by Neil Gordon
In the aftermath of the bombing, some thirty of the group, most of whom faced various conspiracy charges, using carefully prepared false identities—identities prepared long in advance—disappeared in a way that hadn’t been used since the forties, when the Communist Party formed an underground. And from then until the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, they evaded capture and, far from retreating from that unsuccessful experience of bomb building, built dozens more, blowing up governmental and military targets all over the country.
See? And do you understand, now, why the history lesson? I mean, yes: this was a bunch of spoiled little kids, just like they say in all the papers; they were babyish, cruel, and violent. But what I need you to see is that when Sharon Solarz first went underground in 1970, passions were running pretty high. And from a distance, those passions seem a little ridiculous, but I swear to you, they weren’t ridiculous then, and they hadn’t died down much by 1996, when all these things happened that were going to change your life. Just think of, say, Molly Sackler watching Sharon get arrested. Molly, when Sharon first went underground, was sending her husband to his first tour in Vietnam.
These aren’t passions that die down, Iz; they were high then, and they’re high now. Most of the people who lived for and were defined by that history are still alive, and lots of others will bear the scars well into this century. Leo Sackler, for example. Or Rebeccah Osborne.
And—and this is the point I am trying to make—you.
Okay. Your father is filling my screen with instant messages, and I do believe the telephone ringing is him calling to yell at me—the caller ID says it’s a Michigan number, anyway, so just to be on the safe side, I’m not going to answer. But let me tie it up. When the town house blew up, Weather held a big meeting out in northern California and adopted a couple of ground rules, of which the main one was: No human targets. It was not unanimous, but the peaceniks won, and for the rest of their career together as Weather proper, as far as anyone knows, they were successful in bombing only property, with never a casualty, often through great effort. Hardliners twice formed splinter groups. The most famous, after the war was over and Weather was done, formed a group called the May 19th Collective, and went on to infamy in the early eighties, when some of them participated in a famous robbery of a Brinks truck in which two policemen and a guard were killed. Of the participants in the Brinks robbery, all but one are still in jail today, June 2006, twenty-five years later. But it is the other group we’re interested in here. The other split off before the end of the war—in 1974, to be precise—and formed the Marion Delgado Brigade. And the MDB achieved fame when, in 1974, they robbed a bank in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and killed a guard.
The Bank of Michigan robbery was led by a career criminal called Vincent Dellesandro, and included the three ex-Weatherman members. And while Vinnie was caught soon after the robbery, extradited to New York, where he was wanted on prior charges of murder, and killed in the Attica riot, the three Weather members, who were living as fugitives at the time in any case, all succeeded in evading capture; succeeded so well that in the summer of 1996, when virtually every single other Weather fugitive had either been caught or surrendered, they remained at large.
The first two were called Jason Sinai and Mimi Lurie.
The third was Sharon Solarz.
I’m finished now. And I’ll go back to the job I’ve been assigned by the Committee. Where was I? Oh yes, at dawn. June 16, 1996. Armed with the knowledge, now, of who Sharon Solarz was and why anyone cared, I turned off my desk lamp, powered down my computer, rose, and with a massive stretch, knocked over my desk lamp. Then I sat down again.
It had been an interesting night. So much to learn. So much to write. And if I had started out pretty unwilling, now I was fairly convinced that I had fallen upon a chance to do a series of articles that would show my elders and betters a great deal about who Benjamino Schulberg was and what Benjamino Schulberg could do.
And yet I was not planning on starting writing. Not just yet.
First I was planning, as I now did, to sit back in my chair, drawing on an unlit cigarette, and think about what it was that was so bothering me about this story, not in the past, but in the present.
3.
