Days of Rage

by Bryan Burrough

  Back at the apartment detectives and FBI agents busied themselves snapping photographs and combing through the debris. The bomb squad gingerly wrapped the three remaining pipe bombs in bomb blankets, then drove to a police range in the Bronx and detonated them in a pit. FBI agents fanned out to interview neighbors. All four of the wanted FALN members—Carlos and Haydee Torres, Oscar López and his companion, Lucy Rodriguez—were identified as visitors to the apartment.

  Late that night, as agents and detectives continued studying the apartment on Ninety-sixth Street, Ping-Pong balls burst into flames at Macy’s and a Korvette’s store in Manhattan. The next day an FALN communiqué was delivered to the United Press office; it was identical to one found in the apartment. In the following days, as Morales was arraigned and indicted on explosives charges, the apartment began to yield an abundance of clues. One of the rifles had been reported stolen by a Chicano activist the FBI had been investigating in Denver. Best of all, the wreckage of Morales’s workbench revealed a small Gestetner copier. It turned out to be the same machine Maria Cueto had purchased for the NCHA in September 1974, four months before the Fraunces Tavern bombing, and an FBI analysis indicated that it had been used to produce the five-star FALN logo atop the Fraunces communiqués.

  At their desks on Sixty-ninth Street, Don Wofford and Lou Vizi felt that the pieces were finally coming together. They searched Pagan’s apartment, found some FALN literature, and had her brought before the grand jury to provide fingerprints and voice samples. Pagan got the subpoena suspended after claiming she was pregnant with Morales’s child, as in fact she was. She would give birth the following spring.

  As the investigation progressed, Morales was shuttled among Kings County Hospital, the Rikers Island jail, and Bellevue Hospital. Claiming he was a prisoner of war, he refused to say much more than “fuck you” to detectives. Three radical lawyers took his case, and they peppered a judge with all manner of motions, including a request that Morales be treated according to the Geneva Convention, then “turned over to military authorities” and “removed to a neutral country.” They complained incessantly about the quality of his care, saying he had been denied the right to artificial limbs. Hospital officials insisted they planned to make them once he was healthy. Finally, in January 1979, Morales’s attorneys filed their most unusual challenge. In a lawsuit they alleged that police had “illegally confiscated” his severed fingers. The police had taken the fingers as evidence. Morales complained that they should have been sewed back on.

  • • •

  All through 1978, as Mutulu Shakur’s band of revolutionary bank robbers added new members and ambitions, Shakur’s base at Lincoln Detox in the South Bronx came under increasing pressure from city regulators. The trouble had been building for years. The city’s Addiction Services Agency (ASA), which nominally ran the clinic, had cut off all funding in 1973 when Detox refused to provide census data or treatment records to justify it. But the clinic still received money from a separate city agency, the Health and Hospitals Corporation (HHC). Thus one agency, ASA, had oversight but no leverage to enforce it, and a second, HHC, handed over money with little supervision. Neither had the power to rein in the clinic’s director, Luis Surita, who found it easy to strong-arm both agencies even when improprieties surfaced.

  And surface they did. A 1973 ASA audit found that Detox was treating barely half the number of drug addicts its contract specified. Another noted that its treatments were four times more expensive than those at other city clinics. An HHC review in 1976 found nearly $1 million in unsubstantiated payroll, along with phenomenal absentee rates among staff members, as high as 71 percent in some cases; only half of forty-five paid staffers were on duty one day when HHS auditors arrived. The staff, meanwhile, charged the clinics for thousands of dollars of personal phone calls. In 1977, when HHC demanded the clinic’s personnel records, it simply refused, claiming the records were private. That December, when a federal grand jury investigating kickback schemes subpoenaed records on thirty-six patients, one of the clinic’s doctors refused and moved to quash the subpoena.

  As New York City sagged into the worst fiscal crisis in its history, neither its beleaguered mayor, Abe Beame, nor any of his subordinates could summon the will to do battle with the clinic’s angry radicals, who increasingly operated as an independent entity unanswerable to any authority. Every year or two either ASA or HHC would make noises about evicting Detox from the hospital. Time and again the staff organized angry protests in response. In the worst, in 1975, a group of Detox staffers stormed HHC’s downtown Manhattan offices and barricaded themselves inside while they smashed furniture and windows in the president’s anteroom. After that HHC officials appeared notably reluctant to confront the clinic.

