American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst

by Jeffrey Toobin

  In the summer of 1973, the three of them divided the labor of creating the SLA. Mizmoon, with her knowledge of the library, handled research; Ling did the writing, while DeFreeze presided and drank plum wine. His main contribution appears to have been lending his authenticity to the group as a black man and a felon. Together, as a trio, they assassinated Marcus Foster in November 1973. They planned the kidnapping the following February, and Mizmoon and Ling served as DeFreeze’s confidantes during the long wait in the safe house in Daly City, with their captive secured in the closet.

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  Notwithstanding the broadside from DeFreeze on February 21, the people at PIN decided to go forward with the food giveaway the next day. They did accede to one new demand: anyone who wanted the food could line up and receive it.

  The event was without precedent in American history. Even during the Great Depression, no one had tried, on short notice, to feed thousands of people. What made the moment even more extraordinary was that it took place because of something else that had never happened before in the United States: a political kidnapping. The nation had always prided itself on the nature of its civic discourse; lone gunmen might assassinate our leaders, but this was not a place, like Europe or South America, where political outlaws kidnapped their adversaries or robbed banks. So the Hearst kidnapping and its aftermath suited the hallucinogenic moment, where America looked less like itself and more like a foreign country.

  The country was reeling in February 1974. On the sixth, two days after Patricia was kidnapped, the House of Representatives voted to authorize the Judiciary Committee to hold hearings on the impeachment of President Nixon. On February 20, Reginald Murphy, the editor of the Atlanta Constitution, was also kidnapped, and the ransom demand came from something called the American Revolutionary Army. (The kidnapper turned out to be more emotionally unstable than politically motivated, and Murphy was released unharmed after two days. Randy Hearst later hired Murphy to run the San Francisco Examiner.) With the Arab oil embargo still in place, California, the most car-besotted state in the nation, instituted gas rationing; inflation was raging, unemployment rising. Also on February 20, Patricia Hearst turned twenty years old, which the journalists stationed outside the house in Hillsborough commemorated with a ten-foot-long sign that said, in red letters, “HAPPY BIRTHDAY PATTY FROM THE NEWSMEN.” Against this backdrop, the food giveaway began.

  PIN announced that the first distribution would take place in four places—minority neighborhoods in San Francisco, Richmond, East Palo Alto, and East Oakland. (Sara Jane Moore, despite her dowdy appearance, turned out to be a zealous turf fighter in the fledgling organization, and she more or less appointed herself public spokesperson for PIN as well as its chief bookkeeper.) Using the expertise they developed in Seattle, Kramer and Maze quickly mastered the process of getting food delivered to the warehouse in China Basin. Getting the food out the door and into the hands of the needy was more difficult. They had less experience with that kind of work and fewer local contacts who appeared able to get the job done. This led Kramer and Maze, in the improvisational ballet that was PIN, to agree to hand out the food in sites owned by the Nation of Islam.

  The distribution was supposed to begin at noon on February 22, but it was just after dawn when thousands of people started lining up waiting for the deliveries. In the confusion of that first day, the PIN trucks didn’t even leave the warehouse until early afternoon. The crowds stirred impatiently. With cell phones not yet invented, and little in the way of communication coming out of China Basin anyway, the restlessness of the crowds turned to truculence and then to anger. The boxes, all stenciled with the seven-headed logo of the SLA, were supposed to contain a great deal of food: a rack of lamb, a beef roast, a “picnic” ham, a packet of four steaks, a roasting chicken, and either a box of frozen fish or a pork roast, as well as a dozen eggs, a quart of milk, boxes of macaroni and cheese dinners, potatoes, onions, fresh fruits, two boxes of rice, fresh vegetables, flour, instant cocoa mix, and canned milk. (Not all boxes contained everything, but full boxes weighed about twenty-seven pounds.) In three of the cities, the distribution went chaotically but peacefully. The Oakland location was another story.

