ALSO BY BRYAN BURROUGH
The Big Rich: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes
Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933−34
Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco (with John Helyar)
Dragonfly: NASA and the Crisis Aboard Mir
Vendetta: American Express and the Smearing of Edmond Safra
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“The True Import of Present Dialogue, Black vs. Negro (For Peppe, Who Will Ultimately Judge Our Efforts)” from Black Feeling, Black Talk, Black Judgment by Nikki Giovanni. Copyright © 1968, 1970 by Nikki Giovanni. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
Photograph credits
ISBN 978-0-698-17007-0
Version_1
For my mother
There’s a group of youngsters cropping up who is getting tired of this brutality against our people. They are going to take some action; it might be misguided; it might be disorganized; it might be unintelligent; but they’re going to get a little action. And there are going to be some whites who are going to join in along with them.
—MALCOLM X, 1964
At the end of the sixties or the beginning of the seventies, it seemed like people were going underground left and right. Every other week I was hearing about somebody disappearing.
—JOANNE CHESIMARD, AKA ASSATA SHAKUR, BLACK LIBERATION ARMY
And there’s some rumors going ’round, someone’s underground . . .
—THE EAGLES, “WITCHY WOMAN,” 1972
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Without a doubt, this book is the single most difficult project I have ever attempted. During more than five years of research, I thought of quitting any number of times. When I began work in 2009, I had no idea of the challenges involved, or the complexities of dealing with veterans of the radical left. If you said I was naïve, well, I couldn’t argue with you.
Eleven years ago I wrote a book called Public Enemies, in which I employed a million or so pages of newly released FBI files to tell the story of the Bureau’s pursuit of John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, and a half dozen other Depression-era criminals. In approaching this book, I assumed I would be able to draw on similar resources to document the rise and fall of the 1970s-era underground groups. Big mistake. FBI files, those the Bureau has made publicly available, are almost useless to a historian. Only a fraction of the paperwork these investigations generated has been issued, and almost all of it is dreck, either highly redacted headquarters summaries or page after page of highly redacted, and highly repetitive, “airtels” and telegrams. One could learn far more about the underground from newspapers.
The existing literature was helpful, but contained gaping holes. Of the ten or so books and films dealing with the Weather Underground, few contain much detailed information on what interested me most: how the group actually operated underground. There are two good books about the Symbionese Liberation Army from the 1970s, but none on the Black Liberation Army, the FALN, or the United Freedom Front. John Castellucci’s 1986 book about the Family, The Big Dance, is packed with good information but so loosely structured it is often hard to follow.
In the absence of fresh documentation, I was obliged to fall back on the basic skills I learned as a young newspaper reporter many years ago: pounding the pavement, hitting the phones. Veterans of the underground were easy enough to track down. The problem was getting them to talk candidly about decades-old crimes they had rarely if ever spoken of publicly, and which in some cases might still be the subject of law enforcement interest.
During my first year of research, I cold-called any number of aging underground figures. The conversation usually went something like this:
“Hello, my name is Bryan Burrough. You don’t know me from Adam, and I don’t share your politics. Would you be willing to tell me about that building you bombed in 1972?”
Click.
This became somewhat frustrating. A turning point came when, during the course of people’s deflecting my questions, I was directed to their attorneys. The group of radical lawyers who handled underground cases turned out to be surprisingly small; maybe fifteen attorneys, almost all in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, handled just about every major case. A handful worked on dozens of cases spanning multiple underground groups. With the help of several of these attorneys—people motivated simply by a wish to accurately recapture a piece of little-remembered American history—I was able to begin building bridges to their clients, many of whom remain distrustful of anyone associated with the mainstream media. Some interviews took months to negotiate. Even once a veteran of the underground agreed to speak with me, it sometimes took four or five meetings to begin earning something like the trust that is necessary for someone to share secrets with a complete stranger. I am deeply grateful to all those who did.
CONTENTS
ALSO BY BRYAN BURROUGH
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
DEDICATION
EPIGRAPH
AUTHOR’S NOTE
CAST OF CHARACTERS
PROLOGUE
1“THE REVOLUTION AIN’T TOMORROW. IT’S NOW. YOU DIG?”
