withdrawal symptoms. They drove east on Interstate 80, passing into northwest New Jersey, where they shopped for Christmas presents. They were heading home on the interstate around 4:15 p.m. when a state trooper’s car pulled behind them, lights rolling. Inside was a thirty-two-year-old officer named Philip Lamonaco, New Jersey’s 1979 trooper of the year. Manning pulled over on a stretch of highway lined with trees and brush.

What happened next has never been proven. But Levasseur and those close to him would always believe it was Williams who fired the eight bullets into Trooper Lamonaco, killing him. Williams’s motivation, they say, was panic, mixed with a need to prove himself after the discovery of his heroin use diminished his status within the group. Years later Tom Manning would claim it was he, not Williams, who killed Lamonaco in self-defense—Lamonaco fired six shots, emptying his gun—but Manning’s friends always believed he was just trying to protect Williams.

Whatever happened, it was over in less than a minute; the blue Nova streaked west down the interstate, leaving Trooper Lamonaco bleeding in the snow on the shoulder of the road. A motorist stopped and used Lamonaco’s car radio to call for help. Ambulances appeared and took the trooper to Pocono Hospital in East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, where he was pronounced dead at 5:28. Manning and Williams, meanwhile, struggled to get away. Behind
the wheel, Manning took the first exit he could, driving northwest on snowy roads. He turned onto one country lane, then another, trying to find a shortcut to Pennsylvania, but the last one he took, Polkville Road, was still clogged with unplowed snow. The car got stuck in five inches of slush. In desperation, the two men got out and ran into the woods. Later, police with bloodhounds would follow their tracks three miles to a truck stop back on the interstate.

Gros was in her kitchen, watching the girls, when the phone rang. Manning’s voice was even, as usual, but she instantly knew something was wrong. He kept saying someone was “down.” It took a moment for her to realize he was saying someone had been shot. “What-what-what do you expect me to do?” she stammered. “I’m here with the kids.”

“We gotta get outta here!” he blurted. “You gotta come get us.”

“I can’t,” she pleaded, but by the time she hung up, she had promised to rescue them. It was Brattleboro all over again. She began dressing the girls, only dimly realizing the absurdity of what she was doing: preparing three children to pick up a pair of cop killers. Then, just as she began hunting for her keys, Levasseur telephoned. Later that day he managed to find Manning and Williams and bring them home.

Their fingerprints were all over Manning’s car: Levasseur knew they had a matter of days, maybe hours, before police tracked them down. And so, for the second time in two months, the Levasseurs, and now the Mannings, frantically cleared their homes of belongings; the Mannings left their Great Dane behind and a radio blaring. They piled everything and everyone into Gros’s car, five adults and six children, including the Mannings’ seven-day-old son. “Tom’s car, Tom’s house, our house, was gone,” Levasseur remembers. “All our ID was gone. We had nothing at that point but our car, which we thought was still safe.”

They drove east into New Jersey, watching for state troopers, and by the next evening managed to rent a roach-infested apartment in Yonkers, New York, just north of the Bronx. For the next week Levasseur and Manning couldn’t risk leaving the apartment. Ironically, it was Williams, the man who had probably killed Trooper Lamonaco, who had to act as their liaison to the outside world, buying groceries and making phone calls. At night Levasseur stood at the window, brooding. This changed everything. It was one thing to
be wanted for protest bombings that hurt no one. It was quite another to be sought for murdering a cop. The FBI and the New Jersey State Police, he knew, would throw every available resource toward their capture.

And they did. The morning after Trooper Lamonaco’s murder, officers found Manning’s abandoned car, riddled with bullet holes, and by nightfall had identified Manning’s fingerprints inside. The next day photos of Levasseur and Manning peered from the front pages of newspapers across the Northeast. Hundreds of police poured into rural northwest New Jersey, going from house to house in what the
New York Times
called the most intensive manhunt in the state since the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby in 1932. Three days later, with no clue as yet to the fugitives’ whereabouts, more than two thousand police attended Trooper Lamonaco’s funeral in Washington, New Jersey, the largest of its kind in state history. Shortly after, the FBI announced formation of a new Boston-based task force, dubbed “Bosluc,” consisting of several dozen agents, along with troopers from six northeastern states, all working together in an effort to apprehend Levasseur, Manning, and the others.

