An American Radical

by Susan Rosenberg

  In March 1982, I was on my way to work. I rounded the corner on 147th Street and Eighth Avenue walking toward the Harlem Institute of Acupuncture. As I looked down the block I saw an Army tank coming toward me with a huge gun rolling down the one-way street in the wrong direction. I had never seen a tank except in the movies. It looked obscenely out of place on the quiet deserted residential street. I had no idea what would trigger the men inside to start shooting. I knew that they could not have driven it to this Harlem block for show. Then I looked up and saw flak-jacketed sharpshooters wearing face masks and lying down or crouching on all the rooftops of the buildings next to the clinic. There wasn’t a soul out on the street. No one was standing on the corner. No little children were stepping off their stoops to go to the park or to school. There were no patients standing in front of our office, I realized thankfully. I was the only one, a white person out of place, amid all the cops with guns. I knew that they were there to search the clinic and I hoped they were not specifically looking for me. I did not feel that I merited a tank and certainly not sharpshooters. Not wanting to find out how far down the block I would get before someone either shot me or simply grabbed me, I about-faced and walked as fast as I could short of a breakneck run to the corner, then around it, and down into the subway. I did not start breathing freely again until I was miles away, standing in the subway, alternating between fury and fear.

  The FBI did not find the person they were looking for that day. No one was killed or shot or even arrested. Instead, they had kicked in the front door of the clinic carrying blank grand jury subpoenas, filled out the names of the twenty staffers present, and then confiscated all of the clinic’s records. This was one of several raids by the FBI against black-led community institutions that had associations with black revolutionaries.

  In September 1982, six months after the FBI raid on the Harlem Institute of Acupuncture, I was in my car listening to WINS radio, when I heard that there had been a new and superseding indictment in the Brink’s robbery. This meant that the grand jury had added new people to the indictment. The announcer read the list. There were over twenty names. I almost missed hearing my own. I drove around the Upper West Side where I lived and finally parked on Riverside Drive and sat in my car. I was certain I could not get a fair trial; I was afraid of going to prison, but also afraid to flee. I had no time in which to think through whether I should flee or go to jail. What about my family? My burgeoning career as an acupuncturist? What about my dog? What about my new car? I was twenty-six years old. I thought, I’ll fight the conspiracy, I’ll turn myself in, and I’ll get a lawyer. I went back and forth in my mind, weighing my options as I sat in the car. I caressed the dashboard and smelled the newness of it. I listened to the recurring WINS report over and over again. I did not cry, but I was terribly sad. I felt I was being forced to abandon my life. Instead of returning home, I drove to my office. After circling the block twice to see if any police were there, I ran in and grabbed all of the money I could find and random bits and pieces of things that I thought would be valuable or that I could sell. Then I fled.

  Two and a half years later at MCC with all the other political people in prison, we were now trying to help one another reinforce our identity as political prisoners. One afternoon we were sitting together, eating our government-issue lunch of cheese sandwiches and coffee and reading a news article about the Puerto Rican inde-pendentistas on trial in Hartford, Connecticut. The newest woman prisoner was Lucy Segarra, one of the Macheteros. She had been charged with participating in an action in which toys were distributed to poor children in Hartford on Three Kings Day. What made this illegal was that the money used to purchase the toys came, allegedly, from the $7 million Wells Fargo robbery carried out in 1983 by Los Macheteros in Hartford. Though that robbery was the single largest ever carried out in the United States, no one was injured and the money was never recovered.

  When our talk shifted from the trial to the effects of a hurricane on New York, something in the discussion of a violent storm triggered a reaction in Lucy. Her eyes filled up with tears of anger, hatred, shame, and fear. In a soft, halting voice she told us how the Mexican authorities, in conjunction with the FBI, had beaten her (without leaving marks), threatened her by saying they would kill her children, and interrogated her in a locked cell for days while her children were held outside. Finally, they had transported her, placing a hood over her head so that she would not know her whereabouts. They told her that no one knew where she was, that no one would be able to help her, and that as far as the world was concerned she had disappeared. They said that they had killed and broken others in her group, and that still others were giving her up. She went on to describe the men and the place and her deep concern for her children. Always she came back to her children.

  As I returned to my own cell, I realized that living in the midst of this prison madness can either take your soul or give it back to you. I resolved to take mine back.

  Throughout the months of pre-trial detention and then awaiting sentencing, my parents came to visit. It was the beginning of rebuilding our relationship. My parents attended my trial, despite their profound disagreements with me and my friends. Meeting for the first time since my arrest, my mother was so angry that she could hardly speak. She sat in the visiting room, all dressed up and seething. My father cried. It would be a long rapprochement, but even then my parents met me halfway. They always met me halfway.

