Days of Rage

by Bryan Burrough

  Levasseur wasn’t in a position to comfort her. He was rarely home. In the fall of 1982, after their fifth successful expropriation along the I-90 corridor, he had decided it was time to change their area of operations. A Syracuse television station had broadcast a series of features on the UFF and its robberies, and thousands of new wanted posters were flooding upstate New York. He scouted Pittsburgh, Baltimore, and Washington but worried that the thick traffic in all three areas would make getaways uncertain. Eventually they settled on two Virginia cities, Norfolk and Richmond, which were large enough to hide in but small enough to navigate. They rented safe houses in both, then closed the New Haven apartment and opened one in Yonkers. Levasseur left the house in Ohio early most Monday mornings, driving the eleven hours to Virginia via Pennsylvania and Maryland to avoid New Jersey and typically wouldn’t return until the weekend. When they weren’t scouting banks in Virginia—they managed to rob two of them without event, both in Norfolk—they were studying new bombing targets in New York. Before long the constant travel began to wear him down.

  “I was beginning to feel like a long-haul trucker,” he recalls. “We were on the road all the time. All we did was recon trips, take a bank and then run back to New York to ram a bomb up IBM’s ass.”

  He knew they couldn’t do this forever. Then, on January 2, 1984, a slow news day, he was startled to switch on the CBS Evening News and see Dan Rather lead the broadcast with a story about the UFF, the bombings, the robberies, the kids, everything. There they were, he and Gros and the kids, the Mannings, everyone, right there on television. Deeply shaken, he sat down with Pat. Maybe, he said, it was time she turned herself in. They could leave the girls with her mother in Maryland. No doubt she would get a short sentence, maybe a year, then she and the girls could be free. “I said, ‘You know, we’re wearing down,’” Levasseur recalls. “‘The kids are making us vulnerable.’ But Pat wouldn’t do it. She didn’t want to break up the family.”

  • • •

  By 1984, despite eight years of intensive investigation and the combined efforts of the FBI and police from six states, the authorities had no clue where Levasseur and his people were hiding, and no serious leads to pursue. The fact was, the two-year-old Bosluc task force had run out of energy. The prevailing view among its fifty or so members appeared to be that the UFF, like the FALN, would eventually make a mistake and get arrested, probably by some lucky sheriff.

  That February, in a bid to revitalize the task force, the FBI brought in Leonard Cross, a clerkish, easygoing ex-marine who had earned accolades for breaking up a Croatian terrorist group believed to be responsible for bombings in New York. After several weeks debriefing task-force investigators and thumbing through the twenty-two thick volumes of reports they had amassed, Cross could see they were getting nowhere. About the only fresh idea he heard was in Maine, where an ex-con was scheduled to go on trial for helping the group in its very first bank job, all the way back in 1975. The Portland office planned to stake out the trial, on the remote chance Levasseur might stage a rescue attempt.

  Probably the most innovative analysis, Cross saw, was being done by John Markey, an agent in Burlington, Vermont, who had been tracking the UFF’s bank robberies since the South Burlington job in April 1982. At the time the UFF’s involvement was only a hunch; with no “chatter” among Vermont criminals following a very professional job, Markey suspected that only Levasseur had the talent to pull it off. After four similar robberies along Interstate 90 in upstate New York, Markey issued a flier to every bank in the Northeast warning about the UFF. Indexing the dollar amounts of its hauls with the robbery dates, he estimated the group was living on $733 a day. At that rate, Markey warned, Levasseur would strike next between May 1 and June 12, 1984—and not, given the publicity lavished on Markey’s flier by a Syracuse television station—in New York or New England. When the UFF robbed a bank in Norfolk, Virginia, on June 5, Markey telephoned the case agent and quipped, “It’s your lucky day. I’m gonna tell you who just robbed your bank.”

