Three minutes later, at 9:40, a call came in to the WABC-TV Eyewitness News desk. The caller was out of breath, so nervous he garbled his identification, saying, “This is the F.L.A.N.” He told a clerk that bombs had been set at 410 Park Avenue, the site of a Chase Manhattan branch; 1270 Avenue of the Americas, the site of several Latin American consulates; 245 Park Avenue, the American Brands Building; and Mobil Oil’s headquarters. Five minutes later a second call came in to Eyewitness News. This time the caller repeated the same information but added that additional bombs had been placed in both towers of the World Trade Center. A few minutes after that, yet another call was made, to the New York Post, saying an FALN communiqué could be found at the base of the Cuban revolutionary José Martí’s statue in Central Park.
Within minutes sirens began echoing across Manhattan as police scrambled to rope off and search the targeted buildings. A pair of uniformed officers were the first to arrive at Mobil headquarters, where they began scanning the lobby for a bomb. As they did, Charles Steinberg and Ivan Gerson, two managers from a small employment agency, sat inside the Employment Services office, waiting to see if any jobs were available for their applicants. They had been sitting for almost ten minutes when the bomb—hidden in the umbrella left on the coatrack—detonated beside them. The force of the blast could be felt for blocks. The room’s windows exploded outward, propelling a storm of blue-green glass across Forty-second Street. Pedestrians dived for cover.
Steinberg, a twenty-six-year-old newlywed, collapsed like a doll, his suit covered in blood; he died instantly. The office was wrecked: bits of furniture jutting from the walls, glass everywhere, and seven other people scattered around, left bloodied and moaning. In minutes police arrived on the scene and began evacuating the building. Two men with critical injuries, mostly the result of flying glass, were carted to Bellevue Hospital, along with five others, including a man who suffered a heart attack during the evacuation. There’s “a lot of blood and a big pile of human mess,” a cop told a Daily News reporter. “That’s all I can call it. Human mess.”
A summer rainstorm blew in as bystanders milled about beneath their umbrellas, trying to understand what had happened.
“They say it’s that Puerto Rican group,” a woman remarked.
“The FALN,” a black man replied.
“What do they want, anyway?” the woman asked.
“I think they want freedom for Puerto Rico.”
“For who? Puerto Rico isn’t free?”
“They don’t think so.”2
Across the city, police and security guards began evacuating the other targeted buildings. It quickly became a mammoth undertaking: Hundreds, soon thousands, of office workers hustled out into the morning rain, standing beneath umbrellas in clumps on Park Avenue, on the Avenue of the Americas, and especially at the World Trade Center downtown, where Port Authority officers with bullhorns herded all 35,000 people in the two towers out into the streets. It was the first evacuation in the Trade Center’s four-year history; the resulting crowds soon snarled traffic across Lower Manhattan. People craned their necks, staring upward, waiting for something to explode.
Even as the evacuations got under way, city switchboards lit up with bomb threats and warnings, a trickle at first, then dozens, then hundreds. Some claimed to be from the FALN, others from Palestinian groups, while still others came from wary citizens who suddenly thought every stray trash bag or coffee cup might be hiding a bomb. Police operators alone took more than two hundred calls, most of which the NYPD was forced to ignore. Still, seven floors of the Empire State Building were cleared when someone called in a bomb threat on the eighty-second floor. All day, up and down Manhattan, chaos reigned. By nightfall more than 100,000 people had been evacuated from their offices. Many went home. Others lingered nearby, watching police murmur into walkie-talkies and shaking their heads at what life in New York had come to.
“First Son of Sam, now this,” a woman moaned to the Daily News. “You don’t get any peace around here anymore.”
The Times went a step further, editorializing that Friday: “For those who have lived through this mad week in New York there is a shared sense of outrage and impotence. Is New York City, after all, a failed ultra-urban experiment in which people eventually crack, social order eventually collapses, and reason ultimately yields to despair?”