So, I knew who Billy Cusimano was, to some extent. I knew that Billy had settled down in Tannersville in the eighties to begin screwing up the genome of the marijuana plant—at one time he owned an electron microscope and employed a botany postdoc out of SUNY Albany. As to where he came from before that, well, that Sharon Solarz, founding member of Weatherman, had come to see Billy Cusimano, was pretty good stuff, in my journalistic opinion. You with me? It was a good hint that Billy, maybe, had roots in that common ground between the Brotherhood of Eternal Love and the Weather Underground. And it suggested that Sharon had been involved in the Timothy Leary escape, too, and even that perhaps Billy had been a source of the money, which for all I knew could still lead to criminal charges. Was there a statute of limitations on jailbreak from a federal prison? “Note to self,” I thought to myself, and laughed heartily. Then I went back to work, which meant, under the circumstances, that I stopped laughing and closed my eyes again.
What else was in this fact? Well, how about that Billy could have been part of the extensive aboveground support network that Weather had: lawyers, doctors, academics, many of whom are prominent members of their professions today. That was also good stuff. But it wasn’t addressing what was bothering me.
So I tried another question. Why had Sharon come east? Well, here was a no-brainer: my new close personal friend from the FBI, Kevin Cornelius, had, the night before, told me that they had traced calls from the pay phones Sharon was using before she was arrested to Gillian Morrealle, the leftist lawyer in Boston. Clearly Solarz was looking to follow what Katherine Power had done a few years before, that is, negotiate a surrender. Katherine Power had spent eight years in jail, which was severe, but a hell of a lot less severe than what would have happened had she been arrested.
So what was bothering me? Years later, and for years later, your father would grill me on this. Why, in all of this story, was I so like a dog with a bone with this question? There was so much to write, so much story, just with what I had there.
But it wasn’t enough for me, and never did I have an explanation why. I was just built that way. Drives Rebeccah crazy. Like when I see a movie and everyone else is sitting around wiping tears from their eyes, I’m totally stuck on the fact that before he died saving the girl’s life, the hero’s dog appeared on either side of a cut with different collars, or during the chase scene that cost five million dollars to produce and had lead articles devoted to it in the Sunday Times, a license plate read the wrong state.
And so now, after all the work I’d done, and all I’d learned; now, with the chance to sit down and write a career-making story—I still couldn’t stop myself. What was wrong with this picture? Once again, starting with the first anonymous call, what seemed now like weeks ago, I went through the story step by step, detail by detail. And once again, I kept feeling, like an elusive sneeze, the thing that didn’t make sense.
I’ll never stop wondering at that process.
One minute, I couldn’t for the life of me conjure it up.
The next minute, it was sitting on my tongue like my own name, and I said it, aloud: “Why didn’t Jim Grant represent Sharon Solarz?”
That’s all there was. That simple question.
I mean, I didn’t know about the divorce, and the custody battle, or any of that. If I had, would I still have asked the question? It’s impossible to answer.
And if I had known the answer to the question, would I still have published?
I don’t know, Isabel. I don’t know. The question comes down to this: If I had known how much my work, that spring of 1996, was going to fuck up your life, would I have gone ahead?
But see, I didn’t even know that you existed, then, and if I had known, I was too young to understand. What the hell did
I know about children? What the hell did I know about the fact that next to a child, nothing political matters a good goddamn?
Not knowing that, on June 16, 1996, it became, for me, the most urgent matter in my life to answer that question.
Jim Grant was the kind of lawyer who should have gotten moist over the chance to negotiate Sharon Solarz’s surrender. It had news value, it had political value, it had moral value, it had historical value. And what did he do? He handed it over to a competitor.
Why?
I stood, stretched, and knocked over my desk lamp again. This time, however, I didn’t bother picking it up but instead pocketed my car keys and cigarettes. Then, leaning over my keyboard, I looked up Billy Cusimano’s address and telephone number in an on-line phone book, and walked out of the newsroom.
It’s worth noting, by the way, that on my way out, while quite a few people said hello to me, none of them seemed to expect me to respond. And none were disappointed, either. Benjamino Schulberg, it was quite clear, was more or less expected to live in his own world.
4.
