Days of Rage (79 page)

“There were several hundred possible sightings which we are in the process of tracking down,” Cross’s FBI boss, James Greenleaf, told reporters, “but as yet we haven’t come up with anything that sounds really exciting.” And they wouldn’t.

Cross couldn’t believe it. He studied the data for weeks, hoping something would emerge. It never did. He realized they needed to go back to the
drawing board. To begin, he convened a mass meeting of fifty state troopers and FBI and ATF agents at a Salem, New Hampshire, hotel in the middle of August. They had just settled in when the call came.

 • • • 

In early August, eight weeks after Operation Western Sweep, an auctioneer in Binghamton, New York, named Andy Walker was summoned to a U-Haul self-storage facility to cart out the contents of thirty compartments whose renters had failed to pay their upkeep. He loaded everything into his truck and hauled it back to his warehouse. It took days to inventory it all. At one point he was forced to break the lock off a battered foot locker. When he opened it, the first things he saw were parts of a shotgun. Delving further, he found wiring, alarm clocks, and literature—dozens of books and pamphlets, almost all devoted to radical politics. Walker walked to his telephone and called the FBI.

An agent from the Binghamton office was on his doorstep fifteen minutes later. Everything was carted to the FBI office, where the agent in charge, after leafing through the literature, had a hunch it might be Ray Levasseur’s. A fingerprint analysis confirmed it. No one, however, could get too excited about going through things that had been sitting in a storage locker for two years. The boxes were sent to the FBI’s Albany office, where they languished until Len Cross sent for them.

Inside the task force, Cross was among the few agents excited about the boxes from Binghamton. What on earth, more than one of his men said, could they learn from six-year-old gun parts and some musty old magazines? Cross had the boxes shipped to Boston anyway. When they arrived, he stacked them in a second-floor conference room and called in a trio of state troopers to help go through them all.

“Len, we’re wasting time here,” one remarked.

“We’ve got to,” Cross said with a sigh. “These are leads.”

They slid on rubber gloves and began lifting out the pamphlets and magazines. After barely a half hour a New Jersey trooper, Richie Barrett,
said, “Oh, my God, Len, look at this.” There, in a 1975 issue of
Dragon
magazine, was a diagram detailing how to build a bomb. As Cross peered at the article, Barrett said, “Look what it says about a brass screw.” The diagram, Cross realized, was an exact match for Levasseur’s bombs, down to the brass screw drilled into the faceplate. In a later
Dragon
they found an article explaining the best ways to write communiqués. Among the suggestions was mailing a copy of a copy of a copy. Cross had to smile. This was why they could never get any useful information off Levasseur’s communiqués.

A little later Mike Nockunas, a Connecticut trooper, said, “Len, look at this.” It was a catalogue for outdoor furniture. According to the postmark, it had been mailed in 1978 to someone named Jack Horning at 122 Mount Pleasant Street in Derby, Connecticut, just west of New Haven. “That’s gotta be a safe house,” Cross said.

Nockunas, a thirty-three-year-old trooper, volunteered to check the address. The next day he drove into Connecticut on the remote chance he could pick up Levasseur’s six-year-old trail. In Derby he found the house, an aging two-bedroom in a blue-collar neighborhood, but the occupants knew no one named Horning. Neither did anyone else on Mount Pleasant Street. Nockunas began reinterviewing the neighbors, piecing together a picture of the area circa 1978. Finally he found a man who remembered two teenaged sisters who babysat for a family who might be the Hornings. Nockunas tracked down one of the girls, Jennifer Browne, now seventeen.
*
Yes, she remembered the Hornings and their two girls. In fact, she had photos of them. When the girl brought out a photo, Nockunas was startled to find himself staring into the faces of Ray Levasseur and Pat Gros.

For an hour he gently drew from Jennifer every memory of the Hornings. When she mentioned a car accident, Nockunas thought, “Bingo.” An accident meant an accident report. By nightfall he was standing in the Derby Police Department, describing every detail of the long-ago wreck. The sergeant on duty said the records from 1977 and 1978 were in the basement, but he would look. Nockunas headed to Boston to brief Len Cross, and
as they were talking that night, the Derby sergeant called. In his hands he had a report of a one-car accident from September 2, 1978, at the foot of Mount Pleasant Street. “Paula Horning” was the driver, Jennifer Browne and an infant girl the passengers. The weird thing, the sergeant said, was that the name on Paula Horning’s license wasn’t Paula Horning. It was Judy Hymes.

