As they now proceeded to do.
Hunched on the roadside, Boudin noticed Sergeant O’Grady. “Tell him to put the gun back,” she shouted over the din of traffic, alluding to Officer Lennon. O’Grady thought a moment. The radio had already carried a report of a U-Haul truck, driven by black men, heading south toward New Jersey. O’Grady slid his pistol into its holster, then turned to Officer Brown and said, “I don’t think it’s them.” When Lennon shot him a glance, O’Grady said, “Put the shotgun back. I don’t think it’s them.” Lennon walked back up the ramp to his cruiser, opened the door, and slid inside.
Detective Keenan, however, wasn’t so sanguine. He stepped to the back of the U-Haul and yanked the rear door; it was locked. “I want to know what’s in there,” he said aloud.
A moment later the door burst open. The entrance ramp erupted in gunfire as five black men, all armed, leaped out and opened fire. Detective Keenan, struck in the thigh, dived to the roadside and rolled behind a pine tree. Two M16 rounds struck Waverly Brown in the chest and shoulder; when he fell to the pavement, screaming for help, another gunman walked up and fired into his chest. Sergeant O’Grady managed to pull his pistol and fire off one or two shots before being hit by three M16 rounds. He crumbled to the pavement in a spreading pool of blood.
It was over in seconds. The only officer left unhurt was Brian Lennon, sitting in his patrol car thirty feet up the ramp. When the gunfire stopped, he glanced back and saw several men standing around the U-Haul. He poked his shotgun out the window and fired a single blast, then ducked down. The next time he looked up, he was startled to see the U-Haul surging up the ramp toward him. A moment later it struck the patrol car, bumping it aside. Lennon peered up, saw the driver, pointed the shotgun, and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. It was empty. The truck sped up the ramp, heading onto the Thruway. As it disappeared, Lennon drew his service revolver and fired two shots in vain.
Not all the attackers, however, made it back into the U-Haul. Two pointed a gun at a local doctor driving a silver Oldsmobile who tried to drive around the scene; he leaped out of his car as they stole it and drove off. David Gilbert, meanwhile, ran up the entrance ramp and joined Judy Clark in her tan Honda; it too drove off. Out on the Thruway, rubbernecking drivers were slowing their cars, staring at the scene. One, an off-duty corrections officer named Michael Koch, noticed a white woman running down the exit ramp after the fleeing U-Haul. Sensing something was amiss, he pulled his camper to one side of the highway, leaped out, and sprinted across eight lanes of traffic, hurdling the median divider like a track star. The woman was jogging alongside the highway when Koch, waving his badge and a gun, grabbed her from behind. She appeared panic-stricken, babbling, “He shot him, I didn’t shoot him, he shot him, I didn’t shoot him.” Koch had no idea what was going on. He had no idea who Kathy Boudin was. But he pushed her back toward the entrance ramp, where the two fallen officers, Waverly Brown and Ed O’Grady, were dying.
Within minutes every police car in the county was racing toward the Thruway ramp. Among the first to appear was Alan Colsey, the twenty-nine-year-old police chief in South Nyack, who came upon the scene moments later. His radio reported that some of the attackers were fleeing in a U-Haul truck, some in a tan Honda, and some in a white 1980 Oldsmobile. Colsey could see there was no way to flee via the Thruway; it was fast turning into a parking lot. A lifelong area resident, he knew which way anyone heading for the city would need to go.
Colsey floored the accelerator and shot north toward Christian Herald Road, which winds east through a wooded area. He reached the road just as a tan Honda whizzed across his vision going at least fifty miles an hour. On its heels sped a white Olds. He wheeled in pursuit, watching as the two fleeing cars passed a line of others waiting at a red light. Colsey called for help, again and again, but the police band was as clogged as the Thruway; no one responded to his increasingly urgent pleas. Like it or not, he was on his own.
