Days of Rage

by Bryan Burrough

  That scrubbed the Portsmouth robbery. Angry and running low on money, they cast about for a new bank to target. Levasseur remembered a branch of the Northeast Bank of Westbrook he had thought of casing in the Lunt’s Corner area of Portland. On impulse they decided to rob it. On October 4, 1975, just days after abandoning the New Hampshire bank, Manning drove a stolen car up to the Portland bank. Levasseur—wearing a black afro wig and heavy dark sunglasses—led Aceto and a last-minute addition, another ex-con pal, into the bank, guns drawn. As they did, Levasseur glanced toward the drive-through window and gasped.

  “There’s a cop at the window!” he shouted. “Come on!”

  As luck would have it, an off-duty policeman named Paul Lewis was sitting in his wife’s car at the drive-through window. Hearing a commotion behind him, he realized that the bank was being robbed. Shoving his wife out of the car, he took the wheel, made a screaming U-turn, and arrived in front of the bank just as the three robbers sprinted from the entrance, dropping bags of cash in their haste to get into the getaway car. Manning slammed the accelerator and shot down a side road into a wooded area; when they spied Lewis giving chase, Manning veered to a stop at the curb. Lewis did the same, reaching for the pistol beneath the seat—only to realize that the gun was in his car, not his wife’s. At least one of the robbers pulled a .45-caliber pistol and squeezed off several rounds that hit the front of Lewis’s car. As Lewis cowered behind the wheel, powerless to respond, the robbers drove off.

  Though they made their getaway—the take was barely $2,000—the incident left Levasseur shaken. This was not a game. This was life and death. He swore to himself he would never be so careless again. He began studying everything he could find on bank robberies; when he read how a Canadian revolutionary group, the Front de libération du Québec, never stayed inside a bank more than five minutes, he pledged to rob banks even faster. And in the short term, he realized, they would have to strike again. Linda Coleman was paying for almost everything, but even her pocketbook wasn’t bottomless.

  They found the next bank in Augusta, a branch of the Bank of Maine. Again Levasseur tried to be creative. He built a fake bomb using road flares—“They look just like dynamite,” he says—and left it at a supermarket across town. On the morning of December 12 he phoned in the bomb threat. Once half the Augusta police force responded, they hit the bank, Levasseur, Manning, and Aceto charging inside, guns drawn, while Manning’s wife, Carol, stayed outside, driving the getaway car; it was the first and only time she would take part in one of the group’s actions. Levasseur and Aceto vaulted the counters and in less than a minute made it out the door with $12,000. They got away clean.

  Finally they had done something right. Fearing a police dragnet in Maine, they decided to relocate to New York City for a few weeks, taking an apartment on the Lower East Side and attending several parties packed with radicals. At one someone whispered that Bernardine Dohrn was in attendance. At a party at William Kunstler’s apartment, people said the SLA’s would-be memoirist, Jack Scott, was there. One evening Linda Coleman brought Levasseur to her family mansion on Long Island. He left shaking his head. He found the display of wealth obscene.

  They couldn’t decide what to do next. They needed more money, that much was clear. The three men—Levasseur, Manning, and Aceto—fell to arguing. Levasseur wanted time to plan, to look at banks and potential bombing targets. Manning wanted to rob a market they knew in Portland; Levasseur insisted that the target wasn’t properly revolutionary. Aceto argued for killing policemen. “Aceto just wanted to kill cops,” Levasseur recalls. “I got sick of it. We had some pretty intense arguments. We didn’t have enough money to mount a political action, and I was starting to sour on the idea of more expropriations. We had already done two, and where had that gotten us? I told them, ‘Before I’ll steal from some mom-and-pop store, I’ll find a job.’ That view was not always very popular.”

  They split up. Searching for a remote place to live, Levasseur drove his battered brown Chevy to the town of Calais, in far northern Maine on the Canadian border, where he rented a spartan apartment. He was soon joined by Pat Gros, who that January had given birth to their first child, a daughter they named Carmen. Ray missed the birth, but mother and child’s arrival in Calais made a deep impression on him. For the first time he had a family to support; after months of treating Gros as just another girl, he fell in love with her in those winter months in northern Maine, building her a kitchen table from two-by-fours and slow-dancing to the radio at night. He wrote her an impassioned letter to mark the beginning of their new family, in which he tried to explain his philosophy of “armed love.”

