Days of Rage

by Bryan Burrough

  Levasseur got in touch with Laaman, told him to meet him in New Haven, and confronted him there. Yes, Laaman admitted, Williams was a heroin addict. Worse, Laaman had known and hadn’t told the others. Levasseur and Manning returned to Pennsylvania deeply shaken. They didn’t dare tell the women. “Ray and Tom knew the girls would go nuts,” says one intimate. “So they held off telling them awhile. Eventually, you know, they had to try and explain it, so they said Richard had come out of the prison struggle, that it was a symptom of his struggle against the system.”

  Discovery of a junkie in their midst prompted a series of soul-searching discussions among the Levasseurs and Mannings. They couldn’t simply expel Williams; he knew too much, and they needed men. “Ray didn’t know what to do,” Gros recalls. “We couldn’t just kill him. Because we didn’t do that. What [were we going to do], bury him in the woods?”

  After much discussion, Levasseur and Manning agreed that Williams would be taken into the Manning home, where he would undergo an impromptu course of revolutionary rehabilitation. Manning asked his landlord for permission to have a friend stay with the family a few weeks, and in early December Williams arrived in a moving van, forlorn and repentant. He was still there on December 14, when Manning took his wife to a doctor’s office in Kingston and helped her give birth to a boy they named Jonathan.

  • • •

  Things were just settling down for the Levasseurs and Mannings as Christmas approached. On the morning of December 21, Levasseur rose early, threw on a pair of overalls, and drove to Philadelphia, where he planned to scout banks. At the Manning home, Tom stepped out into the cold morning air and walked through new snow to his blue Chevy Nova with Williams, who had overcome the worst of his withdrawal symptoms. They drove east on Interstate 80, passing into northwest New Jersey, where they shopped for Christmas presents. They were heading home on the interstate around 4:15 p.m. when a state trooper’s car pulled behind them, lights rolling. Inside was a thirty-two-year-old officer named Philip Lamonaco, New Jersey’s 1979 trooper of the year. Manning pulled over on a stretch of highway lined with trees and brush.

  What happened next has never been proven. But Levasseur and those close to him would always believe it was Williams who fired the eight bullets into Trooper Lamonaco, killing him. Williams’s motivation, they say, was panic, mixed with a need to prove himself after the discovery of his heroin use diminished his status within the group. Years later Tom Manning would claim it was he, not Williams, who killed Lamonaco in self-defense—Lamonaco fired six shots, emptying his gun—but Manning’s friends always believed he was just trying to protect Williams.

  Whatever happened, it was over in less than a minute; the blue Nova streaked west down the interstate, leaving Trooper Lamonaco bleeding in the snow on the shoulder of the road. A motorist stopped and used Lamonaco’s car radio to call for help. Ambulances appeared and took the trooper to Pocono Hospital in East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, where he was pronounced dead at 5:28. Manning and Williams, meanwhile, struggled to get away. Behind the wheel, Manning took the first exit he could, driving northwest on snowy roads. He turned onto one country lane, then another, trying to find a shortcut to Pennsylvania, but the last one he took, Polkville Road, was still clogged with unplowed snow. The car got stuck in five inches of slush. In desperation, the two men got out and ran into the woods. Later, police with bloodhounds would follow their tracks three miles to a truck stop back on the interstate.

  Gros was in her kitchen, watching the girls, when the phone rang. Manning’s voice was even, as usual, but she instantly knew something was wrong. He kept saying someone was “down.” It took a moment for her to realize he was saying someone had been shot. “What-what-what do you expect me to do?” she stammered. “I’m here with the kids.”

  “We gotta get outta here!” he blurted. “You gotta come get us.”

  “I can’t,” she pleaded, but by the time she hung up, she had promised to rescue them. It was Brattleboro all over again. She began dressing the girls, only dimly realizing the absurdity of what she was doing: preparing three children to pick up a pair of cop killers. Then, just as she began hunting for her keys, Levasseur telephoned. Later that day he managed to find Manning and Williams and bring them home.

