The Brea File

by Louis Charbonneau

  They tried to do it with bombs.

  California—in one view the vanguard of the new civilization of the 1980s, in another the spawning ground for the kooks and crazies—had much the worst of it. Here the PRC first appeared, claiming credit for a series of bombings and hijackings. By sending tapes to local television and radio stations, showering college campuses with their manifestos and calling for popular support in open letters to leading newspapers, the PRC became the center attraction in a media circus.

  In law enforcement the prevailing opinion was that the group was an aggregation of small-time losers, a mixed bag of young white radicals, blacks and Chicanos, led by a charismatic self-styled revolutionary who called himself Ramses. His real name was Carlos Sanchez, a former teen-age gang leader from East Los Angeles with a long history of petty thievery, assault and violence.

  Ramses and the PRC made the police their principal victims, banks their primary targets. The police were called Public Enemy No. 1 in a series of mocking tapes and broadsides. Small-town police—far more vulnerable than the well-trained forces in the major cities—were attacked repeatedly. By late summer every police force in northern California was jittery—and angry.

  The terrorists had used small-town banks to finance their activities, sometimes even coming back to the same town and the same bank for a second robbery. More than once they lured police and the FBI into responding to a holdup alarm, then threw a bomb into the police station while it was undermanned. Once they left what looked like a stalled car on the route the police were expected to take. The stalled car was filled with explosives. When the police stopped to remove it, the car was blown up by a radio signal—a tactic refined by the IRA against British soldiers in Northern Ireland. Three men died in that explosion.

  In July, in San Timoteo, a bomb planted in the parking lot of the police station went off just before two patrol cars returned after responding to a false alarm at the local branch of Bank of America. One policeman was injured by flying glass. It might have been a different story if the bomb had gone off thirty seconds later.

  Macimer himself was part of the volunteer FBI task force working on the PRC case, headquartered in the Sacramento Field Office. One afternoon in late August, Macimer had received a phone call from an informant who refused to identify himself. There were a thousand false leads that summer, every one of which had to be followed up. The informant had agreed to meet the FBI agent. A rendezvous was set up at a motel outside of Fresno for five o’clock on the afternoon of August 28. Although half convinced the call was a hoax, Macimer was there in the motel room, waiting for the informant, when the core of the People’s Revolutionary Committee was trapped in a house on the outskirts of San Timoteo, a hundred miles to the north. Macimer’s informant never appeared.

  At 4:46 P.M. the police in San Timoteo received a tip that the PRC were holed up in a house on the edge of the town, heavily armed and dug in for an all-out siege. In the initial confusion—whether deliberately or by mistake—this call was not relayed immediately to the FBI. The local RA, Vernon Lippert, was not notified until the police were already en route to the hideout. Lippert placed an urgent call for assistance to the special Task Force Center in Sacramento at 5:01 P.M. He then went directly to the address of the house the police had surrounded. He had barely arrived on the scene when the first shot was fired.

  There were conflicting reports concerning who fired that first shot and under what circumstances. The official police report stated that gunfire had come from the house in response to a command over a bullhorn by Chief Harold Whittaker of the San Timoteo police, ordering the fugitives to surrender. Vernon Lippert’s report, written immediately after the massacre, confirmed that the initial shot had come from the direction of the house, and that there followed a massive retaliation by the police….

  * * * *

  After listening to the tapes sent over from Headquarters, Macimer sat at his desk making notes, punctuating several of them with questions. He was still writing when Pat Garvey and Leonard Collins entered the office. Macimer waved them to the only two available chairs and continued writing. Finally he sat back and regarded the two agents critically.

  Garvey was a clean-cut, solidly built man with the shoulders of an athlete or someone devoted to lifting weights. His black hair, blue eyes and jutting jaw stamped his Irish heritage. In Macimer’s own class, twenty years ago, only Garvey’s longer hair would have set him apart. Not so for Collins, Macimer thought. Being black was a rarity among agents in those days; so was Collins’ cool, contemporary style, accented today by a superbly tailored three-piece light blue gabardine suit.

