students’ views on, 155
summit meeting of, 120–23
surrenders of members of, 370–72
Symbionese Liberation Army and, 278, 286, 288–89, 303, 315
Tiburon house of, 160
Townhouse explosion and, 1, 106–13, 115–16, 120, 121, 124, 128, 132, 133, 140, 149, 154, 157–59, 163, 168–69, 178, 218–19, 370, 448, 497, 504, 545
Tucson Five, 153–54
in underground, 81–82, 84, 89–92, 218, 448, 515
Underground film made about, 366–67
violent turn of, 82
war declared against U.S. government by, 123–24, 126–28, 132, 141
Weather Bureau, 74, 75, 81, 82
Weatherman paper, 67–68, 88, 122
“Weatherman Park” gathering and, 168–69
women’s brigade in, 150, 311
youth culture and, 116–17, 121, 144, 146, 149, 158
see also specific members
Weatherman bombings, 1, 2, 56, 79, 82, 92–105, 106, 113, 119, 132, 136–40, 149–51, 152, 154, 158, 159, 161, 168, 223–24, 234, 268, 287, 309–12, 315–16, 355, 356, 497
Ayers and, 96–99, 103, 123
in Berkeley, 95–97
bomb design and, 124–27
of buildings of symbolic importance, 122
at California Department of Corrections, 137–40, 223
of Capitol, 163–64, 231, 366
change in approach to, 223
Fliegelman and, 125–26, 136–39, 149, 151, 163, 391, 461, 480, 490
Fort Dix plan, 103–5, 106, 121–22
in Haymarket Square, 79, 149
at Marin County Courthouse, 150
at Murtagh residence, 100–101, 174
at NYPD, 127–31, 132, 164
of Pentagon, 230–33, 309
at Presidio military base, 136
Robbins’s ideas for, 82–83
routines for, 136–37
San Francisco plan, 127–28
Wilkerson and, 1–2, 124–26, 136
Webb, Robert, 187–90, 195, 196
Weed, Steven, 285, 286
Weems, Donald, see Balagoon, Kuwasi
Wells, Charles, 391
Wexler, Haskell, 366
Wexu, Mario, 452
Wheeler, Thero, 278–79, 281, 286
White, Anthony “Kimu,” 191, 237, 241
White, Avon, 237–38, 242, 243, 253
Whitehorn, Laura, 363, 544
Wilkerson, Cathy, 1–3, 68, 83, 88, 92–95, 100–105, 116, 122, 140, 141, 160, 219, 227, 228, 362, 366, 369, 371, 373, 496, 537, 538, 545
on achievements of the underground, 539–40
bombings and, 1–2, 124–26, 136
Fliegelman and, 126, 371
at summit meeting, 121
in Townhouse explosion, 1, 106–12, 115, 124, 545
Wilkerson, James, 101–2, 110
Wilkins, Roy, 38, 39
Williams, Jeral, see Shakur, Mutulu
Williams, Richard, 514, 516–19, 523–24, 533, 534, 536, 544
Williams, Robert F., 30–31, 38, 40, 43
in Cuba, 31, 34, 42
Wisconsin National Guard Armory, 481–82
Wisconsin State Journal, 148
WLIB, 176–77
Wofford, Don, 320–21, 323, 327–32, 382, 386, 392, 394–96, 463, 464, 483
Woodstock, 10
Woodward, Bob, 135, 497
Wolfe, Tom, 156, 183
Wolfe, Willie (“Cujo”), 276, 277, 291, 295, 303, 306
World Trade Center:
1993 attack on, 541
September 11 attack on, 5, 504n
Wretched of the Earth, The (Fanon), 43
W. R. Grace chemical factory, 436–38
Yippies, 10, 164, 228
Yoshimura, 333–36, 338, 339, 342, 344
Young, John V., 542
Young, Roger, 397, 402, 404–5
Young Lords, 449–50, 467
youth culture, 116–17, 121, 155–56
hippies, 26–27, 85, 116–17, 121, 156–57, 159
Weatherman and, 116–17, 121, 144, 146, 147, 158
Zebra Killers, 4n
Ziegler, Ron, 150–51
Zilsel, Joanna, 99, 111, 117
Zimbabwe, 210
Zion, Sidney, 20–21
Zodiac Killer, 275
IMAGE CREDITS
Image 1: Patrick A. Burns/The New York Times/Redux. Image 2: The New York Times/Redux. Image 3: Jesse-Steve Rose/The Image Works.
Image 4: The New York Times/Redux.
Image 5: David Fenton/Archive Photos/Getty Images. Image 6: AP Photo/Edward Kitch.
Image 7: AP Photo/Marty Lederhandler. Image 8: AP Photo. Image 9: FBI.
Image 10: © Corbis. Image 11: AP Photo. Image 12: The New York Times/Redux.
Image 13 and Image 14: © Bettmann/Corbis. Image 15: AP Photo.