  That attitude disappeared abruptly in January 1978, when New York welcomed a new mayor, the feisty Ed Koch, who was sick and tired of radicals abusing city resources. Teamed with a media-friendly assemblyman named Charles Schumer (later the New York senator), Koch was unafraid of the denizens of Lincoln Detox and determined to put them out of business. “Hospitals are for sick people, not thugs,” he groused in the Times. Detox officials, the mayor recalled years later, “ran it like Che Guevara was their patron saint, with his pictures all over the wall. It wasn’t a hospital. It was a radical cell.” The clinic’s leaders, including Shakur, were determined to fight. When city officials called a meeting to discuss closing the clinic, one staffer declared, “I don’t work for you. I work for the people of the South Bronx.” When HHS officials told Surita that it intended to evict Detox from Lincoln Hospital, Surita retorted, “War is declared—cold war for now.”6

  For all the bravado, Koch smashed Lincoln Detox like a clove of garlic. As night fell on November 28, 1978, he had HHC’s president, Joseph Lynaugh, summon Surita, Shakur, and ten other staffers to his downtown office at 125 Worth Street. When Shakur attempted to explain that the clinic was run by a socialist collective, Lynaugh cut him off. Almost everyone in attendance was being reassigned, Lynaugh announced, except for Surita; Lynaugh fired him on the spot. As the president spoke, the second part of Koch’s plan was unfurling in the Bronx. A large group of uniformed police officers surrounded Lincoln Hospital and blocked every exit but that of the emergency room. Determined to physically evict the staff, they came armed with wire cutters, sledgehammers, and crowbars.

  At 8:00 p.m., his meeting completed, Lynaugh appeared among the officers. Flanked by the mayor’s press secretary and sundry other city officials, he ordered the two dozen Detox staffers on duty that night to leave immediately. Outnumbered, they complied. The Young Lord leader Mickey Melendez trudged out carrying a basket of personal items. Mutulu Shakur drove up at one point and, seeing that resistance was futile, boiled in anger. The clinic was closed, then reopened under a new name and under strict city control several blocks away. Shakur quit. A number of staffers sued, to no effect. Lincoln Detox’s days as a radical haven were over.

  Shakur found himself without a job, but where his fellow staffers lined up outside unemployment offices, he turned to area banks. The gang he had formed with Sekou Odinga had carried out only one armed robbery in the previous year, at a Chase Manhattan branch in Greenwich Village, but in the wake of Lincoln Detox’s closing both the frequency and ambition of these “actions” would rise sharply. It was then that Shakur’s “white edge”—Marilyn Buck and Silvia Baraldini—began to play significant roles in the group’s bank robberies.

  “There was an acceleration, yes,” remembers Baraldini. “You know, when you showed you were willing to go to the next level, the requests never stop. What help you could give, you give it. It was hard to say no. For me, the eureka moment was one day [Mutulu] said, you need to be at a certain corner, you open the trunk and put us in and drive away. I don’t remember the corner, the car, or even the year. I was scared shitless. But I did it. That was when I realized this was not just renting cars. This was when I realized what he was doing.” It
was around that point, Baraldini says, that she asked her May 19 comrades, Judy Clark and Susan Rosenberg, to help out. Both agreed.

  “First we did very precise things that were useful, and we did them because we were white,” Baraldini continues. “Cars, research. The most important thing was ID. We could buy the special cameras necessary to make it. We could do that with ease, and we did. A white girl like me does that, and no one looks twice. But a black man?”

  Thirty-five years later, asked why she joined Shakur and Odinga in their bank robberies, Baraldini folds her hands and heaves a deep sigh. “We had developed a whole political vision of the U.S., how change would come to the U.S., that this involved the blacks getting their own nation. We thought we were helping people to promote that vision. It’s unrealistic, yes, but we believed it. Also, I felt we were rectifying a long history of white people using black people in the U.S., going back to the Civil War. We really thought we were redressing that in some way. That was very important to us, too. There was also a question of resources. They were going to use the money to help the black community, and they did. Or at least I thought they did.”