Arriving in Tannersville toward midmorning, I found Billy Cusimano in his front lawn, kneeling in a flower bed. With some trepidation—the guy was huge—I approached, and he looked up, a questioning look on his face.
“Mr. Cusimano.”
“Yes, child.” He spoke in a baritone and, as he spoke, began the slow process of rising while I, trying to absorb that I had just been called “child,” tried to find my tongue.
“I’m Ben Schulberg. From the Times in Albany.”
“Well, well. You’re the only paper on the eastern seaboard who doesn’t seem to have concluded that I’m guilty of supplying half the minors on the East Coast with marijuana all the while harboring dangerous fugitives. That your doing?” Cusimano was standing now, hands on his hips, and I had a chance to appreciate just how massive he was—in all directions.
“Well, I like to think so. I mean, you haven’t actually come to trial yet.”
“That doesn’t seem to bother anyone else.” Cusimano paused, still staring down. “So?”
“Pardon me?”
“So what do you want?”
“Well…where do you know Sharon Solarz from?” Knowing how lame that sounded, I struggled for control. But once again it eluded me as this monstrously large man, without expression, stepped out of the flower bed and began to walk away, out of the driveway and across a very large, very green lawn. And because he was talking, I had to follow if I wanted to keep listening.
“You don’t really expect me to answer that.” It was a statement, not a question.
On the lawn, I became aware in quick succession of three things. The first was how enormous the lawn was, sloping down a gentle series of hillocks to a line of trees. The second was the size of the sky, a floodlit blue, above the range of mountains that stood away over the trees, the colors nearly fluorescent with early summer sun. And finally, the fact that a row of poplars now ensured that, just at the spot where Billy stopped and turned around, forcing me nearly to walk into his huge belly, no one could see us from the road. Then he went on.
“I mean, if you have a Nexis account and you’re not a fucking idiot, then you know how I know her. And you do have a Nexis account, don’t you?” Cusimano peered with evident curiosity into my face, as if trying to see if I were a fucking idiot. Then he laughed, briefly, which I did not appreciate.
“Alright.” I spoke now without—as you see—much caution. “You know Sharon Solarz from Mendocino in ’71—sounds like a Joni Mitchell song, doesn’t it—when she was in the Weather Underground and you hired her to help get Timothy Leary out of San Luis Obispo. Now, either you’ve stayed in touch for all these years, which was stupid of you, because that means you’ve protected a federal fugitive, or she’s just come to find you for old times sake. What’s amazing is that you’re so arrogant as to let her into your house while you’re under federal surveillance. So there’s my first question. Are you really so arrogant?”
I could see Billy’s cheeks reddening just slightly under his beard. He answered in a straightforward voice, though.
“I didn’t invite Sharon to come here. She came unannounced. And I didn’t have any—any—way of knowing that the FBI would be doing a black-bag job on my house. What, they exhume J. Edgar Hoover for this?”
“They had a warrant, Mr. Cusimano.”
“Listen, kid. First of all, Mr. Cusimano was my father, who ran a greengrocery in Brooklyn. Second of all, as for their warrant: that warrant’ll stand up in court for about seven seconds. That doesn’t matter one bit, though, ’cause they’ve already done what they set out to. My lawyer says they wiped out my whole prosecution with that warrant. A blatantly illegal search warrant.”
“Your lawyer,” I answered right away. “So that’s why Sharon came. To meet him?”
“No. He refused even to meet her.”
It was funny. This guy, I could see he wasn’t stupid. To the contrary, he was evidently an extremely smart man. And yet I had gotten him in less than three minutes. I let the pace slow a little, now, by lighting a cigarette.
“Really? Why’s that? Isn’t this Grant’s kind of case? I mean, the most fundamental issues of the lefty pantheon, I would have thought.”
Now he seemed to be taking me a little more seriously, squinting at me through the sun and speaking in a lower tone.