  Later that same year, John Gotti was arrested. Finally, someone else’s notoriety had eclipsed me and the other political prisoners. I was glad he was in the spotlight. Seeing him in jail, with his swagger, his cigar butt, and the terrible charisma he emitted regardless of his circumstances, I knew it to be true—he was the boss, the man, the Don. During what was described as the Pizza Connection trial, the MCC housed as many Mafia members as political prisoners. Unbelievably, we all mixed in the prison’s attorney-client visiting room, they with their gold crucifixes and we with our revolutionary passions. Although the two groups could not have been more different, we had in common a strong code of principle—we would not snitch, not in our cases, in our lives, or inside the jail itself. In that respect, our honor united us. John Gotti had never witnessed such loyalty before in a group outside the mob. He liked me, and he liked Tim, too.

  On my thirtieth birthday I had a visit with my attorney and was off the women’s floor for several hours. When I returned and stood in the saliport, which separated the outside world from the secured area inside, the cop removing my handcuffs gave me a big smile. I responded with the convict glaze, being in no mood to smile. As the steel door popped open and I walked in, everyone on the floor started singing and I saw the banner they had hung across a set of bars: happy birthday, susan.The party—complete with wine and scotch and a sumptuous Italian meal of eggplant, veal, and chicken—had been bought and paid for by John Gotti. It was one of the best birthdays I had ever had. And there wasn’t a cop in sight. (Several months later, thirteen corrections officers were indicted on corruption charges for selling the food contract at the MCC to a Mafia-run company and several administrators were charged with bribery and corruption.)

  In October,ten days after my birthday, eleven months after my arrest, I was transferred without warning to Arizona. What had been a year of turmoil, heartbreak, resisting capture, trial and prosecution, changed instantly into “doing time.”

  Part Two

  Tucson

  Chapter 5

  Transport

  THE TWO-LANE highway was empty except for speeding trucks and an occasional car. It was a cold November. The ice was thick, and the sun glistened on the snow piled high on each embankment. The light, mixed with the freezing air, made the passing scene sharp and clear. We were driving through the Pennsylvania hills early in the morning. In the now-familiar black Mercedes-Benz it was a smooth ride, for sure. The windows were rolled up, the air heavy. Five hours passed in silence, and the tension rose. The driver, part of a new detail, kept wat
ching me in the rearview mirror. The trooper in the front kept checking his revolver. The jangling of my waist chains and a sporadic cackle from the police radio were the only sounds. The phone rang and the driver picked it up. After some murmuring back and forth the driver accelerated. The helicopter overhead flew low and buzzed us. The driver said, “We’re late, but they’ll hold the plane.” When we passed the road sign for Harrisburg, I knew we were approaching our destination. I knew because I had heard that this was the East Coast departure point for the federal prisoner transport.

  I never knew until I was in prison that at most major airports, in the back or off to the side, there is a military section. It is for use by all branches of the Department of Defense in case of national emergencies, for private use by those with executive privilege, for civil defense maneuvers, and for the shipping and handling of federal prisoners. We drove to the back of the Harrisburg airport, where we were screened, checked, and waved through the gate. As we passed through the rows of fences and barbed wire I thought, Dual function, to keep us in—and keep the rest out. I was sad and afraid: this was my departure from the past, from the life I had known. I was leaving the East Coast, my family, my friends, my patients, my compatriots, everything that was familiar though now distorted by the extreme circumstances of my arrest and the turmoil of the trial. Going to what? To where? To be with whom? Serving fifty-eight years in prison was impossible to fathom. I wasn’t fazed by the military presence and police intimidation; rather, what I feared was the unknowable future. The slow death that had been imposed on me by vindictive prosecution and over sentencing produced the deepest of aches. And what of the movement? I didn’t know.

  We drove onto the runway toward the plane. It was a standard-looking Boeing 707. The stairs were down; ice hung from the wings. Prison guards and U.S. marshals surrounded the plane. They all had shotguns or automatic weapons cradled in their arms. It occurred to me that many of these men, these police, had probably been in Vietnam. In that split instant of surveying the scene, the full military nature of the transport hit me. Should I have tried to escape, the sheer overkill of the firepower would have been directed at me.

  Then I saw a line of about sixty men standing perpendicular to the tail of the plane. All of them were dressed in short-sleeved khaki shirts and pants and blue prison-issue slip-on sneakers. They were handcuffed and chained. It was below freezing. Many were stamping their feet, jumping up and down, and blowing air that formed frost. Almost all of them were young African Americans. They had been removed from the plane so that I could be put on.

  Time stopped, and thoughts began to crowd my head as I looked at these black men standing in the cold, surrounded by white men with weapons. I remembered the first funeral of a black revolutionary that I had ever attended. In 1973, a former Black Panther turned Black Liberation Army member was in a shootout with the New York City police. Wanted for bank robbery, twenty-one-year-old Twyman Myers led a rooftop chase for many blocks before being brought down by eighty bullets. His funeral in Harlem had brought hundreds of mourners, including busloads of schoolchildren from a community center in Brooklyn that was then part of the Black United Front. In one life-altering moment I watched the children pile out of the buses and then I looked up to see flak-jacketed sharpshooters lying facedown on rooftops with their rifles trained on the children.

