Over the next two weeks, everything came together quickly. Melville managed to buy a gun. Jane selected a Miami-bound plane to hijack. On Monday, May 5, they followed the two Canadians to LaGuardia Airport and said goodbye. “How can we ever thank you?” one asked.
“We are all fighting for the same cause,” Jane replied.
That night Jane and Melville hunched over a radio until the announcer on WBAI read a news bulletin: “National Airlines flight number ninety-one has been diverted from Miami to Cuba, where it has now landed.”
Melville and Jane shouted for joy, hopping like rabbits, they were so excited. “Those little bastards,” Melville crowed over and over. “They did it. They did it!”*
• • •
After the hijacking, Melville’s confidence soared. Finally, after months of talk, he began laying concrete plans for the bombing campaign he envisioned. He started practicing with disguises. Jane was startled one day when, lying in the bathtub, she saw a strange man enter the apartment. He looked like a businessman, clean-shaven, wearing a suit and a fedora. It took a moment before she realized it was Melville. “We can’t afford to look like hippies anymore,” he explained. “The revolution ain’t tomorrow. It’s now. You dig?”1
Jane saw her lover’s bombing plans as just another of his fantasies. Talk of bombing she dismissed as a “silly scheme” intended “to win my attention and boost his self-esteem.” Yet Jane’s skepticism only seemed to propel Melville forward. One night that June, she found him hunched over a hand-drawn map. That day, he announced, he and a friend had staked out a building site and followed a truck carrying dynamite all the way to the Major Deegan Expressway. Following the truck, he said, would lead to the source of its dynamite.
Jane looked at him balefully. Maybe, she suggested, he should try looking in the Yellow Pages under “explosives.” When he did, Melville was startled to find three listings, including one in the Bronx. All were for a company called Explo Industries. Soon he began talking excitedly about plans to rob the Explo warehouse. Jane rolled her eyes. She might have laughed out loud had she known what Melville also didn’t: A short drive north, in much of New England, dynamite could be purchased simply by walking into any construction-supplies retailer.
After staking out the warehouse, Melville and two pals made their move on the night of Monday, July 7, 1969. They left at eleven. Jane waited. Midnight came and went. Another hour ticked by. She watched the clock.
At 1:20 a.m., Sam and his pals burst into the apartment, wide smiles on their faces. They plunked down four boxes on the kitchen floor. The robbery had gone smoothly; once the night watchman saw their gun, he offered no resistance. They left him tied up. Jane gingerly opened the top of one box. Inside was row upon row of red dynamite sticks, each wrapped in paper. The words NITRO-GLYCERINE—HIGHLY FLAMMABLE were printed on each. They took the yogurt and the salad out of the refrigerator and slid the boxes in. Sam was as happy as Jane had ever seen him. Once everyone left, they made love, Alpert wrote later, “the most tender and passionate in a long time.”
• • •
The dynamite in the couple’s refrigerator quickly became the focus of discussion among their dozen or so radical friends, all of whom, like Melville, were eager to put it to use. A few days after the robbery, Melville rented a $60-a-month apartment on East Second Street, where they moved the dynamite. The new flat became his clandestine workshop, where he began experimenting with bomb designs. On Saturday, July 26, the sixteenth anniversary of Fidel Castro’s disastrous raid on a Cuban army barracks, he told Jane he was ready to mark the date with their first “action.”
Their target would be a United Fruit warehouse on a Hudson River pier in lower Manhattan; United Fruit, best known for its Chiquita bananas, had been a major investor in Cuba. Melville had already built two bombs and slid them into large vinyl pocketbooks. At dusk he and Alpert and a friend strolled down to the Hudson, where the warehouse, with the words UNITED FRUIT emblazoned on one side, lay in darkness. Standing at the end of the dock, they could see no security, no watchmen. The only sound, other than the whiz of cars on the nearby West Side Highway, was the lapping of water below. While the women stood guard, Melville took one of the bombs and disappeared into the gloom. He returned a minute later, took the second bomb, then left again. He hurried back and herded the women away, saying, “Let’s go.”