  To me you are just as much my sister—a comrade—a revolutionary—another young warrior to add to the voice—our voice—the voice of the oppressed. . . . My love is for the oppressed. Blacks, Browns, Native Americans, poor whites, rising women. With me it’s the mill workers, shoe shop workers, cleaning women, the millions of unemployed laborers. . . . Armed love [means] picking up the gun with one hand and reaching out to the oppressed people and fellow comrades with the other. . . . So—what I feel is what Comrade George Jackson called, “Perfect love, perfect hate, that’s the insides of me.” Love for the oppressed—death for the oppressor. . . . Armed love is deep and lasting and I will take it to the wall and beyond. I believe we can all be together and happy some day. Building the new life.

  Levasseur and Gros’s idyll in Calais was marred only by the arrival of the sullen Joey Aceto. When Levasseur took a construction job, he returned home most days to find Aceto swilling cheap wine, demanding they do something. Levasseur suggested that Aceto get a job; he wouldn’t. Finally, after papering over their differences with Tom Manning, everyone rendezvoused in Portland to organize the new cell. Linda Coleman showed up, as did a new recruit, a bushy-haired twenty-seven-year-old ex-con named Richard “Dickie” Picariello, who had been an inmate leader at Maine State Prison.

  In a series of meetings at a Ramada Inn outside the city, they chugged beers and debated everything: what to call themselves, what actions to mount, who would actually go underground. Eventually they decided to call themselves the Sam Melville Jonathan Jackson unit. As for actions, Picariello argued for prison breakouts and assassinations. Asked whom he wanted to kill, he mentioned utility executives who were raising electric rates, a suggestion that startled Coleman. “Dickie wanted to off Maine Power & Light officials because of rate hikes: I’m like, ‘What?’” she recalls. “I think that was the first time I began having second thoughts.”

  Levasseur’s argument, as usual, won the day. Like Weather and the FALN, they would attack symbols of the fascist U.S. government. The only question was whether to bomb empty buildings or full ones. The women, especially Gros and Carol Manning, argued for empty. But Levasseur would not be deterred. Anyone who got hurt, he announced, was “collateral damage” in their war against the government. The final step was the dynamite. Levasseur had no idea how to get some: Could they just buy it? He dispatched Coleman to a law library. She came back with bad news: Ex-cons couldn’t buy dynamite in Maine. They would have to steal it.

  After the last meeting, in March 1976, everyone scattered. Levasseur and Gros returned to Calais. Picariello promised to look into stealing dynamite but ended up buying fifty sticks instead, from an underworld contact in Portland. He and Aceto met Coleman in a crowded parking lot, where they opened the back of their battered station wagon and, with a flourish, pulled free a blanket to reveal the explosives. Stunned, Coleman hurriedly closed the car, fearing that someone would see. Her concerns grew as Picariello and Aceto downed beers on the long drive north. At one point she suggested that maybe she should drive. It was then she realized she couldn’t do this anymore. “Dickie and Joey were just too crazy,” she recalls. “They just seemed intent on doing whatever it took to get themselves thrown back into prison.”

  Back in Calais things quickly unraveled. Coleman read a letter of resignatio
n. The next morning Aceto stomped off to the bus depot and left for Portland. He cared little for bombings; he wanted to rob banks or kill cops. Levasseur didn’t bother attempting to dissuade Coleman, but losing Aceto was a risk: He might talk. They agreed to send Picariello to Portland to deliver a threat: If Aceto said anything about their plans, they swore to harm his family. In the event, Picariello and Aceto got to talking and ended up striking a deal. Picariello, who thought himself every bit as worthy a revolutionary leader as Levasseur, promised Aceto that if he would help him bomb something, Picariello would help him rob a bank. Maine would now have two genuine revolutionary cells; theirs, they decided, would be named the Fred Hampton unit, after the Panther leader killed in 1969.