“Listen, Sharon came here looking for a way to surrender herself. If she’d been able to do it, she’d have at least had a little control over her life. Now she’s facing spending the rest of her days in jail. If you had any part in that, then feel bad.”
“And why do I feel bad about someone complicit in the murder of a policeman going to jail?”
But his answer surprised me. Less for what he said than for the tone in which he said it, which was not mad but sad. “Complicit? Complicity’s a big word, boy. For example, what are you, right now, complicit in?”
I thought about that. Then: “I don’t know. You tell me.”
“Nah.” Cusimano was turning already. “You wouldn’t believe me.”
“Wait. What are you talking about?”
“That’s your job. Go figure it out.”
But he didn’t turn, speaking as he walked away.
“Mr. Cusimano. Bill. Stop.”
Now he turned and shook his head slowly. “No. You’re not going to listen to me. Kids never do. See, it’s our parents’ revenge on us.”
“But it’s my job to listen.”
“Yeah, that’ll be the day. I’ll tell Jim to expect you. Take 23A down to Palenville, your car doesn’t look like it’ll weather 16.”
And after watching Billy Cusimano walk—or rather waddle—away, I went back to my car and started down 23A to Palenville. I knew the way to Saugerties, and I didn’t need Cusimano here to tell me my car couldn’t make it down 16.
And I guess I knew that your father was the next logical person for me to talk to.
What I didn’t know was why Billy Cusimano’s tone was so hopeless.
Like I was about to do something very bad to someone who didn’t deserve it, and if I only understood why, I too would be sad.
Okay? That good enough for you, J? It’s like two in the morning, and I’m just sending this now, so you got to figure you’ll be up at least another half an hour reading, right? Well, when you finish, reflect on this: you woulda gotten this story four hours ago, except you pissed me off so much with your incessant IMs and phone calls that I went out to dinner just to get you back. So in the future, you just remember: you don’t like the way I’m telling Isabel this story? Then tell her yourself.
Date: June 6, 2006
From: “Daddy”
To: “Isabel Montgomery”
CC: maillist: The_Committee
Subject: letter 6
So now it’s Tuesday, for Christ sake, and thanks to Benny’s nonsense I fell asleep before I even got his e-mail
last night, or I should say, this morning.
About time someone takes that boy out back and shoots him.
Then, I’m that annoyed, I can’t get myself to sit down to work on this, which is making me feel a little desperate because it’s already the sixth of June, and we’re on, like, day two of this story. So listen up, all of you—from now on we write faster, smoother, and sleeker. I mean everybody, and especially you, Benny, you little shithead.
I, for one, am going to cut to the chase. So it’s Monday, the day, come to think of it, just a week or two shy of ten years ago when I was first annoyed by the little shithead, I mean Benny. My business that morning was a bail hearing on a court-assigned hit-and-run case, a young man whose conviction, I’m sorry to say, I was going to overturn on technical grounds to do with probable cause. Sorry, because the little bastard had been drunk as a lord when he left the Ace of Spades in Palenville and promptly plowed into a minivan containing six adolescents from the Harriman Lodge, putting four of them in the hospital. In my opinion, he deserved a harsh and punitive sentence, which perhaps wasn’t a very good attitude for a defense lawyer. And worse yet, he wasn’t going to get it, because the arresting officer had violated the little asshole’s constitutional rights. The way I looked at it, it was the arresting officer who should have been on trial.
I was going to do what I had to. But I wasn’t going to be happy about it, and in fact, when the hearing was finished and the irate judge had recessed until the afternoon—yet another member of the Judicial Friends of Jim Grant Club—I didn’t have the heart to go back to the office. Instead, I walked over to have an early lunch with you and Molly. When that was done, and you had gone out to play in the yard with Kate Carlucci from next door, was when Billy called on my cell to tell me to expect a visit from an Albany Times reporter. That was not unexpected, but it was still a major blow, and I guess how major a blow could be seen on my face, for Molly, turning from the window, frowned and said, “Now what’s up with you, Little J?”