  The contrast between the two agents was a reminder of how much the Bureau itself had changed in the past twenty years. White shirts and conservative suits had once been mandatory; what an agent wore now depended on his assignment, not on the need to project a standardized image. And the modern FBI was a little looser in style as well as dress. The agents themselves had changed, at least in part because 50 percent or more of each graduating class at the FBI Academy since 1979, the first year it happened, had been made up of minorities—blacks, Hispanics, Asians, women. And at the same time, with a changing perception of the challenges it faced and the priorities it should emphasize, the Bureau had become more flexible and open-minded, less rigid than it had been when Macimer first pocketed his badge.

  “You’re booked on a one o’clock flight to Sacramento by way of San Francisco,” Macimer told the two agents. “The SAC there has been briefed, and you’ll receive his full cooperation. However, he also knows that this is a low-profile ‘Special,’ and you’ll be working independently, at least until further notice.

  “Now… let’s go over it. I presume you’re both familiar with what happened in San Timoteo three years ago.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Garvey.

  “It was on TV,” Collins said.

  “Copies are being made of the most important abstracts and a few full reports from the PRC files. You can read those on the plane. As far as the Bureau was concerned, that case was closed. Maybe we were a little too eager to have it closed, but it did seem to be over. All the known members of the PRC were dead. Nobody survived that explosion, including the two hostages who were in the house, a young couple whose van had been commandeered to get the terrorists to San Timoteo. There didn’t seem to be any reason to look beyond what was there for everyone to see, including all those millions like you, Collins, who watched the whole thing in their living rooms. Oh, there was a wrap on the investigation, tying up the loose ends, but all that really did was confirm what everyone wanted to believe—that the case was closed.

  “Apparently Vernon Lippert, the RA in San Timoteo, didn’t think so. My guess is the wipe-out of the PRC nagged at him. It shouldn’t have happened that way. For one thing, a doctor later admitted that he had treated Ramses for a gunshot wound received during a bank robbery in Santa Rosa two weeks before the massacre. He’d kept silent because the terrorists had threatened his family. So Ramses was in no shape to lead anything. Which means the group holed up in San Timoteo to buy themselves some time. They were hurt, probably demoralized. In that state they couldn’t have wanted a confrontation with the police or the FBI—not then, not there.

  “If you read it that way, you have to wonder, as Lippert must have, why they picked that frame house as a hideout. It was certainly no place for a last-ditch battle.

  “Then you start to wonder about that anonymous phone call to the police in San Timoteo that triggered what happened…”

  The two younger agents had been making notes as Macimer talked. Their felt-tip pens paused as Macimer fell silent. Both men looked up at him expectantly, waiting.

  “Vernon Lippert obviously wondered if there wasn’t more to the story than the record showed. A lot of us who were in California that summer could never figure out why Ramses made such a blunder, unless it was a death wish. Lippert started digging into it, taking the case when it was cold and building a new inv
estigative file of his own on it. Lippert was close to retirement, playing out his string as the RA in San Timoteo, so he didn’t exactly go by the rules. He didn’t ask for approval of his investigation, and he didn’t make copies of what he was putting together for Sacramento or Headquarters.

  “Now Lippert is dead and his file on the case is missing.”

  Briefly Macimer listed what had been uncovered at Headquarters during the past week, referring to his own notes and questions. One, a piece of rusty window screen sent by Lippert to the FBI Lab for examination. Residue of gunpowder was found around a tear in the screen. Question: Where did that screen come from? Two, Lippert requested a handwriting comparison from the Handwriting Analysis Unit. That test confirmed that a man named Charles Smith, who rented the PRC’s hideout in San Timoteo two days before the shoot-out, was really Walter Schumaker. Schumaker had been developed as an informant by Special Agents Charles Reese and Victor Pryor of the San Francisco Field Office two years earlier. He was known to have contacts among radical and Communist groups in the Berkeley area and on the Berkeley campus of the University of California. Schumaker received amounts varying from sixty dollars per month to a hundred and fifty dollars during a period of a year ending in June 1980. Payments were discontinued because the information Reese and Pryor were getting from Schumaker didn’t warrant keeping him on the payroll. Schumaker then dropped out of the Berkeley area. Question: What happened to Walter Schumaker?

