Days of Rage

by Bryan Burrough

  So it was, on the cold morning of December 6, 1976, that a new underground group came into being. It didn’t yet have a name, only a mission. After spending the night at Odinga’s apartment, Shakur and his two partners drove their rental car into downtown Pittsburgh and parked a half block from the Mellon Bank. Pistols jammed inside their coats, Shakur and Ferguson took positions outside while Oliver lingered down the block. After ten minutes a truck from the Cauley Armored Car Service coasted to a stop in front of the bank. Inside the truck was $1.44 million in cash, proceeds from a Kaufmann’s department store. When the two guards climbed out, Shakur and Ferguson drew their pistols.

  At that point the robbery degenerated into black comedy. One of the guards fainted. The other followed orders and spread himself against the outer wall of the bank. They were just about to handcuff the two and rifle the truck when Ferguson, who had been suffering from back spasms all morning, was hit by another. For a moment he lost control of his arms and his gun went off. Before Shakur could do anything, a police car appeared. All three men panicked and ran. Ferguson made it only a few hundred feet before being felled by yet another back spasm. Oliver was tackled by a pair of detectives. Only Shakur escaped.*

  This was hardly the auspicious debut Shakur had hoped for. Afterward he pestered Odinga to help him, and in time Odinga relented—to a point. “The idea was, we would each recruit four to nine or whatever crew members, who would help do things, and from time to time we would do things together,” Odinga recalls. Each began with a single recruit. Odinga brought in Larry Mack, his old bank-robbing pal. Shakur recruited thirty-year-old Tyrone Rison, a onetime member of the Republic of New Afrika. A Vietnam vet who never lost his zeal for gunplay, Rison was a small man, five foot nine, earning him the nickname “Little Brother,” sometimes shortened to “L.B.”

  Rison led an unremarkable life. He had a wife and children, lived in Queens’s Rockaway neighborhood, and worked as a physical therapist. Still, hungry for action and wholly in agreement with Shakur’s revolutionary patter, he eagerly signed up for the group’s first expropriation. It came, of all places, at a meatpacking plant called the House o’ Weenies on East 138th Street in the Bronx, three blocks south of Lincoln Hospital. On May 26, 1977, Odinga and Rison barged into the plant’s business office, fired a few shots in the air, demanded and received an armload of cash, then dashed away, spilling bills behind them. Shakur, at Odinga’s insistence, waited in the getaway car.

  It was a start. For their next “action” Odinga identified a Citibank branch in the Westchester County suburb of Mount Vernon, just across the Bronx border. They cased the bank in detail. On October 19, Odinga and Mack burst inside, guns drawn, loudly announcing their intentions and ordering customers onto the floor. Running behind the teller cages, they relieved the cash drawers of $13,800. Then Rison, who had been waiting outside in a gray getaway van with Shakur, scrambled inside and yelled, “Let’s go!” It was their smoothest job yet.

  At that point not much about their crimes was revolutionary. There were no communiqués, no money given to the poor, no rhetoric whatsoever, in fact, except what they uttered among themselves. The FBI didn’t even know they existed. They were just stick-up men.

  • • •

  What transformed Mutulu Shakur’s motley crew of mock revolutionaries from a collection of armed robbers happy to hold up a House o’ Weenies into hard-core felons destined to commit the most outlandish crimes of the era was its incorporation of a small band of white radicals—all fleeing the wreckage of Weatherman and affiliated groups, all still ferociously committed to carrying out “the struggle,” and all but a handful, as it happened, women.

  This unlikely alliance began with Silvia Baraldini, the squat, prematurely gray radical who had risen from the Panther 21 defense committee to spearhead the Assata Shakur defense committee, assume a leadership position in the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee, and, after forcing its split in late 1976, co-found a new group, the May 19 Communist Organization.* May 19 began as a handful of women, no more than fifteen by Baraldini’s estimate, most of them living in Brooklyn. Several, including the ex-Weathermen Judy Clark and Susan Rosenberg, had lingered on the fringes of the underground for years before joining the PFOC. After the split, “we went back to New York and we were kind of lost,” Baraldini recalls. “We had never led organizations before. We were the rank and file. We had never done this. It took time to regroup.”

