Days of Rage

by Bryan Burrough

  Finally, with half the group screaming and red-faced and the other half in tears, Harris shouted, “That’s it! It’s all over!” He and Emily were going in search of black leadership. The others could do as they pleased. The next day the Harrises rented an apartment on Precita Avenue in Bernal Heights, not far from San Francisco General Hospital. And just like that, with no good-byes, they were gone. Patty and the others moved into the remaining safe house, in Daly City. It was then, on August 29, that the Soliahs’ father, Martin, appeared in San Francisco and informed his three children that the FBI was looking for them. Harris ordered everyone to leave the Daly City flat; to make sure they did, he gave the landlord notice. Thrown out, Hearst and the others were cruising the Outer Mission District one evening when they saw a FOR RENT sign at a small apartment building. The address was 625 Morse Street.

  For the next two weeks there was little communication between the Harrises and the others. Patty heard that the couple had found their would-be black messiah, lying stoned in a bush at a rally. For the first time she began thinking of turning herself in. She was exhausted. The SLA was falling apart. But the others persuaded her to stay. “You’re a symbol of the revolution,” one told her. “You give the people hope.”

  • • •

  By midsummer the FBI had finally picked up the SLA’s trail. One of Jack Scott’s friends, who had visited the group in Pennsylvania, gave agents Wendy Yoshimura’s alias, “Joan Shimada.” Someone by that name had registered a car in New Jersey, then sold it to a girl named Cathy Turcich. When agents visited the Turcich family on July 19, her parents volunteered that Cathy’s sister was one of Yoshimura’s oldest friends; she was waitressing in San Francisco, in fact, and was in touch with her. When agents visited the restaurant, the Plate of Brasse, they found that Turcich had disappeared. But when they showed employees photos of Yoshimura’s known associates, someone picked out a photo of a waitress named Kathleen Anger. It was Kathy Soliah. Soliah was also gone; a call from New Jersey had tipped everyone off. Both the FBI and the police, however, were well aware that Soliah and her friends were behind BARC, the pro-SLA group that published Dragon. A week later, playing a hunch, a Sacramento police detective ran all the BARC group’s fingerprints against one found on the Crocker Bank getaway car. It was Jim Kilgore’s.

  The FBI poured men into Sacramento. But the break came after agents struck up a relationship with Martin Soliah, who lived in Palmdale, in the high desert east of Los Angeles. He was horrified to learn that his children might be mixed up with the SLA. He tried to reach them but couldn’t, then managed to arrange a dinner on August 29 in San Francisco. The FBI agreed to let him go alone. When Martin came clean, telling his children he was working with the Bureau, Kathy exploded. “How could you do such a thing?” she demanded. “Don’t you know you can’t trust the FBI?” They spent seven hours walking and talking, the father beseeching the children to come home, the children denying everything.

  Martin Soliah returned, crestfallen, to the FBI agents waiting at his hotel. The family meeting seemed a total loss—until he mentioned one thing. At some point his son Steve had volunteered that he and Michael Bortin and Jim Kilgore were still painting houses. Within days agents fanned out across the Bay Area, showing photos of the SLA to supervisors at every painting job they could find. It took two weeks, but on the morning of Monday, September 15, a pair of agents approached Bill Osgood, manager of the Pacifica Apartments, and showed him the SLA photos. “That one,” Osgood said, pointing to a picture of Bortin. That was “John Henderson,” he said, the boss of the “hippie painters” repainting the apartments.

  At 10:30 a.m. the two agents, sitting in a parked car, saw Kathy and Jo Soliah drive up. Surveillance teams took up positions all around the complex. At 5:30, when the Soliahs were finished for the day, agents followed their 1967 Ford as it drove into San Francisco, eventually stopping at 625 Morse, where the women disappeared inside. The next morning agents spied Steve Soliah leaving the apartment, followed him to Pacifica, and at day’s end trailed him to a second address, 288 Precita in Bernal Heights.