They rushed back to their apartment and turned on the radio, eagerly awaiting the news. None came. In the morning Jane pored over the Times: nothing. They began to suspect that police had covered up the news. That afternoon they made an anonymous call to WBAI, the radical radio station, and an hour later it finally carried the news. The two bombs, set beside the warehouse, had blown a hole in an outer wall and wrecked a door. Unfortunately, they learned, United Fruit no longer used the facility. It was being used instead by a tugboat company. Melville was crestfallen. “I used up forty sticks of dynamite on that job,” he complained. “That’s one quarter of what we’ve got.”
Their friends were furious at being left out of the plan. But that wasn’t what delayed their new bombing campaign. Alpert came home from work one evening and found Melville in bed with one of her friends. Afterward he wanted to break up. Then he changed his mind. They began to fight, then they agreed to try sleeping with other people. Melville was morose. And then came that rainy weekend they all went up to Woodstock and then sullenly drove back to New York and Alpert came home from a long day at work and Melville confessed he had planted a new bomb without her.
“Where did you plant the bomb?” Alpert asked.
“At the Marine Midland Bank.”
The name meant nothing to Alpert. It wasn’t a target they had discussed. It stood at 140 Broadway, a few blocks up from Wall Street.
“Why Marine Midland?” Alpert asked.
“No particular reason,” Melville said. “I just walked around Wall Street till I found a likely-looking place. It’s one of those big new skyscrapers, millions of tons of glass and steel, some fucking phony sculpture in the front. You just look at the building and the people going in and out of it, and you know.”
“What time did you set the bomb for?” Alpert asked.
“Eleven o’clock.”
Alpert stared at the clock. Barely an hour away.
“Sam, you never even cased that building,” she said, worried. “Do you know what the Wall Street area is like at eleven o’clock on a weeknight? People work there until after midnight. Cleaning women. File clerks. Keypunch operators. Did you make a warning call or anything?”
Melville shifted.
Alpert all but dragged him to a pay phone up the street. She made the call, reaching a security guard. She told him about the bomb and pleaded with him to evacuate the building. The guard seemed annoyed.
“I’d like to help you, lady, really, I would,” he said. “But I don’t leave this post until midnight when I make rounds.”
“But the bomb’s going to go off at eleven.”
“I see your point.” The guard sighed. “I’ll do what I can.”
Back in the apartment, Alpert and Melville sat by the radio, waiting. The news came a few minutes after eleven.
Melville had simply wandered into the building and left the bomb next to an elevator on the eighth floor. That night about fifty people, almost all women, were working on the floor, inputting data into bookkeeping machines. When the bomb went off at 10:45 p.m., the explosion destroyed several walls, blowing an eight-foot hole in the floor and dumping a ton of debris down into the seventh floor, where more people were working. Windows shattered, generating a blizzard of flying glass; several women’s dresses were cut to shreds. Sirens echoed through lower Manhattan. Ambulances carted away twenty people who had been injured, none of them seriously.
Alpert was apoplectic—not because of the injuries but because of Melville’s motivation. The bombing, she saw, had nothing to do with th
e war or Nixon or racism. She knew Melville better than anyone, and she knew this was about her. As she wrote years later, “Because I had threatened to abandon him, for even one night, by sleeping with another man, he had taken revenge on a skyscraperful of people.”
Afterward they drafted a communiqué, which called the bombing an act of “political sabotage.” Jane typed up three copies and sent them to Rat, the Guardian, and the Liberation News Service. Alpert was actually at Rat when the paper’s editor, Jeff Shero, slit open the envelope and read it.
“Far fuckin’ out!” he yelped.