Sam Melville and the Birth of the American Underground
2“NEGROES WITH GUNS”
Black Rage and the Road to Revolution
PART ONE: WEATHERMAN
3“YOU SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION”
The Movement and the Emergence of Weatherman
4“AS TO KILLING PEOPLE, WE WERE PREPARED TO DO THAT”
Weatherman, January to March 1970
5THE TOWNHOUSE
Weatherman, March to June 1970
6“RESPONSIBLE TERRORISM”
Weatherman, June 1970 to October 1970
7THE WRONG SIDE OF HISTORY
Weatherman and the FBI, October 1970 to April 1971
PART TWO: THE BLACK LIBERATION ARMY
8“AN ARMY OF ANGRY NIGGAS”
The Birth of the Black Liberation Army, Spring 1971
9THE RISE OF THE BLA
The Black Liberation Army, June 1971 to February 1972
10“WE GOT PRETTY SMALL”
The Weather Underground and the FBI, 1971−72
11BLOOD IN THE STREETS OF BABYLON
The Black Liberation Army, 1973
PART THREE: THE SECOND WAVE
12THE DRAGON UNLEASHED
The Rise of the Symbionese Liberation Army, November 1973 to February 1974
13“PATTY HAS BEEN KIDNAPPED”
The Symbionese Liberation Army, February to May 1974
14WHAT PATTY HEARST WROUGHT
The Rise of the Post-SLA Underground
15“THE BELFAST OF NORTH AMERICA”
Patty Hearst, the SLA, and the Mad Bombers of San Francisco
16HARD TIMES
The Death of the Weather Underground
17“WELCOME TO FEAR CITY”
The FALN, 1976 to 1978
18“ARMED REVOLUTIONARY LOVE”
The Odyssey of Ray Levasseur
19BOMBS AND DIAPERS
Ray Levasseur’s Odyssey, Part II
PART FOUR: OUT WITH A BANG
20THE FAMILY
The Pan-Radical Alliance, 1977 to 1979
21JAILBREAKS AND CAPTURES
The Family and the FALN, 1979−80
22THE SCALES OF JUSTICE
Trials, Surrenders, and the Family, 1980−81
23THE LAST REVOLUTIONARIES
The United Freedom Front, 1981 to 1984
EPILOGUE
PHOTOGRAPHS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A NOTE ON SOURCES
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
IMAGE CREDITS
CAST OF CHARACTERS
WEATHER UNDERGROUND, AKA WEATHERMAN, 1969 TO 1977
BERNARDINE DOHRN: beautiful, brainy, first among equals, “la Pasionaria of the Lunatic Left”
JEFF JONES: California-raised “surfer dude,” co-leader, Dohrn’s onetime lover, principal instigator of 1975–76 “inversion strategy”
BILL AYERS: effusive child of wealth, enthusiastic writer, named to national leadership after the Townhouse bombing
ELEANOR STEIN: New York cell, national leadership, later married Jeff Jones
ROBBIE ROTH: thoughtful Columbia University SDSer, New York cell, named to national leadership after Townhouse
MARK RUDD: hero of 1968 Columbia protests, early Weatherman leader, eventually marginalized
JOHN JACOBS, AKA “JJ”: Columbia organizer, Weatherman’s intellectual pioneer, principal author of founding Weatherman paper
TERRY ROBBINS: SDS organizer, Bill Ayers’s best friend, intense and dedicated, leader of Townhouse cell
CATHY WILKERSON: Townhouse survivor, later West Coast bomb maker
KATHY BOUDIN: Townhouse survivor, longtime Weatherman
HOWARD MACHTINGER: University of Chicago PhD candidate and intellectual, led first West Coast “actions”
“PAUL BRADLEY”: pseudonym for San Francisco cadre active in California bombings
“MARVIN DOYLE”: pseudonym for Bay Area radical who worked closely with national leadership circa 1971–72
RON FLIEGELMAN: New York cell, explosives expert
RICK AYERS: Bill Ayers’s brother, organized West Coast logistics
ANNIE STEIN: Eleanor Stein’s mother, political adviser
CLAYTON VAN LYDEGRAF: aging Seattle radical, Weatherman cadre, later led purge of Weather Underground and Prairie Fire Organizing Committee
BLACK LIBERATION ARMY, AKA BLA, 1971 TO 1973
ELDRIDGE CLEAVER: famed radical writer, BLA’s intellectual leader
DONALD COX, AKA “D.C.”: BLA’s military strategist
SEKOU ODINGA, AKA NATHANIEL BURNS: Cleaver’s number three in Algiers, most important black militant of underground era
LUMUMBA SHAKUR: Odinga’s boyhood friend, BLA adviser
ZAYD SHAKUR: Lumumba’s brother, BLA intellectual
RICHARD “DHORUBA” MOORE, AKA DHORUBA BIN-WAHAD: rangy, motor-mouthed street intellectual, instrumental in BLA’s formation
JOHN THOMAS: Army veteran, leader of Georgia training camp
THOMAS “BLOOD” MCCREARY: Brooklyn soldier
TWYMON MEYERS: trigger-happy soldier, probably most violent revolutionary of the underground era
RONALD CARTER: Army veteran, leader of Cleveland cell, prime suspect in Foster-Laurie murders, January 1972
JOANNE CHESIMARD, AKA ASSATA SHAKUR: last BLA leader
SYMBIONESE LIBERATION ARMY, 1973 TO 1975
DONALD DEFREEZE, AKA CINQUE: escaped California convict, Berkeley radical, founder and first leader of the SLA
MIZMOON SOLTYSIK: DeFreeze’s lover and aide-de-camp
BILL AND EMILY HARRIS: strident SLA members
KATHLEEN SOLIAH: SLA supporter turned recruit
PATTY HEARST: California heiress, SLA member
FALN, 1974 TO 1980
OSCAR LÓPEZ: leader, onetime Chicago community organizer
CARLOS TORRES: López’s number two
MARIE HAYDEE TORRES: Torres’s wife, convicted of 1977 Mobil Oil bombing
GUILLERMO “WILLIE” MORALES: FALN soldier, bomb maker
DYLCIA PAGAN: FALN member, mother of Morales’s child
DON WOFFORD AND LOU VIZI: FBI pursuers
SAM MELVILLE JONATHAN JACKSON UNIT, AKA UNITED FREEDOM FRONT, 1976 TO 1984
