Days of Rage

by Bryan Burrough

  It was in Portland that he made three friends who would be at his side in coming years. Two were his lovers. Pat Gros, a slender, cheerful hippie girl who had fled her Maryland home in 1967 for San Francisco’s Summer of Love, had ricocheted among dozens of demonstrations and secretarial jobs until washing up, aimless and adrift, in Portland, where she endured a green-card marriage to a German puppeteer until Ray caught her eye at a demonstration. The sight of rugged Ray Levasseur, with his black beret and radiant smile, simply melted her. Going to work as a SCAR volunteer, she was transfixed. To Ray she was just another girl whose bed was always available.

  The second woman had a more distinctive background. Pretty, with long dark hair, Linda Coleman grew up in a Long Island mansion, the daughter of a prominent family that traced its ancestry to Manhattan’s original settlers; her grandmother was Joan Whitney Payson, the owner of the New York Mets baseball team. Shuttled between relatives as a girl, then banished to boarding school, Coleman fled Hampshire College that fall for Portland with a newfound thirst for radical politics and a shameful secret: She was rich, thanks to a $150,000 trust fund she received on her twenty-first birthday. Eager to shed her white-skin privilege, she began working at the SCAR offices between classes at a local hospital. She too glimpsed Levasseur at a demonstration, was struck by his charisma, and was soon sharing his bed. Levasseur liked Coleman. He liked her money even more. Neither she nor Pat Gros pushed for a commitment. “You gotta understand, Ray makes no commitments,” quips one old friend. “His only commitment is to the revolution.”

  The third friend was Tom Manning, a handsome South Boston ex-con with a volcanic temper and great artistic talent. Like Levasseur, Manning had returned from Vietnam angry and aimless; after robbing a liquor store, he was sent to Massachusetts’s grim Walpole State Prison, where he nearly died after being knifed by another prisoner. After his release he had met and married a sixteen-year-old runaway from Kezar Falls, Maine; he and Carol had settled in Portland, where she gave birth to a boy they named Jeremy. When Manning saw SCAR’s newspaper, he signed up as a volunteer and quickly emerged as Levasseur’s loyal sidekick, a position he would maintain for years.

  This was 1974, the high-water mark of the SLA and the second-generation underground groups, and Levasseur had begun peppering his conversations and lectures around Portland with references to the need to “take things to the next level,” to consider that violent revolution might be the only way to bring permanent change to “Amerika.” SCAR’s director, Alan Caron, thought such talk was delusional and risked alienating their supporters. By that summer it was clear the two men were heading for a showdown. “It was a choice between Alan and Ray,” recalls a onetime SCAR member. “On one side you had the armchair revolutionaries. On the other were the real revolutionaries. They had these huge arguments. With Ray there were always these vague discussions of violence and the absolute necessity of violence. ‘Sometimes you gotta go there, and the time is getting close! We’re being attacked! You know, we have to fight back.’”

  Many found this kind of talk frightening. “I remember at my last meeting with Tommy and Ray,” Caron recalls, “Tommy spent a lot of time describing to me, while Levasseur chortled, what revolutionaries in Africa were doing to moderate leaders. They were killing them. And he goes, ‘A lot can be learned from Africa, you know.’ I was convinced by then that they were certifiably insane, or coked up on speed. Whatever it was, these guys were way, way out there. The last time I saw them, they came to the SCAR office and physically attacked me, beat me up, and told me to keep my mouth shut. I literally lived in fear of being killed for years after that.”

  The showdown finally came in August 1974, and Levasseur and a dozen of his SCAR acolytes resigned. Rather than start a competing group, Levasseur decided to take an entirely new tack, opening a ramshackle two-room bookstore on downtown Portland’s main street, Congress Street. The Red Star North Bookstore, adorned with a large red star in the window and posters of Che and Ho Chi Minh, sold only radical literature, including the Berkeley papers and Dragon. The workers were volunteers. At night Levasseur led a study group that pored over his favorite Marxist texts. “It was tough for a lot of us to keep up with Ray’s intellectual capacity,” remembers Linda Coleman.