  Like Clayton Van Lydegraf and his Bay Area acolytes, a number of the May 19 women felt the seductive lure of the underground. It was Mutulu Shakur who made them see what a willing white woman could do for a black militant who couldn’t afford to draw attention to himself. Baraldini and Shakur had known each other for years, but in 1977 their relationship began to change. Shakur began dropping by her apartment late at night, talking revolutionary politics, sometimes taking her for drives; their discussion always turned to the need to lend a hand to oppressed African Americans.

  “It started out with him asking me for small favors,” Baraldini recalls. “I rented cars for him, I gave him money. They were little things, nothing really illegal. I perceived it as helping a friend.”

  Everything began to change one night in December 1977. Until that point Baraldini and the women of the May 19 Communist Organization, while committed to fighting racism and police brutality, hadn’t done much of anything. That evening was ostensibly a Kwanzaa party, in someone’s cramped Brooklyn apartment. But the true agenda revolved around a renowned radical the May 19 women had until recently known only by reputation: Marilyn Buck, famous in underground circles as the only white member of the BLA. It wasn’t entirely accurate—the BLA didn’t have any membership rolls—but in 1973 Buck had been convicted in a California federal court of illegally purchasing ammunition for the BLA, purportedly at the behest of Donald Cox, Eldridge Cleaver’s aide-de-camp. An attractive brunette, Buck was a Texas minister’s daughter who had emerged from SDS’s University of Texas chapter. While like-minded peers joined Weatherman, she headed instead to San Francisco, where she fell in with the Black Panthers and, later, the BLA. To hard-core militants who snickered at “toilet bombers” like Bernardine Dohrn, Buck was the genuine item, brave, resourceful, and utterly committed to the cause. One FBI agent called her “the white Joanne Chesimard.” “Marilyn was the queen,” recalls Elizabeth Fink, who was at the Kwanzaa party that night. “She was the white girl—the white girl of the BLA.”

  The California court sentenced Buck to ten years and sent her to the federal women’s prison in Alderson, West Virginia. In 1977, having served four years, she was granted a furlough and headed to New York, where she bunked with her lawyer, Susan Tipograph, and befriended Baraldini. By the night of the Kwanzaa party, word had spread through the radical women of May 19 that Buck had no intention of returning to prison.

  “I remember the discussion that night: Should Marilyn go back?” Baraldini recalls. “Marilyn was firm: She wasn’t going back. She needed protection. So some of us went along. We agreed to protect her. This was the first time any of us supported someone underground. That meant money, apartments, ID; we did all that for Marilyn. This was a very big deal. It was taking the step into the unknown, the point of no return. And it was one of the biggest mistakes we made. It eventually put the FBI onto us. She only had eighteen months [left in her sentence]. But we couldn’t say no. This was Marilyn Buck. We couldn’t say no.”

  Baraldini and her friends found Buck an apartment, the first of several she would use in the slums of East Orange, New Jersey. But Buck wanted more: She wanted to rejoin the underground. So Baraldini and Shakur arranged an introduction to the one man they all idolized, Sekou Odinga. “After Marilyn walked away from the joint,” Odinga recalls, “she told people she wanted to get involved with the struggle again. They reached out to people, who reached out to me.” They met at a hotel in the Washington, D.C., area. “We talked for about two or three hours,” Odinga continues. “S
he wanted to plug in. She made that clear. She gave me her history, the things she had done for the BLA, her understanding of the struggle, especially the African struggle. I kind of grilled her. I probably treated her unfairly. Her thing was, ‘Use me as you see fit.’ I was pleased with her answers. She passed.”

  With the emergence of Baraldini and Buck, Odinga and Mutulu Shakur saw the potential for bigger and better things. They now had something the BLA hadn’t had: an aboveground support network. They called it “the white edge.” The group had no official name. Unofficially some began calling it “the Family.”

  • • •

  As Mutulu Shakur’s band of armed robbers in the Bronx grew in confidence through the early months of 1978, the investigations into the FALN were going nowhere. None of the jailed suspects would say a word. Worse, on January 23 a judge freed Maria Cueto and her assistant, Raisa Nemikin. In May several other suspects, including the Chicano activist Pedro Archuleta and the Rosado brothers, were released; they posed on the steps of the Federal Courthouse, clenched fists raised.

