Although the men in D Yard preparing for bed late Sunday night had no idea that the NYSP had been given the green light to storm the prison the next morning, they were by no means optimistic that a peaceful end to this standoff was imminent. It was clear to them that Oswald had no intention of removing Vincent Mancusi from his position at Attica, nor was Rockefeller budging on offering full amnesty in exchange for their surrender. And yet, it still wasn’t easy to imagine surrendering. Earlier that day, Herb Blyden had gotten up before the men in D Yard and had made the implications of this crystal clear. Even after being transferred to Attica, he reminded everyone, he still faced “seventy-seven counts” for having rebelled at the Tombs the year before.21 “All of this came about,” he made clear, “after the Mayor and staff promised us, promised us no reprisals on the T.V. screen.” Before he sat down Blyden said sadly to those looking up at him, “Man, I am not trying to scare you,” but no matter what they say and promise here at Attica, “you’re gonna still die.”22
Roger Champen felt ill as Blyden’s words rang in his ears. Then, later on that night when a prison chaplain suddenly showed up and asked that he be allowed to give the men huddled over in the hostage circle Last Rites, Champ thought he was going to be sick.23 “I was afraid,” he said. “I didn’t want to die and I didn’t feel it would serve a purpose to die for what was going on. Nothing concrete has happened then in terms of seeing some changes.”24 As he tried to bed down that night, Champ hoped against hope that Blyden was wrong about what would happen. Champ felt some peace, though, knowing that “if there are any lives lost in here, and if a massacre takes place…in the final analysis the world will know that the animals were not in here, but outside running the system and the government.”25
PART IV
Retribution and Reprisals Unimagined
TONY STROLLO
Tony Strollo considered himself a staunch patriot as well as a devout Catholic who attended mass every Sunday, avoided meat on Fridays, and made the sign of the cross whenever he drove past a church. Tony’s father had labored day in and day out at a Chevy plant in Buffalo and he, like so many other autoworkers of his generation, felt pretty certain that America’s working stiffs could only trust the party of FDR. But Tony distrusted liberals. And while many kids of the 1960s found themselves leaning to the political left of their parents, Tony spent that decade growing considerably more conservative than his.
When Tony graduated from high school in 1962, he was eager to enlist in the Army. By 1966, Tony was married and had started a family. To support his kids, he decided to try his hand at being a prison guard—one of the few jobs available to young men seeking work in the rural areas of the state. Tony worked for a while at Sing Sing Correctional Facility and eventually landed a transfer to Attica, which allowed him to work closer to home as well as to be in the same prison where his brother Frank worked. Tony, though, did not want to collect his paycheck from a penal institution forever. His dream had always been to become a police officer, and after a few short months Tony got a call from the New York State Police.
In 1971 Tony was loving every minute of his job as a state trooper. Assigned to the Genesco barracks in Livingston County, about twenty-five miles from home, he patrolled the rural areas of the county, driving the highways and byways of upstate New York looking for speeders and drunk drivers. At night he attended classes at Erie County Community College in Williamsville.
On September 9, 1971, Tony’s brother Frank had been on duty at Attica when it exploded in rebellion. Now, Frank sat in the hostage circle and Tony paced outside the prison’s walls feeling utterly helpless. He was a member of law enforcement, yet he could do nothing to rescue his brother. So he, along with hundreds of other state troopers, did the only thing they could do, keep pressuring their superiors to be allowed to retake the facility from the rioters. After five days of waiting, and as Tony and the rest of his troop shivered outside Attica in the cold drizzly dawn, sleep-deprived and on edge, they finally got some good news. They were going in.
Tony was secretly troubled, though. He knew that troopers had a lot more experience stopping speeders than storming a prison. Tony had been assigned his own .38 sidearm, and about three times a year, he and his fellow “Staties” would go to the shooting range to practice just in case they ever needed to use their weapons with an unruly citizen. But they were also being handed .270 rifles. Tony had absolutely no training in the use of this weapon and he knew that was true of most of the other officers.1
In Tony’s opinion it was strange that the New York State Police even had such weapons. They had ordered about one hundred of them a decade ago when it was time to update the arsenal. Most officers, however, were uncomfortable using a .270. Each gun had a scope on it and the slightest jostling could throw it off-kilter. What’s more, the ammunition that came with these Model 70 Winchester bolt-action rifles consisted of silver-tipped bullets, which were, according to another trooper, “particularly explosive [and capable of] terrible damage to human tissue.”2
But Tony just tried to shake off his misgivings. After all, the prisoners had started this—their possible injury was certainly nothing to lose sleep over. Still, he was finding it hard to get the words of one of his commanding officers out of his head. He had said to Tony gravely, “There is no chance that we can get to your brother in time.”3 Tony prayed he was wrong.