  From the outset the bookstore drew the close attention of Portland police. Detectives sat outside at all hours, photographing everyone who came and went. Levasseur would stand in the doorway, staring at them over his uplifted index finger. Tensions quickly escalated. By the fall someone had begun sliding notes under the bookstore’s door, threatening to rape the women volunteers and kill the men. Each note was adorned with swastikas and Ku Klux Klan signs. Down at the harbor, meanwhile, the SCAR office began receiving taped phone calls of screaming women, machine-gun fire, and a bugle playing taps.

  Then, near the height of tensions, a bizarre scandal struck the Portland Police Department. A policeman was arrested for soliciting three other officers to perform the vigilante-style execution of a trio of criminals; the city council initiated a series of hearings. Levasseur believed what everyone in Portland’s radical circles believed: that there was a genuine, Central America−style death squad operating inside the Portland police, and that it was this group that was terrorizing SCAR and the bookstore. On the street there were rumors that the death squad had a list of twenty or more local troublemakers to kill. Levasseur’s name was said to be at the top. As everyone expected, it was Levasseur who led the demonstrations outside Portland’s city hall.

  That fall, just as the bookstore opened and the police scandal broke, Tom Manning confided to Levasseur a secret that changed their lives forever. His brother-in-law, Manning said, was a onetime SDS radical named Cameron Bishop, who was on the FBI’s list of Ten Most Wanted Fugitives. He knew people in the Weather Underground. And he wanted to talk to Levasseur about his dream: starting an underground unit that would strike back at Amerika.

  • • •

  Cameron Bishop was a legend in radical circles. In February 1969, as a twenty-six-year-old SDS organizer at Colorado State University, he had committed perhaps the first major act of antiwar sabotage: the dynamiting of four electrical transmission towers that served a Colorado defense plant. He became only the second American charged in peacetime under a World War I−era sabotage law, and in April 1969 he became the first self-styled revolutionary placed on the FBI’s Most Wanted List. Bishop vanished into the underground, eventually, as luck would have it, meeting Tom Manning’s sister Mary while hitchhiking through a Maine blizzard in 1971. They had married and settled in Rhode Island, where Mary gave birth to two children and Bishop held a factory job.

  Levasseur met Bishop in a Boston fast-food joint and was dazzled. After five years in hiding Bishop badly wanted back in the revolutionary game. He was everything Levasseur dreamed he would be: the son of poor sheep farmers, a onetime army paratrooper, and a tough talker who praised the SLA and dismissed the Weathermen as “bourgeois rich kids.” Together, Bishop proposed, they could launch a bombing campaign that would bring the American ruling class to its knees. Afterward Levasseur returned to Portland, exhilarated. “This was my opportunity,” he recalls. “This was everything I had been waiting for.”

  Almost immediately, however, a problem arose. “Things started moving too fast,” Levasseur remembers. “I got a call from Tom: Cameron’s picture had run on a Rhode Island TV station, and Mary and Cameron and their kids were coming up to Portland. I was like, ‘What?’ He’s a Top Ten fugitive! I’ve got a death squad here. We’re under round-the-clock surveillance! What the fuck?” Within days the Bishops moved in with the Mannings at their cramped apartment in the Munjoy Hill neighborhood. Mary Bishop went to work at the bookstore. Cameron Bishop began urging Levasseur to form an underground cell—immediately. When Levasseur protested that they had no money, no way of supporting themselves, Bishop said they would do what the BLA and the SLA had done: rob banks.

  “Cameron
was a big fan of expropriations,” Levasseur remembers. “But he had never done one. He had an attitude, and a gun, but he’d never done it. Cameron was really pushing this. I thought it was totally premature. I was game for a lot, but robbing a bank? That was ludicrous. None of us had experience at anything like that. That was just too much. I really resisted. On the other hand, I felt a commitment to Tom and Cameron. I felt myself getting drawn into it.”