  Back in Boston, Len Cross’s first order of business was a reorganization. He had Bosluc redesignated a “domestic terrorism” task force, which streamlined its organization and upgraded its importance. He had a clerk break up the twenty-two volumes of reports into files for each bombing and bank job. Then he covered an entire wall of the Boston office with a map of New England, handed several boxes of color-coded pushpins to three agents, and had them mark the map with the UFF’s every bank job, bombing, and address. When they finished, Cross stood before the map, hands on hips, and saw the pattern he hoped to find. The pushpins blanketed the Northeast, with the exception of a circular area centered on western Massachusetts, lapping into southern Vermont, northwestern Connecticut, and New York east of the Hudson.

  “You know,” he mused, “a pig never shits where it eats.” The UFF, he was willing to bet, was hiding inside that circle.

  To find out where, Cross devised what became the largest and most intricate manhunt in FBI history. He divided the target area into more than one hundred grids, most about ten miles square, and assigned an FBI agent and a state trooper to each. What made the UFF vulnerable, he thought, was their children. Computers were used to compile an exhaustive list of the four kinds of facilities Levasseur and the UFF families were known to haunt: Montessori and similar schools, pediatricians, pharmacies, and health food stores. The goal of “Operation Western Sweep,” as it was called, was to display photos of the UFF fugitives at every such facility in southern Vermont, western Massachusetts, northwestern Connecticut, and most of eastern New York; they also planned to show photos of the remaining Brink’s fugitives, including Marilyn Buck and Mutulu Shakur. By the time the operation was set to begin, in the first week of June, nearly two hundred agencies, from the FBI to local sheriffs, had agreed to contribute to the canvass.

  Cross set up his war room in the middle of the target area, at a state police barracks in Westfield, Massachusetts. After a press conference on June 4—the day before the UFF struck in Norfolk—police and federal agents flooded into their zones; they checked schools, pharmacies, and pediatricians in 101 towns in western Massachusetts alone. Every evening someone from each grid square would bring reports to troopers stationed at the state border, who drove the reports to Westfield, where Cross had them entered into his computers.

  For two solid weeks FBI agents and troopers visited every target in the zone. By June 19 they had finished, and Cross could finally, after weeks of preparation, see what they had achieved: nothing. Not a single hard lead.

  “There were several hundred possible sightings which we are in the process of tracking down,” Cross’s FBI boss, James Greenleaf, told reporters, “but as yet we haven’t come up with anything that sounds really exciting.” And they wouldn’t.

  Cross couldn’t believe it. He studied the data for weeks, hoping something would emerge. It never did. He realized they needed to go back to the drawing board. To begin, he convened a mass meeting of fifty state troopers and FBI and ATF agents at a Salem, New Hampshire, hotel in the middle of August. They had just settled in when the call came.

  • • •

  In early August, eight weeks after Operation Western Sweep, an auctioneer in Binghamton, New York, named Andy Walker was summoned to a U-Haul self-storage facility to cart out the contents of thirty compartments whose renters had failed to pay their upkeep. He loaded everything into his truck and hauled it back to his warehouse. It took days to inventory it all. At one point he was forced to break the lock off a battered foot locker. When he opened it, the first things he saw were parts of a shotgun. Delving further, he found wiring, alarm clocks, and literature—dozens of books and pamphlets, almost all devoted to radical politics. Walker walked to his telephone and called the FBI.

  An agent from the Binghamton office was on his doorstep fifteen minutes later. Everything was carted to the FBI office, where the agent in charge, after leafing through the lite
rature, had a hunch it might be Ray Levasseur’s. A fingerprint analysis confirmed it. No one, however, could get too excited about going through things that had been sitting in a storage locker for two years. The boxes were sent to the FBI’s Albany office, where they languished until Len Cross sent for them.

  Inside the task force, Cross was among the few agents excited about the boxes from Binghamton. What on earth, more than one of his men said, could they learn from six-year-old gun parts and some musty old magazines? Cross had the boxes shipped to Boston anyway. When they arrived, he stacked them in a second-floor conference room and called in a trio of state troopers to help go through them all.

  “Len, we’re wasting time here,” one remarked.

  “We’ve got to,” Cross said with a sigh. “These are leads.”

