Days of Rage

by Bryan Burrough

  The following week Patty Hearst broke down in tears on the witness stand, insisting her life was in danger. Asked who would want to harm her, she sniffed, “The New World Liberation Front.”

  • • •

  The break the FBI so badly wanted, it appeared, came that same week, after police in Lagunitas, an unincorporated area of Marin County, were called to the scene of a shoot-out at a local home. Two Berkeley radicals were arrested. They turned out to be members of the New Dawn Collective, a tiny group of activists that operated a bookstore and published communiqués from a new underground group that called itself the Emiliano Zapata unit of the NWLF. The Zapata unit had claimed credit for eight bombings in recent months, most against Safeway Stores.

  The shoot-out, police learned, arose after members of New Dawn had attempted to raid the home of a local drug dealer, apparently in search of money, à la the Black Liberation Army. A search of the suspects’ van found reams of Zapata and NWLF literature. That, in turn, led to the address of a Spanish-style bungalow in the town of Richmond, mere blocks from the home where the SLA had hidden out two years earlier. Just before dawn on February 21, thirty FBI agents and local SWAT teams surrounded the house, broke down the door, and dragged out six New Dawn members in handcuffs. Inside, agents found 150 pounds of explosives, most of it stolen from a Santa Cruz−area quarry a year earlier, as well as still more Zapata and NWLF communiqués.

  FBI officials were jubilant; one crowed to the Chronicle that they had “broken the back” of the NWLF. But they hadn’t. The San Simeon bombing came the very next day, and after exhaustive questioning of the New Dawn suspects, the FBI was forced to admit that those arrested were members of the Zapata unit but not of the NWLF. They had merely been using the NWLF name.

  The Hearst trial went on, undisturbed, for the next month. Then, on March 11, after three more unrelated bombings, the NWLF struck at another Hearst estate, Wyntoon, on 67,000 heavily wooded acres near Mount Shasta in far northern California. A woman caller to KRON-TV in San Francisco took credit for a bombing, again demanding that the Hearsts contribute $250,000 to the Harris defense fund, but the Hearsts said there hadn’t been any explosion. It took almost five hours to find the bomb, partially exploded, in the basement of the remote mansion, which was roughly six miles from the nearest road. A few floorboards were splintered, but the FBI was left to marvel at the persistence of a group that had climbed a perimeter fence, trudged through miles of forest, and found a way to break into the mansion and plant the bomb, all without being detected by caretakers.

  Nine days later Patty Hearst’s trial came to an end, with a guilty verdict. The judge gave her thirty-five years, later reduced to seven. She would serve only twenty-two months; President Jimmy Carter commuted her sentence in early 1979. President Bill Clinton granted her a full pardon in 2001. Bill and Emily Harris pled guilty to charges of kidnapping and ended up serving eight years. The rest of the SLA had vanished.

  • • •

  If the Patty Hearst saga was finally at an end, the mystery of the New World Liberation Front still had several colorful chapters remaining. A grand jury had begun hearing testimony against Jacques Rogiers. The investigation dragged on for months. Through it all the NWLF kept up its bombing campaign, albeit at a slower pace; between March and December 1976 it managed only seven attacks. The most significant was a bomb planted in a window box attached to Supervisor Dianne Feinstein’s home in Pacific Heights on December 14. A maid noticed a fruit punch can among the flowers the next morning. Feinstein’s daughter, a Berkeley sophomore, glanced through a window and saw “some liquid, and the letters E-X-P-L.” Police arrived and found a pocket watch timing device lying on the sidewalk. The bomb had misfired at 2:14 a.m.

  Feinstein was apoplectic. “The time has come,” she told reporters, “when the fear and intimidation that everyone feels has got to stop. I don’t think that going around putting bombs on people’s houses accomplishes a thing.” Later that day an NWLF communiqué delivered to media outlets demanded improvements in health conditions at the city jails.