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  By 1974, Your Black Muslim Bakery, as it was called, was already a kind of landmark in Oakland. Yusuf Bey (born Joseph Stevens) had a talent for making bean pies and a friendship with Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Nation of Islam. Bey had opened the establishment in 1971 in response to Muhammad’s suggestion that he produce goods in accord with Muslim dietary laws, with no refined sugar, fats, or preservatives, as well as the Nation of Islam’s imperative for black pride, self-help, and personal discipline. Bey also earned a reputation, like the Nation of Islam itself, for rough treatment of adversaries. Allegations of extortion, abuse, even rape, behind the closed doors of the bakery surfaced from its earliest days.

  On the morning of February 22, roughly five thousand people lined up on the sidewalks leading to the bakery, where the PIN trucks were supposed to deliver the food packages. Waiting for hours, the crowd spilled into the street, blocking the way of the first truck that arrived in the afternoon. The driver sat on his horn, and someone in the crowd threw a bottle through his window. A riot ensued.

  As more trucks arrived on the clogged streets, people stopped them and began forcibly removing the goods. The scene quickly degenerated. People threw food from the trucks into the crowd, and heavy items—especially the frozen meats—became weapons. Twenty-one people were treated in hospitals. Gangs of kids followed those lucky enough to snare some food and relieved them of the bounty. The trucks were emptied within an hour, and thousands of those waiting received nothing at all. Television cameras captured the chaos.

  For the Hearsts, the aftermath of the fiasco in Oakland added insult to injury. One woman lost an eye when someone threw a rock through her car window, and she sued Randy Hearst, PIN, and the city of Oakland for $1 million. The proprietors of the bakery asserted that they were forced to distribute food from their own stocks to keep those waiting outside from rioting. Specifically, they made the improbable claim that they had doled out 150,000 pounds of fish and 820 cases of eggs. In light of this, the bakery presented PIN with a bill for $154,000—a transparent attempt at a shakedown of a deep-pocketed patron. Kramer had a starchy sense of rectitude, and he wanted to give the bakery owners nothing. But Randy, worried about offending any potential ally in the effort to free Patricia, approved a payment of $99,026. According to Kramer’s admittedly imprecise estimate, about nine thousand people received some food on the first, disastrous day of the giveaway. But the real question, on the night of February 22, was whether the program could continue at all.

  On the night of the Oakland fiasco, Randy Hearst called Bill Coblentz, his street-savvy lawyer, begging for ideas that might save the project and thus Patricia. Coblentz, in turn, placed a call to a young private investigator named David Fechheimer, the deputy to Hal Lipset, the PI who was handling security at the PIN warehouse. Coblentz’s question was simple: How the hell could they fix this thing?

  Fechheimer had an idea: Delancey Street.

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  John Maher was born in New York in 1940 and grew up there as a child heroin addict and street hoodlum. He moved to Los Angeles and cleaned up his life with the help of Synanon, the cultlike drug treatment program. After Maher moved to San Francisco, he wanted to help addicts like himself, but he sought to do it in a way that reflected both the rigor of Synanon and the off-kilter sensibilities of his adopted home. So in 1971, Maher founded the Delancey Street Foundation, one of the most effective, and also one of the quirkiest, drug treatment programs in the nation.

  Maher scraped together funds to buy the former Russian consulate, in tony Pacific Heights, where he spent several years fighting neighbors who wanted to evict Delancey Street. Maher took the toughest cases—long-term drug addicts, recently released prisoners, gang members, and hopeless alcoholics. He treated them with a dizzying comb
ination of deference and discipline. Sometimes Maher picked them up from prison in a Rolls-Royce, but he insisted that they shave their heads, live under his supervision, and work seven days a week. Maher took no government money and started a business that reflected the local values: a posh restaurant, called Delancey Street, fully staffed by his residents.

  On the afternoon following the Oakland fiasco, Fechheimer convened a meeting with Randy Hearst, Bill Coblentz, and Maher at the Delancey Street restaurant, which was located on San Francisco’s fashionable Union Street. Hearst wore a tie; Maher showed up in his customary outfit of a buckskin jacket over a white cashmere turtleneck. Fechheimer explained the problem. PIN needed a genuine security force that could protect both the warehouse in China Basin and the various distribution centers. Hustlers and crooks were lusting after Hearst’s money, and PIN needed a force that would not just stop them but intimidate them from even trying. Could Maher’s Delancey Street residents help?

