Days of Rage

by Bryan Burrough

  The next step was to secure a new source of dynamite; the old sticks were starting to sweat, and Levasseur worried that they might be unstable. And so, shortly after midnight on November 10, 1976, the two men found themselves crawling on their bellies through a field outside the town of Bow, New Hampshire, wearing backpacks laden with pistols and hacksaw blades. Their target was McGoldrick Mine and Quarry Supply. They sawed through a fence and made off with a hundred pounds of dynamite sticks.

  Levasseur then rented the first of a series of safe-house apartments the group would use, this one in Nashua, New Hampshire. They stored the dynamite there, and many of their guns, along with notes Levasseur had begun compiling on prospective bombing targets. They changed the locks and sprinkled talcum powder inside the door when they left, the better to see whether anyone had entered in their absence. Finally, on December 12, a month after the dynamite theft, they left a large, twenty-stick bomb outside a Union Carbide building in Needham, Massachusetts. Levasseur called in the warning, then a later claim of credit, but to his dismay the bomb failed to explode. Newspaper coverage the next day carried the first public identification of Levasseur and Tom and Carol Manning, who had been indicted on the 1975 bank jobs.

  Fearing pursuit, Levasseur had everyone move yet again, this time to the Connecticut mill town of New Britain, southwest of Hartford. Gros and Levasseur rented an apartment above a Puerto Rican social club; the Mannings, one nearby. The men took construction jobs. Gros found work as a temp; Carol Manning babysat. Levasseur and Tom Manning began taking weekend trips to reconnoiter targets, driving their own cars and communicating via walkie-talkie. After several months Levasseur found the next target: a W. R. Grace chemical factory in Marlboro, Massachusetts. Grace had been accused of exploiting its Latin American workers, and the building was barely ten miles from the town of Clinton, where President Carter was holding a town hall meeting that March. Levasseur built the bomb, a large one, and left it outside the plant gate on the evening of March 12, 1977. It blew up at 8:24, shattering more than a hundred windows. Afterward they called in credit to United Press International, directing police to a communiqué slipped inside a Boston phone booth. Not till later that day, however, did they learn that while the W. R. Grace logo adorned the factory, Grace had sold it nine years before. They had inadvertently bombed the Ideal Roller and Graphics Company, which made printing presses. “We screwed up there,” Levasseur recalls. “That was pretty stupid.”

  Between actions, life for the couples began to slow in New Britain. Their various fake IDs held up; there was no sense that the authorities had their scent. Gros made friends at her office job, and for the first time she and Levasseur found themselves nervously attending the odd office party. She and Carol Manning did their best to construct the illusion of domesticity. Gros baked bread and made maple syrup. Carol refused to participate in any more actions; like Pat, she felt that raising her child—two-year-old Jeremy—was far more important than what they always euphemistically called their “political work.”

  The fear and chaos brought on by Joey Aceto’s betrayal—he had, in fact, given the FBI chapter and verse—was slowly receding. Levasseur was still working at New Britain construction sites that May when, as he was sipping coffee at his boss’s house one morning, the telephone rang. It was Gros. “Have you seen this morning’s paper?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “You need to see it right away.”

  Levasseur hung up, made an excuse, and walked to a convenience store to buy the New Britain newspaper. Deep on an inside page he was startled to see an old photo of himself. Beneath it was a news story: The FBI had just named him one of America’s ten most wanted criminals. Fighting panic, he saw that it was a bad photo. Taking a deep breath, he returned to his boss’s house, then did a full day’s work. When he came home that night, he found Gros packing.

  They moved to the neighboring city of Waterbury, the Mannings following close behind, where they rented another tiny apartment. The men found new construction jobs. Not long after arriving, Pat Gros discovered she was pregnant again. For reasons she only dimly understood, she was swept by waves of relief. “I was in denial a lot of the time, pretending that none of this was real,” she recalls today. “I only figured out years later why I kept getting pregnant, and why it made me so happy. It was the only way I had to not get more involved. If I was pregnant, they couldn’t ask me to rob a bank.”

