Prairie Fire was widely read in radical circles and noticed in the mainstream, garnering a brief article in the New York Times. For the leadership, the taste of relevancy proved intoxicating and would lead to a series of plans that transformed what remained of the organization. The book’s impact was felt outside the group as well. Like Dragon, Prairie Fire served as an invitation to new groups to take up the cause of “armed struggle” even as Weather’s leaders, increasingly preoccupied with the printed word, showed little interest in new bombings themselves. Others heard the call, however, and within months of Prairie Fire’s appearance, they began to strike.
• • •
On its face, it was just another political rally, nearly twenty thousand people streaming into Madison Square Garden carrying angry placards and posters that night, October 27, 1974, three months after Prairie Fire’s publication. They had come to hear radical icons, such as Angela Davis and Jane Fonda, raise their fists and deliver speeches calling for change. What almost no one understood, save perhaps for the handful of people building the bombs, was that this rally heralded not only the debut of a new political movement but a new barrage of political terror, all the work of a group of militants who would emerge as the most determined bombers in U.S. history. All but forgotten today, they would go on to bomb dozens of U.S. skyscrapers and landmarks, raid presidential campaign offices, and kill more innocents than any other underground group.
They weren’t black nationalists. They weren’t aging hippies. Or the Palestinians, or the Croatians, or any of the other groups that resorted to terror tactics around the world during the 1970s. They were Puerto Ricans.
Their first bomb, though no one realized it at the time, had exploded at 12:55 a.m. on a hot summer night two months before the Garden rally, on August 31, 1974, in Damrosch Park outside Lincoln Center on Manhattan’s West Side. The explosion did little but tear up a row of hedges. Sifting through the debris, the NYPD bomb squad found the remains of several propane tanks. No one claimed responsibility, and the incident was quickly forgotten.
A month later, on the night of September 28, two small bombs exploded across the river in Newark, New Jersey, in an alley between City Hall and police headquarters. No one was injured; there was no communiqué. The blasts came in the wake of rioting in which two Puerto Ricans had been killed. At the time Newark police had no clue the incidents were linked.
All of this, it appeared, served as a rehearsal for the onslaught that began on October 26, 1974, the morning before the Garden rally. At 2:55 a.m. a large bomb exploded beside a Mercury Comet parked outside the Marine Midland Bank in New York’s Financial District.* The car was lifted into the air and smashed down on its roof, wobbling like an overturned turtle as the first patrol cars arrived; the bomb, which police later estimated to contain forty sticks of dynamite, shattered windows as high as eight floors up in surrounding buildings.
A few minutes later a second bomb detonated, outside the Exxon Building at Rockefeller Center in Midtown, again shattering windows but injuring no one. Ten minutes later a third exploded, outside the Banco de Ponce a block west, destroying the front door and blowing out windows as high as thirty-one stories up in adjoining buildings. As police began sifting through the debris they were startled by the distant booms of a fourth and fifth bomb, one exploding outside the Union Carbide Building on Forty-eighth Street, the other at Lever House, on Park Avenue at Fifty-third Street. Both blew out windows, but no one was hurt.
Minutes later a caller to the Associated Press directed reporters to a communiqué inside a phone booth at Broadway and Seventy-third Street. The eight-paragraph note claimed the bombings on behalf of a group neither the NYPD nor the FBI had ever heard of: Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional Puertorriqueña, Spanish for “Armed Forces of Puerto Rican National Liberation.” The communiqué was emblazoned with a logo: a five-point star with the initials FALN inside. The text called for independence for Puerto Rico and the release of five “political prisoners,” all Puerto Rican militants who had carried out two attacks in Washington more than twenty years before: an attempted assassination of President Harry Truman in 1950 and a machine-gun attack on the floor of Congress in 1954. The five bombings, it said, were “a significant step in the formation of an anti-imperialist front in the United States, which will support and fight for the national liberation of Puerto Rico, and educate the American people about the murderous and genocidal policies of the Yanki capitalists through the world.”