A weary Mayor Abraham Beame—hip-deep in a spirited primary challenge from the likes of Bella Abzug, Mario Cuomo, and Ed Koch—scuffed through piles of bloodstained glass at the Mobil building, telling reporters, “This is an outrageous act of terrorism.”3 At three o’clock he stood at a City Hall podium alongside the police chief, Michael J. Codd, and promised that new detectives would be added to the FALN probe, adding that, yes, this could be done without drawing manpower from the Son of Sam case.* “The FBI has an excellent idea who these people are,” Beame said of the FALN, “but they haven’t been able to catch them in the act.” The latest communiqué, fished from a niche in the José Martí statue, gave the police little new to pursue. It railed against imperialist corporations, demanded the release of “political prisoners” and an “End to Grand Jury Abuse!” then closed, oddly, with the words “Victory to the Palestinian Struggle!”*
The next day the bomb threats and warnings erupted again, leading to the evacuation of several more office buildings. They would persist for days, climaxing the following week when LaGuardia Airport had to be shut down. NYPD detectives, under intense pressure to make an arrest, burst into an apartment in the Bronx and arrested a twenty-seven-year-old Puerto Rican militant. They found guns and copier machines and FALN stickers. The Daily News and the Post played it up as a break in the case, but it wasn’t; the man was eventually freed.
The FBI, meanwhile, descended on Mobil headquarters. The wreckage made a deep impression on Roger Young. “I remember walking through there and literally having to step over a pool of blood,” he recalls. But the emotion counted less than the evidence. From the receptionist’s wrecked desk agents managed to fish out the form the girl carrying the umbrella had left behind. Within days word came from the FBI lab: They had identified a single print on it. It was a right middle finger, and it belonged to Carlos Torres’s twenty-two-year-old wife, Marie Haydee Torres. One month later FBI officials were able to stand at a City Hall podium beside the police chief and announce her indictment. It came on the same day, September 7, that Carlos Torres and Oscar López were indicted on explosives charges in Chicago. It was progress, not that anyone had a clue where López and the Torreses might be hiding.
The FBI was attempting to pressure their friends and family, but the FALN’s aboveground supporters were proving to be a combative lot. In New York agents detained three longtime suspects, Julio Rosado and his two brothers, Andres and Luis. When a judge ordered them to provide handwriting and voice samples, they refused and were thrown in jail until they did; so vocal were the forty or so supporters who appeared in court that day—they repeatedly hissed at the judge—that federal marshals had to clear the courtroom. An identical scene played out in Chicago, where López’s brother José, along with Roberto Caldero and Pedro Archuleta, were ordered to jail when they refused to answer a judge’s questions. Their hearing, held under tight security, was marked by repeated shouts and hisses from a crowd of seventy supporters, obliging Judge James B. Parsons to laconically remind them that “this is not a ball game.”
There matters lay until October. Then, late on the night of the tenth, a homeless man—apparently an addled one—was nosing through a trash basket in front of the General Motors Building, across from the southeast corner of Central Park. He discovered a shoe box, opened it, and found himself staring at a wristwatch, some wires, and two sticks of dynamite, one sawed in half. For some reason he disconnected the wiring, tossed the full stick of dynamite back in the trash, then deposited the half stick, the watch, and the wires in a concrete planter, where it was noticed early the n
ext morning by two FBI agents walking by on unrelated business. The bomb squad removed all the explosives.* A caller to the New York Post claimed credit for the FALN, saying the attempted bombing was to protest First Lady Rosalynn Carter’s visit to Puerto Rico that week. A communiqué, one of the oddest yet, was later found in a Midtown phone booth. It was a diatribe against Australia, whose diplomats had blocked a resolution to have the United Nations take up the question of Puerto Rican independence.
The homeless man’s bomb wasn’t the only one that failed to detonate. That same night, a worker in the Damaged Mail section at the Main Post Office in Chicago spied a large manila envelope lying on a windowsill. Opening it, he found a wristwatch and four sticks of dynamite wrapped in polka-dot wrapping paper. The bomb had been set to go off the previous night but hadn’t.