  “Sounds crazy, right?” asks Elizabeth Fink. “Let me tell you, it was crazy then, too. These people, Judy and Silvia, they were driven crazy by their commitment to the blacks. It was like a cult. The question was, how crazy could you be?”

  At first only Buck took part in the actual robberies. The first took place at the Livingston Mall in suburban New Jersey, a half hour west of the Holland Tunnel. On December 19, 1978, three weeks after Lincoln Detox’s closing, Shakur and the gang’s three other gunmen drove into the mall parking lot in a stolen Chevrolet Caprice station wagon. Buck followed in a gray van she had rented in the adjacent town of Millburn. Around 10:00 a.m. Odinga and Shakur wandered into the Bamberger’s department store; Shakur was wearing a long black leather coat that concealed a walkie-talkie. A saleswoman noticed him strolling through boys’ wear, seemingly talking to himself. Odinga, meanwhile, nosed through infant apparel. At one point he approached a saleslady and pleasantly asked, “What size does a seven-year-old wear?”

  At about 10:15 a Coin Deposit Corporation armored car pulled up outside the store. Two armed guards emerged, one rolling a hand truck. Inside the store, Shakur, Odinga, and Larry Mack followed as the guards ascended an escalator toward the second-floor business office. Once the guards disappeared into the office, however, Mack became nervous and began edging away. Shakur was trying to lure him back when the guards reemerged, a brown duffel bag piled onto the hand truck. Odinga pulled his pistol and shouted, “This is a holdup! Nobody moves!”

  One guard went for his gun but stopped when Shakur ran toward him, waving a pistol of his own. “On the floor! On the floor!” Shakur shouted. Both guards complied. At that point Larry Mack began walking toward the escalator. “Come back here!” Shakur shouted at Mack. “Come back here now!” Mack stepped back for a moment, then ran down the escalator all the way to the getaway car, where Tyrone Rison was waiting. When their two comrades didn’t reappear after several minutes, Rison forced Mack to scramble back inside to see what was wrong. He found Shakur and Odinga hunched over the two prone guards, trying in vain to get handcuffs around their ankles. The cuffs were too small.

  They left the guards as they were, then pushed the hand truck down the escalator and out to the car. In the duffel bag was $200,000 in cash. Rison drove to a rendezvous point, abandoning the stolen car, and the four men climbed into Marilyn Buck’s waiting van, which had been legitimately rented and thus was unlikely to draw the attention of pursuing police. Buck drove them back across the George Washington Bridge to a safe-house apartment they had rented just over the Bronx border in the suburb of Mount Vernon. It was their smoothest and by far most lucrative robbery to date, and Buck had acquitted herself with aplomb.

  The Family was ready for bigger things. Marilyn Buck, having spent time in prison herself, had a special affinity for those behind bars. That fall she drew up a list of underground figures they might help escape. At the top of the list was none other than Willie Morales, who went on trial in a Queens courtroom in early 1979. Found guilty, he appeared for sentencing April 20. An unruly crowd, packed with policemen, FBI agents, and dozens of Puerto Rican, black, and white radicals, jammed the courtroom. Shoving matches broke out. The NYPD’s William Valentine escorted Morales out of the courtroom. At one point Morales looked Valentine in the eye and said, “You’re a dead man.”

  Morales was taken to Bellevue, where he was given a cell in the third-floor prison ward as he waited for doctors to finally install the artificial hands he had been demanding. Ahead stretched years, maybe decades, behind bars. To all appearances, Willie Morales’s career as a Puerto Rican revolutionary tilting against the imperialist yanquis was over. In fact, it was only beginning.

  21

  JAILBREAKS AND CAPTURES

  The Family and the FALN, 1979−80

  Even today, more than thirty-five years later, no one outside the FALN or the Family knows precisely how they did it or even who took part. But the planning, it was clear, had taken weeks, and few of the policemen and FBI agents who later investigated the plot to rescue Willie Morales had any doubt that it was spearheaded by Marilyn Buck, Sekou Odinga, and the FALN. Silvia Baraldini, while declining to discuss details, confirms that she received a “formal” request for aid from the FALN. “We were asked to do this one aspect, to bring in the tools,” she says. “We were white, and women, so of course we could do this on our own. And we did.”