Both the NYPD and the FBI mobilized, but behind the scenes there was little real urgency, at least at first. Bombs had been going off in New York for five years, and more than a few had been placed by the odd Puerto Rican radical, most of whom had been arrested. At first blush this seemed more of the same. The NYPD catalogued the evidence, but as they suspected, there were no fingerprints, nor anything else to identify the bombers. In time the probe’s momentum waned. At some point someone would make a mistake, and then arrests would be made.
Then six weeks later, just before 11 p.m. on December 11, a call came in to an NYPD precinct house in East Harlem. A woman with a Latin accent said there was a dead body inside an abandoned building. An officer named Ray Flynn responded, along with a rookie named Angel Poggi, a Puerto Rican officer who was enjoying his first full day of police work. When the two reached the building, they found it boarded up. There was no sign of activity. They left, figuring it had been a hoax.
A few minutes later the woman called again. The body was inside the building, she said. With a sigh, Flynn and Poggi returned. Flynn headed down a flight of steps to check basement windows. Poggi stepped up to the front entrance, a set of double doors. He pushed on the left door, which budged an inch or so. Poggi thought the body might be blocking the door. He took out a flashlight and peered inside. He could just make out a pile of debris blocking the doors and, above, what appeared to be remnants of a spider web hanging from the ceiling. Poggi gave the right door a shove. The explosion blew him into the air and vaulted his body out into the street, where it landed on the pavement, crumpled and shredded with slivers of wood and glass. Flynn raced to the cruiser and called for an ambulance, which spirited Poggi, still alive, to Metropolitan Hospital. Permanently disfigured, Angel Poggi would lose his right eye and much of the vision in his left and suffer a ringing in his ears for years afterward.
A woman telephoned the Associated Press several minutes later, claimed the attack on behalf of the FALN, and directed police to a communiqué in a phone booth at Fifty-second Street and Tenth Avenue. The single piece of paper, emblazoned with the same star logo as the October bombings, cited Comando Tomás López de Victoria, a Puerto Rican revolutionary, and said the attack was revenge for the death of a Puerto Rican musician named Martin Perez, who had hanged himself while in custody at the NYPD’s 25th Precinct ten days earlier.
Suddenly the NYPD’s investigation of this FALN gained momentum. If these people were targeting cops, it was time to get serious.
• • •
When Lou Vizi, a caustic thirty-one-year-old Philadelphian, transferred to the FBI’s New York offices that summer after spending his first year in the Bureau chasing moonshiners across eastern Kentucky, he was thrilled to be back in a big Eastern city—at first. Then he sized up his twenty or so fellow agents in the Puerto Rican Security Squad. Most had gray hair and paunches. “Half these guys had been in that squad since World War Two,” Vizi recalls. “They never went out in the streets. You couldn’t dynamite ’em away from their desks. They had cases that, I swear, had been open for twenty years. We had zero resources, not a single radio, and one car the supervisor took home at night. When you went out on a lead, you had to take the subway.”
There wasn’t much to do. The Puerto Rican independence movement that turned violent on the island during the 1950s had spawned two series of bombings in New York but little of note in three years. Vizi, the youngest member of the squad, spent weeks probing an old case inv
olving a group of supposed dissidents before realizing that the group no longer existed. It was a lonely job until Don Wofford—a genial thirty-three-year-old North Carolinian who had joined the Bureau two years earlier, after serving in Vietnam as an army hospital administrator—arrived at the squad on October 25, two days before the Garden rally.* Wofford and Vizi, both army veterans eager for action, found themselves running down leads together. When the older agents lost interest in the case—let the NYPD handle it, they muttered—the two young bucks kept at it. “None of the old guys wanted any part of that case,” Vizi recalls. “Are you kidding? All that work? Riding the subway? They gave it to us instead.”
Not that the young men, who had never actually investigated a bomb case, much less met an actual Puerto Rican, had much to offer. At one point Vizi was sent to NYPD headquarters, where someone pulled him into a meeting of deputy chiefs, one of whom asked what the FBI knew about the FALN. “Nothing,” Vizi was obliged to stammer. “We’ve never heard of these guys either.”