  As my mind returned to the present, I felt a unity with the men, despite the divide between us. I peered into the distance to see their faces, understanding that their history as black people had placed them there. Their journey had begun with the “middle passage” four hundred years ago when they had been originally captured as slaves, and now, in their struggle to survive and live, they were waiting to enter the modern slave ship. Knowing that these men were standing and waiting for me brought my life into sharp relief. I remembered the words of John Brown—“America is birthed in the blood of slavery”—and all my sadness turned to fury. I went hot in the cold morning.

  The marshals had surrounded me and hustled me out of the car, almost picking me up to get me to the stairs and onto the plane. For hours, through the entire drive, I had not said a word, not uttered a sound, but as I stood up from the car in anger, I found my voice. I yelled to the men standing there, “I am sorry these police made you wait in the cold, brothers! I’m sorry! They didn’t need to do that!”

  And for one short moment, the chains, the guns, the cold, the agony—all of it receded into the background. A man on the line yelled back: “Aren’t you Susan? I was with Ray at MCC!”

  “Yes!” I shouted. “I am!”

  He turned to the others and said, “She is ours! She’s Black Liberation Army!”

  Another man called out: “Thank God for the BLA! Don’t worry, baby! The more they fear you, the more they respect you!”

  “We will win one day!” I yelled. “Maybe not now, but one day!”

  A third man said, “I know about Assata! Don’t worry!”

  In the few seconds the exchange lasted, the guards turned their weapons first on me and then on the line of prisoners. The marshals began to drag me toward the plane. At the top of the stairs I turned to look once more at the dreary, bleak northeastern landscape. The cold wind hit my face hard as tears streamed down my cheeks.

  The prison transport is like no other air travel. The plane is stripped down to the bone; there are no dividers between first class and coach, and there is no movie telling you where emergency exits are or how to use your seat as a flotation device in case of a water crash. In addition to my forty pounds of chains, I wore handcuffs encased in the dreaded “black box,” a wooden box that closes over the few links between each cuff and is in turn shut with a padlock, completely immobilizing the hands. The black box is always the sign of a serious criminal. Back then very few prisoners were black-boxed, and the number of women even fewer.

  The prisoners who had been waiting on the tarmac were moved to their seats, and the plane took off. In the front row, directly behind the cockpit, I was surrounded by marshals whose duty it was to ensure that no one communicated with me. Every few days the transport moves hundreds of prisoners—men and women—from one place to another, all over the country. There are many reasons why a prisoner is moved. Most prisoners are moved several times during the course of their sentence. Some are being sent from their trials to their first prison, some are being sent by court order to a specific prison, others are being shipped to prison hospitals or mental units, and a few are being released.

  Our first stop was in Ohio. A group of men entered the plane and the vibes, which were already hostile, got worse. This group looked like they had been through a shipwreck. Six of them were chained together by twos, and they were dirty and disheveled. They all appeared to be drugged. I heard one marshal call them the “psycho crew.” These men were going to the U.S. Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri, known back then as the prison for the criminally insane. I could not stop turning around to peer at them. One man looked like he had been locked up forever. His beard was down to his chest, his face so chiseled that his skin was translucent. I noticed that his glasses were held together with paperclips on both sides, and so he became “Paperclip” to me. He was very tall and painfully skinny. The marshals shoved him into a window seat in the middle rows of the plane. The man next to him, a small, dark Latino, was none too pleased. He kept shooting glances at Paperclip and scowling. I thought to myself, Chill, the guy is sick. He can’t help the way he looks.

  On this leg of the flight they fed us. Everyone was given a white box, containing an ancient apple, some colored juice facsimile, and a wrapped sandwich consisting of two pieces of white bread and a slab of mystery meat. The rumble of complaints that went through the passengers only got worse when the marshals pulled out their Big Macs and fries and munched in front of us.

  We were to land in Indianapolis, where we would all be driven to the county jail to wait until the airlift took off again the next day. As the plane began i
ts descent, the marshals removed our lunch boxes. Just as the pilot said, “Everyone, be seated,” I felt the air pressure drop. My stomach went into my throat and turned over. The landing wheels engaged and, in the same instant, a scream of terror reverberated through the rush of air. Air released at ninety miles an hour is one of the loudest sounds imaginable, and yet that scream cut through it and reverberated.

  I turned around so I could see the rest of the seats in back of me. I took in the scene behind me. The emergency window exit was gone and the Latino prisoner was in danger of being sucked out of the plane. He had looped his cuffs around the armrest, but his body was horizontal. Paperclip had gone through the window and was lying flattened against the wing, holding on to the edge. The plane had still not touched the ground.

  For a moment, everyone on the plane was frozen in time. Then a tumult ensued. The head marshal grabbed the clinging Latino prisoner and threw him into the aisle in order to reach the window. The prisoners started yelling and cheering. One marshal ran to the front, where all the others had gathered around me, since I had been deemed the greatest security threat and “escape risk.” (Good, I thought.) Then the marshal in charge started screaming at one of the younger ones. “Get out on that wing, get that motherfucker.”