Colsey followed the cars into Nyack, past the volunteer-ambulance building, then down a hill toward a T-intersection. The Olds veered and made the turn, but the Honda’s driver lost control, skidding through the intersection and crashing sideways into a concrete wall in front of a white Victorian home. Colsey stopped his car across the street and jumped out, drawing his pistol. Traffic kept streaming through the intersection, blocking his line of sight. He could hear the Honda’s engine racing and see what appeared to be three people in the car. As he watched, a white man with a heavy black beard stepped out of the right side: It was David Gilbert. To Colsey’s surprise, Gilbert began walking toward him, shouting something he couldn’t hear over the din of passing cars. Colsey yelled for him to raise his hands. After a moment, he did.
The driver, a petite white woman in a tweed jacket and slacks, eased out next. She also raised her hands. By then two more policemen arrived. There was a third man in the backseat of the Honda, a black man who had been wounded. Colsey took them all into custody.
Everyone else got away. Behind them, Mutulu Shakur’s cocaine-fueled gunmen had left three men dead and three others wounded.
• • •
“I was told to stay home all day that day,” Silvia Baraldini recalls. “Then I got the call: Judy had been busted, with David.” Baraldini hurried to the Mount Vernon apartment where the survivors were gathering. In their scramble to escape, Marilyn Buck’s gun had gone off, wounding her in the knee. “I just remember everything was crazy, and we had to clean everything, get rid of all the fingerprints. We cleaned for hours. Cleaning, cleaning. Then the effort became to get Marilyn safe. That took like a whole month. [After a doctor friend treated the wound,] we got her out of the country. To Mexico.”
Sekou Odinga was driving in Brooklyn when he heard the news on the radio: “An armored car robbery? In Rockland County? Right away I knew. My first reaction? Damn fools. I told you. Second reaction? What can I do to help? Another guy wanted to take me up there [to the Mount Vernon safe house]. I refused to go. It was just way too crazy.”
• • •
Within hours, the hunt for the Brink’s robbers became the top priority of every police officer and FBI agent in the New York area. For the moment, no one had a clue who any of the others were. A search of the captured vehicles, however, quickly led to Buck’s apartment in East Orange, New Jersey. Buck was the Family’s logistics expert and kept detailed records, all of which fell into police hands by the next day. By nightfall on Wednesday, barely twenty-four hours after the robbery, the NYPD had identified a string of the Family’s safe houses, including the Mount Vernon apartment, which had been abandoned just hours before. As it happened, the building superintendent had grown suspicious and jotted down license plate numbers of several of the gang’s cars.
One was the gray Chrysler LeBaron Sekou Odinga was driving through the South Ozone Park section of Queens two mornings later with Mtayari Sundiata slouched in the passenger seat. In an amazing bit of luck, an NYPD detective named Daniel Kelly noticed the plate while driving down Foche Boulevard. Kelly called for backup. After a minute Odinga noticed the pursuit and floored the accelerator, veering first onto the Van Wyck Expressway, then onto busy Northern Boulevard. “I knew I was in trouble when I saw them switch lanes on me,” Odinga recalls. “That was my fault. I was rushing.”
When the police cars hit their sirens and rolling lights, Odinga crashed across a concrete median and slammed into a violent U-turn, racing west toward Shea Stadium. Detectives in an unmarked car and an emergency-services truck gave chase, at one point sideswiping the Chrysler as Odinga struggled to retain control of the car. Sundiata rolled down his window and, producing a 9mm pistol, fired several shots. The police truck fell back. One of the Chrysler’s tires blew out, forcing Odinga to veer into an adjoining warehouse district.
“I didn’t know the area; it was stupid, a tactical error I made,” Odinga recalls. “That’s how I ended up on a dead-end street.”
The t
wo men jumped out of the car and ran into the rear yard of the Tully-DiNapoli Construction Company, where they split up. Sundiata leaped atop a stack of sewer pipes to make it over a fence. Jumping down on the far side, he confronted a pair of detectives. In the ensuing exchange of gunfire, Sundiata was shot in the head and killed.
Police poured into the area. A few minutes later four of them glimpsed Odinga hiding under a van. As they approached, Odinga aimed a pistol at them—and then dropped it. “I give up,” he said.
