Days of Rage

by Bryan Burrough

  No one knew that the FALN was behind the botched raid. Its failure did nothing to dissuade Oscar López. His next move, in fact, turned out to be the group’s most ambitious to date. It happened on the morning of Saturday, March 15, 1980, two months after the Oak Creek raid. A few minutes after 9:00 three men and a woman dressed in ski parkas—their identities were never revealed—walked into an office building on Fifty-ninth Street in Midtown Manhattan, just off Park Avenue. Ignored by security guards, they headed to the elevators, pressed “9,” and a few moments later emerged outside offices housing the New York City campaign headquarters of the Republican presidential candidate George Bush, who was locked in a primary duel with Ronald Reagan. Bush had just won Puerto Rico’s first-ever primary, a development that radicals believed brought it one step closer to statehood.

  The doors were locked. All four whipped pistols from their parkas, then slid pillowcases with eye slits over their heads. When the first worker arrived, a few minutes later, they pointed a pistol at him and demanded a key. He didn’t have one. They bound his hands with tape. One by one, six more workers strode off the elevators, none with a key, and were tied up. “When I got off the elevator, there were two people standing with masks over their heads and pointing guns at me,” one volunteer said later. “‘Don’t say anything, nobody will get hurt,’ they said. I asked if this was some kind of joke. They said, ‘This is a political action.’”

  When a senior staffer finally arrived with a key, the raiders split into pairs, one remaining by the elevators while the second shoved the volunteers into the office. Inside, one of the masked men demanded a set of voter-registration lists. He was told they weren’t available. Irked, the two raiders then spent ten minutes spray-painting FALN slogans on the office walls. One read simply, FALN. Another read, STATEHOOD MEANS DEATH. Afterward they fled.

  Meanwhile, in Chicago, Oscar López and a three-person team wearing ski masks burst into the two-story Illinois headquarters of the Carter-Mondale campaign. “This is an armed takeover!” he shouted, brandishing a shotgun. They herded three volunteers into a corner, bound them with tape, then ransacked the office, ripping out telephones and spray-painting slogans on the walls. They repeated the process on the floor above before running out. No one was hurt. This time they found the voter lists. A few days later letters were mailed to 150 delegates; each contained veiled threats should Puerto Rico be made a state. Other delegates reported threatening phone calls. In one, the caller hung up after muttering, “Watch out for the bomb.”

  The raids were front-page news. The FBI did all the things it was supposed to do but once again found little to pursue. Its investigation to date, just about everyone admitted, had been a dismal failure: the defeats at every conceivable grand jury, interviewing and failing to arrest Carlos Torres and Willie Morales, Morales’s escape. In New York supervisors came and went; none made any real difference. Lou Vizi, who had been at Fraunces Tavern, gave up, accepting a transfer to a robbery squad. Eventually his partner, Don Wofford, gave up, too.

  The FALN was a ghost. “I can remember very clearly the feeling at that point,” a retired FBI man recalls. “There was a sense that these guys might go on doing this, the bombings, literally forever.”

  • • •

  On Thursday, April 3, 1980, Oscar López gathered his people in front of the basement chalkboard at the Milwaukee house. Everyone was there, including the New Yorkers, Carlos and Haydee Torres, even Dylcia Pagan, the activist dating Willie Morales. Their target was an armored car, and López went over the robbery and the escape plans in detail. It was the beginning of Easter weekend. The cops, he said, would be half-asleep.

  The next morning Freddie Mendez joined the others donning their disguises. Most dressed in jogging suits, intending to masquerade as runners and college students. On the way out López opened a large box packed with weapons: rifles, handguns, knives, smoke grenades. Everyone took something. Mendez joined a group filing into a stolen van. López and the others jumped into waiting cars. Everyone headed south toward Chicago.

  The action began a few minutes after one. A man and a woman stormed into a Budget rental-car office in Evanston, the leafy city where the campus of Northwestern University stretches along Lake Michigan. “Everybody down!” the man shouted. A dozen agents and customers, including a man with his nine-year-old son, were inside, and it took several minutes to tie them up. “Don’t cry,” the father told his son. “Just pray.” Within minutes the robbers were gone, driving off in a Budget panel truck.