Their first success came two weeks after Trooper Lamonaco’s murder, in early January, when they found the Manning home in Marshall’s Creek; the landlord called in the tip when he found it abandoned. Inside they found a drawing of Joanne Chesimard. The Mannings had been thorough—nothing police found gave any clue where they might be hiding—but they made one crucial mistake: Among the personal effects they left behind was a single photo of the Levasseurs and their children, the first inkling anyone in law enforcement had that they now had three daughters. In time, all their pictures, including the children’s, would grace wanted posters.
*
The first, a photo of nine-year-old Jeremy Manning, was issued to the press on January 9, immediately after the farmhouse was located.

“When they started targeting the kids, that changed everything,” recalls Levasseur, who remained moored in the Yonkers apartment all that January. “Every article emphasized the kids. That began to weigh on us a lot more. I
told Pat, ‘We shouldn’t have the kids. This is just too much.’” They discussed trying to leave the girls with their grandparents, but Gros couldn’t do it. Instead, they changed the girls’ names and cut their hair. Carmen, who had long dark hair, had hers cut short. Simone, who had curls, allowed her hair to grow out.

But it wasn’t just the girls who put them at risk. In time, Levasseur knew, the FBI would focus on the New England prison-activist community. Laaman, Kazi Toure, and their friends would be called in for questioning, and maybe worse. Once Laaman made it to Yonkers, Levasseur told him he would have to join them underground; he had no choice. When Laaman resisted, insisting there was nothing to link him to the group, Levasseur lashed out: “They’ll have grand juries! You won’t testify, so you’re going to jail! Come on!” After heated discussion Laaman finally capitulated. He would go underground, he said, under one condition: His family had to come, too.

“Are you insane?” Levasseur asked.

Laaman’s girlfriend, a flighty brunette named Barbara Curzi, had three children, the youngest fathered by Laaman.

“Three kids with the kind of heat we’ve got?” Levasseur asked. “No way. This is crazy! Absolutely fucking crazy!”

But Laaman would not budge. He wouldn’t come underground without Barbara and the kids. “You guys got families,” he said. “Why can’t I have mine?” Levasseur gave in.

It took days for everything to come together. Curzi, as one might imagine, was not thrilled with the notion of going underground with three children. Levasseur and Manning, who were now both on the FBI’s Most Wanted list, sat in the Yonkers apartment, brooding and pacing, until the end of January, when Laaman finally sent word that they were ready. It took another week to gather their belongings into a U-Haul trailer. Finally, on February 7, seven weeks after the Lamonaco killing, everything was set. Laaman and Toure agreed to rendezvous with Curzi and her children in a rest area on Interstate 95 in North Attleboro, Massachusetts, near the Rhode Island border, just after midnight.

When the men drove up, however, she wasn’t there. They waited, Laaman behind the wheel, Toure trying to stay awake beside him. By 1:00 a.m.,
there was no sign of her. At 2:00, still nothing. A few minutes later a Massachusetts state trooper named Paul Landry drove his cruiser into the rest area and shone his headlights on Laaman’s green Plymouth station wagon. When Landry approached the car, he noticed that the engine was on. Laaman rolled down the window with a smile and, answering Landry’s questions, told him everything was fine. They were just two guys from New Hampshire driving down to New York and had stopped a moment to rest. When Laaman turned over their fake driver’s licenses and a registration, Landry noticed Laaman’s license had its photo clipped onto it. Toure’s had no photo at all. Training his flashlight inside the car, Landry saw Toure reach his right hand inside his jacket.

Uneasy, especially about what might be in the jacket, Landry returned to his cruiser and called in the license and registration; everything came back clean. Still, something bothered him. He called for backup. A few moments later a second trooper, Michael Crosby, pulled his cruiser alongside. In a whispered conversation Landry said he thought the black passenger might be holding a gun or drugs.