• • •
For their next bombing, a group of their friends pitched in. On September 18, 1969, as President Nixon delivered a speech at the United Nations, two miles north, Alpert and the others gathered around Melville as he assembled a bomb. He used fifteen sticks of dynamite, a blasting cap, and a Westclox alarm clock. When he finished, he lowered the device into a handbag Jane had stolen. Wearing a white A-line dress and kid gloves, she slid the bag’s strap over her shoulder, gave the group a salute, and left. She took the bus downtown, cushioning the bag on her lap, and got off at Foley Square, home to the U.S. Courthouse, with its vast, colonnaded façade; the New York County Courthouse; and Alpert’s destination: the two-year-old Federal Building, a forty-two-story rectangle of glass and steel. At the elevator bank, Alpert pressed the button for the fortieth floor. Reaching it, she stepped into an empty hallway. She left the bomb in an electrical-equipment closet.
Around 1 a.m. the conspirators gathered on the roof of an apartment house in the East Village. They had trained a telescope on the upper floors of the Federal Building. All the skyscraper’s lights remained ablaze. High atop the building, an airplane beacon blinked its orange eye. They waited, taking turns at the telescope. The minutes ticked by like hours. Then, suddenly, a few minutes before two, every light in the Federal Building silently winked out.
“Holy shit,” someone breathed.
“An explosion of undetermined origin,” the Times called it the next morning, by which time Melville had already learned they had bombed not the Army Department, as planned, but an office suite belonging to the Department of Commerce. The blast had blown a six-foot hole in a wall and a twenty-five-by-forty-foot hole in the ceiling, mangling furniture and file cabinets on the floor above. No one had been injured.
A few days later Alpert was walking into the Rat offices when she saw police cruisers outside. She stopped at a pay phone and called in. An editor said the cops wanted the Marine Midland communiqué. Alpert killed time in a diner before returning. The cops were gone. But she knew that she and her friends had been sloppy. Too many people were too chatty. Still, she allowed herself to relax when Melville left for a radical gathering in North Dakota.
Melville was still away when some of the others, led by a young militant named Jim Duncan, decided they wanted to bomb something, too.* Duncan targeted the Selective Service induction center on Whitehall Street in lower Manhattan, the building where every man of age in the borough had to register for the draft. On the night of October 7, Duncan left his bomb in a fifth-floor bathroom. When it detonated, at 11:20 p.m., the explosion wrecked the entire floor, scattering debris throughout the building and blowing out windows. No one was injured. The communiqué, which Duncan wrote himself, was mailed to media outlets across the city. It said the bombing was in support of the North Vietnamese, “legalized marijuana, love, Cuba, legalized abortion and all the American revolutionaries and G.I.’s who are winning the war against the Pentagon [and] Nixon. [S]urrender now.” The reaction at Rat, and among everyone they knew in the Movement, was joyful.
Afterward, Jane and the others planned their most ambitious attack to date: a triple bombing, aimed squarely at centers of American corporate power. They planned to strike on Monday, November 10, 1969. The day before, Melville returned, having run out of money; once he got some, he said, he was going back to North Dakota. He spent the day talking with his pal George Demmerle of the Crazies, excitedly telling him everything. The two agreed to bomb something together that week. Jane was beside herself. None of them much cared for Demmerle.
Still, they decided to go ahead. Jane typed up the communiqué in advance, mailing it to the newspapers. On Monday they built the bombs. That night they left them at their targets: the RCA Building at Rockefeller Center, the General Motors Building at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-ninth Street, and the headquarters of Chase Manhattan Bank. Everything went smoothly. By midnight everyone had returned to the apartment. Then they phoned in their warnings and waited.
The bombs began detonating at 1:00 a.m. The first exploded on the empty sixteenth floor of the Chase Manhattan building just as police, reacting to the warning call, finished a fruitless search; the blast ripped through an elevator shaft, sending debris cascading all the way to the street. The bomb on the twentieth floor of the RCA Building detonated in a vacant office suite, panicking dozens of guests in the Rainbow Room restaurant, forty-five floors above; men in tuxedos and women in gowns scurried down a freight elevator and stairwells to the street. The office suite was demolished; dozens of windows were blown out. The bomb at the General Motors Building accomplished much the same.