After an underground journey that had taken him from New York to Cuba, Algeria, and as far afield as Angola, Sekou Odinga’s odyssey was at an end. The NYPD, from all appearances, did not welcome his return. When he was escorted from the 112th Precinct that evening, Odinga’s body was covered with bruises and cigarette burns. Taken to the prison ward at Kings County Hospital, he was found to have sustained damage to his pancreas.
Bit by bit, police managed to assemble a picture of the Family. Kuwasi Balagoon was arrested peacefully in January 1982. Silvia Baraldini was arrested in November outside her Manhattan apartment. The rest would not be captured for years.
23
THE LAST REVOLUTIONARIES
The United Freedom Front, 1981 to 1984
On October 4, 1981, sixteen days before the Brink’s robbery, the Maine Sunday-Telegram published an article on Ray Levasseur’s underground group headlined WHERE ARE THE TERRORIST BOMBERS NOW? It was a good question. Levasseur and his group hadn’t made a public statement in almost three years, since their last action, the bombing of a Mobil Oil office outside New York in early 1979.
In fact, the Sam Melville Jonathan Jackson unit was poised to reemerge, in a new form, bigger and more committed than ever. That summer of 1981 Levasseur and Pat Gros and their three girls had sold their extra belongings in a yard sale and left their farmhouse in northern Vermont for a larger home they rented outside the village of Cambridge, New York, across the border from the college town of Bennington; they enrolled their oldest daughter, Carmen, now five, in a Bennington Montessori school. Tom and Carol Manning, meanwhile, had moved to a sixty-acre farm outside Marshall’s Creek, Pennsylvania, in the Pocono Mountains, an hour west of New York City, where they lived as Barry and Diane Easterly. They had enrolled their son, eight-year-old Jeremy, at a nearby Montessori school. Carol was pregnant with a third child, due that December.
Everything had begun to change after Gros spied her old acquaintance Sally Stoddard at the grocery store in the summer of 1980. Gros had been frightened that Stoddard might turn them in. But Levasseur was thrilled. His greatest frustration remained his inability to recruit new members, and Stoddard, who had a long record of working with many of the same prison activists he had known in Maine and Massachusetts, was a possible conduit to any revolutionaries remaining among them. The women, Gros and Carol Manning, were less enthusiastic.
“Ray was really anxious to get people he could work with,” Gros recalls. “He needed that connection to the outside political world. Carol and I, we were very unhappy about it. We were paranoid things would start popping again, the actions, the banks. We had two and three kids each, remember. Carol was really sick of it.”
Levasseur was still debating how to approach Stoddard when, in August 1980, he spotted her at the Caledonia County Fair in Lyndonville. When he approached, Stoddard scrunched up her features and said, “Ray?” Levasseur smiled. No one had called him by his given name in almost five years. “Ray?” he answered. “Why would I want to be Ray?” They took a walk. Years later, what Stoddard remembered most vividly was Levasseur’s admission that he sometimes pronounced his full name in the shower, alone, just to remind himself who he really was.
As Levasseur had surmised, Stoddard was still in touch with a number of Boston-area activists, most notably the father of her two children, a convicted armed robber named Richard Williams. Williams, in turn, was friends with a man Levasseur badly wanted to meet, an Estonian-born onetime SDS radical named Jaan Laaman. Dark, intense, and argumentative, Laaman had done prison time after bombing a New Hampshire police department in 1972. Afterward, like Levasseur and Williams, he had become involved in the New England prison-reform movement. Together with another radical friend, a tall, rail-thin African American named Kazi Toure, Laaman took several meetings with Levasseur that winter. The three of them were willing to help rob banks, Laaman said, but they wouldn’t go underground. They could help the group more by remaining in place.
And so, as 1981 dawned, Levasseur could see his dream taking shape. Who would have imagined it? A full ten years after the Weathermen had gone underground, at least five years since any serious new radical cell had been formed anywhere in the United States, at a time when talk of an armed revolution seemed not only improbable but downright anachronistic, here were people prepared to rejoin the underground cause. “[I was] pretty excited,” Levasseur recalls. “Three strong recruits and the potential for more, plus the real potential for having a network in the Boston area.”