  At 1:40, after one of the agents struggled free and called the police, descriptions of the pair and the stolen truck were broadcast across the area. At Northwestern, where the campus police were accustomed to helping out local officers, a dispatcher quickly rebroadcast the alert. Much to his surprise, a Northwestern officer radioed in fifteen minutes later. The truck was sitting in a campus parking lot just off its main thoroughfare, Sheridan Road.

  As it happened, a team of five Evanston plainclothes officers was working surveillance nearby. They responded within minutes, quickly spying the stolen truck. The senior officer that afternoon, Sergeant Jerry Brandt, parked his unmarked car a few rows away, then popped the hood and, along with the others, pretended to be inspecting its engine. Shooting furtive glances toward the truck, they couldn’t see anyone in or near it. Then, at 2:15, they watched as a small Hispanic man in a jogging suit appeared and walked toward it.

  An hour or so later a white van drove up, and a Hispanic woman in a raincoat hopped out and began talking with the man. Together they opened the back of the Budget truck. Peering through binoculars now, Sergeant Brandt spotted rifle butts peeking out from beneath a carpet of some kind. He glanced at his men. “Let’s go,” he said.

  The two suspects were still standing behind the truck, their backs turned, as Brandt and his men jogged through the parking lot, weapons low. Brandt took the woman. At the last minute she turned, shoving her hand into her raincoat, where Brandt was certain she held a gun. She began to struggle, slapping him with her left hand.

  Three other officers slammed the man against the van, hitting him so hard that he lifted off the ground. He reached for a pistol jammed in his waistband, but an officer named Mike Gresham placed a .357 Magnum to his forehead first. “It’s all right, it’s all right,” Gresham purred. “Take your time going for that gun. I can wait.”

  Sergeant Brandt, meanwhile, was still struggling with the woman.

  “Hey, somebody, give me a hand over here!” he barked.

  “Whatsa matter, Sarge?” one responded. “Can’t handle ninety-nine pounds of pissed-off female?”

  With the others’ help, the woman was subdued. They found a revolver in her pocket, a .38 in the man’s waistband, and three more guns in the van. Neither prisoner would talk, but the officers noticed something strange: The man was wearing a fake mustache. The pair were taken to Evanston police headquarters. Detectives from Chicago were called to begin questioning them.3

  And that was that—or so it seemed. Except minutes before all this happened, the Evanston police switchboard had taken a call from a housewife who lived several blocks south of the campus. A group of young people in jogging suits were standing around a parked van, she said, smoking what she suspected might be marijuana. Two officers—Pat Lenart and Bill “Red” Lamerdin—responded within minutes. There they found not one but two vans, parked a block apart, and agreed to take one each. Lenart walked toward the first van. He could see a woman in the driver’s seat. Approaching her window, he was about to say something when the engine revved.

  Inside were nine members of the FALN, waiting for an armored car they expected at Northwestern. They had guns.

  • • •

  What happened next was described in court testimony years later by Freddie Mendez, who was in the rear of the van with Carlos Torres and seven others. The driver was Oscar López’s companion, twenty-nine-year-old Lucy Rodriguez. “Cop
s,” she said. “What do I do?”

  “Brush him off,” Torres said, suggesting she be as courteous as possible. As Officer Lenart approached, Torres whispered with his men. Two wanted to jump out shooting. Torres told them to be cool—he had “brushed off” police before. Rodriguez saw Lenart place a hand on his pistol. Torres said, “Start the engine.”

  Reaching the van, Lenart ordered Rodriguez to stop the engine and roll down her window. After a whispered exchange with the men behind her, she complied with a weak smile. Lenart said he was investigating a report of “kids” running into the van.

  “No, officer,” she said. “There are no kids in this van.”

  Lenart asked for her license. She fumbled in her purse, then rolled up the window and once again started the engine, apparently so Lenart couldn’t hear her talking with the men in the back. Lenart again told her to turn off the engine. Again she complied. Lenart noticed she kept glancing at his gun. He sensed that something wasn’t right. Just then the second officer, Red Lamerdin, having determined that the second van was empty, coasted to a stop on his motorcycle behind the van. Lenart motioned for him to watch the far side.