  A month later, on January 23, 1977, Jacques Rogiers was finally arrested on charges of threatening public officials and conspiracy. After a press conference he took a vow of silence, refusing to say a word to anyone. The next day the NWLF issued a communiqué threatening three supervisors with death if Rogiers should die in jail. It then commenced its most intense spate of bombings in months. After three bombings in the four days leading up to Rogiers’s arrest—the targets, once again, were PG&E transformers—it detonated four more bombs in the following week, a campaign that climaxed on the night of February 4, the day Rogiers was formally indicted. One bomb exploded inside a women’s room at the Federal Building. An hour later a second went off, directly beneath a green Volvo station wagon in the driveway of District Attorney Joseph Freitas’s San Francisco home. The car, an officer noted, “was blown to smithereens.” The NWLF communiqué warned prosecutors not to make Rogiers a “scapegoat” and once again threatened the supervisors, saying, “If necessary, the poor and oppressed will take freedom over your dead bodies.” Mayor Moscone, irate, denounced the bombings as an “effort to terrorize and even paralyze city government.”

  Afterward the NWLF fell silent for six long weeks. Then, on the night of March 22, it again targeted Supervisor John Barbagelata. An unusual bomb—actually a single blasting cap tied to a broom handle—was tossed toward his home on Portola Drive. It landed in a neighbor’s yard, obliterating a swing set. The Barbagelata family, gathered in their kitchen fifteen feet away, fell to the floor in panic. No one was hurt.

  In the following weeks, as preparations for Rogiers’s trial began, the NWLF returned to bombing unrelated targets, mostly PG&E transformers, as well as a bomb tossed toward a home once owned by a PG&E board member. The trial began in mid-May. It featured testimony from Supervisors Kopp, Barbagelata, and Feinstein, along with vigorous attempts to link Rogiers to these and other bombings. Rogiers and his attorney, Tony Serra, spent much of the proceedings smoking marijuana—in the courthouse. “Jacques had the finest marijuana I ever had,” Serra recalls. “He insisted—insisted—we get stoned whenever we went to court. We’d go into the stairwell and smoke grass before court, at lunch, and after court. Tons of it. I can remember walking into court—I remember it so clearly—literally floating into court. I can still feel it, every step, just kind of floating up to the bench.”

  It was an unorthodox but ultimately successful strategy. Once the judge ruled that Rogiers had been acting as a journalist, the defense grew confident. On June 7 the jury announced its verdict: not guilty. Serra and Rogiers exchanged hugs. Afterward “there was a big party scheduled to celebrate the victory,” Serra recalls. “Jacques was a hero, in his world, for his righteous character and demeanor. I remember all of us waiting at this party, waiting and waiting. He never showed up. And no one ever saw him again. No one. I never saw or spoke to him again, and I don’t know anyone who did. He disappeared. I was told he went to the mountains and became a monk and never again ventured into society. He was just gone. It was almost Christlike.”

  Jacques Rogiers’s days as the public face of the NWLF were over. Almost forty years later his fate remains a mystery.

  • • •

  And still the NWLF bombings went on. There were ten more that summer, all directed against Coors beer distributors in sympathy with a workers’ strike. None did significant damage. Then, after twin bombings at another PG&E facility and the Marin County Courthouse on August 29, 1977, the NWLF suddenly unveiled a new target: the rich. On September 1 a bomb was planted outside the Pacific Union Club—it didn’t explode—and the next night at the Olympic Country Club; it did explode. A week later a powerful bomb exploded at the San Francisco Opera House, destroying the limousine entrance. “As long as poor people are forced to live in unsafe, unhealthy housing,” the communiqué read, “ruling class functions will be threatened.”

  The thre
e bombings triggered a civic uproar exponentially louder than any other NWLF actions to date. Blowing up a PG&E transformer was something the San Francisco elites could safely ignore; blowing up the opera was another thing altogether. The police could only sigh. “Hell,” one detective griped to the Chronicle, “they’ve been bombing on a regular basis for months—even years—and now all of a sudden, people are excited because some guy goes to Nob Hill to have lunch with the board chairman and all he hears about is the bomb. Then he goes out to the Olympic Club for a round and it’s the same thing. He’s gonna get mad.”4

  The Chronicle published a “box score” of Bay Area bombings dating to 1971. No one had an exact count, the paper noted, but the number was easily more than one hundred, credited to seven radical groups. By far the most active, by the Chronicle’s count, was the NWLF, with sixty-four, followed by the Chicano Liberation Front, with nine; the Zapata unit, with eight; and a group calling itself Americans for Justice, with six. The most popular targets were PG&E, bombed twenty-three times, followed by the U.S. government and Safeway stores, with nine each. The FBI had posted rewards for information on the NWLF but had nothing to show for it. “We believe they’re not an extremely large group,” one agent told the paper. “But who knows?”

