Days of Rage

by Bryan Burrough

  Slowly the group began to accept her as something other than a prisoner. When she grew weak from inactivity, sometimes unable to walk to the bathroom without help, they had her do calisthenics. The women watched as she bathed. DeFreeze remained obsessed with the idea of an FBI raid, and in an effort to bolster their defenses he taught Patty to break down and use a shotgun. But it was her seeming acceptance of their political views that truly changed her status. Patty considered herself “apolitical” and didn’t care a whit about Mao or prison conditions; she thought these people were suicidal. But in an effort to improve her plight, she began agreeing with every point they made, until finally they gave her books to read, Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, George Jackson, Marx, Mao. They began letting her out of the closet, still blindfolded, to sit in on their political discussions, where she did her best to appear an eager student. She memorized the SLA’s rules and asked an endless stream of questions, every one of which the others were thrilled to answer. In time they stopped calling her “Marie Antoinette.” They called her “Tiny” instead.

  Patty had no idea what they had planned for her. At one point DeFreeze spoke of trading her for Joe Remiro and Russ Little. Another time he suggested she might face a choice: Join the SLA or be executed. “You know, we’ve kind of gotten to like you,” he said. “So we don’t really want to kill you, if we don’t have to. Think about it.”

  For the moment, though, DeFreeze let the subject lapse. Then, in late March, seven weeks after the kidnapping, the group suddenly abandoned its Daly City safe house for a cramped, one-bedroom apartment on Golden Gate Drive in San Francisco; DeFreeze was convinced an FBI raid was imminent. To make the trip, Patty was taken from her closet and maneuvered into a plastic garbage can, which was placed in the trunk of a car. At the new flat she was again led into a closet. One evening, as her political education continued, she was brought into the living room and told about “revolutionary sex.” Anyone in the SLA was free to have sex with anyone else, they told her; no one was forced to, but it was considered “comradely” to accept any sexual offer. That night Willie Wolfe came to the closet and wordlessly had sex with Patty. Several days later DeFreeze began visiting her as well. Patty remembers lying there “like a rag doll,” just waiting for the sex to be over.

  They had been in the new apartment only a few days when DeFreeze came to the closet and finally made the proposal that changed Patty’s life forever. “The War Council has decided you can join us if you want to,” he told her. “Or you can be released, and go home again.”

  Patty wrote later that she never believed they would release her; the choice, she felt, was between joining them or death. Without a moment’s hesitation, she blurted, “I want to join you.”

  “You’ll be an urban guerrilla, fighting for the people.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I want to fight for the people.”

  Over the next week Patty endured blindfolded talks with all eight SLA members, assuring each that she was genuinely committed to their cause. Finally she was led into a meeting where DeFreeze told her to remove her blindfold. When she did, she saw the others, for the first time, grinning at her. “As General Field Marshal,” DeFreeze announced, “I welcome you to the Symbionese Liberation Army!”

  Patty’s first thought was what ugly, depressingly ordinary people they all were: Their voices had been so much more impressive. “Now that you’ve seen us,” Angela Atwood asked, “what do you think?”

  “Oh, you’re all so attractive!” Patty lied.

  “Well,” DeFreeze said, “all freedom fighters are beautiful.”

  Overnight Patty was accepted into the group. She was issued combat boots, a carbine, and a new name, “Tania,” after a noted Cuban revolutionary. She began using the SLA’s communal toothbrush, which she found disgusting. She lined up in the morning for DeFreeze’s inspections and stifled laughter as she watched the others engage in “combat exercises,” darting around the apartment pretending to shoot each other, “like cowboys and Indians,” she wrote later. Once her own training began, they started preparing the communiqué that would announce her enlistment to the outside world—a publicity coup, DeFreeze promised, pronouncing the word “coop.” Everyone contributed to the script Patty read into the tape recorder. In it, she announced she was joining the SLA voluntarily and launched into a tirade against her father that was so “over the top,” she wrote later, she was certain he would realize she was doing this simply to remain alive.

