Days of Rage

by Bryan Burrough

  But Huffman, it is clear, was never the most stable soul. According to a relative interviewed by prosecutors, he was prone to violent mood swings. In the wake of the final NWLF bombing, in 1978, there is considerable evidence that Huffman began losing his grip on reality. Feral dogs and coyotes roamed the Bonny Doon area in those days, and Huffman became obsessed with them, calling them “demon dogs” whose incessant howling was the voice of Satan. Psychiatrists would later debate whether Huffman was schizophrenic, drug-addled, or just a weird guy, but what’s unavoidable is the sense that, as 1979 wore on, the focus of his anger became Maureen Minton.

  The couple had a worker named Dennis Morgan, who helped tend the marijuana farm. Morgan later told prosecutors he became increasingly frightened of Huffman. According to Morgan, Huffman developed a long list of complaints against Minton: She hadn’t watered the weed enough, or she’d watered it too much. She’d neglected to give Che his heartworm medicine. She didn’t respect Huffman’s grandfather. Huffman’s lawyer would later claim that his client believed that Minton herself was possessed by demons. That September Minton told an aunt that, all demons aside, Huffman was incensed that she had had an abortion against his wishes. Morgan later swore that Huffman told him he was “getting rid of Minton and [finding] himself a new lady. One who could bear him children.”

  Whatever the reason, there is little doubt as to what happened on the bright Sunday morning of September 23, 1979. Standing in their yard, Huffman ordered Minton to kneel before him. For some reason he slid a draftsman’s knife into her mouth. Then, lifting a long-handled axe, he swung it viciously down onto her skull, all but splitting her head in two. Minton died instantly. Huffman then took a two-by-four and beat her body, hoping, his attorney would later claim, to knock the demons out of her corpse. Apparently unsatisfied, he then took a scalpel and cut out a section of her brain. His attorney would insist that Huffman believed Minton’s brain matter had magical powers.

  A few hours later Huffman packed a suitcase and threw it in his car, along with $32,000 in cash, ten bags of marijuana, a book (The Greatest Story Ever Told), and a paper sack containing a portion of Minton’s brain. He drove down to the Pacific Coast Highway and turned north toward San Francisco. A few miles up the road, just past the beach at Greyhound Rock, he picked up a German hitchhiker, driving off so quickly he left the young man’s girlfriend in the road. Huffman, who appeared highly agitated, was talking a mile a minute, and the poor German couldn’t understand a word he was saying. He pleaded with Huffman to stop the car, at which point Huffman produced a knife and began slashing at him. A struggle ensued, during which the car skidded to a stop outside the Short Stop Market in Half Moon Bay.

  The hitchhiker leaped from the car and raced toward a young man named Corey Baker, who was standing in the parking lot. Huffman emerged and began yelling something unintelligible. Baker approached him, noticing a strange whitish-gray substance on his hands. He thought it was fish guts. It wasn’t. He told Huffman to calm down and go wash his hands. Huffman responded by punching him, grabbing a fountain pen, and attempting to poke out his eyes. Baker ran. Huffman drove off. An hour later a police car managed to force him off the road near the town of Pacifica. Huffman got out of the car, swearing and spitting, his eyes rolling back in his head. When an officer pulled his gun, Huffman held up his book and the bag of brains, as if to shield himself. Officers wrestled him to the ground. Later, when they visited the cottage, they found Minton’s body. Huffman was tossed into jail.

  Once he calmed down, Huffman telephoned Tony Serra, who agreed to represent him. At that point, Serra insists, this was a simple murder case. He had no clue that Huffman was behind the NWLF bombings; the authorities wouldn’t learn of the connection for months. Not long after the arrest, Serra says, Huffman attempted to hang himself in his cell. Cut down at the last minute, he was rushed to a hospital, where doctors saved his life. But there was lingering brain damage of some sort. Afterward, Serra says, Huffman’s speech became slurred, the name Tony came out “Dunny.” At the hospital Huffman motioned for Serra to lean in close. “Dunny,” he whispered.