Once again the sound of sirens echoed through the streets of Manhattan. Alpert and the others were thrilled. For the police, however, the bombings represented an escalation they could not ignore. This was simply unprecedented, three bombings in one night; the city had never seen anything like it. The next morning the NYPD’s cigar-chomping chief of detectives, Albert Seedman, tromped through the wreckage, shaking his head and muttering under his breath. His men had been investigating the bombings since the first one, at United Fruit, and had made no headway whatsoever. He decided to form a special squad of twenty-five handpicked detectives to find the perpetrators.
Seedman considered calling the FBI, who he suspected knew more than he did; after the Federal Building bombing, the head of the Bureau’s New York office, a square-jawed veteran named John Malone, had called to say they were working an informant in the case. That morning, as Seedman was establishing his command center at the RCA Building, Malone called again. “It took a while,” Malone said, “but the informant finally gave up our man.”
“Who is it?” Seedman asked.
“His name is Sam Melville.”
• • •
The three explosions ignited a new kind of civic tumult that would become all but commonplace in New York and other cities in the next decade: a rash of bombings followed by a wave of copycat threats, followed by the mass evacuations of skyscraper after skyscraper, leaving thousands of office workers milling about on sidewalks, wondering what had happened. That Tuesday the NYPD was obliged to check out three hundred separate bomb threats. The next day, November 12, the Associated Press counted thirty just between the hours of 8 a.m. and 1 p.m. A dozen buildings had to be emptied, including the Pan Am Building, on Forty-fifth Street, the Columbia Broadcasting building, on Fifty-first Street, and a library in Queens. Afterward the Times editorialized that “periodic evacuation of buildings [may become] a new life style for the New York office worker.” The columnist Sidney Zion, noting how powerless the city appeared during a string of bombings now entering its fourth month, said New York “was rapidly becoming Scare City.”2
Even as Melville and his friends rejoiced that Tuesday, teams of undercover FBI and NYPD men began filtering into their neighborhood. The next day Albert Seedman heard from the FBI’s John Malone. “Our informant says Melville is ready to do another job tonight,” Malone said. “This time they plan to place bombs in U.S. Army trucks parked outside a National Guard armory. The trucks will be driven inside late at night, and the bombs will go off a few hours later.”
“Which armory?”
“He didn’t say.”
There were three: two in Manhattan, one in Queens. “We can cover them all,” Malone said. “In fact, we can ask the army to park plenty of truc
ks outside each armory. He can have his pick.”
All that day Malone and Seedman took reports from the surveillance teams. By midafternoon they believed that Melville was working in his workshop on East Second Street. Not until it was too late would anyone realize that he wasn’t.
• • •
Melville had left the apartment that morning at eight, ducking out to meet his friend Robin Palmer, who had planned a bombing of his own. It was to be a busy day, Melville’s last before returning to North Dakota the next morning. He was determined to go out with a bang—literally—with two separate actions: one with Palmer that evening, the other with George Demmerle later that night. Palmer’s target, which he had scouted himself, was the Criminal Courts Building, at 100 Centre Street, where a group of Black Panthers, the so-called Panther 21, was on trial for an alleged conspiracy to kill New York policemen. That morning Melville built at least five dynamite bombs. Afterward they took the subway downtown to the courthouse and slid one behind a plumbing-access panel in a fifth-floor men’s room. They were careful. No one noticed.
The bomb exploded at 8:35 p.m., demolishing the men’s room, leveling a seventy-foot terra-cotta wall, and shattering windows. Pipes burst, spilling a river of water down through the stairwells. Other than those at a night-court trial three floors above, few people were in the building; one woman sitting on a toilet a floor below the explosion was blown fifteen feet through the air but was unhurt. Albert Seedman took the call while at dinner in Midtown. Roaring downtown in his limousine, he toured the wreckage, broken glass crunching beneath his shoes, so angry he could spit. Melville had done this under their very noses. However, they had all three New York armories under surveillance now, and one last chance to stop him before he struck again.
• • •
As Seedman simmered, Jane Alpert returned home from work. She found Melville standing in the dark, peering through the window blinds. He put a finger to his lips. “They’re back,” he murmured.
Days of Rage Page 3