  The one new element to the new bombings was Tony Serra’s debut as the NWLF’s spokesman. “They called my office,” Serra recalls. “I didn’t know who it was. He asked if I would take over communications. I said sure. I got a call every few weeks. It was like, ‘Go to Fifth and Mission, there’s a phone booth.’ So I go. The phone rings. ‘All right, Tony, look across the street, do you see the pillars holding up the billboard? Go over there, on the right side, there is a parcel.’ This happened like six times, and always, along with the communiqué, there would be at least two bags of [marijuana]. I held a press conference, always well attended, and put out the communiqué.”

  Then that fall, without explanation, the calls stopped. There were two more NWLF bombings in October, followed by an explosion outside a Union 76 refinery in the town of Rodeo on November 10. Then nothing. The NWLF went utterly silent for five long months. At the FBI offices in San Francisco, agents debated what was happening. Had the NWLF simply given up? No one knew. Finally, on March 14, 1978, another bomb went off, outside a PG&E substation in suburban Concord; a communiqué expressed support for a coal miners’ strike. After four years and a hundred or so bombings—the precise number remains in dispute—this would prove the final NWLF action, the final communiqué. At the FBI agents waited for the bombings to resume; they never would. “When the bombs stopped, we kept wanting them to start again, because with nothing new to work on, everything just went cold,” recalls Stockton Buck, an agent on the NWLF case.

  Not for a full five years would the truth about the New World Liberation Front, or much of it, finally emerge. It was as strange a tale as any in the annals of the radical resistance. The NWLF, it turned out, had been the only underground group to dissolve after an axe murder.

  • • •

  The full story of the New World Liberation Front will never be known. The fact is, other than a handful of county prosecutors and FBI agents, no one (aside from the author of a 1978 master’s thesis, written long before the group was revealed) tried very hard to learn it, much less write it. Not a single pamphlet, magazine article, or book has ever been published analyzing the NWLF, which detonated more explosive devices than any other radical underground group, nearly twice as many as the Weather Underground.

  What’s clear is that there were at least three separate combat “units” of the NWLF, none of which appeared to know the first thing about the others. All were responding to the Bay Area Research Collective’s 1974 call for radical groups to unite under one banner. The first group was Bill Harris and the rump SLA, which was responsible for two bombings in August 1975. The second group was the Emiliano Zapata unit, which detonated eight bombs later that year.

  The vast majority of NWLF actions, however, probably seventy or more, were carried out by a third group, which can be viewed as the “actual” NWLF. This one centered on a deeply troubled man named Ronald Huffman. Remarkably little is known about him. From the scant public record it appears he was born in Oregon in 1939. His parents worked at a mental hospital. He had a difficult upbringing, that much is clear; a stepfather, it was later claimed, beat him with a hose. He was arrested at sixteen for burglary; in 1963, when he was twenty-three, there was an arrest for smuggling balloons filled with heroin across the Mexican border, followed a few years later by a marijuana arrest.

  By 1971, when he turned thirty-one, Huffman seems to have been a small-time marijuana dealer in the San Jose area, a balding radical typically adorned in biker regalia; his customers called him “Revolutionary Ron.” According to Stockton Buck, who became the FBI’s expert on Huffman, Huffman met his girlfriend—and future bombing confederate—Maureen Minton in 1971 or 1972. A bit more is known about Minton. She grew up in Mountain View, in today’s Silicon Valley, the daughter of a family who owned one of the town’s oldest stores, Minton Lumber. Described as a quiet hippie girl, she graduated with honors from Berkeley in 1970, then, in search of a peaceful life, moved to an island commune near Vancouver, British Columbia. She met Huffman on a return visit to the Bay Area. The two lived for a time in rural Canada, Buck says, before relocating to Santa Cruz, California, two hours south of San Francisco, in 1973. Not long after, they rented a bungalow in a remote mountainous area ten miles north called Bonny Doon. Among their neighbors was the noted science fiction writer Robert Heinlein.