Four days later, on October 15, three Hispanic children were passing by a National Guard Armory on South Calumet Avenue in Chicago. Suddenly one of them, a girl maybe ten years old, spied something on a window ledge. It was a package of some sort, wrapped in newspaper. As her two friends watched, the girl unwrapped it and was surprised to see a clock, some wires, and several sticks of what she realized was dynamite. Carefully rewrapping the bomb in her hands, the girl and her friends scurried to the armory’s front door, pressed the bell, and told the custodian who answered that they had found a bomb. He didn’t believe them but took the package anyway. Not until he reached the basement did he unwrap the parcel and see that it was in fact a bomb. He called the Chicago police, who searched the building and found a second bomb, this one placed in wrapping paper, on another windowsill. The newspaper was dated October 10, indicating that the bombs had probably been timed to go off with the others on October 11. Analysis of the dynamite confirmed what the FBI suspected: These were FALN bombs, from the same batch of dynamite found on West Haddon a year earlier.
In Washington Roger Young pondered the four dud bombs in New York and Chicago for days. This made no sense. One dud might be a bad or misplaced wire. But four? Something, he realized, was wrong with the FALN. With its explosives. He could feel it. He called the FBI lab’s assistant director, Tom Kelleher, who explained that the bombs probably hadn’t gone off because the detonators malfunctioned. Or—and this caught Young’s attention—the dynamite might be going bad. All the FALN dynamite had come from the single batch stolen nine years earlier.
Some dynamite, Kelleher explained, has a shelf life, especially if not properly maintained. It can become unstable. Vibrations from a passing bus, even the footsteps of an encroaching mouse, might set it off; the children in Chicago had been very lucky. Whether the rest of the FALN’s dynamite had gone bad was impossible to know. But if it had, and if it was stored en masse, as at the West Haddon bomb factory, an accidental explosion could destroy an entire apartment block. For several long nights Young lay in bed, thinking about those children in Chicago. The more he pondered, the more he realized he couldn’t take the risk of that happening again.
Over the next several days Young and Kelleher had a series of long, quiet conversations. Eventually, after Young had a late-night spark of inspiration, they came up with the outlines of a plan. It was audacious, to say the least. In fact, it was unlike anything ever attempted in the history of the FBI. If their superiors learned of its details, both men realized, they might be fired or worse. They swore each other to secrecy and promised never to put anything about it in writing. Kelleher said he needed time to work out the technical details. Young promised to wait but soon realized he couldn’t take the chance. It was all so outlandish it might never work, but he had to take the chance, and he had to do it now.
And so, a few days later, Young flew to Chicago and drove to the Metropolitan Correctional Center. He had the warden gather the FALN supporters—Oscar López’s brothers, José and Juan, and another man—in a room. When he stepped inside, he could feel hatred radiating from the prisoners like bad cologne. You don’t have to say a thing, Young began. Just listen. Slowly he told them what he knew. The FALN’s dynamite was getting old. There was a chance it had become unstable. It’s one thing to bomb a National Guard armory or a Wall Street bank in protest of something you believe in. But if that dynamite went off by accident, children might die. Whole families might die. No one wanted that. That was not what the FALN was about.
Silence. No one said a word. Then Young unveiled his offer. If someone was able to get word to the FALN, he said, the FBI was prepared to make a deal. In return for handing over the last of the Heron Dam dynamite, he continued, he would personally see to it that the FBI gave the FALN replacement dynamite, stick for stick. He would make the exchange in person, one on one, at any location the FALN chose.
Silence. Young looked around the room. He could hear them breathing. He scanned the faces around him. Their hatred was only building. No one said a word, but he could tell they thought it was some kind of stupid trick. And it was. What Young didn’t say was that, back in Washington, Tom Kelleher was working to build a case of fake dynamite—actual dynamite that had been chemically altered so as never to explode. Further, Kelleher was attempting to construct something altogether new, a newfangled global positioning chip that could be inserted into every stick of explosive the FALN accepted.
But it was not to be. After several minutes without another word spoken, Young left the room, the jail doors clanging loudly behind him. He never heard a peep about the offer from the FALN or anyone else, and he wouldn’t speak of it again for thirty-five years.