  By the next morning, Wednesday, September 17, teams of FBI agents and SFPD inspectors were in place. At 10:50 they spotted a man who might be Bill Harris, wearing cut-off jeans, as he emerged from the Precita building, stretched, then disappeared back inside. At 11:30 they watched as the man and a woman who might be Emily Harris came out and went for a jog. All day agents watched the pair come and go, at one point trailing them inside a Laundromat, but they couldn’t be sure it was the Harrises. The man had jet-black hair; Harris’s was brown. The woman looked nothing like Emily Harris.

  All that night and into the morning agents at the San Francisco office debated what to do. None could be sure it was the Harrises. And there was no sign of Patty Hearst. Finally, at a 9:00 a.m. meeting, the agent in charge, Charles Bates, told his men to arrest the couple if they went jogging again. At least they could be sure they weren’t carrying guns. As luck would have it, the couple emerged from the Precita building at 12:50, the man in purple running shorts, and proceeded to go for a jog. An FBI car cruised behind.

  At 1:12 the couple were walking slowly back toward 288 Precita. As they approached the front door four agents sprang from a parked sedan.

  “We’re the FBI!” one shouted.

  Without a word Bill Harris raised his hands. Emily, however, turned and ran—only to confront two agents directly behind her, one with a shotgun pointed at her chest. “You motherfuckin’ sons of bitches!” she shouted. “You sons of bitches!” Emily was taken away in handcuffs. Agents took Bill Harris’s fingerprints in the car. “It’s him,” someone said.

  Agents stormed the house. It was empty. There was no sign of Hearst. An hour later a handful of FBI men moved in on 625 Morse. The building had two apartments, one on the second floor, the other on the third; they couldn’t be sure which one was Steve Soliah’s. Taking a risk, they approached a man in the garage, who turned out to be the owner. No one was living on the second floor, he said. But three new tenants, a man and two young women, were living on the third. The “girls,” he said, were up there right now.

  “What’s the best way up there?” the ranking agent, Tom Padden, asked.

  “Up the back stairs,” the landlord said.

  Leaving the other agents to cover the front, Padden and an SFPD inspector named Tim Casey unsheathed their pistols and crept up the wooden stairway at the rear of the building. Padden went first, taking each step slowly, quietly. Just before reaching the landing outside the apartment, he glanced back at Casey, who was holding a .357 Magnum. Casey nodded.

  Padden stepped onto the landing, a .38 in his outstretched right hand. There was a Dutch door to the apartment; the upper half was open to the air. Peering inside, Padden was startled to come face-to-face with Wendy Yoshimura, standing in the kitchen. “FBI!” he barked. “Freeze!”

  Yoshimura froze. Then Padden saw the second girl, sitting at the kitchen table. She stood and turned to run.

  “Freeze or I’ll blow her head off!” Padden yelled.

  The other girl stopped. Inspector Casey burst into the kitchen, his Magnum pointed at her back.

  “Patty!” he said.

  She turned around slowly. He could see her face now. At which point Patty Hearst did about the only thing she could. She peed.

  • • •

  It was over. The capture of Patty Hearst was front-page news around the world and would remain so for months. At the federal courthouse newsmen and photographers mobbed the car as she was hustled inside. She was arraigned on charges of robbing the Hibernia Bank, then taken to the San Mateo County jail. Asked her occupation, she famously replied: “Urban guerrilla.” The FBI arrested Steve Soliah later that day, but amazingly there were no agents at the Pacifica apartment house where the others spent the day painting. When news of the arrests hit the radio, all of them—Kathy and Jo Soliah, Mike Bortin, Jim Kilgore—disa
ppeared and went underground.

  A side benefit of the arrests, Bay Area officials announced with relief, would be the end to the manic series of bombings carried out in the name of the New World Liberation Front; police assumed that the NWLF was a cover for Bill Harris and the SLA, with perhaps a few stray radicals contributing to the campaign. The bombings had become a fixture of daily life in the Bay Area, like the fog. After its debut in August 1974 the NWLF had accelerated the pace of its actions in 1975, detonating thirty-seven explosive devices by the time Hearst was captured, an average of one every week for nine months. Its targets, almost all struck by bombs left outside buildings late at night, included Pacific Gas and Electric transformers and substations, U.S. Air Force radar sites, KRON-TV, the California Department of Corrections, the firing range at San Quentin prison, the Marin County Courthouse, and the home of a Safeway Stores board member. Almost all of NWLF’s communiqués complained about some aspect of Bay Area life, typically railing against conditions at area jails, slumlords, and labor disputes. There were so many bombings that an FBI man termed San Francisco “the Belfast of North America.” To date, no one had been seriously injured.