  Pat seldom shared her doubts with Ray, but it was clear both she and Carol Manning were at best ambivalent about their lives underground. A rare airing of these feelings occurred in Waterbury. As Pat recalls, “Tommy came to me and said, ‘Carol’s been talking, she doesn’t want to do this anymore.’ He had a question about how effective we were being. I said, ‘Well, yeah, look outside. There’s not a lot of people wanting a revolution. There’s nobody.’ And he said, ‘Do you think this is even worth doing?’ I had to admit, I agreed with him.”

  They knew what Levasseur would say, but they talked to him anyway, and to their relief he kept his temper. He pointed out the obvious, that if they quit living underground, he and Manning faced years in prison.

  Still, that lingering skepticism within the group, the sense that maybe their lives underground really were as futile as they sometimes seemed, contributed to a pause in their “political work.” After the W. R. Grace bombing in Marlboro that March, Levasseur and Manning carried out no more bombings in 1977. Expropriations were too risky with only two of them, and by that fall the money again began to run low. Then, around Thanksgiving, Levasseur was laid off. He found a job installing security systems and enjoyed it, until he realized he was leaving his fingerprints at homes all over Waterbury; if even one was burglarized, detectives might find his prints and discover he was in the area. He quit the job, and by that winter both men were out of work. Their savings fell so low the Mannings reluctantly moved into Levasseur and Gros’s apartment, four adults now, with two small children to raise. Gros was due in March.

  Despite the long months of inactivity, Levasseur clung to his dream of reopening a revolutionary front in New England. His plans, in fact, were growing more ambitious. If they were to thrive as an underground cell and placate the women’s concerns about endangering the children, they needed to physically separate their family and revolutionary lives. What they needed was a permanent safe house, a place he and Manning could store dynamite and guns and plan their actions; the Nashua flat had long since been vacated. Once a safe house was established, the couples could move far away, returning to it only to carry out actions. The plan, however, would take money, and everyone knew what that meant: another bank robbery. The women didn’t want to hear it, but Levasseur was adamant. He’d had an epiphany, he said. It had come that fall while working construction.

  Levasseur remembers the day clearly, almost forty years later. He had been digging a hole at a construction site, and with his foot still on the shovel, he had glanced up and seen a Brink’s truck coasting to a stop at a bank across the street. Asking his boss for a moment, he had walked across to the bank and followed the two couriers as they lugged bags of cash inside. Standing in the lobby, he studied how the manager took the cash bags and slid them back toward the vault after a bit of chitchat with the couriers. The manager had finally strolled to the barred door outside the vault, unlocked it, and lugged the bags inside—but not, Levasseur could see, into the vault itself. The money just sat on the floor for a half hour, until a teller moved it inside. In that delay Ray saw an opportunity. If they could hit a bank as cash bags were being delivered but before they were stored in a vault, they could be in and out in under a minute. With hundreds of thousands of dollars. Even with only two of them, the idea seemed too enticing not to try.

  All that winter Levasseur and Manning followed Purolator and Brink’s trucks through the snow-clogged streets of Waterbury, studying and memorizing their routes. They settled on a target, a branch of the Banking Center on
Piedmont Street, but by the time they were ready to move, it was already February. Gros was now eight months pregnant; the idea of her children’s father staging an armed bank robbery on the eve of childbirth did not sit well with her. “There were several emotional discussions about that, whether to do the bank before or after the baby came,” Levasseur recalls. As usual, he won the debate.