  That left the Sam Melville Jonathan Jackson unit with precisely four members—Levasseur and Gros, Tom and Carol Manning—and fifty sticks of dynamite. The defections didn’t matter to Levasseur. He had read a Boston Globe article mentioning long lists of parolees kept at the Suffolk County Courthouse in Boston. If they could destroy those lists, he reasoned, the authorities would be powerless to keep track of thousands of ex-convicts. That, he announced to the group, was exactly the kind of place they should try to bomb.

  • • •

  To this day, Levasseur won’t discuss that first bombing, but he doesn’t deny that he planted the device. Building bombs was never hard for him; he had helped his grandfather blow up tree stumps as a boy, and with diagrams in the Dragon and other radical manuals he found it easy to hook the blasting caps to a tiny Westclox wristwatch. In time he became so expert he authored his own hundred-page manual.

  The bombing of the Suffolk County Courthouse on April 22, 1976, was a sensation throughout New England. News that twenty-two people had been injured, including the would-be cabdriver, Edmund Narine, stunned Boston. Coverage took up several full pages in the Globe. Afterward Governor Michael Dukakis made a televised address to deplore the attack, then, with the city’s mayor, led a march of thousands of citizens through the downtown area, dubbed a “procession against violence.” The injuries, and the reaction to them, left Levasseur and the others stunned.

  “There was time for them to clear the building, but they didn’t,” Levasseur says. “I was sick, all of us were, that we had hurt someone. Pat was really upset.” Recalls Pat, “I was just in shock. People were not supposed to get hurt. Everyone felt shitty.” She made Levasseur swear he wouldn’t hurt more people. He promised to try.

  That first SMJJ communiqué, mailed to a Boston alternative newspaper, struck the same melodramatic notes Levasseur used in his diary and his letters to Gros. “This is but the sound before the fury of those who are oppressed,” it began, going on to list a series of demands to reform prisons in Maine and Massachusetts. “We wish to make it clear at this time, that if these demands are not justly dealt with, there will be further attacks against the criminal ruling class.”

  Back in Portland, Dickie Picariello read reports of the bombing and knew it was Levasseur’s work. He wanted to bomb something, too. The problem was, Levasseur had his dynamite. Picariello telephoned Calais and begged for a few sticks, but Levasseur refused, insisting he didn’t have enough to share. Irked, Picariello took matters into his own hands. He and Aceto broke into an explosives warehouse in New Boston, New Hampshire, and stole fifteen cases of dynamite and blasting caps. On May 11 they walked into the headquarters of the Central Maine Power Company and wandered the halls until they found places to leave the two bombs they had managed to assemble. Afterward they called in a warning—the building was safely evacuated, and no one was hurt in the two explosions—and mailed a communiqué to the Augusta newspaper. Three days later they robbed a bank in the town of Orono.

  A bizarre competition thus developed between the two rival revolutionary cells. Levasseur struck next. Early on Monday, June 21, he left a small bomb in a grocery sack beside the front door of the Middlesex County Courthouse in Lowell, Massachusetts. It exploded at 6:16 a.m., showering a janitor with broken glass. They had called in a warning ahead of time, then made a second call to claim responsibility and direct police to a communiqué taped inside a pay phone in nearby Lawrence. It called for reforms at Tom Manning’s alma mater, the Walpole State Prison.

  In Boston FBI agents didn’t know what to think: In two short months New England had suffered three bombings from what appeared to be two separate groups. To confuse matters further, there was already a Sam Melville Jonathan Jackson unit in California, an offshoot of the New World Liberation Front. Reached by reporters, Jacques Rogiers claimed he was “ninety-nine percent certain” the Boston bombing had been done by an NWLF “combat unit.” Determined to sort things out, the FBI assembled a task force. They quickly picked up a tip that Dickie Picariello was involved.

  FBI agents began watching Picariello’s Portland apartment just as the strange contest between the two underground cells reached its climax. The occasion was Sunday, July 4, 1976, the American Bicentennial. Still working out of his apartment in northern Maine, Levasseur had an action scheduled, but it was Picariello and Aceto who planned something spectacular: a series of bombings of eight separate targets, including courthouses, post offices, and an Eastern Airlines passenger jet. The drama began early on the morning of Friday, July 2, when the two, along with another Maine ex-con, planted bombs at a National Guard Armory in Dorchester, Massachusetts, at the Essex County Superior Courthouse, and under an Eastern Airlines Electra prop jet at Boston’s Logan Airport. The plane was destroyed, the buildings were damaged, but no one was hurt. Agents watching Picariello’s flat inexplicably failed to see him leave.