18
“ARMED REVOLUTIONARY LOVE”
The Odyssey of Ray Levasseur
Now is the time to show our love for our people and our hatred of injustice and oppression. Armed revolutionary love means not standing around while the oppressor strangles the life out of our people with his jackboot. There will never be a better time to fight and die than now—cutting the throats of kamp kammanders and fascist agents.
—Ray Luc Levasseur, in a 1976 letter celebrating the birth of his first daughter
It was the morning of April 22, 1976. The streets of downtown Boston were thronged with people on their way to work. Across from the gray granite façade of the Suffolk County Courthouse, a slender hippie girl stepped through the crowds into the subway station. At a pay phone, glancing about nervously, she dialed the courthouse switchboard. “This is no joke,” the girl, whose name was Pat Gros, told the operator. “This is the Sam Melville Jonathan Jackson unit. A bomb will go off in the probation office in twenty minutes.”
It was 8:52. Replacing the receiver, Pat walked up to the street, fighting her nerves. She had never done anything like this before. None of them had. She was only doing it, she knew, out of fear that the group’s fiery leader, the father of her infant daughter, would reject her. “I was scared shitless,” Pat recalls thirty-five years later. “This was our initiation, you know. I was just so in love with him, I had to show I was willing to be part of that armed struggle.”
The bomb was scheduled to go off at 9:12. By 9:00, with her eyes fixed on the courthouse entrance, Pat realized with a start that no one was being evacuated. Frightened, she scurried back into the subway and again called the switchboard, repeating her warning. About five minutes later she saw a stream of people beginning to leave the courthouse. They were mostly judges; security was apparently evacuating the most important people first. Still, she noticed, no effort was being made to block the doors. People were still streaming in.
One of them was a man named Edmund Narine, a student who bounded up the courthouse steps heading for the Probation Office upstairs, where he needed to get a piece of paper showing he had no criminal record in order to get his cabbie’s license. In Room 206 he took a spot in line, amiably chatting with another waiting man; neither noticed a backpack tossed against one wall. Suddenly, at precisely 9:12, there was a deafening explosion, and Narine’s vision went pink. Only later would he realize he was seeing the world through his own blood.
>
The blast wrecked the Probation Office, injuring twenty-two people, including Edmund Narine, who would lose his left leg below the knee. Sirens echoed across downtown Boston. Ambulances arrived to cart off bloody, moaning men and women. Crowds of the curious began milling outside, just as they had at Fraunces Tavern and the Townhouse. Across the street Pat Gros turned her back and ran.
• • •
They called themselves the Sam Melville Jonathan Jackson unit—the SMJJ for short—though they later changed the name to the United Freedom Front. Whatever you called them, they were hands down the most unusual of the 1970s underground groups: two blue-collar couples—later three—who robbed banks, engaged in deadly shoot-outs with police, and bombed courthouses, military installations, and multinational corporations, all while raising small children, eventually nine in all. They were an inspiration for the 1988 movie Running on Empty, starring the teenaged actor River Phoenix. But while the cinematic family had retired from underground work, their real-life counterparts remained active and violent year after year after year, eventually triggering one of the largest manhunts in modern U.S. history.
The SMJJ arose from the prison movement, as the SLA did, but in an unlikely corner of the country: the state of Maine. Its leader and guiding light was a brawny, tattooed Vietnam veteran named Raymond Luc Levasseur.* Long before he went underground, Levasseur was an arresting figure in Portland’s bustling radical community, a Marx-spouting ex-convict stalking the snowy streets in a Ho Chi Minh goatee, black beret, and knee-length black leather jacket, a ponytail flopping down his neck. What most remember was not his chiseled prisoner’s face but the dark intensity of his deep-set black eyes—“like a cross between Rasputin and Jesus Christ,” as one friend puts it. Uncompromising, confrontational, and very, very angry at the world, Levasseur radiated charisma. “Ray had a big ego, a big heart, and a hard shell,” recalls one of his many lovers. “When he walked into a room, he was very tough and puffed up, but the moment that scowl turned into a smile, it just melted you.”
Days of Rage Page 47