  “He told me where he had buried all his cash, hundreds of thousands of dollars, plus a huge freezer of marijuana,” Serra remembers. “I go, ‘Far fucking out!’ So I go out there one night, with two shovels, two friends, and we dig where he told us, beneath a ladder in this old shed. And we found this massive freezer. I was so pumped! Wow, five hundred pounds of marijuana! And then we open it and the thing is empty!” Serra later returned to the cottage and dug dozens of holes in the yard. He never found a thing.

  The first hint authorities received that Huffman might be involved in bombings came a few months after his arrest, when an informant suggested as much to the San Jose police, who passed the tip on to the FBI. “It was really vague, you know, that Huffman might be good for some bombings,” recalls Stockton Buck. Huffman and Minton’s fingerprints were forwarded to the Bureau, which began checking them against unidentified prints found on NWLF and other communiqués as far back as 1971. Among the first hits they got were those found on the candy box bombs. Eventually the FBI made sixteen matches in all. Many NWLF communiqués held no identifiable prints, however, so it’s possible Huffman and Minton sent many of those as well. The only other evidence emerged after the new occupant of their Bonny Doon bungalow found a package buried in the yard. Inside was $30,000 in decomposed cash, along with hundreds of pages of NWLF literature: communiqués, codes, manifestos, surveillance rules, revolutionary tracts, and munitions manuals.

  Amazingly, Huffman’s ties to the NWLF remained a secret for four years. For much of this time he remained in jail as psychiatrists debated whether he was fit to stand trial for Minton’s murder. Finally, in April 1983, he was ruled fit. The trial took place in Monterey. Huffman pled not guilty by reason of insanity; about the only sound he made during the proceedings was an occasional doglike growl. Tony Serra told the jury Huffman was “stark raving mad.” Another defense attorney termed him “absolutely wacko.” The jury disagreed, finding him guilty of second-degree murder.

  The following week federal prosecutors finally unsealed a months-old indictment against Huffman for the NWLF bombings; because each carried a five-year statute of limitations, he was charged with conspiracy. The story made the front pages of the San Francisco papers but disappeared after a day or two. Outside the Bay Area it was all but ignored. The last NWLF bomb had detonated barely five years before, but it might as well have been fifty, so thoroughly had the world changed. The Chronicle story sounded as if the NWLF arose during the Dark Ages, terming Huffman, probably the decade’s most prolific bomber, “part of a world that eventually disappeared.”

  In the end Ronald Huffman pled guilty and went to prison. No one connected with his case, including his attorneys, has a clue what happened to him after that. An administrator in the Santa Cruz County district attorney’s office, however, confirms that Huffman died in a California state prison in 1999. Where he is buried, or whether anyone cared, remains a mystery.

  16

  HARD TIMES

  The Death of the Weather Underground

  The release of Prairie Fire on July 24, 1974, proved a transformative moment for the remaining members of what was now known as the Weather Underground Organization. The book itself, distributed to alternative bookstores, coffeehouses, and left-wing hangouts from coast to coast, successfully reintroduced the group to radical conversations everywhere. At some point, Prairie Fire morphed into something far more than simply a book. It became the first step in Weather’s most crazily audacious plan ever: a grand scheme for the entire leadership not only to “resurface” publicly but to do so while simultaneously gathering the radical left into a single overarching coalition that they themselves—Jeff Jones, Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, Eleanor Stein, and Robbie Roth—would emerge to personally command.

  What’s more, it was all to be done in secret. In hindsight it was almos
t laughably brazen: The radical left, home to some of the most suspicious people in U.S. politics, was literally going to be fooled into returning Weather’s leadership to the exalted positions they had abandoned on leaving SDS four years before.

  The plan sprang from months of anguished discussion of Weather’s irrelevancy. By 1974 it had become an open point of debate among the leadership: They were achieving precisely nothing. Remaining underground wasn’t having the slightest influence on anyone in the radical left; it was only cutting them off from a movement seemingly reenergized by the Watergate scandal and the myriad FBI and CIA abuses already spilling into the press. Staying underground “was an increasingly high-cost fantasy,” Bill Ayers recalled. “What was it accomplishing?” Dohrn herself agreed, noting in a 2004 interview that “to do what we were doing, in the sense of doing a couple actions a year and releasing communiqués, seemed inappropriate [in 1975]. And I think it was inappropriate. It didn’t have the kind of shock value and interpretive value that it had during the war.” Jeff Jones was even more blunt, also in a 2004 interview: “The underground had run its course by 1975.”1