RAY LUC LEVASSEUR: charismatic leader, noted Maine radical
TOM MANNING: Levasseur’s number two man, convicted in 1981 murder of New Jersey State Trooper Philip Lamonaco
PAT GROS LEVASSEUR: mother of Levasseur’s three daughters
CAROL MANNING: Tom’s wife
JAAN LAAMAN: onetime SDS radical, late recruit
RICHARD WILLIAMS: recruit, convicted in Lamonaco murder
KAZI TOURE: recruit
LEN CROSS: FBI pursuer
MUTULU SHAKUR GROUP, AKA “THE FAMILY,” 1977 TO 1981
MUTULU SHAKUR: leader, longtime New York radical, acupuncturist, stepfather of the late rapper Tupac Shakur
SEKOU ODINGA: co-leader, governor on Shakur’s engine
TYRONE RISON, AKA “LB”: Army veteran, subleader
MARILYN BUCK: leader of white-radical contingent, among most determined white radicals of the underground era
SILVIA BARALDINI: intense Italian-born radical, moved from Prairie Fire Organizing Committee to May 19 Community Organization to Shakur’s group
ALSO . . .
SAM MELVILLE AND JANE ALPERT: underground pioneers
GEORGE JACKSON: California convict, would-be underground messiah
PROLOGUE
The woman sitting across from me in a bustling Brooklyn diner is a sixty-eight-year-old grandmother now, freckled and still very attractive. She has warm eyes and short silver hair combed over her ears. She wears a long-sleeved pink blouse. At her side her five-month-old grandson burbles in his stroller. By training she is a math teacher. She has taught almost thirty years in the New York schools. This was what she decided to do when she got out of jail.
Her name is Cathy Wilkerson, and many years ago she was briefly famous. In her twenties she belonged to the Weather Underground, the militant group that famously declared war on the United States in 1970. Its favored weapons were bombs, which it spent six long years detonating in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, Pittsburgh, and Washington. It was Wilkerson’s family townhouse in Greenwich Village that was destroyed in the group’s most infamous bombing, on March 6, 1970. The accidental explosion killed three of her closest friends, including her lover. She was one of two survivors who crawled from the rubble and made their way underground.
Years ago Wilkerson wrote a memoir of her radical youth, called Flying Close to the Sun. But as several of her peers did in their own books, she left out almost all details of her underground career. There is page after page about being lonely and penniless and adrift, but she has never explained what she actually did underground. There is almost nothing about her clandestine work, about her role in the bombings. This is our sixth meeting, and while she is happy to discuss old friends and old politics, she has sweetly resisted my entreaties to discuss her involvement in what are euphemistically known as the Weather Underground’s “political actions.”
Another Weatherman alumnus, however, has told me. He is the father of Wilkerson’s adult daughter, in fact, and though they rarely speak, he happens to l
ive four blocks away. Even though he perfected the group’s bomb design and served for years as its explosives guru, he—unlike Wilkerson—has never been publicly identified. A grandfather with a patchy white beard, he can be seen most mornings walking a tiny white poodle through the streets of his neighborhood, which is called Park Slope.
“So,” I say, “I’ve been told what your role was.”
Her eyelids flutter. She reaches down and begins to rock the stroller. “You think you know?” she says.
“Yes,” I say. “You were the West Coast bomb maker.”
There is a long pause. She glances down at her grandson. He begins to spit up. She reaches down, wipes off his chin, and takes him into her arms, gently sliding a bottle between his lips.
“Look,” she finally says. “I felt I had a responsibility to make the design safe after the Townhouse.” The bomb design, she means. “I didn’t want any more people to die.”
And then she begins to talk about that secret life, about the bombs she built and detonated, mostly in the San Francisco area, all those years ago. The story she tells is like many I heard from those who joined Weather and other radical underground groups of the 1970s, who mistakenly believed the country was on the brink of a genuine political revolution, who thought that violence would speed the change. It is elusive and impressionistic, a mixture of pride and embarrassment, marked with memory lapses that may or may not be convenient.
Interviews for this book, many of which took months to negotiate and arrange, played out across the country and beyond, at a Mexican restaurant in Berkeley, a remote farmhouse in Maine, a North Carolina hotel, a series of cafés in Rome, a Senegalese buffet in Harlem, a taco joint in Albuquerque, a tenement beside the Brooklyn Bridge, the homes of retired FBI agents in New Jersey, California, and elsewhere, as well as a prison or two. Like many of those I saw, Wilkerson is angry at some of her old friends and, forty-odd years later, still grappling to make sense of what she did.
Days of Rage Page 1