  The communiqué, issued April 3, ignited a media firestorm and triggered a national debate about Patty and her motivations. America’s embrace of this discussion, coming as it did smack in the middle of the Watergate investigations, might be understood as a welcome diversion from weightier matters. As for Patty herself, she always insisted her decision to join the SLA was purely a question of survival. In time, though, the lengths she would go to in order to “belong” would cause many who knew her, and millions who didn’t, to question her actions. Her quandary, in fact, confronted her almost immediately. They were running low on money, and she was startled to hear DeFreeze and the others debating the merits of various banks they wanted to rob.

  Once they identified their target, a branch of the Hibernia Bank on Noriega Street, they rehearsed the robbery in exhaustive detail. Patty couldn’t believe they would actually go through with it; the whole idea seemed so surreal. If they did, she was certain she would be killed. Yet there she was, her carbine clasped to her side, as the group filed out of the Golden Gate apartment on the bright, sunny morning of Monday, April 15. It was the first time Patty had been outdoors in weeks. As they drove in two rented cars toward the bank, she marveled at the blue of the sky, the green of the trees. They pulled up around the corner from the bank just before ten. DeFreeze, with Patty and Gabi Hall, was first through the door; there were eighteen employees and six customers inside. Guns hidden, the trio strolled to a desk.

  As they did, Mizmoon and Nancy Perry burst inside, guns drawn. Just then the clip fell out of Perry’s rifle, clattering to the floor, bullets spilling everywhere. Patty produced her carbine, DeFreeze a submachine gun. “This is a holdup!” DeFreeze shouted. “The first motherfucker who don’t lay down on the floor gets shot in the head!”

  It went like clockwork, everyone rushing around shouting, “SLA! SLA!” as they herded the tellers and customers to one side and scooped cash from the drawers. Patty stood moored in the lobby, until she remembered what she was supposed to say. Several customers heard her say, in a small voice but clearly, “This is Tania Hearst.”

  They were finished in minutes. DeFreeze began calling out numbers, the signal for each to leave. Just as they turned toward the front door, a fifty-nine-year-old liquor store owner named Pete Markoff entered the bank. Just behind was his pal Gene Brennan, a seventy-year-old pensioner. Seeing the robbery in progress, Markoff turned to run. For some reason Nancy Perry opened fire. Markoff fell, a .30-caliber bullet striking his right buttock. Brennan was hit in the hand. “I’ve been shot!” he yelled. “I’ve been shot!” As customers from a nearby bar spilled out to see what was happening, the SLA sprinted from the bank, DeFreeze turning to fire a burst at the onlookers, scattering them. The group hustled into the getaway cars and were gone in an instant. The take came to $10,600. Back at their apartment, the mood was euphoric. DeFreeze presented Patty with a pistol as reward for her performance.

  The Hibernia robbery was a turning point. The bank-camera photo of Patty calmly holding a gun on customers, soon to become one of the decade’s iconic images, provided the first evidence that she had in fact joined the group. Initially the San Francisco papers withheld judgment. A Chronicle headline suggested SHE MAY HAVE BEEN COERCED; the Hearsts’ Examiner asked, WAS PATTY A PUPPET? But the U.S. attorney general, William Saxbe, had no such doubt. In Washington he told reporters that Patty “was not a reluctant participant.” His comments set the tone for a transformation in the pursuit of the SLA, which had be
en lackluster; California’s attorney general suggested that police had been “timid” out of concern for Patty’s safety. In fact, police hadn’t even identified all the SLA’s members. After the robbery they did, and wanted posters sprouted in post offices across the state. Arrest warrants were finally issued. San Francisco’s mayor, Joseph Alioto, denounced the SLA as “killers, extortionists and third-rate intellectuals,” claiming, “We have indulged them long enough.”

  At the flat on Golden Gate, DeFreeze began to worry. He promised it was only a matter of time before the FBI found them. He genuinely believed that agents were checking every house in San Francisco in an effort to quash the revolution. He said no one could leave the apartment, which was a problem; after two days they ran out of food. At that point DeFreeze announced that the answer was to recruit new soldiers the FBI didn’t know. Taking Bill Harris with him, he marched out of the apartment and, to the others’ dismay, began knocking on other doors in the building, introducing himself as “General Cinque of the SLA” and asking the occupants to join up. After one woman slammed the door in their faces, DeFreeze was convinced that recruitment in their own building might be a tad unwise.