That, for the most part, was the extent of FBI-NYPD cooperation. The police kept the evidence to themselves, leaving Wofford and Vizi to begin combing through the Puerto Rican squad’s files. They had chased a few leads, accomplishing nothing, when the booby-trapped bomb maimed Angel Poggi. They stood around the crime scene, powerless to help, while the NYPD gathered evidence. One thing, however, was clear.
“Don and I started realizing this was going to get a lot worse,” Vizi recalls. “These guys were serious. We tried to warn people, warn our supervisor, but no one was listening. It was no use.” And then it happened.
• • •
Friday, January 24, 1975. It was a frigid noontime on Wall Street; a brisk winter wind whistled through the steel-and-concrete canyons. On the sidewalks bankers and traders and their assistants pressed down their hats and gathered their overcoats as they trudged out to grab sandwiches and hot cups of coffee. On Broad Street there was a steady flow of men—almost all men, in fact—moving into the colonnaded front doors of Fraunces Tavern, a redbrick restaurant that was one of the oldest buildings in New York. It opened in 1762 and had been a favorite of George Washington’s. Washington, in fact, gave an emotional farewell address to his officers there in 1785.
Two centuries later Fraunces was a clubby Wall Street lunch spot, defined by white table linens, attentive waiters, and Revolutionary-era portraits. It had three dining areas: the bustling room inside the front doors, the private 250-member Anglers Club upstairs, and, set behind a pair of fire doors down a hallway, an annex building that housed the Bissell dining room. It was there, at an oval table set just inside the doors, that a group of six young executives were having what should have been a routine business lunch. Three of the men were bankers at J. P. Morgan & Co.; the others were clients. Lunch had been a last-minute decision, a chance to break from a long meeting and get to know one another.
Three of the men sat with their backs to the doors. Frank Connor, a thirty-three-year-old father of two, was a Morgan man, a finance executive who rode a commuter train into Manhattan from his home in Fair Lawn, New Jersey. Jim Gezork worked for Scott Paper in Philadelphia. Beside him sat Alex Berger, the thirty-two-year-old son of German Jewish refugees who worked for the chemical company Rohm & Haas in Philadelphia. Berger and his wife were expecting their first child, a son, in three months.
Around one o’clock, their meals almost finished, they called for the check. Five minutes later, with all three dining rooms packed with patrons, a waiter across the room saw an unkempt man in a trench coat step through the double doors and look around. Standing beside the oval table where the six executives were readying to leave, the man appeared out of place; the waiter thought he might be one of the homeless people who sometimes wandered into the restaurant. The waiter glanced away, and when he looked up, the man was gone. A few minutes after that another diner approached the stairs that led up to the Anglers Club. The waiter noticed a large gray duffel bag someone had inexplicably plopped down at the base of the stairs. Not wanting anyone to trip, he nudged it to one side of the staircase with his foot.
The duffel, which carried a bomb consisting of roughly ten sticks of dynamite and a propane tank, detonated at 1:22 p.m. The immense explosion collapsed the staircase and blew a hole in the floor seven feet wide. Windows and plate-glass doors shattered in buildings up and down Broad Street; a truck parked outside was wrecked, tossed on its side. The thin wall to the Bissell dining room evaporated. Sitting behind it, Frank Connor and Alex Berger were killed instantly; Jim Gezork would die on the operating table. All around, bodies were thrown into the air, people somersaulting through a blizzard of deadly flying glass. Knives and forks zinged through the restaurant like angry bees, impaling a number of diners; doctors would later remove cutlery from a dozen or more patrons. More than forty people were badly injured in the Bissell dining room alone. The force of the explosion erupted upward as well, sending a single floor nail firing through the ceiling like a bullet, where it tore through the bottom of a chair and ripped into the body of a sixty-six-year-old banker named Harold Sherburne, killing him.