  In desperation Levasseur began casting about for an alternative. An ex-con friend suggested sticking up a Portland department store on payroll day. Levasseur had ethical concerns, refusing to rob any store that was locally owned. “Expropriation is only justified if it’s a large company that’s already ripping the people off,” he says. “So no mom-and-pop stores. It had to be part of the ruling class.” They studied the job for weeks, and after satisfying himself that the store was owned by the ruling class, they decided to move. Levasseur declines to divulge details—he was never linked to the robbery—but finally, in November, the store was robbed. “We didn’t get much, a few thousand dollars,” he says. “It was mostly checks.”

  The robbery, however, did little to quell Bishop’s demands that they immediately go underground. Levasseur stalled. His politics may have been radical, but in matters of risk he was highly conservative; planning and precision were hallmarks of his underground career. Levasseur and Bishop were still debating whether and when to go underground when, just before Christmas, Portland police raided the bookstore and arrested Levasseur for carrying an open can of beer. By the time he made bail he could feel control of matters slipping away. Tom Manning had inexplicably beaten up his landlord and now had a court date looming; he could be sent to jail if they remained aboveground. Worse, Levasseur had borrowed a girlfriend’s car for the store robbery; she had gotten angry and was threatening to turn them in.

  “There was a craziness that was building,” Levasseur recalls. “Things were just moving too fast. When I first met with Cameron, I envisioned something planned out, something careful. But things were pushing us. Cameron kept going, ‘We gotta go. We gotta go.’”

  Then came the final straw. Linda Coleman walked into the bookstore one morning and discovered that it had been ransacked. On the floor she found Mary Bishop whimpering in a fetal position. She had been raped, she said, by two men who held a broken bottle against her neck. Levasseur had no doubt as to who was responsible: the Portland police, the fascist pigs who wanted them all dead. Bishop again demanded they go underground. Facing a kaleidoscope of pressures, real and imagined—the police, Manning’s court date, the vengeful girlfriend, his commitment to the Bishops, not to mention his long-held dream of forming his own underground cell—Levasseur capitulated. By the next day he and the Mannings and Bishops had vanished from Portland’s streets.*

  • • •

  That first week they hid in a friend’s farmhouse in York County, six adults—Levasseur had brought yet another girlfriend along—and three small children, sleeping where they could and stacking their guns over the fireplace. Levasseur soon rented a house in Somersworth, a mill town just across the New Hampshire border. They were armed and underground now but not yet at the point of no return.

  Again Bishop urged that they should rob a bank. Levasseur continued to resist. He needed to study how this was done, he said again and again. Finally, after weeks of discussion, he agreed to accompany Bishop back to Rhode Island, where Bishop said he knew several banks they could hit. “Cameron said he knew the area. I said, ‘What does that mean?’ [He says,] ‘I know the roads, I know banks with armored cars just rolling in. There’s all kinds of money there!’ We just had this nebulous idea that there was something ripe there, ready to pick. That’s how fucked up it was. We had all these guns, we had Marighella’s Mini-Manual [of the Urban Guerrilla] with all these passages I had underlined. Basically we were impatient, we were desperate, and we were stupid.”

  They began scouting Rhode Island banks, sitting outside branches all around Providence for hours at a time, not quite sure what they were looking for. Which is what they were doing on the morning of March 12, 1975, the two of them slumped in a white 1967 Chevy in a Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot across from the Old Stone Bank in East Greenwich. Levasseur was in the backseat, a .38 jabbed in his belt. Bishop was behind the wheel, cradling two pistols in a paper sack. Tom Manning had just stepped into the doughnut shop when Bishop spied two men—clearly plainclothes detectives—approaching the car.

  “What do we do?” Levasseur asked.

  “I got solid ID,” Bishop said. “Don’t worry about it.”

  Which were the last words Bishop spoke to Levasseur before the detectives placed them under arrest. As it turned out, a woman had seen them two days before, long-haired men in a car full of guns, telephoned police, and described the car. A sawed-off shotgun was found in the trunk, along with a map showing the route of a Purolator armored car. When the police ran Bishop’s fingerprints, they realized who they had detained. The arrest of a Top Ten fugitive made national headlines. Photos of both men graced the front pages in Maine.

  It was over.