  Another key participant, it’s been suggested, was the radical attorney Susan Tipograph, who represented not only Marilyn Buck but Willie Morales. Tipograph, it should be emphasized, was never charged in the case and has always denied any involvement. But prosecutors would later file affidavits that would strongly imply that it was she who smuggled the wire cutters to Morales.

  At the time, May 1979, Morales was being held in the third-floor prison ward at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan. Tipograph visited regularly. All visitors were required to be searched, but as federal prosecutors noted in a court filing four years later, “Tipograph became increasingly vehement that the attorney-client privilege protected her from a search by correction officers. On one occasion, when correction officers denied her request to be exempted from a search, she surrendered a knife only after repeated questioning.”

  According to prosecutors, on the evening of Friday, May 18, Tipograph arrived on the third floor and again objected when officers asked to search her. This time, for whatever reason, they relented. She was not searched, nor was her bag, nor was she made to walk through a metal detector. Somehow, at some point after this visit, Morales came into possession of a fourteen-inch pair of wire cutters. He hid them with the assistance of another prisoner, who helped him tie a series of shoelaces around his waist. To this he attached a small hook. When Morales placed the wire cutters on the hook, they dangled between his legs, unnoticeable under his bathrobe.

  Over the next two nights Morales, working only with the stumps of his hands, used the wire cutters to clip through the wire of the metal grate that covered his cell window. None of the six guards saw or heard a thing as he worked. Then, at 2:30 a.m. on May 21, a Monday, Morales asked to go to the bathroom. The officer responsible for him, Thomas Ryan, led him to the toilet and back. At some point after that, Morales finished cutting a one-foot-square hole in his window grate. Then he raised the window and punched out its screen.

  Forty feet below, stationed at positions up and down a courtyard that stretched along the building, stood several members of the Family, perhaps as many as a dozen. The only one who ever confirmed his involvement, in a later interview with the FBI, was Tyrone Rison, the Vietnam veteran known as “L.B.,” who said he guarded one end of the alley with an assault rifle. Marilyn Buck was almost certainly there. They had a ladder and placed it against the redbrick wall beneath Morales’s window.

  By
that point Morales had unfurled a ten-foot-long, flesh-colored bandage, tied one end to his bed, and tossed the other end out into the cool night air. It wouldn’t reach down to the ladder, but it was the best Morales could muster. Somehow he wriggled through the hole he had cut. Then—and this was the part that flummoxed everyone afterward—the man with no fingers used the bandage as a rope to lower himself down the side of the building. He had wet the bandage to strengthen it, but in a matter of moments it snapped. FBI agents later surmised that he fell twenty feet onto a window-mounted air-conditioning unit below, which showed a sizable dent afterward; Morales would later blame the fall for minor kidney damage he suffered. He landed on the dewy grass below, leaving two deep footprints in the turf.

  No one had heard or seen a thing; Officer Ryan, his supervisors later alleged, slept through the entire escape. One imagines that Morales exchanged a series of quick, elated hugs with his rescuers, who quickly slid him into a waiting car. By the time guards finally noticed his disappearance, an hour after dawn, Willie Morales was safely tucked away inside Marilyn Buck’s small safe-house apartment in East Orange, New Jersey, an hour’s drive west, eager to rejoin his comrades in the FALN.*

  • • •

  From the FBI’s Sixty-ninth Street offices to City Hall to the Department of Correction, official New York was thunderstruck by the brazen escape. HANDLESS TERRORIST ESCAPES, proclaimed the Post headline. How on earth had a one-eyed man with no hands managed to cut his way out of a cell and shimmy down the side of a building? How had he gotten the wire cutters? Above all, why hadn’t anyone noticed? Below Morales’s window police found a broken stretch of bandage, a pair of hospital slippers, and Morales’s glasses. The wire cutters had been left on the floor of the cell. As officers fanned out across the city in a fruitless manhunt, the city’s corrections commissioner, William J. Ciuros Jr., stepped before the microphones at City Hall, admitted “there was sloppiness on our part,” and announced that Officer Ryan was being suspended for “negligence in permitting the escape.” Three months later Ciuros himself and several of his aides were fired.