  Here the couple comes into clearer focus. Huffman—“Revolutionary Ron”—was a colorful if little-noticed character on the streets of Santa Cruz. Minton worked as a volunteer at Planned Parenthood and at some point began to study nursing at Cabrillo College. From all available evidence, however, their lives were overwhelmingly focused on two things, and two things only: marijuana and bombs. They constructed an elaborate marijuana farm in the dense foliage around their new home, four enormous plots of cannabis plants, some as high as ten feet tall. The surrounding brush, much of it manzanita bushes, was so thick that Huffman was forced to cut tunnels through the greenery just to reach his plants. An intricate system of water hoses snaked through tree limbs to irrigate the marijuana. Elsewhere water pools were dug. Huffman’s weed, it was said, was of the highest quality. It was probably what Tony Serra was smoking at Jacques Rogiers’s trial.

  Watering and harvesting the marijuana was a full-time job, but Huffman and Minton had spare time, and they appear to have used much of it building the New World Liberation Front. To this day no one knows whether the NWLF had two members or dozens; Stockton Buck guesses it may have been six or seven, but no one other than Huffman and Minton would ever be publicly identified. Years later the FBI used fingerprint evidence almost exclusively to build an NWLF case. By doing so, it was able to establish that the couple had been engaged in underground activities as early as 1973, when they first moved to Santa Cruz. Their first known action, actually just a communiqué, was mailed to the Chronicle on October 1, 1973, commenting on the Weather Underground bombing of an IT&T office on Madison Avenue in New York. Oddly, it was sent in the name of Weather as well, though fingerprints later established that it was Huffman and Minton’s work. It demanded that the state open free health clinics for the poor. There was no actual bombing.

  If the IT&T communiqué represented the couple’s initial attempt to dip their toes into the underground pool, they soon realized they wanted an identity of their own. Their first actual bombing, it appears, came on November 27, 1973, at a PG&E substation in Cupertino; this was three weeks after the SLA’s assassination of Marcus Foster. A communiqué, sent in the name of “Americans for Justice,” demanded a 10 percent reduction in utility rates. The explosion briefly cut off power to four surrounding communities. Months later, in February and March 1974, the same group claimed responsibility for three bombings outside Shel
l Oil facilities in Berkeley, Coalinga, and San Ramon; the communiqués demanded that Shell give away its products for free.

  The Americans for Justice bombings garnered few headlines, but they happened to coincide with the SLA’s rise and kidnapping of Patty Hearst. That spring, after DeFreeze and the others were killed in Los Angeles, BARC made its open invitation asking other groups to carry out bombings in the name of the New World Liberation Front. Huffman and Minton, it appears, were the first to accept. Their subsequent bombings were all in the name of the NWLF. The first known NWLF action, the dud bomb found outside a General Motors facility in suburban Burlingame in August 1974, was theirs, fingerprints on the communiqué confirmed. So was the Sheraton bombing that October and several—but not all—of the bombings that provided the backdrop to Hearst’s trial. It was Huffman and Minton who carried out the campaign against the San Francisco supervisors. The notorious “candy box” bombs delivered to Supervisors Barbagelata and Kopp were the couple’s work. So was the December 1976 bomb found in Dianne Feinstein’s flower box.

  In all, the FBI would be able to tie Huffman and Minton to only sixteen bombings and attempted bombings between 1973 and their final attack in 1978. In all likelihood, the vast majority of the other NWLF bombings were theirs as well. Little is known about life inside their remote marijuana compound, or of their relationship with Jacques Rogiers. It’s possible that the couple simply mailed their communiqués to Rogiers anonymously; it’s possible they never met. It’s also possible, as some suggest, that Rogiers made his living selling Huffman’s marijuana in San Francisco. Nor is there any clue as to why Huffman and Minton stopped their bombings in 1978. “We just could never learn much about them,” recalls Madeleine Boriss, then a Santa Cruz prosecutor. “We could never find any real friends or associates. It was just them.” They did have a dog. His name, perhaps unsurprisingly, was Che.