  Nor did anyone see the trio of ex-cons later that Friday when, just before midnight, they detonated yet another bomb, outside the post office in Seabrook, New Hampshire, heavily damaging the building. But on the third night, the Saturday before Bicentennial Sunday, agents spotted Picariello, Aceto, and two partners as they left Portland, heading south. They followed the four to a state police barracks outside Topsfield, Massachusetts, where they watched as two men got out, apparently with bombs at the ready. When the agents moved in, Aceto led them on a high-speed chase, eventually losing control of his car and crashing into a stone wall. Inside agents found guns and forty-six sticks of dynamite, most of it rigged as bombs.* The others were arrested later.

  That same night Levasseur left a bomb outside a branch of the First National Bank of Boston in the town of Revere.* It blew up the next morning without incident, but such was the media furor over the Picariello-Aceto bombings and arrests, almost no one in New England noticed: The Globe gave the bombing a tiny story on an inside page. Levasseur was incensed, since his communiqué, the group’s third, marked a sharp change in their public face. For the first time he had put aside his calls for prison reform and, having studied and admired the FALN’s work, authored a florid call for Puerto Rican independence and the release of all Puerto Rican “political prisoners.” No one cared.

  His irritation, however, was quickly overcome by fear. It was only a matter of time, he knew, before Aceto talked. And so, picking up Gros and their baby, he and the Mannings did the only thing they could: They ran.

  • • •

  Their new home, the first of many to come, was a squalid flat in the New Hampshire village of Suncook. Levasseur took a midnight-shift job in a tannery, scraping and cleaning rancid, bloody cowhides. The Mannings found a place in Vermont. As yet, neither Levasseur nor Tom Manning had been identified publicly, but they knew that Joey Aceto was talking. FBI agents were fanning out to talk to everyone. Family. Friends. The SCAR people. The ex-cons. It was only a matter of time, Levasseur knew, before their faces would be staring out from the bulletin boards of every post office in New England. They were now cut off from anyone they had ever known.

  They were alone. From Debray’s and Marighella’s revolutionary texts Levasseur knew that his little group had fallen victim to every guerrilla cell’s main vulnerabilities: the danger of early days a
nd the danger of extreme isolation. He pored over his books to find out what to do. He started with identification, the foundation of every underground life. He had secured his first fake driver’s license in Calais, simply calling the motor vehicle bureau and asking for a duplicate in the name of a man he read had died in a motorcycle accident. It was easy: At the time Maine licenses didn’t have photos. The only problem was, the dead man had the wrong color eyes and happened to be three inches too tall. What they needed, Levasseur saw, was solid photo IDs, something to stand up to a policeman’s perusal. In Suncook he began doing as the Weathermen had: visiting courthouses to harvest the birth certificates of dead infants, then using them to secure Social Security cards and driver’s licenses. Gathering IDs, in fact, would become the one constant in their lives for years to come. When anyone in the group had spare time, they used it to “build ID.” Eventually Levasseur alone would build more than a dozen identities.

  With no hope of outside support, they began stockpiling materials for a life underground that would be self-sufficient and sustainable: programmable Bearcat scanners, one for each household and car, the better to monitor the police; more reliable cars, one for each of them, to replace the junkers everyone was driving; plus bulletproof vests, guns, ammunition, dynamite, and a place to store it all. Neither Levasseur nor Manning had anywhere near the money that was needed, nor was manual labor likely to raise it anytime soon, so after much agonizing, they decided to mount another expropriation. To prepare, Levasseur and Gros moved a second time, to an apartment in Manchester, New Hampshire. She found work as a waitress. He picked apples alongside Mexican migrant workers. He declines to identify the bank he and Manning robbed that fall, only saying that it was in Manchester. “I just walked into the place, by myself, with two guns, and I end up on the counter, covering the whole place myself,” Levasseur recalls. “Talk about vulnerable.” Manning drove the getaway car. They got away clean, with between $15,000 and $20,000.