  The initial idea, which came to be known as “inversion,” emerged from talks Jones had with Eleanor Stein’s mother, Annie. “There was a feeling,” recalls Dohrn’s friend Russell Neufeld, who emerged as a key player in Weather’s new plans, “and Annie Stein was its most passionate advocate—Annie had super-strong opinions on almost everything—that Weather had squandered its ties to the Movement and needed to find a way to regain its leadership. Annie convinced Jeff and Eleanor of a lot of this, and Jeff and Eleanor convinced the rest of the leadership.” There was skepticism at first, but Jones and Eleanor pushed. This, they argued, was their last, best chance to ever be political leaders again. “The idea was, Weatherman’s leadership was going to take control of what remained of the Movement,” recalls Cathy Wilkerson. “It was beyond ridiculous. We could never get away with it. Any person in their right mind should have known we were behind this, but you know, we were all enveloped in the vapor. Leadership, it was like a drug. We really thought we were the Chosen People.”

  As it unfolded, the conspiracy had two thrusts, one open and honest, the other secret and dishonest. The honest component would capitalize on Prairie Fire’s popularity by establishing a second publication, envisioned as a quarterly radical newsmagazine, called Osawatomie, named for the Kansas town where the abolitionist John Brown, long a Weather icon, first saw battle in 1856. The slender periodical, dense with left-wing position papers and occasional reportage on events such as a busing controversy in Boston, debuted in 1975.

  The dishonest part of the plan involved the formation of a new aboveground group whose stated purpose was spreading Prairie Fire’s message via discussion groups across the country. This group, the vehicle that leadership secretly hoped to ride back to national prominence, was called the Prairie Fire Distribution Committee, or PFDC, and its first twenty or so members, many of whom had physically distributed the book that summer, portrayed themselves as entirely unrelated to Weather, as simply good-hearted radicals inspired by Prairie Fire’s message to try to knit the disparate threads of the Left into a single tapestry. The only ones briefed on the Central Committee’s actual goals were the five close allies it had secretly selected to run the PFDC. These included Russell Neufeld; Dohrn’s sister Jennifer; Jeff Jones’s college pal Jon Lerner; and a fervent onetime Weatherman named Laura Whitehorn. At first Neufeld and Lerner resisted.

  “The creation of the front organization, the secret organization, it’s one of the things I deeply regret, being a shill,” says Lerner. “I remember objecting very much to the idea, because I didn’t like the manipulative part of it, and I didn’t think it was going to work. The Laura Whitehorns of the world, they thought it was just a great idea. And I allowed myself to be bludgeoned into it, and it was about my needing to belong to the group emotionally. We were manipulating the PFDC the entire time. The entire time.”

  “I don’t think I understood all of that until much later,” remembers Neufeld. “Initially I thought it was just a way to build an aboveground support group. Only later did I learn everything, and it made me very uncomfortable. For me the contradiction was, we were building this mass organization, when in fact we were manipulating them all into being pawns of our leadership. It became very manipulative.”

  It all started simply enough, in the fall of 1974, when the new PFDC leaders began wooing friends during a series of picnics and parties in the Boston area. “A lot of people swallowed our entire line, that we had nothing to do with Weather,” Lerner says. “But a lot of people, including people who came to these picnics, did not join us, because I think they understood right away that this was a front for Weather. Me, I thought it was obvious.”

  Neufeld and other volunteers, meanwhile, drove a battered Volkswagen bus to campuses around the country, convening discussion groups and handing out copies of Prairie Fire. “I was constantly being asked whether this was a front for Weather,” he recalls. “I didn’t want to lie outright, so I kept saying, ‘I really can’t talk about that.’”

  To Neufeld’s surprise, they were able to sign up dozens of new members, eventually more than a hundred. PFDC chapters were established in Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Chicago. In Brooklyn Silvia Baraldini prevailed on the two dozen or so members of the Assata Shakur Defense Committee to join en masse, despite her concerns that Prairie Fire seemed to be deemphasizing the black struggle in favor of a classic Marxist philosophy of working alongside the “international working class.” “I read it, and I was skeptical, this glorification of white working-class stuff,” Baraldini recalls. “I was stupid. I fell for it. It wasn’t Weather, but it had that Weather mystique, and that was a powerful thing. We didn’t realize their leadership had already abandoned any pretense at being true revolutionaries and wanted only to surface and take control of the Left and enjoy the middle-class lives they had left behind. None of us knew how we were being manipulated.”