19
Chomping at the Bit
At 6:30 a.m. on Monday, the 13th of September, the fifth and what would be the final day of the Attica uprising, Commissioner Russell Oswald was locked away with Rockefeller attorney Howard Shapiro and Gerald Houlihan, the public relations director for the Department of Corrections, busily crafting the final statement they shortly would give to the prisoners. Oswald was feeling raw and ragged, having just returned to the prison after less than two hours of rest the night before.1 He was dreading the task of presenting this particular message to the men in the yard. It seemed “paradoxical” to Oswald that he had “spent a lifetime in furthering, meeting the needs, human rights concerns, of disadvantaged people” and now had to “face up to this kind of decision against people I was trying to help.”2 He made peace with this by concluding that he couldn’t have done any more than he already had. The real problem, he had decided, was the “some 3,000 people from the New York City system” who had been transferred to upstate prisons like Attica in the wake of the previous summer’s jail rebellions.3 The “hard core group…led in large measure by Maoists” that had sparked those riots, he reasoned, had been “constantly trying to radicalize” prisoners in the rest of the state and now here he was.4 Maybe there was no way he could have ended the standoff at Attica peacefully. And anyway, the governor had indicated that “his decision was firm.” Oswald decided he now had no choice but to follow orders.
So now there he sat, hunched over a typewriter next to Shapiro and Houlihan, getting the wording of the statement he would take to the prisoners at the A Gate just right. That there would even be a final communiqué to men in D Yard was in no small part thanks, again, to John Dunne. As his fellow observer Tom Wicker remembered gratefully, once Dunne learned on Sunday night that the troopers were going in the next morning, he “argued for and obtained a pledge that at 7 a.m., before the resort to violence…one last appeal would be made to the inmates for a settlement.”5
But the final missive that Oswald was drafting would not at all convey what Dunne had hoped it would—what the true cost of not surrendering immediately now would be. According to documents internal to the Rockefeller administration, Oswald had been told to “submit his final offer—not phrased as an ultimatum—to the inmates about 7:00 Monday morning, giving them one hour to respond…if the response was negative or if no answer was received within an hour, orders would be given to retake the facility.”6 The crucial caveat here, of course, was that the “final offer” would not be “phrased as an ultimatum.” Rockefeller did not want to let the prisoners know that if they didn’t comply, an
assault would commence immediately.7
But the message was precisely that. As another internal memo makes clear, Deputy Superintendent Leon Vincent had already advised his correctional personnel via their supervisors, at approximately 6:00 on Sunday—the night before the assault—that a “move to regain control of the institution” was going to take place “during the morning hours of Monday September 13, 1971.”8 This was of course before any prisoners had been given any final opportunity to surrender. The New York State Police, the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office, and Attica’s correction officers and correction officials from as far away as the Great Meadow Correctional Facility in Comstock had also been informed Sunday night that the retaking would definitely happen Monday morning.9
As Oswald worked on the text of this appeal, Major John Monahan from Batavia Troop A of the New York State Police and Attica superintendent Vincent Mancusi held a formal briefing in the Attica head clerk’s office to iron out the final details of a plan to commence at 9:00 a.m. Meanwhile, Captain Hank Williams, also of Batavia’s Troop A, readied his troops; Lieutenant Colonel George Infante of the Bureau of Criminal Investigation (BCI) waited in the wings to make sure the assault went as planned; and Governor Rockefeller’s right-hand man, Robert Douglass, reviewed the “surrender message” that was to be read to prisoners once the assault began.10 Simultaneously, Major General John C. Baker, the chief of staff to Governor Rockefeller, began briefing the many National Guardsmen who had been summoned over the last few days to let them know that, contrary to standard protocol, Governor Rockefeller had decided that the New York State Police would be leading the assault, and the National Guard would only go into the prison later to administer any needed medical assistance.
This break in protocol was both surprising and problematic. Whereas the National Guard had a clear plan already in place for bringing civil disturbances in confined areas under control, known as Operation Plan Skyhawk, the New York State Police had virtually no formal training for this sort of action.11 The hundreds of troopers gathered at Attica had never conducted any drills or mock assaults. They had no practice communicating with each other through gas masks, nor familiarity with handling the weapons. As one trooper by the name of Gerard Smith put it, troopers “weren’t trained for this and…the position [they got put into] was a political football.”12
That the Attica rebellion was so fraught politically might well be why Rockefeller did not ask his National Guard to end it. A dark cloud still hovered over the Ohio National Guard after its men had shot more than sixty-seven rounds of ammunition into an unarmed crowd of student protesters at Kent State University, killing four, little more than a year before, in May of 1970.13 Neither Rockefeller nor the higher-ups in the Nixon administration (including John Mitchell, the attorney general) wanted to give America’s liberal and left elements any more reason to focus attention on Attica than they already had.14
To National Guardsman Dan Callahan, however, the governor’s decision to let the police troopers retake the prison was just stupid. Before his unit was called to Attica it had spent considerable time back at the armory discussing what weapons, if any, should be used in a retaking of this prison. Since there was no reason to believe the prisoners had firearms, maybe no guns were needed, but if firearms would be used, Callahan felt strongly that these must be chosen with great care. No weapon loaded with buckshot should be used, for example, because its wide scatter would cause many casualties.15 Yet as Callahan could now see, not only were the troopers about to enter Attica heavily armed with buckshot-loaded shotguns, but they clearly were also angry as well as “haggard” and “exhausted.”16 For the life of him, Callahan could not understand why the governor would send such an unwieldy and clearly disintegrating group into an operation as delicate as a hostage rescue. “There was a way to do this,” he later reflected, but unleashing hundreds of overwrought, fatigued, and excessively armed men was not it.17