  Their fingerprints were all over Manning’s car: Levasseur knew they had a matter of days, maybe hours, before police tracked them down. And so, for the second time in two months, the Levasseurs, and now the Mannings, frantically cleared their homes of belongings; the Mannings left their Great Dane behind and a radio blaring. They piled everything and everyone into Gros’s car, five adults and six children, including the Mannings’ seven-day-old son. “Tom’s car, Tom’s house, our house, was gone,” Levasseur remembers. “All our ID was gone. We had nothing at that point but our car, which we thought was still safe.”

  They drove east into New Jersey, watching for state troopers, and by the next evening managed to rent a roach-infested apartment in Yonkers, New York, just north of the Bronx. For the next week Levasseur and Manning couldn’t risk leaving the apartment. Ironically, it was Williams, the man who had probably killed Trooper Lamonaco, who had to act as their liaison to the outside world, buying groceries and making phone calls. At night Levasseur stood at the window, brooding. This changed everything. It was one thing to be wanted for protest bombings that hurt no one. It was quite another to be sought for murdering a cop. The FBI and the New Jersey State Police, he knew, would throw every available resource toward their capture.

  And they did. The morning after Trooper Lamonaco’s murder, officers found Manning’s abandoned car, riddled with bullet holes, and by nightfall had identified Manning’s fingerprints inside. The next day photos of Levasseur and Manning peered from the front pages of newspapers across the Northeast. Hundreds of police poured into rural northwest New Jersey, going from house to house in what the New York Times called the most intensive manhunt in the state since the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby in 1932. Three days later, with no clue as yet to the fugitives’ whereabouts, more than two thousand police attended Trooper Lamonaco’s funeral in Washington, New Jersey, the largest of its kind in state history. Shortly after, the FBI announced formation of a new Boston-based task force, dubbed “Bosluc,” consisting of several dozen agents, along with troopers from six northeastern states, all working together in an effort to apprehend Levasseur, Manning, and the others.

  Their first success came two weeks after Trooper Lamonaco’s murder, in early January, when they found the Manning home in Marshall’s Creek; the landlord called in the tip when he found it abandoned. Inside they found a drawing of Joanne Chesimard. The Mannings had been thorough—nothing police found gave any clue where they might be hiding—but they made one crucial mistake: Among the personal effects they left behind was a single photo of the Levasseurs and their children, the first inkling anyone in law enforcement had that they now had three daughters. In time, all their pictures, including the children’s, would grace wanted posters.* The first, a photo of nine-year-old Jeremy Manning, was issued to the press on January 9, immediately after the farmhouse was located.

  “When they started targeting the kids, that changed everything,” recalls Levasseur, who remained moored in the Yonkers apartment all that January. “Every article emphasized the kids. That began to weigh on us a lot more. I told Pat, ‘We shouldn’t have the kids. This is just too much.’” They discussed trying to leave the girls with their grandparents, but Gros couldn’t do it. Instead, they changed the girls’ names and cut their hair. Carmen, who had long dark hair, had hers cut short. Simone, who had curls, allowed her hair to grow out.

  But it wasn’t just the girls who put them at risk. In time, Levasseur knew, the FBI would focus on the New England prison-activist community. Laaman, Kazi Toure, and their friends would be called in for questioning, and maybe worse. Once Laaman made it to Yonkers, Levasseur told him he would have to join them underground; he had no choic
e. When Laaman resisted, insisting there was nothing to link him to the group, Levasseur lashed out: “They’ll have grand juries! You won’t testify, so you’re going to jail! Come on!” After heated discussion Laaman finally capitulated. He would go underground, he said, under one condition: His family had to come, too.

  “Are you insane?” Levasseur asked.

  Laaman’s girlfriend, a flighty brunette named Barbara Curzi, had three children, the youngest fathered by Laaman.

  “Three kids with the kind of heat we’ve got?” Levasseur asked. “No way. This is crazy! Absolutely fucking crazy!”

  But Laaman would not budge. He wouldn’t come underground without Barbara and the kids. “You guys got families,” he said. “Why can’t I have mine?” Levasseur gave in.