  A massive blizzard, the largest to hit Waterbury in forty years, pushed the bank job back still further. Gros was entering her ninth month when the men finally made their move, on a snowy Thursday morning, March 2, 1978. Just before 10:00, minutes after they watched a Brink’s truck deliver several large bags of cash, they burst into the bank. Both wore multicolored ski masks, Levasseur cradling a pistol, Manning a shotgun as he guarded the door. “Everybody down! Everybody down on the floor!” Levasseur hollered at the ten employees and customers. He hurdled the teller counter and strode to the open vault, where he easily scooped up several bags of cash lying on the floor. Both men then ran back outside, circling into a rear parking lot, where their stolen getaway car, a green Ford station wagon, sat idling. They were in and out in less than two minutes. The next day’s newspaper called it “a smooth operation done by professionals.”*1

  In fact, it was perfect. When they emptied the Purolator bags, Levasseur and Manning were stunned to realize they had made off with more than $55,000 in cash—and established the template for every robbery to come. Within days the two couples cleared out of their cramped apartment, decamping to new homes Gros found for them in Derby, a village near New Haven. Levasseur and Gros, now posing as Jack and Paula Horning, rented the second story of a duplex on Mount Pleasant Street. A month to the day after the robbery, Gros, with the help of a midwife, gave birth to her second child, Simone.

  For the first time in two long years, the couples were truly able to relax. Levasseur and Gros bought a dog, a German shepherd they named Rocky, who would be with them until the end. Gros, who had injured her knee in a car accident years before, was finally able to go in for surgery; afterward she hobbled around on crutches. No longer needing to work, Levasseur took the summer to play househusband, spending long hours quieting little Simone, who was colicky. In his spare time he drove into New Haven and found a tattoo artist who, for a little extra cash, promised discretion. Levasseur sat for sixteen hours as she painstakingly covered his two large tattoos, a Panther on his left arm with the word LIBERATION and a dragon on his right arm.

  Once settled in Derby, Levasseur was able to establish the long-planned operational headquarters for the Sam Melville Jonathan Jackson unit in an apartment back in New Britain, the first of a series of Connecticut safe houses he would maintain in the months to come. The location was ideal, midway between the target-rich suburbs of New York and Boston, where he was planning their next bombings. They bought a table and chairs from the Salvation Army, plunked them down in the kitchen, and threw two mattresses in the bedroom. When they were done, Levasseur grinned, turned to Manning, and said, “Money changes everything. Ain’t America grand?” Not long after, on the evening of October 27, 1978, the two carried out their first action in eighteen months, detonating two large bombs simultaneously outside Mobil Oil offices in Waltham and Wakefield, Massachusetts. Damage was minimal. The communiqué, which once again called for Puerto Rican independence, was left in a Cambridge phone booth.

  Levasseur felt fulfilled: It was good to be back at work. Only one incident, in fact, marred their months in Derby. Gros and their teenaged babysitter—a new luxury, courtesy of the Waterbury bank—were driving to the grocery store when Gros took a turn too sharply and slid into a ditch. A tow truck extracted them, but a policeman appeared and took down Gros’s registration and license. Worried about angering Levasseur, she didn’t tell him. When he heard of the accident from the babysitter, he flew into a rage, insisting that Gros tell him again and again exactly what had happened. Neither could see any chance of exposure. He reminded her to change her license immediately.

  Once her knee healed, they set in motion phase two of Levasseur’s plan. To insulate their family lives from their “political” work, the couples decided to split up. Levasseur and Gros would move to Vermont, the Mannings to eastern Pennsylvania, where they had lived before moving to Maine. They established a new safe house, in a small apartment in New Haven, just off the Yale University campus. To stay in touch, Levasseur and Manning identified a series of pay phones and set a schedule of regular calls. When it was time to do underground work, they would meet in New Haven.

  Once everything was set, Levasseur and Gros rented a house outside Rutland, Vermont, but after a few months they decided they wanted something more isolated. What they found, in the spring of 1979, was a remote farmhouse on a pond in far northeastern Vermont, adjacent to their new landlord’s dairy pasture. The house was barely habitable, with no insulation and only a single woodstove for heat. During their first winter there Levasseur was forced to line the house’s interior with bales of hay and cover the walls with plastic; it still took ten cords of wood to get them through to spring. Still, they loved it. There was a swing set out back for the girls and, to Levasseur’s delight, a concrete bomb shelter on the land where he could store his dynamite.