  They slid on rubber gloves and began lifting out the pamphlets and magazines. After barely a half hour a New Jersey trooper, Richie Barrett, said, “Oh, my God, Len, look at this.” There, in a 1975 issue of Dragon magazine, was a diagram detailing how to build a bomb. As Cross peered at the article, Barrett said, “Look what it says about a brass screw.” The diagram, Cross realized, was an exact match for Levasseur’s bombs, down to the brass screw drilled into the faceplate. In a later Dragon they found an article explaining the best ways to write communiqués. Among the suggestions was mailing a copy of a copy of a copy. Cross had to smile. This was why they could never get any useful information off Levasseur’s communiqués.

  A little later Mike Nockunas, a Connecticut trooper, said, “Len, look at this.” It was a catalogue for outdoor furniture. According to the postmark, it had been mailed in 1978 to someone named Jack Horning at 122 Mount Pleasant Street in Derby, Connecticut, just west of New Haven. “That’s gotta be a safe house,” Cross said.

  Nockunas, a thirty-three-year-old trooper, volunteered to check the address. The next day he drove into Connecticut on the remote chance he could pick up Levasseur’s six-year-old trail. In Derby he found the house, an aging two-bedroom in a blue-collar neighborhood, but the occupants knew no one named Horning. Neither did anyone else on Mount Pleasant Street. Nockunas began reinterviewing the neighbors, piecing together a picture of the area circa 1978. Finally he found a man who remembered two teenaged sisters who babysat for a family who might be the Hornings. Nockunas tracked down one of the girls, Jennifer Browne, now seventeen.* Yes, she remembered the Hornings and their two girls. In fact, she had photos of them. When the girl brought out a photo, Nockunas was startled to find himself staring into the faces of Ray Levasseur and Pat Gros.

  For an hour he gently drew from Jennifer every memory of the Hornings. When she mentioned a car accident, Nockunas thought, “Bingo.” An accident meant an accident report. By nightfall he was standing in the Derby Police Department, describing every detail of the long-ago wreck. The sergeant on duty said the records from 1977 and 1978 were in the basement, but he would look. Nockunas headed to Boston to brief Len Cross, and as they were talking that night, the Derby sergeant called. In his hands he had a report of a one-car accident from September 2, 1978, at the foot of Mount Pleasant Street. “Paula Horning” was the driver, Jennifer Browne and an infant girl the passengers. The weird thing, the sergeant said, was that the name on Paula Horning’s license wasn’t Paula Horning. It was Judy Hymes.

  This was a name they had never heard. Nockunas headed straight for his office in Meriden and all but ran to a computer terminal. He entered the “Judy Hymes” license in an FBI database. It was expired. But, he saw, it had been turned in for a new license in New York. A few more keystrokes and Nockunas saw the license had again been turned in, this time in Ohio. Then he saw it: the Judy Hymes in Ohio had just purchased a red-and-white Chevrolet van that August, two months before. The computer listed an address, 5318 North High Street, Box 65, in Columbus. Within minutes Nockunas had identified the address as that of a business called Mail Services Etcetera. It was a mail drop. It was, he realized with a start, an active UFF mail drop.

  This was by far the best lead anyone had fielded in eight years. In Boston Len Cross got on the phone with the Cincinnati field office and explained the situation. An agent arrived at Mail Services Etcetera’s office in a Columbus strip mall the next day. After working things out with the owner, agents installed a camera trained on Box 65, along with a buzzer that would sound in the manager’s office if the box was opened from the outside. Agents rented a house across the street. If the buzzer sounded, the manager was to immediately call them.

  On Monday, October 15, 1984, Cross had a four-man team in place to begin the surveillance; a new team would rotate in from Boston every week if necessary. The first day nothing happened. And the second. And the third. Apparently, Cross could see, this mail drop wasn’t used much. At the end of that first week he sent out another team.

  A second week passed with no sign of the Levasseurs, the Mannings, or the Laamans. In Washington supervisors began to grow restless. Multiagent stakeouts were expensive. How long was this going to take? Cross urged patience. This was the best lead they’d ever had, he emphasized. One of the Bureau’s assistant directors, Oliver “Buck” Revell, gave him one final week. If the UFF hadn’t checked its mail by Saturday, November 3, he was putting an end to the stakeout.