How, exactly, the State Police would retake Attica was formalized in a handwritten agreement signed by Major John Monahan and Attica superintendent Vincent Mancusi in their early morning meeting.18 That plan was then conveyed both verbally and in writing to Deputy Superintendent Leon Vincent and Assistant Deputy Superintendent Karl Pfeil of Attica, as well as to Captain Henry Williams of the State Police.19
First, all electricity to the prison would be shut off. Then, a helicopter, dubbed “Jackpot 1” and provided by the National Guard, would fly over the prison yard to drop CS tear gas, temporarily disabling the rebel prisoners gathered outside in D Yard. Another chopper carrying tear gas canisters would follow that one in case it should malfunction. Meanwhile, two six-man teams of troopers, who, armed with .270 rifles and tear gas projectiles, had taken positions on the rooftops of A and C Blocks, would clear the catwalks of anyone in the way. Nearly two hundred troopers “armed with revolvers and shotguns” simultaneously would enter A and C Tunnels in small teams and converge on Times Square.20 Once those troopers made it to Times Square, they would fan out to secure B and D Blocks, while a team of twenty-five men with guns and ladders would attempt to rescue the hostages in the circle.21 For reasons not made clear, the entire operation would also be filmed. Since the day the Attica rebellion began, there had been several state troopers assigned to chronicle events at the prison. Those men would continue to operate both a television camera and a video recorder during the retaking.
As many details as this plan had, there were many crucially important ones missing. Though troopers were to commence shooting at the gas drop, the mechanism by which they would be informed when to stop remained unclear. Indeed, “the decision on whether or not to fire thus passed directly to the riflemen themselves,” which left much of the assault’s fate in individuals’ hands.22 Since there was no clear way for an individual trooper to communicate with another, this lack of planning was potentially dangerous for all concerned. The troopers had not been equipped with radios, and specific troopers weren’t charged with relaying commands from the higher-ups. Worse, each trooper sent into the prison was to wear a heavy gas mask, which, even with a plastic window, would be difficult to see out of through the powdery gas. The noise of shooting was likely to make it impossible to communicate. Hand signals could have been agreed upon to deal with the other communication barriers, but this wasn’t done either. Perhaps most important, the plan had no provision for giving either a surrender message or post-assault instructions to the prisoners in English or Spanish, and no procedure was outlined for what to do with the prisoners once the state had regained control of the facility.
Not only did the state’s retaking plan leave a great deal to chance, but troopers later claimed to have heard instructions very different from those that their commanding officers had been charged with giving them. Trooper Gerard Smith later testified that his captain had told his team that “firing was supposed to take place simultaneously when the helicopter came over to drop the gas” and that “everybody on the top catwalk was supposed to be eliminated.”23 Others later denied they had been given this charge.
While various battalions of troopers were being briefed, Attica’s deputy superintendent, Leon Vincent, explained the attack plan to approximately 312 correction officers just as eager as the NYSP troopers to enter the prison. Although Vincent later insisted that he had made it clear to them that only state troopers, and no COs, were to go in, there is no corroboration of this claim.24 To the contrary, according to later testimony by Superintendent Mancusi, Leon Vincent had actually “issued an order that correctional officers could participate in the armed retaking.”25 Even if Vincent had verbally banned these men from participating, they likely would not have been deterred. Some had traveled a great distance to lend their assistance. One CO’s wife later described her husband as walking out the door “like John Wayne,” armed with the personal gun he kept under his bed, as soon as he heard the news that the retaking was imminent. She desperately called out to him, “Don’t do something you will regret,” but he just “k
ept on going.”26
A crowd of sheriffs and sheriff’s deputies from a total of eight New York counties had also converged on Attica, and, like the COs, they had spent the last four days pacing restlessly outside the prison hoping to assist in the retaking. On the morning of the 13th, they had already donned “grey coveralls, and an assortment of helmets, riot batons, shotguns, and other weapons” in anticipation of being able to enter the facility.27 Park police from Genesee and Schuyler counties were also there. As in the case of the COs, it is unclear whether they were told they could participate in the retaking or not. But to men of rank from numerous sheriff’s offices, such as Sergeant Frank Hall from Monroe County, there seemed to be little question that they too would act.28 They were armed and ready.
It was remarkable just how many weapons had been distributed to members of law enforcement trampling the grass around the prison. The way in which this process was conducted, particularly by the NYSP, was extraordinary as well. As early as the first day of the rebellion, .270 rifles were passed out to officers in every troop and—quite deliberately, it would later become clear—there was virtually “no effort made by anyone…to make a record by serial number or trooper” of who received which rifles.29 Although four full days had passed during which those in charge could have ensured that all protocols regarding the distribution of weapons were followed, none of the weapons now being readied for the retaking had been formally recorded. And thus, the men who were about to go into Attica were accountable to no one.
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