  Collins and Garvey exchanged glances. Collins whistled softly through his teeth.

  “Exactly,” Macimer said. “A former FBI informant was with the PRC. And that’s not all of it. He wasn’t just a former informant. He was being run by another agent who called himself Brea—a code name. Apparently Schumaker didn’t know him by any other name. And there’s no FBI record of such a code name being used.”

  “How do we know there was such a guy?” asked Garvey.

  “I’ll let you hear it for yourselves,” Macimer replied. He swiveled his chair toward the Panasonic tape recorder on a shelf of his bookcase behind the desk. The cassette was already in place. “There are two tapes, both of which were sent by Lippert to the Engineering Section of the Lab for comparison. I’ll tell you about the other tape after you hear this.

  “The tape covers a recorded conversation received by Special Agent Katherine Washington in the Sacramento Field Office at 11:02 A.M. August 27, 1981-the day before the San Timoteo disaster.” Macimer punched the “start” and “play” buttons on the recorder and sat back. Garvey and Collins both hunched forward in their chairs to listen. Macimer said, “The woman’s voice, obviously, is Agent Washington.”

  CALLER: I’d like to talk to Brea.

  WASHINGTON: Would you please spell your name, just for our records?

  CALLER: You don’t need my name. Brea knows who I am.

  WASHINGTON: I’m not sure I understand. Who is Brea?

  CALLER: Hey, don’t play games with me, lady. I don’t have much time. This phone number he gave me to call if there was an emergency doesn’t answer, and I’ve got an emergency.

  WASHINGTON: What kind of emergency?

  CALLER: I’ve got to talk to Brea.

  WASHINGTON: If you’ll give me your name, and tell me who Brea is—

  CALLER: He’s the one I been reporting to. Listen, okay, if he’s not there, just give him the message. Tell him the situation isn’t what I told him. It’s changed.

  WASHINGTON: Can you be a little more specific?

  CALLER: On the telephone? Are you kidding?

  WASHINGTON: Sir, there is no Agent Brea in this office. Are you sure you have the right name?

  CALLER: Sure I’m sure! Listen, I know it isn’t his real name. It’s—what do you call it?—his code name. Okay. You get him the message, and I mean fast! I got to know if the plan is still on, you know? He’s got to give me time to get out, and I’ll need some bread.

  WASHINGTON: Where can he reach you?

  CALLER (laughter): You think I’m stupid? He knows where I am. I’m with the Egyptian.

  WASHINGTON: The Egyptian? What-?

  Macimer punched off the recorder. “That’s where he hung up.”

  For a long moment there was silence in the small, crowded office as the two young agents digested what they had heard. Garvey appeared puzzled. Collins, Macimer thought, was quicker. He pursed his lips, the whistle this time silent.

  “The Egyptian,” Garvey said suddenly. “Ramses?”

  “Maybe. Remember, at the time this call was received, it was just one of some two hundred calls that came into the Task Force Center at Sacramento during a forty-eight-hour period, nearly half of them claiming to have information about the PRC. So at the time nobody paid much attention to the call for Brea. No one had ever heard of Brea, as a real name or an agent’s code name.”

  “And after the big blowup, the call didn’t seem important. It got lost in the shuffle,” Collins suggested.

  “That’s right.”

  “What’s on the other tape?” Collins sounded as if he had already made a guess. Collins had a good cop’s instincts, Macimer thought. Sometimes that was more important than experience or intelligence… and Collins was also intelligent.