Image 16: AP Photo
Image 17: Jack Manning/The New York Times/Redux. Inset above left: © Corbis. Inset below left: Courtesy of Sun-Times Media. Inset below right: AP Photo/New York City Police.
Image 18 and Image 19 © Bettmann/Corbis.
Image 20: © Bettmann/Corbis. Image 21: AP Photo. Image 22: unknown.
Image 23: Boston Globe/Getty Images. Image 24: FBI.
Image 25: The New York Times/Redux. Image 26: Paul Shoul.
Image 27: © Corbis. Image 28: FBI.
Image 29: © Corbis. Image 30: FBI. Image 31: unknown.
Image 32: Shobha/Contrasto/Redux. Image 33: AP Photo/David Handschuh. Image 34: AP Photo/Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Marcus Garner. Image 35: Daniel Lynch/Financial Times REA/Redux. Image 36: AP Photo.
*These six organizations are the most significant of the modern underground era in terms of their longevity and the impact of their “political actions.” But they were not, by any means, the only radical groups that committed violent acts on U.S. soil during the 1970s and early 1980s. Probably the most important underground group not chronicled in this book is the George Jackson Brigade, which robbed at least seven banks and detonated twenty pipe bombs in the Pacific Northwest between March 1975 and December 1977. There are other groups that committed even greater mayhem but can’t easily be defined as underground organizations. One is the band of four Black Muslim men who carried out the so-called Zebra Murders, fourteen execution-style killings of white people in San Francisco during a six-month period in 1973 and 1974. Another was a squad of Croatian nationalists responsible for what at the time was the deadliest terrorist attack in the United States since 1920, a bombing at New York’s LaGuardia Airport in 1975 that killed eleven people.
*Allard and Charette remained in Cuba for ten years. Upon their return to Canada in 1979, both were arrested and served jail terms on old bombing charges. A U.S. effort to extradite the pair was denied in 1991.
*“Jim Duncan” is a pseudonym.
*“Paul Bradley” is a pseudonym for a long-serving member of the Weather Underground.
*In the mid-1970s Grathwohl testified about Weatherman before a Senate subcommittee and subsequently wrote a book, Bringing Down America. Later he emerged as a kind of conservative gadfly who regularly appeared on Fox News and other cable channels to talk about Ayers and others he knew in the group. Grathwohl died in 2013.
*The details of the Robbins group’s first actions are supplied by Wilkerson, who actually remembered that the Murtagh bombing happened on a different night from the other firebombings. However, newspaper articles at the time date them all to a single evening, February 21. Over the course of the next ten days, no other firebombings received mention in the New York press, suggesting that Wilkerson’s memory may be faulty and that all the Weather firebombings did happen on t
he same evening.
*Five people were living in the townhouse that week: Terry Robbins, Diana Oughton, Cathy Wilkerson, Teddy Gold, and Kathy Boudin. At least a half-dozen more members of the collective, including Brian Flanagan, lived elsewhere.
*At the time, the sale of firecrackers was illegal in New Hampshire. The sale of dynamite wasn’t. “You can buy dynamite easier than bananas,” the state’s attorney general complained in an interview with the New York Times.
*In later years Gold’s Weather comrades would speculate that he had returned to the townhouse from the drugstore in time to be killed. In all likelihood, he hadn’t left yet. He was crushed beneath the basement’s concrete staircase.
*Detectives sifting through the rubble that day also discovered an appointment card indicating that Kathy Boudin was scheduled to see her dentist Monday, March 9, three days after the explosion. Checking with the dentist later that week, they were amazed to find that she had kept it.
*Two of the accused were later acquitted in a jury trial.
*Gilbert claims that the bomb was discovered after Weatherman phoned in its whereabouts. Retired FBI agents recall that it was found by a shaken janitor later that year.
*“Marvin Doyle” is a pseudonym. The author now works for a Washington-area think tank, where no one knows his history as a 1970s-era radical.
*Michael Kennedy declined to comment for the record.
*The statue would eventually be rebuilt yet again, this time inside a protected courtyard.
*Reached at his Oakland-area home in 2013, Stang declined to discuss the incident, saying it was all “a misunderstanding.”
*The lone disparity between versions of this incident involves what car was being driven. Jones remembers he was driving Suzie Q. Three FBI agents present that day recall he was driving a Volvo sedan.
*Three weeks later Thomas, Mark Holder, Frank Fields, and Joanne Chesimard were indicted for the robbery. According to a BLA member captured and interviewed by the NYPD in 1973, the participants were Thomas, his girlfriend Ignae Gittens, Holder, Fields, Chesimard, and Andrew Jackson. Jackson was later tried and acquitted of involvement. Forty years later New York detectives who have extensively researched the BLA say they doubt Chesimard was present; they believe the second woman was another female BLA member.