  Maher pondered. “I have three hundred men and thirty trucks, and I’m willing to help you, but I have two conditions,” he said. Hearst, Coblentz, and Fechheimer leaned forward to hear the terms.

  “We will not accept any payment, and we will not accept any publicity,” Maher said. The three men stammered that those conditions appeared acceptable. Maher excused himself to use the pay telephone in the restaurant. Within a few minutes, dozens of bald-headed ex-goons appeared, in a surreal parade, marching down Union Street. They were reporting for their assignment to China Basin.

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  The Delancey Street residents mostly stopped the wreckage and pilfering—though a truck with food for four thousand people was hijacked the following week. Still, Randy Hearst had to deal with the other, new disaster on his hands—DeFreeze’s demand for an additional $4 million.

  So Randy changed tactics. His initial impulse had been simply to accede, as best he could, to whatever the SLA demanded. But that approach failed to produce Patricia’s release and also yielded an escalating series of demands. So Randy took a harder line, in part because he had no other choice; he didn’t have another $4 million. Not that he expected Cinque to understand, but Randy didn’t even control the company or foundation that bore his name; his father, the Chief, had seen to that. And the professionals in charge were loath to funnel any more money in the direction of lunatics like DeFreeze and Ling.

  Randy was grim-faced as he took to the microphones on his driveway. “The size of the latest demand of the SLA is far beyond my financial capability,” he said. “Therefore, the matter is out of my hands.” With that, Charles Gould, Hearst’s second-in-command at the Examiner (and the day-to-day boss of the place), stepped in to make a statement. He said the Hearst Corporation was prepared to contribute an additional $4 million to People in Need “provided Patricia Hearst is released unharmed.” It was a dramatic change in the Hearst bargaining position, which Gould underlined. “Two million dollars will be contributed immediately upon the release of Patricia and two million more will be contributed in January 1975.” In other words, the Hearsts would provide no additional funds as long as Patricia remained a captive. As Randy trudged away from the reporters, he was despondent.

  Back in the house, Steven Weed sat with his stockinged feet perched on top of the dining room table. If there was one point of unanimity among the protagonists in the kidnapping, including the Hearst family, the FBI, even the SLA and eventually the public, it was contempt for Patricia’s erstwhile fiancé. Ironically, the Hearst family and the SLA had basically the same complaint about him: cowardice. Randy and Catherine had what they called a “manliness test” for their daughters’ beaux; Steve, with his droopy mustache, slouching demeanor, and superior attitude, had failed that exam even before the kidnapping. Now the Hearsts felt that Weed’s cowardice might have cost Patricia her life. “What ever happened to the real men in this world, men like Clark Gable?” Catherine asked Steve one day. “No one would have carried my daughter off if there’d been a real man there.” (Among themselves, Patricia’s captors sneeringly made the same point.)

  Trying, as always, to prove that he knew more than anyone else, Weed sought to position himself as simultaneously inside and outside the Hearst camp. He saw himself as a potential bridge to the kidnappers, so he didn’t want them to think he was fully part of the establishment. For its part, the FBI also resented this supercilious attitude, and agents questioned him repeatedly and gave him a lie detector test, suspecting that he was holding back some of the truth of what happened on Benvenue. They grilled him about everything in his background, including the time at Princeton that he played quarterback for a team from Students for a Democratic Society in a touch football game against a team from ROTC. (Weed wasn’t in SDS but played as a favor for a friend.) This was yet another waste of time in the FBI investigation.

  As the situation with the kidnappers was deteriorating, Weed compounded the problems with a tone-deaf interview with Marilyn Baker, the reporter covering the story for KQED, the local public television station. Weed’s targets included Catherine Hearst. “Patty and I always thought her mother was so hypocritical,” he said. “She’d say one thing to your face and another behind your back. Like, if you asked her if she liked a new dress, she’d tell you how beautiful it was, then you’d hear her telling the cook, ‘Isn’t it awful?’ ” (He also complained that the Hearst household provided store-bought rather than homemade cookies.)