  Neither the Bureau nor the Bay Area police, despite ample reward offers, had been able to make a single arrest. The NWLF communiqués were mailed fast and furiously, some with unidentifiable fingerprints, each in the name of another NWLF “combat unit”: People’s Force No. 1, which preferred bombing General Motors facilities; People’s Force No. 2, which hit the air force sites; People’s Force No. 4, which struck PG&E transformers; the Lucio Cabanas unit, named after a Mexican guerrilla leader, which bombed everything; the Nat Turner/John Brown unit, which bombed the corrections department. At the FBI’s San Francisco office, the working assumption was that all these “units” were essentially just the SLA, the profusion of names an effort to make the NWLF appear larger than it actually was.

  Within days of Hearst’s capture, however, that assumption was already being challenged. When a bomb damaged a PG&E substation in San Carlos on October 13, a communiqué arrived in the NWLF’s name. Two more NWLF bombs exploded by Halloween, one outside the army’s Fort Ord. Things took an unexpected turn in November. After San Francisco voters approved a series of ballot initiatives designed to curb police power, the police responded with a ticket-writing blitz, issuing three times as many parking tickets as normal. On November 16 the NWLF unveiled a dramatic response of its own, pouring liquid steel into the locks of hundreds of city parking meters. “They got 400 to 500 meters,” a police spokesman told the Associated Press, “including a bunch in front of police headquarters.” The NWLF communiqué, signed by the “People’s Forces Training Unit,” threatened to sabotage every parking meter in San Francisco if the police didn’t stop writing so many tickets.

  That the NWLF’s underground campaign had taken a seriocomic turn did little to stem the FBI’s frustration that the group apparently remained alive and well. It was then, just as San Franciscans were beginning to accept the idea that the bombings might continue, that things got strange. To that point the NWLF had delivered its communiqués the old-fashioned way, leaving them outside radio stations and newspaper offices late at night or taping them inside telephone booths. Now, the police heard, someone was delivering them by hand. In January 1976, after two more bombings during the holidays, the San Francisco Chronicle publicly identified the NWLF’s shadowy courier as a gentleman calling himself Jacques Rogiers. Tall and thin, with bushy brown hair and a broomlike mustache, Rogiers turned out to be a thirty-seven-year-old convicted marijuana dealer whose real name, it appeared, was Jack Rogers.* At Soledad and San Quentin he had written for radical inmate newspapers. Prison administrators thought he was basically harmless, if a tad unhinged; one internal assessment noted that Rogiers supported the SLA and “appears not to have good contact with reality and is living a fantasy life.”3

  Maybe so, but after his release from San Quentin in 1974, Rogiers found quite a few new friends living much the same fantasy life on the streets of San Francisco. He made a deep impression on several. “Of all the hundreds of clients I’ve ever represented, the two largest influences on me were Huey Newton and Jacques Rogiers,” recalls Tony Serra, the ponytailed radical attorney who eventually represented Rogiers. “Jacques was like a holy man, a guru, a wise man. I’ve never known anyone before or since like him.”

  Rogiers’s entry into underground causes was a tangled affair. In June 1975 the high-profile president of the United Prisoners Union, an ex-con named Wilbur “Popeye” Jackson—he had played a key role in organizing the SLA food drives—was shot dead on a San Francisco street, along with his girlfriend. Jackson had been publicly critical of the NWLF, saying it should be bombing buildings filled with people instead of empty ones. A letter to the Chronicle claimed credit for Jackson’s murder on behalf of the NWLF. But the NWLF hadn’t done it. Bill Harris had fired off a letter saying so, which at the time had contributed to the notion that the NWLF and the SLA were actually the same group.