  Even better, Vermont’s “Northeast Kingdom” was teeming with counterculturists, many of them aging radicals like themselves, and for the first time since going underground, the couple, now posing as the Boulette family, were able to enjoy something like a social life. They made friends and cooked outdoors and went to county fairs. “I felt so comfortable there,” Pat recalls. “Everyone was like us. All the people in communes, the bookstores, health stores. It was a beautiful place, and for the first time we could be ourselves, as much as possible. It wasn’t like America, you know? And not a lot of cops.”

  Best of all, Levasseur agreed to take some time off from underground work after one final action. The bombing, on February 27, 1979, was their most ambitious to date. The target was a Mobil Oil regional headquarters in Eastchester, in New York’s Westchester County. Ray built the bomb into an attaché case, then donned a business suit, walked into the building, and left the case in a third-floor bathroom. A receptionist took the warning call at 3:30 p.m., while the building was full of people. Ray warned that a bomb was set to go off in one hour.

  “We are retaliating for the imprisonment and/or torture of Puerto Ricans by the Mobil Oil Company,” he said.

  “Who are you?” the receptionist asked.

  Ray decided to throw the authorities a curve, posing as the FALN. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “When we bombed Mobil Oil in New York there were people killed. Get the people out of the building.”

  The building was safely evacuated just as the bomb exploded, wrecking much of the third floor. No one was hurt. The communiqué, left in a Manhattan phone booth, said the attack commemorated the 1954 Puerto Rican nationalist attack on the U.S. House of Representatives.

  Safely back in Vermont, Levasseur returned to his life as husband and father. He found a job as a housepainter, then as a lumberjack. “We wanted a little sabbatical, which can be the kiss of death for a foco,” he recalls. “Marighella says the duty of every revolutionary is to create a revolution. But the duty of a revolutionary with two kids is to bring home a paycheck and support his family, too.”

  For a solid year, in fact, the men did no real underground work—no bombings, no bank robberies. Instead, they intermittently rendezvoused in New Haven and from there embarked on long reconnaissance trips, scouting and mapping corporate headquarters, military installations, and courthouses across the Northeast, from Boston all the way south to Philadelphia, Levasseur sitting for hours outside a munitions factory or National Guard armory, tracing maps of the building, its highway approaches, and any guards in a notebook.

  The women silently hoped their men would never return to underground work. There would be no revolution, they knew. A new decade was dawning, the 1980s; the ver
y idea of a revolution seemed ridiculous now. Levasseur and Manning, however, would not be dissuaded. They had been through too much, sacrificed too much, to give up now. The time would come, Levasseur told Gros in bed at night, when they would recruit new members and launch attacks more daring than anything they had attempted before. She listened and nodded, hoping the day would never come.

  Gros gave birth to their third child, a daughter they named Rosa, in March 1980. Down in Pennsylvania, Carol Manning soon was pregnant again as well. As each new day passed without a bombing or bank robbery, both women came to believe that their lives in anonymity might last forever.

  But it was not to be. One morning that summer Gros drove into the Vermont village of St. Johnsbury to buy groceries. At one point as she walked the aisles, she felt eyes on her. She glanced up and noticed, to her amazement, just across the store, a familiar face. A tall woman, attractive, dark hair. It took a moment for the name to register: Sally Stoddard. She had worked in the prison-reform movement. Gros remembered her from a conference years before.

  Her heart raced. She willed herself to finish the shopping, to appear normal. As she finally headed for the checkout, she felt sure Stoddard was following her. As the girl totaled up her groceries, Gros had the panicky thought that Stoddard would approach her. She must know they were underground. She wouldn’t risk it. Would she?

  She didn’t. Gros hustled to her car, tossed in the groceries, and drove quickly home, where Levasseur was waiting. It was then that everything began to change.

  Part Four