  Not that this stopped him. He and Harris strode out into the surrounding neighborhood and began knocking on other doors. Amazingly, this strategy worked. After several more doors were slammed in their faces, a black woman who happened to be a Black Muslim said she would help. The next day she brought them food. A few days after that she found a new apartment where they could hide, on Oakdale Avenue in a black neighborhood. To ensure that they made it there safely, DeFreeze had Angela Atwood, the amateur actress, experiment with disguises, daubing black theatrical makeup on all the white faces. The women donned Afro wigs; Patty, it’s said, made a thoroughly convincing black girl. DeFreeze chose to dress in drag; apparently he made quite a fetching woman. On the way out they trashed the flat, scrawling antigovernment slogans on the walls and throwing papers into a makeshift acid bath they brewed in the bathtub. No sooner had they left, however, than word came that the new apartment was not quite ready.

  The woman found them a shabby hotel, where they waited for two days, pacing and reading. Once they moved into the new apartment, they again relied on the woman, now augmented by three Black Muslim men, to buy their groceries. Now that they had money, DeFreeze began saying it was time to initiate combat operations. They would drive the streets of San Francisco hunting for policemen to kill, as the BLA had done. But before they could begin, Randolph Hearst announced a $50,000 reward for Patty’s return. Suddenly DeFreeze began eyeing their Muslim helpers with suspicion. After several days he decided that remaining in the Bay Area was too risky. They would don their disguises once more and move their theater of operations to a city he knew well, or thought he did: Los Angeles.

  • • •

  They drove south in three vans the Muslim men rented for them, arriving in Los Angeles on May 10. The first day they cruised the black neighborhoods in South Central until they spotted a house on West Eighty-fourth Street with a FOR RENT sign. After they moved in, the first order of business was shedding their disguises. “Willie and I looked like shit in black makeup,” Bill Harris said much later. “It was just too phony.”1 For several days everything went smoothly, each of them running out to pick up the groceries and clothes they needed.

  By this point, Patty wrote later, she was losing her grip on her old identity. After three months of intermittent death threats, then untold hours of political indoctrination, she had grown “numb” and was increasingly willing to do whatever DeFreeze and the others told her to do. A cynic might deride her intellectual weakness, and many later did; a supporter might say this was a nineteen-year-old’s way of coping. Whatever it was, by the time the SLA moved to Los Angeles, Patty came to believe that her safety depended solely on her obedience; if she ever mulled an actual escape attempt, much less insubordination, she didn’t mention it later. She simply did what she was told.

  It took all of six days in Los Angeles for trouble to start. On May 16 Patty and the Harrises went shopping at Mel’s Sporting Goods in neighboring Inglewood. When the Harrises went inside—Patty remained outside in a Volkswagen van—a security guard noticed Harris stuffing a pair of socks into his jacket. The couple paid for other items, but after they walked outside, the guard confronted Harris about the socks. When Harris refused to go back inside, a struggle ensued. Emily jumped on the guard’s back. Other employees rushed out and joined the fight.

  Suddenly Patty began firing a carbine from the van—the first time she had fired a gun in anger, it appears—bullets shattering the store’s front windows. The Harrises sprinted to the van. Patty drove off in a squeal of tires, the guard leaping into his own car to give chase. At a stoplight the Harrises jumped out and ordered a young black man out of his car. “We’re from the SLA and we need your car,” Harris shouted, and the man hastily obliged; when Harris noticed the guard a few cars back, he pointed his rifle, and the guard slammed into reverse, leaving the scene. After commandeering and switching to a second car, a station wagon, Patty and the Harrises drove off, but the dimwitted decision to identify themselves as “the SLA” quickly brought the FBI into the matter. By nightfall news of the SLA’s surprising arrival in Los Angeles headlined the evening newscasts.

  For the next several hours the desperate trio ricocheted through the city, commandeering a series of vehicles from frightened Angelenos, briefly taking two drivers hostage. Every hour they stopped at a pay phone and called the emergency numbers they had arranged, but neither DeFreeze nor anyone else ever answered. They continued like this all through the night, giving up only late the next morning. It was then, unable to make contact, that they decided to take shelter in a strangely appropriate place, the fantasy capital of California: Disneyland.