  “Another cop,” Rodriguez whispered.

  Torres pushed through the curtain and sank into the passenger seat. Outside, two more officers arrived. Lenart stepped around the front of the van and told Torres to roll down his window.

  “Officer, what’s the problem?” he asked.

  Lenart explained as Rodriguez disappeared into the back. Another man took her place behind the wheel. Lenart thought this was getting ridiculous. “I want everybody to get out,” he said. A moment later one of the officers jerked open the van’s rear doors. To their surprise, seven people emerged, four men and three women, followed by the two men up front. “You see, there’s nothing going on,” Torres said. “It doesn’t smell like reefer, does it?”

  As everyone stood behind the van, Freddie Mendez started to edge away. An officer told him to freeze. Suddenly Mendez placed a hand to his mustache. One of the officers noticed something strange: It moved. Just then another officer noticed what appeared to be a gun butt protruding from one of the women’s purses. “Gun!” he shouted.

  Officer Lenart ordered the men to lie on the ground. The suspects slowly stretched out facedown on the pavement. It was then the officers noticed how oddly everyone was dressed, wearing what appeared to be layers of clothing beneath their jogging suits. At least two more, like Mendez, were wearing fake facial hair. This was just too weird. Lenart decided to take them all in for questioning.

  The nine of them said little as they were taken to headquarters. Scattered into interview rooms, not one would say a word, not even after being asked about the four pistols and the shotgun found in the van. One or two indicated that they spoke Spanish. Finally Mendez opened his mouth, saying he hadn’t done anything.

  The Evanston police had no clue who these silent people were—one or two officers thought they might be Middle Eastern—but everyone realized this was something more than a hold-up crew. They phoned the FBI. By nightfall three agents had arrived, including, as luck would have it, Greg Rodriguez, a Spanish speaker who had worked the West Haddon episode in 1976. He recognized Lucy Rodriguez and Carlos and Haydee Torres. When he called them by name, Haydee Torres spit at him. “You’re a pig,” her husband said, “and every pig has his Saturday, and yours will come soon.”

  Though the other eight suspects could not be identified, and though Oscar López and Willie Morales were clearly not among them, the FBI men agreed: This must be the FALN. By midnight Evanston headquarters was swarming with FBI agents and SWAT teams, the latter brought in to ring the building in the event López staged a rescue attempt. Because the prisoners wouldn’t speak, it took days to identify them. All, it turned out, had been active in Puerto Rican independence groups. Carmen Valentín, the fiery counselor from Tuley High, was one. Elizam Escobar was an artist living in New York, Dickie Jimenez a student at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Adolfo Matos worked at a Manhattan parking garage. None had been suspected of belonging to the FALN.

  In the meantime agents, hoping to grab López and Morales, gathered the suspects’ wallets, sorted through all the identification they could find, then spread across Chicago checking addresses. They found nothing for three long days, until they finally checked the address on Lucy Rodriguez’s driver’s license, which turned out to be the Milwaukee safe house. López and Morales were long gone, but inside agents found their files and weapons and FALN communiqués. That search led, in turn, to the Torres apartment in Jersey City, where agents found blasting caps and other bomb paraphernalia.

  By then the FALN’s supporters, including Carlos Torres’s father, Reverend José Torres, had appeared in Evanston. That Sunday, two days after the arrests, they demonstrated outside police headquarters, waving Puerto Rican flags and chanting, “The fight continues.” Someone called a New York newspaper and said the FALN would kill one police officer every day until Torres was released. Nothing came of it.

  The next day, Monday, April 7, all eleven prisoners had to be dragged into an Evanston courtroom. Outside, fifty supporters chanted, “Drive the Yankees to the sea, Puerto Rico will be free!” The group’s attorney, the noted radical Michael Deutsch, refused to recognize the court’s authority, insisting his clients were captured combatants. “I am a prisoner of war!” Torres shouted as he was dragged from the courtroom. “Viva Puerto Rico Libre!”

  Every arraignment, every court appearance, meant more of the same: shouting, spitting, demonstrators. The wheels of justice, however, ground forward. Haydee Torres, wanted for the Mobil bombing, went to trial first, that May in New York. She drew life. That summer the rest were tried on various state charges, including conspiracy to commit armed robbery. All, like Torres, refused to mount a defense. All were found guilty, drawing sentences from eight to thirty years each.