  It took days for everything to come together. Curzi, as one might imagine, was not thrilled with the notion of going underground with three children. Levasseur and Manning, who were now both on the FBI’s Most Wanted list, sat in the Yonkers apartment, brooding and pacing, until the end of January, when Laaman finally sent word that they were ready. It took another week to gather their belongings into a U-Haul trailer. Finally, on February 7, seven weeks after the Lamonaco killing, everything was set. Laaman and Toure agreed to rendezvous with Curzi and her children in a rest area on Interstate 95 in North Attleboro, Massachusetts, near the Rhode Island border, just after midnight.

  When the men drove up, however, she wasn’t there. They waited, Laaman behind the wheel, Toure trying to stay awake beside him. By 1:00 a.m., there was no sign of her. At 2:00, still nothing. A few minutes later a Massachusetts state trooper named Paul Landry drove his cruiser into the rest area and shone his headlights on Laaman’s green Plymouth station wagon. When Landry approached the car, he noticed that the engine was on. Laaman rolled down the window with a smile and, answering Landry’s questions, told him everything was fine. They were just two guys from New Hampshire driving down to New York and had stopped a moment to rest. When Laaman turned over their fake driver’s licenses and a registration, Landry noticed Laaman’s license had its photo clipped onto it. Toure’s had no photo at all. Training his flashlight inside the car, Landry saw Toure reach his right hand inside his jacket.

  Uneasy, especially about what might be in the jacket, Landry returned to his cruiser and called in the license and registration; everything came back clean. Still, something bothered him. He called for backup. A few moments later a second trooper, Michael Crosby, pulled his cruiser alongside. In a whispered conversation Landry said he thought the black passenger might be holding a gun or drugs.

  The troopers approached the passenger-side door, tapped on the window with a flashlight, and motioned for Toure to get out. When Landry asked what was in his jacket and reached for it, Toure blocked his hand, but not before Landry realized that he was wearing a bulletproof vest. Landry immediately told Toure to put his hands on his head. “This guy has something,” Landry barked to Crosby. “Watch the driver.”

  Just then Laaman reached his hand inside his jacket, where he hid a 9mm pistol. Landry drew his service revolver. Laaman leaped from the car, crouched down, and fired several shots across the car toward the troopers. Officer Landry grabbed Toure and dropped to the pavement. Officer Crosby ran for the protection of a Dumpster. Laaman fired several shots at Crosby, then sprinted for the dark woods at the edge of the rest area. Crosby raced to his car and radioed for help.

  Toure was taken into custody and, under questioning at the police barracks in Foxboro, identified Laaman. An all-points bulletin was issued; dozens of police plunged into the area, shining searchlights into the woods up and down the interstate in an effort to find Laaman. Somehow he managed to elude them. Once again it was Pat Gros, asleep back in Yonkers, who took the call. Because she was the only one of the group not being sought by police, Levasseur let her retrieve Laaman. Barbara Curzi, meanwhile, drove toward the North Attleboro rest stop around 4:15 that morning and, seeing it swarming with police, continued driving south. By the next day everyone, including Laaman, Curzi, and all three of their children, was safe in the Yonkers apartment.

  For the third time in four months, they had somehow survived a run-in with the authorities. But Levasseur, worried that Kazi Toure would talk, quickly realized they couldn’t stay long. He sent Gros to Albany, where she found them two apartments. Laaman and his family initially bunked with the Levasseurs, all six of them packed into a dingy basement apartment on an alley. The Mannings found a place nearby. No one was especially happy with the arrangements, which were a far cry from the spacious farmhouses they had enjoyed before the Lamonaco killing.

  Once they were settled in Albany, the top priority became money. All four men were now far too hot to work normal jobs, which meant that money for the expenses of three entire families, seven adults and nine children—everything from beer and food to diapers and baby formula and lunch boxes—would need to come from bank robberies, a situation Levasseur dreaded. Worse, the Mannings had lost everything in fleeing, the Levasseurs almost everything; everyone needed furniture and cars. Levasseur also wanted to raise cash for Toure’s bail. So they moved quickly, finding the first bank, a branch of Chittenden Trust in South Burlington, Vermont. They hit it on April 2, four of them now, in a stolen getaway car—ski masks, body armor, guns waving, shouting, scooping up cash bags. The take was $61,000.