This was a name they had never heard. Nockunas headed straight for his office in Meriden and all but ran to a computer terminal. He entered the “Judy Hymes” license in an FBI database. It was expired. But, he saw, it had been turned in for a new license in New York. A few more keystrokes and Nockunas saw the license had again been turned in, this time in Ohio. Then he saw it: the Judy Hymes in Ohio had just purchased a red-and-white Chevrolet van that August, two months before. The computer listed an address, 5318 North High Street, Box 65, in Columbus. Within minutes Nockunas had identified the address as that of a business called Mail Services Etcetera. It was a mail drop. It was, he realized with a start, an active UFF mail drop.

This was by far the best lead anyone had fielded in eight years. In Boston Len Cross got on the phone with the Cincinnati field office and explained the situation. An agent arrived at Mail Services Etcetera’s office in a Columbus strip mall the next day. After working things out with the owner, agents installed a camera trained on Box 65, along with a buzzer that would sound in the manager’s office if the box was opened from the outside. Agents rented a house across the street. If the buzzer sounded, the manager was to immediately call them.

On Monday, October 15, 1984, Cross had a four-man team in place to begin the surveillance; a new team would rotate in from Boston every week if necessary. The first day nothing happened. And the second. And the third. Apparently, Cross could see, this mail drop wasn’t used much. At the end of that first week he sent out another team.

A second week passed with no sign of the Levasseurs, the Mannings, or the Laamans. In Washington supervisors began to grow restless. Multiagent stakeouts were expensive. How long was this going to take? Cross urged
patience. This was the best lead they’d ever had, he emphasized. One of the Bureau’s assistant directors, Oliver “Buck” Revell, gave him one final week. If the UFF hadn’t checked its mail by Saturday, November 3, he was putting an end to the stakeout.

As it happened, Mike Nockunas was one of the four men manning the stakeout that week. There was little to do but drink coffee. Then, on that final Saturday morning, as the agents prepared to pack up, the phone rang. Box 65 had just been opened. Nockunas and the others stared at the monitor. There, standing in front of Box 65 across the street, was a face Nockunas knew well. “That’s Patty Gros,” he breathed.

A lookout said she was driving a white Chevy van with a red stripe down one side. Everyone scrambled into cars and wheeled toward the strip mall. In minutes they spotted the van as it left the parking lot. And then, amazingly, they saw a second, identical white Chevy van, a red stripe down the side. In the ensuing confusion, all but one of the pursuit cars elected to follow one van. The second van drew only a single car, driven by a Rhode Island trooper named Louis Reale.

The two processions headed in different directions through the streets of Columbus. Alone behind his van, Reale checked its license plate. After a few moments its registration came back: Judy Hymes. He had the right van. He got on the radio and tried to alert the rest of the pursuing agents, but in the heat of the chase, no one was willing to listen. It took several more minutes for the rest of the pursuing FBI agents and state troopers to let the other van go.

Reale kept his van in sight until the pilot of an FBI airplane, scrambled from a nearby airstrip, radioed that he was on it. Falling back now, relying on the aircraft, Reale followed its instructions as the van headed toward Interstate 71. By the time it reached the highway, he could see the other pursuit cars falling in behind him.

It was a gray, drizzly morning as the van, now with a half-dozen cars in loose pursuit, turned onto I-71, heading northeast toward Akron. In Boston Len Cross notified the FBI field offices in Cleveland, Detroit, and Pittsburgh. All were put on alert. High above central Ohio, meanwhile, FBI
agents in the airplane watched as Gros repeatedly stopped at the roadside, stepped out and stretched, then drove the wrong way down an exit or two, common tactics used to identify pursuers. Clearly she knew what she was doing. Finally, one hundred miles north, they watched as she left the interstate at Exit 209, turning onto Route 224, heading east toward Akron. The trailing agents stayed well back for forty more miles, passing south of the city, until the van again left the highway, this time heading into a rural area between Akron and Youngstown. Barely a mile later agents in the airplane watched it turn into the driveway of a small house.