  Out of nowhere, and with little or no track record in Bay Area radical politics, Rogiers had announced he was forming a group called the People’s Court in an effort to determine the truth behind Jackson’s murder. He eventually published a forty-four-page pamphlet exonerating the NWLF. The NWLF apparently liked what it read; within weeks Rogiers had taken up his courier duties and, after his unmasking in the Chronicle, effectively emerged as the public face of the NWLF. With the help of several young assistants, Rogiers worked out of a cluttered flat on Valencia Street; he called his little operation People’s Information Relay 1. Under police questioning, Rogiers insisted he wasn’t a member of the NWLF and didn’t know anyone who was. He claimed he simply took delivery of communiqués and relayed them to the press. It was far from clear whether any of this actually broke any laws. For the moment the police were powerless to do anything but keep Rogiers under watch.

  On the eve of Patty Hearst’s trial, in mid-January, things took an abrupt and ominous turn. Until then, despite having detonated forty-five bombs in the previous sixteen months, the NWLF had largely been dismissed as another harmless Bay Area oddity; its bombs hadn’t hurt anyone, and most went off in the dead of night at remote locations. Then, on Saturday, January 10, 1976, the day after an NWLF communiqué reiterated demands for improved health care in city jails, a package arrived at the home of a San Francisco supervisor—the equivalent of a city councilman—named John Barbagelata. His daughters, Marina, fourteen, and Elena, twelve, picked up the mail and, while walking back inside, began pitching the package back and forth. “Hey,” one joked, “this could be a bomb!” Their mother, noting the strange typed address identifying her husband as “the people’s choice,” decided to take no chances. She placed the package on a rear patio.

  A half hour later the president of the board of supervisors, Quentin Kopp, brought his mail from home and dropped it in his City Hall office. The largest piece was a package wrapped in plain brown paper. When his assistant began opening it, she noticed an inner wrapping of aluminum foil. Suspicious, she suggested they call the police. Detectives were soon on the scene. Inside the package they found a box of See’s hard candy. Inside the candy box they found a bomb. After Kopp phoned the Barbagelata home, police raced there and found an identical bomb in the strange package left on the patio.

  Mayor George Moscone angrily denounced the bombing attempts, which were widely assumed to be the work of the New World Liberation Front. On Monday an anonymous caller to media outlets confirmed as much, insisting the NWLF wasn’t actually trying to hurt anyone. “Listen carefully,” a young woman’s voice told a Chronicle reporter. “A half stick of dynamite and a six-second-delay fuse constructed with great care demonstrates that this was not an attempt to kill.” Pressed by reporters, Rogiers said City Hall had only itself to blame for ignoring the NWLF’s communiqués. “They keep stepping up their actions,” he said. “When are the supervisors going to take them seriously? T
hey’ve gone right up to the edge. Next time they’re liable to say, ‘They won’t take us seriously. Now let’s kill one of them.’”

  Patty Hearst’s trial began four days after delivery of what came to be known as “the candy box bombs.” For the next two weeks the NWLF busied itself elsewhere, launching a series of new bombings—none, however, linked in any way to the proceedings. On Saturday, January 31, it attempted to bomb five PG&E transformers in San Geronimo. The next night it blew up another landlord’s car and bombed the home of a landlord who owned an apartment building that had burned, killing several poor residents. The next night a bomb went off outside the home of the Bank of California’s chairman. Rogiers merrily delivered the communiqués, as he had before. Across Valencia detectives watched him come and go, unable to stop him. Rogiers shot them a middle finger from time to time and showed no signs of distancing himself from the underground. Within weeks, in fact, he began publishing a new journal, called TUG: The Urban Guerrilla, which was essentially a counterpart to the Dragon, a repository for bombing communiqués.

  Finally, during the third week of Hearst’s trial, the NWLF turned its attention to the proceedings, if mildly. One afternoon a bomb threat was telephoned to the courthouse, forcing an early adjournment. Then, on February 12, a bomb went off beside a guesthouse at the Hearst family’s fabled San Simeon estate, near San Luis Obispo, 150 miles south of San Francisco. It caused about $1 million in damage. An anonymous caller took credit on behalf of the NWLF, demanding that the Hearsts put up bail money for the Harrises. Afterward Randolph Hearst was beside himself. “These people, they’re just a bunch of maniacs,” he told a wire-service reporter. “Just a bunch of maniacs.”