  The FALN bombings, meanwhile, continued. On January 31, eight days after Cueto and Nemikin went free, two pipe bombs exploded in New York, one in a trash bin outside the Consolidated Edison building, the second beneath a police car five blocks north. No one was hurt; a caller took credit on behalf of the FALN. In the following days three more unexploded bombs were found, presumably intended to detonate along with the others. One was found by a group of boys in Harlem, who handed it to a passerby, who handed it to a construction worker, who helpfully disassembled it before handing it to a police officer.

  Three months later came a more ambitious set of attacks: simultaneous actions in New York, Chicago, and Washington. The date was May 22. At 9:40 a.m. a pipe bomb exploded in a trash can in front of the Justice Department in Washington; no one was hurt. Twenty minutes later tiny Ping-Pong-ball incendiaries burst into flames at shops inside all three major New York−area airports, Newark, LaGuardia, and JFK. An hour later, in Chicago, a caller from the FALN phoned in bomb threats at O’Hare Airport and an adjacent hotel; no bombs were found.

  FBI agents in all three cities scrambled to gather evidence and leads, but there was nothing to be learned. The FALN seemed able to strike anywhere, at any time, without interference. At the FBI offices on East Sixty-ninth Street, morale plunged to new lows. Then, after months without progress of any kind, things suddenly changed. It was a hot summer day, July 12, 1978. The call came from Queens.

  • • •

  Late that afternoon, in a fetid second-floor apartment on Ninety-sixth Street in the East Elmhurst section of Queens, the FALN’s main bomb maker, Willie Morales, hunched over a workbench building his fourth device of the day, a pipe bomb. It consisted of a single stick of dynamite, wrapped in its original red paper, which Morales carefully slid into a sixteen-inch length of pipe, finishing the bomb by screwing on a metal cap. He worked alone, drops of sweat rolling down his sides in the heat, the only sounds the salsa music blaring from cars outside.

  Morales was twenty-eight that day, a small, wiry man with unruly black curls. He liked to be called Guillermo. It had been eighteen months since his interview with FBI agents, who had dismissed him as a quiet, passive nobody. Like all his FALN brethren, he was an unlikely revolutionary. Morales had grown up in East Harlem and gone to college, earning a degree in film from the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan. He had worked a smattering of jobs: lab technician at the Department of Health, reading instructor at Public School 96, counselor for the Police Athletic League, lifeguard, even drug counselor in charge of referring addicts to drug treatment centers. Unlike the others, he wasn’t sought by police and thus had never gone underground. For several years, until he’d recently been laid off, he was a ticket agent for Trans World Airlines, usually working at its 2 Penn Plaza office.

  He had been working in this apartment for three months. Carlos Torres rented it for him. His only furniture was a thin cot by the front window, where he slept. It was a Hispanic neighborhood, where the pulsing rhythms of salsa and mariachi blared from car radios on those humid summer days. He fit in easily here; no one bothered him. In a rear closet he kept his materials: sixty-six sticks of dynamite, containers of black and smokeless gunpowder, plus sixty pounds of potassium chlorate, a chemical used in making explosives. Morales was especially adept at crafting the Ping-Pong-ball incendiaries the FALN liked to leave in Macy’s and Gimbels. He had hundreds of balls. The closet also held two M1 carbines, a .45-caliber semiautomatic rifle, and a sawed-off shotgun.

  As he worked Morales kept a homemade bomb-making manual beside him; its cover was adorned with the words IN THIS WE TRUST. Every bomb he made was exactly like its counterpart in the manual. Every single one detonated when the big hand on a wristwatch struck “9,” just like the bombs Ron Fliegelman built for the Weather Underground. All three of the bombs he had built that day were set to explode, presumably intended to be taken to their locations that evening.