For the next hour, as agents on the ground stayed well away from the house, supervisors in Boston, Cleveland, and Washington debated whether to move in. As they did, two things happened. At one point a man emerged from the house and took a German shepherd for a walk in the yard. As the dog urinated, an agent was able to snap a long-distance photo. It was Ray Levasseur, they were certain. Then, a bit later, the airborne agents saw a second man emerge from the house, slide into a car, and drive out onto Route 225. As he headed north, two pairs of agents scrambled in pursuit.

For a half hour the agents followed as the car headed toward Cleveland. At one point it stopped in a rest area and the driver stepped out and used a pay phone. A minute later he returned to the car and continued north. The pursuing agents split up, one set following the car, the second heading for the pay phone. One of these agents quickly called the telephone company and asked for the number just dialed. Meanwhile, up ahead, the unidentified man in the car headed into the Cleveland suburbs. Within minutes his pursuers, a pair of New England troopers unfamiliar with Ohio roads, lost him.

It didn’t matter. By dusk the number called from the pay phone had led the FBI, now augmented by the Cleveland police, to a two-story white frame house on West Twenty-second Street. In the windows agents could see jack-o-lanterns and Halloween decorations. Inside they were able to identify the man in the car, who turned out to be Richard Williams, as well as Jaan Laaman, Barbara Curzi, and their three children. As night fell, police took up positions all around the house. Down in Deerfield, meanwhile, the FBI
brought in one of its Nightstalker aircraft, armed with infrared cameras and sensors, to watch the Levasseur home.

Throughout that Saturday night and into the morning of Sunday, November 4, FBI supervisors debated when and how to move in. They hadn’t seen Tom and Carol Manning yet, and Len Cross argued persuasively that they should wait until they did. The Cleveland SAC, nominally in charge of the operation, agreed to hold off for now. But in the event that any of the suspects left their homes in the morning, all bets were off.

 • • • 

It was rainy and cold the next morning as Pat Gros tried to herd her squabbling daughters outside and into the van. Carmen, who was eight, and Simone, six, were arguing over who got to wear what. Rosa, still a toddler, was wobbling around the dining room, begging for attention. The German shepherd, now named Buck, was barking to be let out, and when he darted into the yard, Levasseur had to drag him back. Finally Gros got everyone out the door, then loaded desserts and gifts into the back with the girls. As she strapped them into their seats, Carmen popped a tape of Michael Jackson’s
Thriller
into her boom box. Gros tied her hair back and slid behind the wheel. Levasseur sagged into the passenger seat and opened his newspaper.

It was Richard Williams’s birthday, and they were having a party at the Laamans’ house. As they swung out the driveway, Gros noticed that Levasseur seemed unusually relaxed. He normally had a nervous habit of glancing in the mirrors, but this morning he seemed interested only in the newspaper. He looked like another Ohio farmer, except for the 9mm pistol jammed into his waistband.

Out on the blacktop, she turned north toward Cleveland. Ten minutes later, as the windshield wipers kept a beat to Michael Jackson’s yips and yelps, a Bronco with blackened windows suddenly roared by on the left. Then, as she watched, the Bronco’s driver slammed on his brakes directly in front of them. As the Bronco slid to a stop on the wet pavement, Gros was forced to brake hard, pitching everyone in the van forward in their seatbelts.

“What the fuck are you doing, Pat?” Levasseur growled, crumpling his newspaper.

Before she could reply, the back of the Bronco opened and a man in body armor leaped out and aimed a pump shotgun at Levasseur’s head.

“Oh, my God, Ray!” Gros cried.

Levasseur’s first impulse was to run. But then he glanced through the rear window and saw a fleet of cars skidding to a halt all around. Within seconds more than fifty uniformed officers spilled out into the rain, training M16s and shotguns at the van. He made a face, glanced at Gros, then slowly rolled down his window and tossed out his pistol. In a flash an FBI agent ripped open his door, pulled him from his seat, and shoved him off the road onto the soggy lawn of a farmhouse. The home’s owners stood in their bathrobes on the porch, arms crossed, as agents stripped off Levasseur’s pants, yanked off his shoes, and slammed him facedown onto the wet grass. One agent nuzzled the barrel of an M16 into his ear and said, “That’s it, Jack.”

After a moment they rolled him onto his back. His eyes were ablaze. “Do you know who you’re looking at?” he snarled.