  • • •

  Identifying himself as a member of the SLA wasn’t Bill Harris’s worst blunder that frantic day in Los Angeles. When the FBI searched the Volkswagen van they had abandoned, they found a parking ticket issued three days earlier outside a house on 833 West Eighty-fourth Street, where at that very moment DeFreeze and the rest of the SLA were watching news broadcasts with mounting alarm. And with good reason. By ten o’clock that night FBI agents and LAPD officers were creeping into the neighborhood. Staying well back, they watched the house in silence for several hours, seeing no signs of activity. Finally, just before dawn on May 17, they approached a neighbor, who identified photos of the Harrises as people he had seen at the house at 833. By 8:50 a.m. police had the house surrounded, at which point an LAPD sergeant took out a bullhorn and ordered everyone inside to come out with their hands up. When no one answered, tear gas canisters were fired inside. Minutes later, SWAT teams crashed through the front and back doors. The house was empty.

  DeFreeze and the others had fled. They drove around for several hours, it appears, before stopping at about 4 a.m. It was then, at a small stucco house at 1466 East Fifty-fourth Street, four miles away, that a hard-partying thirty-five-year-old named Christine Johnson answered a soft knock on her front door. She and a group of friends had been drinking wine and listening to music all night; theirs was the only house on the block with lights still on. Opening the door, Johnson and her friend Minnie Lewis found a stranger: DeFreeze. “I saw your lights, sisters,” he said. “My name is Cinque. I need your help.”

  The name meant nothing to the two women. DeFreeze said he and his friends needed a place to stay for a few hours. He admitted, sheepishly, that police were looking for them, not an unusual circumstance in this neighborhood. He pulled out $100 and promised there would be no trouble. Johnson whispered for a moment with her friend, then took the money and said they could stay for a little while.

  At that moment there were six people in the house, Johnson and Lewis, a parking lot attendant named Freddie Freeman, seventeen-year-old Brenda Daniels, and two sleeping children. Freeman helped DeFreeze unload the vans, which took twenty minutes. The
re were boxes packed with documents, a footlocker, sleeping bags, and, to Freeman’s dismay, nineteen guns, including four .30-caliber carbines, a Browning .30-06, and seven sawed-off shotguns. There were also four thousand bullets, some of them in bandoliers. DeFreeze and Freeman lugged it all inside and stacked it in the kitchen.

  They hid the vans in an alley around the corner, then went to look at an apartment house where Freeman suggested they could find a permanent home. By the time DeFreeze returned, Johnson was having second thoughts about sharing their home with these odd strangers. Not only were “Cinque’s” friends all white; they were white people with pistols jammed in their belts. They had watched in dismay as one of the girls, apparently Nancy Perry, filled several bottles with gasoline. An hour later, after sending Lewis’s two children to school, Johnson and Lewis popped several pills, swigged a few last beers, and went to sleep.

  People, including a stream of preschool children, filed in and out of the house all morning. DeFreeze sent Brenda Daniels for groceries. One of Daniels’s girlfriends came by for what she called “a wake-up beer.” Freeman’s supervisor arrived to pick him up for work, but Freeman waved him off, figuring to make some money off Cinque and his strange white friends. At midmorning DeFreeze gave Freeman $450 and told him to go buy them a car. Through it all, he and his acolytes stood at the windows in shifts, taking turns grabbing naps. At the top of every hour DeFreeze picked up the telephone and dialed one of the designated pay phones, hoping to find Bill Harris. No one answered.

  It was growing hot. By noon, the sky a brilliant blue, the temperature had risen into the eighties. As before, DeFreeze made no effort to hide who they were. He seemed to genuinely believe that, because they were fighting in the name of black people, black people would support them, or at least would not alert the police. When asked, he said he had come to Los Angeles to start a revolution, to kill police. Told that the neighborhood was dominated by a local gang, the Crips, DeFreeze said he hoped to meet some, pledging to make them “right-on revolutionaries.” Each of the visitors scurried back outside to spread the word that the SLA was at Christine Johnson’s house. Up and down the street, people shook their heads in disbelief. Others whispered in their yards. Phones rang. The news spread. A sixty-three-year-old grandfather named James Reed stopped by the house to drop off some collard greens. Two white girls wearing pistols smiled at him and said hi.