The now five-man group hit its first bank, in New Britain, Connecticut, on June 25, 1981. It went so smoothly that Levasseur realized the new recruits were ready for full-time revolutionary work. The long sabbatical in Vermont was over. He and Gros and the girls moved south, to the farmhouse in New York, to be closer to the others in Boston and to the corporate headquarters and military installations they planned to start bombing again.
• • •
That Monday morning Levasseur walked into the town clerk’s office in Brattleboro, Vermont, to secure a birth certificate he needed for a new identity. It was that of a long-dead baby girl; Gros had been in the same office two weeks earlier and had arranged for it to be ready. What she hadn’t noticed was that Brattleboro’s police were headquartered in the same building. When a clerk retrieved the document for Levasseur, he noticed it was for a dead infant and became suspicious. He phoned the police.
An officer named Richard Guthrie strolled through a hallway into the clerk’s office. When he asked for identification, Levasseur coolly pulled a 9mm automatic from beneath his jacket and ordered Guthrie and a clerk onto the floor. He stepped around the counter, yanked Guthrie’s service revolver from its holster, and ordered a trio of clerks into a rear office. Without another word, he jogged from the office into his Chevy Malibu and drove away.1
An areawide alert immediately went out; roadblocks were set up all across southern Vermont. Speeding south from Brattleboro on Interstate 91, Levasseur passed a pair of state troopers parked on the median; they didn’t notice him. Listening to the police scanner bolted beneath his dashboard, he realized he now had police behind him and ahead of him, at a roadblock being thrown up at the Massachusetts−Vermont state line. He would never make it through. A moment later he spied a rest stop, the last one in Vermont before the border. He veered into it, parked the car out of sight, and sprinted into the woods.
It was as desperate a moment as he had faced since going underground six years before. Thrashing through the underbrush, he had only the dimmest idea where he was heading. He tried to bear south, toward Massachusetts, aware that if the state police found his car at the rest area, they would soon be after him with dogs and helicopters. He ran through the woods for two hours, seeing no one. Several times he thought he heard dogs. At one point he spotted an airplane above the trees. After about ten miles he came upon a road. Keeping to the trees alongside it, he reached a general store—and a pay phone.
Gros took the call in the kitchen. Her car was in for repairs. Thinking quickly, she phoned a neighbor, borrowed his battered pickup, and, with her three daughters in tow, drove into Massachusetts, where an hour later she spied Levasseur loitering nervously at the general store. The neighbor’s truck was so old that the horn blew whenever she hit the turn signal; Levasseur was apoplectic when she pulled up with the horn madly honking. “What the fuck are you doing?” he demanded.
They made it back to the farmhouse safely, and by
the next evening they were gone. Jaan Laaman helped them pile some of their things into Gros’s car; later, when they were sure the police hadn’t found the house, they returned and took the rest. Laaman took two dozen boxes of Levasseur’s magazines and books and stowed them in a self-storage unit outside Binghamton, New York. Piling the kids into the car, the couple headed for the Mannings’ farmhouse in Pennsylvania and, within days, rented a place of their own in the town of Germansville.
Once they were settled, Levasseur drove to New Haven with Tom Manning to caucus with Laaman and Richard Williams. It had been a close call. There was much to discuss, but to Levasseur’s surprise, the new recruits seemed more interested in asking for more money; they had already run through their share of the New Britain proceeds. He couldn’t understand how this could be but agreed to hand over cash at the next meeting. There was something else, though, something he couldn’t put his finger on. It was something about Williams. “Richard was always late, always antsy, always wanting to leave early,” Levasseur recalls. “I got irked. Afterward I remember telling Tom, ‘He doesn’t seem right. What’s going on with him?’”
They knew Williams had once had some kind of drug problem and sometimes drank too much. Levasseur laid down strict rules about chemical use. Alcohol and marijuana were tolerated in moderation; anything harder was strictly forbidden. It made people sloppy, and sloppiness was something he wouldn’t tolerate. Once, after Williams had gotten drunk at a group gathering, Levasseur had ordered him to do five hundred push-ups as punishment. According to Gros, it was Tom Manning who unraveled the mystery of Williams’s behavior when he visited his Cambridge apartment and glimpsed drug paraphernalia in his bathroom.
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