*The story of the BLA’s sojourn in Atlanta is based on interviews two captured BLA members gave to the NYPD months later, along with newspaper accounts of their crimes and interviews with policemen who investigated them.
*Chesimard’s identification, while likely, is not ironclad. The witness, Paul Costa, also identified another BLA member, Andrew Jackson, who was in Florida at the time.
*Jackson was a California prison inmate and best-selling author who had been killed the previous August. See chapter 12 for details.
*Authorities later arrested two of the men’s girlfriends and accused them of smuggling in hacksaw blades.
*According to Avon White, gunmen that night were Kearney, Zayd Shakur, and Fred Hilton. Only Kearney, armed with a Browning automatic, appears to have fired. Shakur and Hilton remained in the parked car. The shooting of the Imperato brothers led to a change in NYPD policy that remains in place to this day: Relatives can no longer ride in the same squad car.
*Some sources claim that the name New World Liberation Front originated in a statement by Eldridge Cleaver in 1969. Cleaver envisioned it as an alliance of radical whites and Third World blacks.
*It was the same bank Sam Melville had bombed in the days after the Woodstock festival five years earlier, in September 1969.
*Wofford joined the FBI in 1972 to avoid a second stint in Vietnam. The oldest student in his class at the FBI Academy, he served two years in Norfolk, Virginia, before his transfer to New York.
*This man, Oscar Collazo, served twenty-nine years in prison until ordered released by President Carter in 1979. Collazo was among several Puerto Rican nationalists decorated by Fidel Castro that same year.
*The names are pseudonyms. The couples were never publicly identified.
*Or, according to government prosecutors, John Hazinski.
*In 1976 Time magazine carried a story that detailed how a major break in the case came when agents in the “Dirty Dozen” uncovered piles of incriminating Weatherman files in an office safe maintained by the onetime New York assistant director John Malone. Today neither Bill Gardner nor other prosecutors interviewed for this book can remember any such discovery. The only important FBI documents investigators found, Gardner emphasizes, were those he himself found at FBI headquarters at the outset of the investigation.
*The indictment against the FBI’s John Kearney was simultaneously dropped.
*Among the PLO’s other attorneys was Dennis Cunningham, who led the FBI to Bernardine Dohrn and Jeff Jones in the Weather “Encirclement.”
*Seven days after the bombings, the “Son of Sam” killer, a mentally unbalanced man named David Berkowitz, was finally arrested.
*Five days after the Mobil Oil bombing, an office worker at one of the targeted buildings, 1270 Avenue of the Americas, glimpsed an envelope lying on an eighth-floor windowsill. Inside it police discovered an unexploded FALN bomb, apparently a dud that had been intended to detonate along with the two other August 3 explosions. Despite repeated NYPD searches, no other FALN bombs were found.
*Just before 4:00 that afternoon a pipe bomb exploded in a fountain outside the New York Public Library, lightly damaging a statue. This explosion was probably not an FALN bomb, the FBI concluded.
*The name rhymes with “harasser.”
*Kathie Flynn lost her appeal, jumped bail, and lived underground for a period of months. According to Levasseur, she eventually turned herself in to authorities.
*Pat Gros and Linda Coleman, who did not join the others underground, attempted to keep the bookstore open for several weeks, then quit and shut its doors.
*Agents later recovered the rest of Picariello’s dynamite, almost six hundred pounds of it, buried near Portland.
*Levasseur had hoped to place a bomb at a bank in downtown Boston but discovered that police security linked to the Bicentennial celebration made it impossible.
*This robbery was never publicly linked to Levasseur and Manning. However, in interviews for this book, Levasseur volunteered details of the robbery and its approximate date. These details clearly match the March 2, 1978, Waterbury robbery described in contemporary newspaper accounts, though Levasseur, concerned about legal ramifications, declined to confirm they were the same.
*Both Ferguson and Oliver served brief prison sentences for their role in the aborted robbery. Neither gave Shakur’s name to police.
*May 19 is the birthday of both Ho Chi Minh and Malcolm X.
*Officer Ryan would later claim that he looked in on Morales at 7:00 a.m. and saw “a form” in his bed. The disappearance would be discovered a half hour later, leading police to speculate that Morales had escaped during that half-hour window of time. This is highly unlikely.
*Police did say they suspected that the man in the mailman disguise was probably the same “mailman” seen loitering outside a neighborhood bank the week before. The man had been reported to police, bizarrely, after a woman noticed he was wearing high-heeled shoes.
*James Kelly suffered a concussion but soon returned to work. Joe Trombino too recovered from his wounds, though he never fully regained the use of his left hand. He remained a Brink’s guard for twenty years. Trombino died while making a pickup in the basement of the World Trade Center when it was attacked by terrorists on September 11, 2001. He was sixty-eight.
*Police located the Levasseur home in rural Germantown a week later. It yielded no further useful information.
*The name Jennifer Browne is a pseudonym.
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