  No one would ever figure out exactly what went wrong that sweltering day in the apartment on Ninety-sixth Street. What the FBI ultimately heard but could never confirm was that Torres had prepared the timer on that final pipe bomb and had made a mistake. The hour hand on the wristwatches had to be shaved smooth to insure proper detonation, and Torres, it was said, had whittled the wrong hand: not the hour hand but the minute hand. Thus when Morales set the bomb to go off in a matter of hours, he actually had only a matter of minutes.

  At 5:20, as Morales was screwing the metal cap onto that last bomb, it exploded in his hands. The boom could be heard up and down the street. The blast blew off most of Morales’s hands, sending his severed fingers zinging madly through the apartment. The metal cap he was holding rocketed into his chin, fracturing his jaw in at least five places, knocking out a number of teeth, ripping off his lips, and destroying his left eye; his face was a bloody mess. He must have been unconscious for a time, but if so, he quickly came to.

  It was at that point, after realizing he was still alive, that Willie Morales did several amazing things. Despite having nine of his fingers blown off—only his left thumb remained intact—and despite having dreadful burns across his face, he still had the strength and presence of mind to gather an armload of FALN documents, which he somehow lugged into the bathroom and began trying to flush down the toilet. He left a trail of blood the whole way. When the bathroom door closed behind him, he had to fight to reopen it, as evidenced by the bloody stump marks he left on it.

  Once the papers were flushed, Morales limped to the apartment door, locked it, then closed and locked each of the windows. Finally he went to the gas stove, blew out its pilot lights, and cranked the gas up to high—apparently twisting the knob with what remained of his mouth. Police sirens were already filling the air at that point. What Morales wanted, the FBI later surmised, was for the police to force their way into the apartment. Maybe an axe or a gun would do it, maybe the light switch. Whatever it was, he would need only the tiniest spark to ignite the gas spreading through the apartment. He was going to die, Morales suspected, but if so, he would take a dozen cops with him.

  Firefighters were the first to arrive, stomping up the stairs in their heavy boots. They used an axe to crash through the door. Luckily, nothing produced the spark Morales had hoped it would. Immediately the firemen smelled the gas and saw the blood—blood everywhere. Waving their arms to dissipate the gas, they entered the apartment and stepped to the front windows to release it, which is when they found Morales sprawled, barely alive, on his cot. This was no ordinary explosion, the firefighters saw. This was a matter for the police.

  Detectives from the NYPD’s bomb squad were among the next to arrive, walking in as attendants carried Morales on a stretcher to a waiting ambulance. As yet no one had a clue who he was, nor could they tell at a glance. By the time paramedics began swathing his arms and upper body in bandages, Morales’s head had swollen to the size of a basketbal
l.

  Don Wofford took the call a half hour after the blast; anytime anything blew up in New York City, the FBI agent got a call. He sent a half dozen agents to Queens, and one, Danny Scott, joined the NYPD’s William Valentine at Elmhurst General Hospital, where they found Morales lying on a gurney wrapped in bandages, a bloody mummy. Valentine had been working FALN bombings for years. Studying the man’s size and shape, he grabbed a tape measure and took his measurements. It was only a hunch, Valentine said, but he thought this might be Willie Morales.

  After a bit Morales was able to mumble a few words. He told doctors his name was “William” and gave an address for his next of kin. Agent Scott drove to the address in East Harlem, the same building, he realized, to which he had tailed Puerto Rican activist Dylcia Pagan several times. Inside, he climbed the stairs and knocked on an apartment door. Pagan answered. Scott asked whether William was home.

  “He’s out visiting a relative,” Pagan said. “Why?”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, I’m sure, why? Is something wrong?”4

  Scott explained about the man in the hospital. “We just wanted to be sure it wasn’t your William,” he said. Pagan turned pale. She said it couldn’t be her William, but Scott could see that it was. Later that evening she appeared at the hospital. Morales was considerably more pleasant to her than he had been to Detective Valentine. Alluding to the bombed-out apartment, Valentine asked, “What happened in there?”

  From beneath his bandages Morales managed a mumbled reply: “Fuck you. Fuck yourself.”

  Valentine just smiled. “Fuck me?”

  “Fuck yourself.”

  “It’s you that are fucked, pal,” Valentine said. “You’ll be wiping your ass with your elbows.”5