  “It’s a recording of a conversation early in 1980 between Special Agent Reese and Walter Schumaker, the informant we know rented the PRC’s hideout. According to a voiceprint comparison in the Lab, the voice of the man who talked to Agent Washington on August 27, 1981, is the same as the voice of the informant on the second tape. The man who made that call to Brea was Walter Schumaker.”

  Garvey was beginning to grasp the implications. A look of consternation appeared in his eyes.

  “Two hundred agents were looking for the PRC,” Macimer said slowly. “And one of them had an informant planted inside the group, we don’t know for how long. But at the time of the shoot-out, that agent, the one who called himself Brea, either knew or could have known exactly where the terrorists were.”

  “And he didn’t report it?” Garvey was incredulous.

  “Neither then nor afterwards.”

  Garvey broke a somber silence. “What about Schumaker?”

  “We don’t know.” Macimer glanced down at one of the reports he had removed from the master PRC file. “Interviews with neighbors of the house on Dover Street indicate that no one was seen leaving there on the twenty-eighth. Schumaker apparently left the house the day before, probably to buy groceries and whatever else the group needed. He could go out safely because he wasn’t on any wanted list—and he used that time to call Brea. That’s speculation,” Macimer added, “but it would seem to be a good guess that he was inside with the others on the twenty-eighth.

  “The FBI Disaster Squad went in after the explosion,” the SAC went on quietly. “They were able to find parts of seven or eight bodies. Two of those were identified as the hostages. Their van was found abandoned in the next town, by the way, ten miles away. Fingerprints of at least two of the victims were never found for verification. Schumaker’s prints are in the criminal file. I think it’s a reasonable assumption that one of the unidentified bodies was his.”

  “That means Brea knew…”

  “Don’t get ahead of yourself, Collins. Let’s see what the facts say when they’re all in. What I want you two to do is go to San Timoteo and find out what else Vernon Lippert learned. Find out who he talked to and what they told him. Talk to the neighbors, the police. Check with Pacific Telephone and see if you can find out where that phone call to Sacramento came from on the twenty-seventh. My guess is it was long-distance from San Timoteo. Find out where Lippert got hold of that window screen. I want to know everything that Lippert dug up, everything that was in the Brea file.”

  He paused, staring at the two agents as they scribbled on their pads, actually two-by-four-inch cards small enough to hold in the palm of your hand as you wrote. He waited until both men had finished writing before he said, “We’re going to finish what Vernon Lippert started. Find out
who Brea was.”

  7

  Late that Tuesday afternoon the two agents who had been assigned to the case of the stolen FBI vehicle reported to Macimer’s office.

  Jack Wagner was in his thirties, one of the famous class known in the Bureau as the “Berrigan 1000.” These were an extra thousand agents authorized by Congress in 1970 at the urging of J. Edgar Hoover, after the Director testified about the “plot” of the Berrigans to kidnap prominent government leaders and blow up government buildings. Wagner had a degree in economics from Columbia on top of three years in Vietnam. He was blond, broad-shouldered and athletic, with a perennial boyishness about his handsome features. Only his eyes were old. Calvin Rayburn, his partner, was thin and stoop-shouldered, five years younger, with black curly hair, heavy black eyebrows and eyes so deep-set that he seemed to wear a perpetual scowl. Where Wagner was outgoing and deceptively casual, Rayburn was silent, as sober in demeanor as his gray flannel suit.

  Hell, Macimer thought, what happened to that FBI stereotype you always read about?

  The two men worked well as a team in the Criminal Section. The file containing their daily reports of the ten-day Interstate Transport of Stolen Vehicle investigation was, however, disappointingly thin. Macimer thumbed through the reports and sat back in his chair, swiveling gently for a moment. Finally he said, “Stearns doesn’t remember anything about the people in the Fedco parking lot who helped him up after he fell?”