  But it wasn’t enough, not if they were to escape their run-down apartments in Albany and establish a new base of operations. They began scouting the next bank immediately, a branch of the Syracuse Savings Bank. As in Vermont, they rented a safe-house apartment nearby, along with a garage where they could keep the stolen cars they began using for reconnaissance. Once everything was set, on June 25, they rushed the bank lobby just after 11:00 a.m. Everything was going smoothly until Richard Williams went to grab the cash bags, which were lying on the floor inside the barred door to the vault. Somehow the door swung shut behind him—and locked. Williams grabbed the bars.

  “I’m locked in!” he yelped.

  Tom Manning grabbed an assistant manager by the collar and shoved her toward the locked door. “Open the door, bitch!” he ordered.

  It was as tense a moment as the group had experienced inside a bank. The manager fumbled with her key ring as Manning hovered, his pistol at the ready. “Anybody moves, they’re dead!” Levasseur shouted.

  It took interminable seconds before a key was produced. After a moment Williams was freed. They sprinted from the bank, never noticing a police car sitting at a McDonald’s across the street. As he sped away Ray thought they were being tailed. They had just taken up their guns, preparing to open fire, when the suspicious car disappeared. They made it back to Albany safely but noticed a neighbor watching them as they strode into the Levasseurs’ basement apartment. Worried, they hovered over a scanner all that night and the next, until they were certain the police weren’t onto them. The haul, however, more than made up for the anxiety. It came to $195,000, by far their largest to date.

  It was a close call, too close for Gros and the other women. Levasseur didn’t need to be reminded that they were robbing banks too close to home. They needed to move, and soon; the children had to be enrolled in classes by the time school started in August. After several scouting expeditions, they decided on their farthest relocation yet, to Ohio, a manageable eight-hour drive from the Interstate 90 corridor where Levasseur was most comfortable finding new banks. Flush with $250,000 in cash—a portion was sent to Boston for Toure’s bail—Gros rented all three families houses within blocks of each other in a blue-collar neighborhood in Cleveland. The Levasseurs would now be the Petersons, the Laamans the Owens family, the Mannings the Carrs. Williams, however, decided not to join them. He remained part of the group, but for the time being he moved to a house he rented in North Carolina. After a few months Levasseur decided to move his family away from the others, renting a house in rural Deerfield, east of Akron. He felt
comfortable in the countryside; the nearest neighbors were a quarter mile away.

  By the fall of 1982 everyone was settled into new homes, and the group’s focus shifted once again, to a renewed bombing campaign. It had been almost four years since their last action, and Levasseur was determined that the United Freedom Front (UFF), as they decided to rename the group, would stage a memorable return. Over the next two years they would go on to detonate ten more bombs, almost all in suburban New York: at an IBM office in Harrison in December 1982; an army reserve center on Long Island in May 1983; an army recruiting office in the Bronx in August 1983; a Motorola office in Queens in January 1984; and other offices of IBM, General Electric, and Union Carbide. All the bombs detonated when the buildings were empty; no one was seriously hurt. There were newspaper articles after each but no great hubbub. Levasseur’s communiqués attacking corporate wrongdoing were largely ignored.

  It was exhausting work. By 1983 Levasseur and Gros had been underground for seven years, and the cumulative strains were beginning to show. Gros’s, in fact, increased as her three girls grew. Carmen was turning seven; the youngest, Rosa, was three. They had been forced to explain to the girls that they were fugitives. Without explaining the details of bank robberies and bombings, they said they were being sought for their political beliefs. Still, Gros felt that Carmen was beginning to understand what they had done. “They heard everything,” Gros recalls. “When we were in meetings, in the basement. They knew.”

  Just before Christmas that year Gros was walking up the stairs at Laaman and Curzi’s house when she suddenly suffered a panic attack, her first. Her heart racing, she allowed Curzi to drive her to an emergency room, where a polite young doctor, addressing her by her latest alias, leaned forward and said, “Mrs. Peterson, this is all about stress. You need to find a way to relax.”