  About Randy Hearst, Weed said, “Actually, we disagreed somewhat over the importance of divulging his finances. He does not seem to understand how people, even very intelligent people, could fail to understand his financial status. One of the problems, though, is that Mr. Hearst is getting too much advice—from friends, relatives, the authorities, even the cook.”

  Of the FBI, he said, “Unfortunately, they’re almost comical. Mr. Bates comes in and sits down. He’s poured a drink, then Mr. and Mrs. Hearst and whoever just sit down and chat. The comical part is how adept Mr. Bates is at not telling us anything.” Did he trust the FBI? “To a point. I do not believe that the FBI wants Patty to die, but I think the SLA would be wrong to trust them entirely.”

  Weed even offered faint praise to his fiancée: “Oh, she’s pretty, you know, the prettiest of any of the Hearsts’ daughters. But then none of them are raving beauties. She’s a bright girl, too. Not brilliant, of course, but reasonably bright. She’s a simple girl. The simple things please her. She rarely got angry and then it would all be over in a few minutes. She has a very good character, too.”

  Finally, Baker asked if Weed was willing to take Patricia’s place as a hostage. (Russ Little’s father, the military mechanic in Florida, had publicly offered to take Patricia’s place.)

  “It uh…It depends on the circumstances. I wouldn’t rule it out.”

  Weed’s petulance and arrogance infuriated the Hearsts, of course. Privately, Randy called him an “egocentric pain in the ass.” But Weed’s interview also drew the notice of a different audience. Fourteen miles away, in her closet in Daly City, Patricia Hearst had been granted a television, and she was now following her own story with close attention.

  8

  “I’M A STRONG WOMAN”

  The restrictions on Patricia in Daly City were loosened within a few days of the kidnapping. The first to go were the restraints on her wrists. She was blindfolded for a while, too, so she couldn’t identify her captors. When she was allowed to take her blindfold off, the SLA members she could see wore ski masks. At first, the SLA had blasted music into the closet so Patricia couldn’t hear their conversations, but then they let her listen to the news. They gave her a television and books, starting with George Jackson’s Blood in My Eye. Before long, though, the door to the closet stayed open almost all day, which was the most important change of all.

  And so Patricia’s long conversations with members of the SLA began. Often they talked at her, especially DeFreeze, but sometimes they engaged in real conversations. Patricia was scared and weak and at times cou
ld barely stand up, but she was curious and attentive, too, especially once it became clear that the SLA had no intention of killing her. This was no indoctrination, formal or otherwise; the SLA wasn’t organized enough for such an undertaking, and there was no apparent point anyway. As DeFreeze told Patricia from the beginning, they didn’t expect to keep her around for very long. It’s just that the SLA were talkers, and Patricia was, very literally, a captive audience. The three people assigned to her—Angela Atwood, Nancy Ling, and Willy Wolfe—generally spoke to her while sitting cross-legged on the floor by the door to the closet. (The house was carpeted but unfurnished.) In one remaining concession to operational security, the SLA members did continue to refer to each other by their code names in front of her, so Patricia knew her keepers as Gelina, Fahizah, and Cujo.

  All of the members had assignments. Camilla Hall, Mizmoon’s erstwhile lover, bought food and supplies for the group. Bill and Emily Harris also left the house occasionally to do errands, like buying disguises and conducting surveillance—mostly to see if anyone in the neighborhood was looking for them or casing 37 Northridge Drive. Mizmoon and Ling catered to DeFreeze, listening to his diatribes, researching his ideas, and writing his communiqués. As for the general field marshal himself, he spent long hours sequestered in one of the three bedrooms, brooding, drinking, and listening to music. One day, DeFreeze stunned the comrades by announcing that the SLA had a “national anthem”—a jazz tune called “Way Back Home,” by the Crusaders. (When DeFreeze cited “Way Back Home” in one of the communiqués, the Crusaders were, predictably, horrified.)