  Federal prosecutors in Chicago, however, weren’t satisfied. One, Jeremy Margolis, argued that the defendants should be tried under a “seditious conspiracy” law so obscure it had been used only twice—against the Puerto Rican nationalists in the 1950s-era attacks in Washington. As luck would have it, President Carter had just granted clemency to those same defendants the year before, suggesting that the Justice Department wouldn’t look fondly on an identical prosecution. But Margolis was tenacious, and after winning Washington’s approval, he won indictments against all ten FALN defendants that December.

  The trial commenced in Chicago in February 1981. The courtroom was patrolled by bomb-sniffing dogs. The defendants, sitting in shackles, regularly interrupted the proceedings, shouting insults at the judge. At one point they began a hunger strike. None of it mattered. After barely a week of testimony, the jury found them all guilty. The judge handed down stiff sentences. Carlos Torres got seventy more years. The others drew sentences of between thirty and ninety years apiece. As the judge read their sentences, the prisoners hurled insults and threats. “If I weren’t chained, I’d take care of you right now!” Carmen Valentín shouted. “There will soon be judges, marshals, members of the jury, prosecutors, agents, all of you—some of you will be walking on canes and in wheelchairs!”

  No one was satisfied: None of the defendants had been charged with the FALN’s deadliest bombing, at Fraunces Tavern. The prisoners themselves were unrepentant. Their supporters, especially those in Chicago, were alive with rumors and fanciful plans to somehow rescue them. Freddie Mendez, who struck a deal with prosecutors before the trial, claimed that one involved kidnapping the son of the new president, Ronald Reagan, and exchanging him for the prisoners.

  And the violence, more than a few FBI men guessed, was far from over. Oscar López and Willie Morales were still at large, still able to recruit militants to the cause, still able to build bombs. Police suspected they were behind the explosion of two powerful pipe bombs in a locker room at New York’s Pennsylvania Station at the height of
rush hour a few days before Christmas. No one was hurt, but the station had to be evacuated, forcing thousands out into the cold and snarling rail service throughout the region. A caller directed police to a communiqué in a trash can, which took responsibility on behalf of the “Puerto Rican Armed Resistance,” a previously unknown group. “It would appear that, if they are not connected, they have the same aims as the FALN,” the NYPD operations chief, Patrick Murphy, told reporters.4

  The incident was all but forgotten for five months. Then, on the morning of Saturday, May 16, 1981, someone calling on behalf of the same group phoned the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, claiming that three bombs, including one aboard a Pan American flight leaving for Guatemala, would go off at JFK airport in fifteen minutes. The flight, which was already taxiing, was recalled and evacuated. As passengers spilled out, a twenty-year-old Pan Am handyman named Alex McMillan walked into a nearby men’s room and noticed a bag on the floor. A ticket agent entered a moment later, and when McMillan pointed out the bag, the agent went for security. McMillan lingered in the bathroom, however, and when the bomb exploded, he absorbed what police called the “full force” of the explosion. He was dead by nightfall.

  Alex McMillan became the FALN’s sixth innocent victim. That evening police found a second bomb, unexploded, inside a vinyl bag outside Gate 18. A third was found before dawn in a women’s restroom. Later that day an anonymous caller to the Daily News tied the incident directly to the FALN trials, saying it was “to protest the imprisoned people being held in Chicago.” The next action, he promised before hanging up, “will be to eliminate President Reagan.”

  Monday brought a wave of bomb threats across the New York area, at the Chrysler and Empire State buildings, Grand Central Terminal, and Newark Airport, among many targets; more than a few New Yorkers were reminded of the mass evacuations following the 1977 FALN bombings. Two bombs turned up, mailed to the Honduran consulate and the U.S. mission to the United Nations; upon examination, they proved identical to the JFK bombs, all the same design as those built by the FALN and Ron Fliegelman. The next day someone claiming to be an FALN spokesman called the New York Post and said the bombs were the work of Willie Morales. The caller promised “a lot of bloodshed” should anything happen to the FALN prisoners in Chicago.