Chaos ensued. In a flash waiters and patrons from the main dining room, which remained unharmed behind a thick brick wall, scrambled through the wreckage and dragged dazed and bleeding men out onto the sidewalk. The blast echoed through the Wall Street area, sending scores of office workers, plus firemen at a nearby station house, into the streets to see what was wrong. A priest from Our Lady of the Rosary Church on State Street was among the first to arrive; he knelt in the wreckage, administering last rites. Within minutes the whine of sirens filled the air. Wounded men writhed in pools of blood beside the gutters as the first police cars arrived. Quickly the streets filled with cops, fire engines, ambulances, and crowds of the curious. By nightfall four men would be declared dead. It was the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil since an anarchist bomb hidden in a horse-drawn cart killed thirty-five people on Wall Street in 1920.
Don Wofford and Lou Vizi were in a car on FDR Drive when they heard the news on the radio. They stopped, telephoned their supervisor, Harry Hogue, and asked whether the FALN might be involved.
“A tavern? The FALN isn’t gonna blow up a tavern,” Hogue replied. “Believe me, it’s probably just a gas explosion.”
“We’re going down there anyway,” Wofford said.
“Well, okay, but I’m telling you, it’s just a gas explosion.”
Wofford and Vizi were among the first FBI men on the scene. By the time they arrived, a caller had taken responsibility for the attack on behalf of the FALN, directing police to a communiqué inside a phone booth. By that evening Don Wofford, barely two years out of the FBI Academy, found himself leading the Bureau’s investigation, which he named FRANBOMB. In those early hours, backed by nearly fifty agents, he and Vizi began scribbling assignments on note cards and handing them to other agents, who flooded the streets looking for eyewitnesses. No one had much of anything useful to say. The NYPD came up with sketches of two Hispanic men seen in the area, but they never came to anything. The NYPD managed to identify the duffel bag’s maker, and detectives fanned out in hopes of finding who sold it. The components of the bombs detonated to date—the Timex wristwatches, the batteries, the propane tanks—were studied in detail. They were all the same, in all likelihood the work of a single bomb maker. There was little else to be learned.
But that wasn’t Wofford’s central problem. From the beginning, the Fraunces Tavern investigation—and the broader probe of the FALN—was hamstrung by the strange new rules of policing in the mid-1970s. Until 1972 the NYPD, like the FBI, had maintained extensive files on all manner of Puerto Rican radical groups. But after complaints from left-wing civil rights groups, many files, along with scores of files on similar radicals, had been destroyed. “We haven’t done any surveillance of Puerto Rican political groups in several years,” one detective griped to the New York Times. “We’ve been forbidden from even
attending meetings as observers. The truth is we have no good contacts inside the radical Puerto Rican community and we were completely unprepared for the FALN when it sprung up.”1
The FBI, however, unlike much of the American public, knew a lot about Puerto Rican terrorism. Then as now, it’s hard to identify an issue of such national significance about which so many Americans knew—and cared—so little. Yet there had been people in Puerto Rico, a U.S.-owned territory roughly three times the size of Rhode Island, who had been fighting for its independence almost since Christopher Columbus stepped onto a beach there in 1493. The indigenous Taino revolted against the Spanish in 1511. They lost. Native-born islanders (criollos) took to arms for reform in 1809. They lost. Anti-Spanish conspiracies—one history counts more than thirty—popped up throughout the nineteenth century. Full-blown revolts against Spain erupted in 1868 and again in 1897. Each left its leaders in prison, with sundry followers skulking off to jungle lairs or U.S. cities to begin plotting anew.
When the United States gained control of the island in 1898, after the Spanish-American War, it appeared the nationalists had given up their guns for political debate. The Puerto Rico Independence Party was formed in 1912, though its cause was soon subsumed by the more powerful Nationalist Party, formed in 1922. The new party’s leaders loudly called for independence, but unfortunately—and this has always been the irony for Puerto Rican nationalists—the vast majority of Puerto Ricans were happy being part of the United States. The Nationalist Party was defeated again and again at the polls, and before long its frustrated leaders decided it was time to return to violence.
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