  19

  BOMBS AND DIAPERS

  Ray Levasseur’s Odyssey, Part II

  Cameron Bishop was taken to Denver to face the old sabotage charges. Levasseur was detained on a weapons charge. To his amazement, he was granted bail; the authorities had no idea of his plans for revolutionary action. Linda Coleman dipped into her trust fund to pay a Boston bondsman $3,000, the first of a series of outlays that would keep Levasseur afloat in the coming months. A friend drove down to Rhode Island with Pat Gros to pick him up, and they chugged a celebratory six-pack on the drive to his mother’s home in Maine. That night he and Gros made love in a guest room, conceiving what would become their first child.

  Then Mary Bishop telephoned from Denver. She pleaded with Levasseur to come west to form a legal defense committee for her husband. He didn’t want to go—Tom Manning was sitting in a Boston apartment, penniless, waiting for direction—but he did; Bishop, after all, seemed to be his last hope of joining the revolution. Levasseur took Coleman and drove cross-country to Colorado, where they joined Mary Bishop in a ranch house Coleman rented for them. That started the problems. The house was too nice, Coleman felt, and thus not properly revolutionary. She was deeply confused, unsure whether her money was going to true revolutionary purposes or just beer. They began to argue, with Levasseur barking that she was giving him money with strings attached.

  The problems mounted when Bishop’s family raised his bail. The Bishops turned out to be well-to-do sheep farmers—not at all the blue-collar people Levasseur had imagined—and, worse, Bishop seemed in no hurry to restart their underground army. “Cameron had always been very big on how it was every revolutionary’s duty to escape, but he didn’t want to skip bail,” Levasseur recalls. “I said, ‘This is it. It’s time to go. We got unfinished business.’ And he kept stalling. Then Mary gets wind of this, and she wants no part of it. So she makes it very uncomfortable for me to be there. One night she got mad and threw a pot at me in the kitchen, so I left.” Before doing so, he and Bishop arranged a “call schedule” whereby Levasseur would telephone him at a series of pay phones once he returned east. Weeks later, when Levasseur began making the appointed calls, Bishop failed to appear for a single one.

  Levasseur returned to New England in July 1975 on a bus, confused and depressed. Manning was now a fugitive, having failed to appear for his court date, and Levasseur soon would be; he had no intention of returning to Rhode Island to face his charges. Once it grew clear that Bishop was not rejoining them, it was obvious that if they were ever to set up an underground cell, they would have to do it alone.

  “Our thinking,” Levasseur recalls, “was seriously idealistic or serious tunnel vision. We wanted to be part of what these other groups—the SLA, Weather—were doing out there. We felt, there’s a fucking war going on out there, and we want to be pa
rt of it. We wanted to be somewhere between the Weather Underground and the BLA. Weather had done some good actions. I liked Prairie Fire. But we felt we would have to go beyond what they were doing. The BLA, they also had good actions, but I didn’t want to be just a squad that targeted police. That was too narrow. Not that I objected on moral grounds. I had no problems offing cops. None. But it was just beyond our capability. It would be way too much heat for us, and I didn’t think we could withstand that.”

  Two men didn’t make much of an army, however. What they needed was recruits. Renting an apartment in Portsmouth, New Hampshire—later they rented a second in Springfield, Massachusetts—they began sending out feelers to their ex-convict friends. Their first recruit turned out to be an unfortunate one, Joey Aceto, a diminutive twenty-two-year-old burglar paroled in Maine that April; Aceto had been in and out of institutions since boyhood and, unbeknownst to Levasseur, had a record of drug use, suicide attempts, and snitching on fellow inmates. At the Springfield apartment Levasseur mounted an elaborate indoctrination for Aceto, plying him with revolutionary books Aceto did his best to understand.

  The next task was raising money. Much of their time was spent driving back and forth to Portsmouth, where they began casing their first bank. This time they were determined to do things correctly. Levasseur studied the bank’s layout and personnel in detail, tailing the manager to his home, then devised an elaborate getaway plan by sea, arranging for a shady lobster boat captain to spirit them away from Portsmouth by boat. On their first rehearsal run, however, the boat began taking on water and had to be beached on a sandbar.