  As it happened, Mike Nockunas was one of the four men manning the stakeout that week. There was little to do but drink coffee. Then, on that final Saturday morning, as the agents prepared to pack up, the phone rang. Box 65 had just been opened. Nockunas and the others stared at the monitor. There, standing in front of Box 65 across the street, was a face Nockunas knew well. “That’s Patty Gros,” he breathed.

  A lookout said she was driving a white Chevy van with a red stripe down one side. Everyone scrambled into cars and wheeled toward the strip mall. In minutes they spotted the van as it left the parking lot. And then, amazingly, they saw a second, identical white Chevy van, a red stripe down the side. In the ensuing confusion, all but one of the pursuit cars elected to follow one van. The second van drew only a single car, driven by a Rhode Island trooper named Louis Reale.

  The two processions headed in different directions through the streets of Columbus. Alone behind his van, Reale checked its license plate. After a few moments its registration came back: Judy Hymes. He had the right van. He got on the radio and tried to alert the rest of the pursuing agents, but in the heat of the chase, no one was willing to listen. It took several more minutes for the rest of the pursuing FBI agents and state troopers to let the other van go.

  Reale kept his van in sight until the pilot of an FBI airplane, scrambled from a nearby airstrip, radioed that he was on it. Falling back now, relying on the aircraft, Reale followed its instructions as the van headed toward Interstate 71. By the time it reached the highway, he could see the other pursuit cars falling in behind him.

  It was a gray, drizzly morning as the van, now with a half-dozen cars in loose pursuit, turned onto I-71, heading northeast toward Akron. In Boston Len Cross notified the FBI field offices in Cleveland, Detroit, and Pittsburgh. All were put on alert. High above central Ohio, meanwhile, FBI agents in the airplane watched as Gros repeatedly stopped at the roadside, stepped out and stretched, then drove the wrong way down an exit or two, common tactics used to identify pursuers. Clearly she knew what she was doing. Finally, one hundred miles north, they watched as she left the interstate at Exit 209, turning onto Route 224, heading east toward Akron. The trailing agents stayed well back for forty more miles, passing south of the city, until the van again left the highway, this time heading into a rural area between Akron and Youngstown. Barely a mile later agents in the airplane watched it turn into the driveway of a small house.

  For the next hour, as agents on the ground stayed well away from the house, supervisors in Boston, Cleveland, and Washington debated whether to move in. As they did, two things happened. At one point a man emerged from the house and took a German shepherd for a walk in the yard. As t
he dog urinated, an agent was able to snap a long-distance photo. It was Ray Levasseur, they were certain. Then, a bit later, the airborne agents saw a second man emerge from the house, slide into a car, and drive out onto Route 225. As he headed north, two pairs of agents scrambled in pursuit.

  For a half hour the agents followed as the car headed toward Cleveland. At one point it stopped in a rest area and the driver stepped out and used a pay phone. A minute later he returned to the car and continued north. The pursuing agents split up, one set following the car, the second heading for the pay phone. One of these agents quickly called the telephone company and asked for the number just dialed. Meanwhile, up ahead, the unidentified man in the car headed into the Cleveland suburbs. Within minutes his pursuers, a pair of New England troopers unfamiliar with Ohio roads, lost him.

  It didn’t matter. By dusk the number called from the pay phone had led the FBI, now augmented by the Cleveland police, to a two-story white frame house on West Twenty-second Street. In the windows agents could see jack-o-lanterns and Halloween decorations. Inside they were able to identify the man in the car, who turned out to be Richard Williams, as well as Jaan Laaman, Barbara Curzi, and their three children. As night fell, police took up positions all around the house. Down in Deerfield, meanwhile, the FBI brought in one of its Nightstalker aircraft, armed with infrared cameras and sensors, to watch the Levasseur home.

  Throughout that Saturday night and into the morning of Sunday, November 4, FBI supervisors debated when and how to move in. They hadn’t seen Tom and Carol Manning yet, and Len Cross argued persuasively that they should wait until they did. The Cleveland SAC, nominally in charge of the operation, agreed to hold off for now. But in the event that any of the suspects left their homes in the morning, all bets were off.