  The second step in Weather’s plan was transforming the PFDC into a permanent group, the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee, or PFOC. The change was announced at a July 1975 convention in Boston, where doubts about Weather’s influence lingered. “I couldn’t believe how many people were buying into this,” recalls Elizabeth Fink. “To me it was blindingly obvious Weather was behind it.” It was in Boston that the third and final step of Weather’s plan was unveiled: a second PFOC conference, this one scheduled for January 1976, aimed at uniting dozens of radical groups—white, black, and Hispanic—beneath a single banner. Jeff Jones, in a bit of candor, came up with the name: the Hard Times Conference. There, the PFOC leadership, secretly controlled by the Central Committee, would be elected to lead the new coalition. Once Weather’s leadership resurfaced and dealt with its legal troubles, they would be free to take over the group outright.

  The Hard Times Conference, then, became a kind of Hail Mary pass for Weather’s leadership, their last shot at regaining all they had thrown away. From the summer of 1975 on, all the PFOC’s efforts—with Jones and the Central Committee pulling strings behind the scenes—were focused on luring radical groups to the conference, which was to be held at the University of Illinois’s Chicago campus. No group was too small to invite. Jonathan Lerner reached out to Native Americans. Silvia Baraldini recruited blacks in the South. Again and again Russell Neufeld, who moved to Chicago to supervise the preparations, was obliged to deny that Weather was involved. “Jeff was the one most involved in the day-to-day details,” he recalls. “I was constantly being asked by Jeff to carry out Weatherman’s wishes, and this troubled me. It became very manipulative. We just lied so much.”

  Among the preparatory steps was an unusual “cadre school” the Central Committee convened at a home in a gated community outside the town of Bend, Oregon. About twenty Weathermen attended, including several who had been invited back into the group; most took buses across the count
ry from Boston. They masqueraded as graduate students on an anthropology field trip. Rick Ayers, who arranged everything, posed as their professor. The purpose of the five-day retreat was teaching Weather’s new political “line,” that is, the Marxist-Leninist philosophy set out in the pages of Prairie Fire. Annie Stein was on hand for guidance. “That really represented Annie’s intellectual triumph,” recalls Howard Machtinger, who attended.

  “We read a lot of Lenin, read and discussed, and then we had physical education, exercises, and running,” recalls Lerner. “I remember Bernardine Dohrn wearing big wedge sandals, running in these high sandals. The politics was strange, because it represented a real shift away from our early suspicion of Marxism and Lenin and was an adoption of classic commie rhetoric. It was like stepping backward into the old days. But it made people comfortable. It was known.”

  The months leading up to the Hard Times Conference were a blizzard of activity. Inside Weather the leadership debated endlessly whether to publicly “surface” two, three, or all five of its members. A team of lawyers led by Kathy Boudin’s father, Leonard, was assembled to negotiate the surrenders. All were highly aware of the FBI break-ins, and at least one of the attorneys, it was later claimed, reached out to friends in the Democratic Party to see if they might strike some form of immunity deal in exchange for public testimony against the FBI.

  The final weapon in Weather’s public-relations arsenal was an attempt to burnish its image in the American mainstream. It was, of all things, a movie. After reading Prairie Fire, a documentarian named Emile de Antonio was startled to realize that Weather was still active. “What the hell,” he mused, “is an essentially white, middle-class revolutionary group doing in America in 1975?” Through mutual friends he arranged a meeting with Jeff Jones and Eleanor Stein in the distant Brooklyn precinct of Sheepshead Bay at Lundy’s, a restaurant where Stein’s family often held celebrations. Jones immediately recognized the potential of a sympathetic film, both to clean up Weather’s image and as a fund-raising vehicle. He agreed to be interviewed once de Antonio promised to hide their faces, give the leadership “final cut,” and refuse to cooperate with any government subpoenas.