Days of Rage (4 page)

One night Jane returned to the apartment and found Melville pacing nervously. “They’ve come up with a plan,” he said.

Jane stared.

“They want to hijack a plane to Cuba.”

“You’re not serious.”

They were. He was. Even though every nerve in her body told Jane not to, she agreed to help. She did it, she told herself, out of love. The real reason, though she couldn’t admit it for years, was the excitement. She was involved in something bigger than herself. They were changing the world. This was justified. This was important.

Over the next two weeks, everything came together quickly. Melville managed to buy a gun. Jane selected a Miami-bound plane to hijack. On Monday, May 5, they followed the two Canadians to LaGuardia Airport and said goodbye. “How can we ever thank you?” one asked.

“We are all fighting for the same cause,” Jane replied.

That night Jane and Melville hunched over a radio until the announcer on WBAI read a news bulletin: “National Airlines flight number ninety-one has been diverted from Miami to Cuba, where it has now landed.”

Melville and Jane shouted for joy, hopping like rabbits, they were so
excited. “Those little bastards,” Melville crowed over and over. “They did it. They did it!”
*

 • • • 

After the hijacking, Melville’s confidence soared. Finally, after months of talk, he began laying concrete plans for the bombing campaign he envisioned. He started practicing with disguises. Jane was startled one day when, lying in the bathtub, she saw a strange man enter the apartment. He looked like a businessman, clean-shaven, wearing a suit and a fedora. It took a moment before she realized it was Melville. “We can’t afford to look like hippies anymore,” he explained. “The revolution ain’t tomorrow. It’s now. You dig?”
¹

Jane saw her lover’s bombing plans as just another of his fantasies. Talk of bombing she dismissed as a “silly scheme” intended “to win my attention and boost his self-esteem.” Yet Jane’s skepticism only seemed to propel Melville forward. One night that June, she found him hunched over a hand-drawn map. That day, he announced, he and a friend had staked out a building site and followed a truck carrying dynamite all the way to the Major Deegan Expressway. Following the truck, he said, would lead to the source of its dynamite.

Jane looked at him balefully. Maybe, she suggested, he should try looking in the Yellow Pages under “explosives.” When he did, Melville was startled to find three listings, including one in the Bronx. All were for a company called Explo Industries. Soon he began talking excitedly about plans to rob the Explo warehouse. Jane rolled her eyes. She might have laughed out loud had she known what Melville also didn’t: A short drive north, in much of New England, dynamite could be purchased simply by walking into any construction-supplies retailer.

After staking out the warehouse, Melville and two pals made their move on the night of Monday, July 7, 1969. They left at eleven. Jane waited. Midnight came and went. Another hour ticked by. She watched the clock.

At 1:20 a.m., Sam and his pals burst into the apartment, wide smiles on their faces. They plunked down four boxes on the kitchen floor. The robbery had gone smoothly; once the night watchman saw their gun, he offered no resistance. They left him tied up. Jane gingerly opened the top of one box. Inside was row upon row of red dynamite sticks, each wrapped in paper. The words
NITRO-GLYCERINE—HIGHLY FLAMMABLE
were printed on each. They took the yogurt and the salad out of the refrigerator and slid the boxes in. Sam was as happy as Jane had ever seen him. Once everyone left, they made love, Alpert wrote later, “the most tender and passionate in a long time.”

 • • • 

The dynamite in the couple’s refrigerator quickly became the focus of discussion among their dozen or so radical friends, all of whom, like Melville, were eager to put it to use. A few days after the robbery, Melville rented a $60-a-month apartment on East Second Street, where they moved the dynamite. The new flat became his clandestine workshop, where he began experimenting with bomb designs. On Saturday, July 26, the sixteenth anniversary of Fidel Castro’s disastrous raid on a Cuban army barracks, he told Jane he was ready to mark the date with their first “action.”

Their target would be a United Fruit warehouse on a Hudson River pier in lower Manhattan; United Fruit, best known for its Chiquita bananas, had been a major investor in Cuba. Melville had already built two bombs and slid them into large vinyl pocketbooks. At dusk he and Alpert and a friend strolled down to the Hudson, where the warehouse, with the words
UNITED FRUIT
emblazoned on one side, lay in darkness. Standing at the end of the dock, they could see no security, no watchmen. The only sound, other than the whiz of cars on the nearby West Side Highway, was the lapping of water below. While the women stood guard, Melville took one of the bombs and disappeared into the gloom. He returned a minute later, took the second bomb, then left again. He hurried back and herded the women away, saying, “Let’s go.”

They rushed back to their apartment and turned on the radio, eagerly awaiting the news. None came. In the morning Jane pored over the
Times
: nothing. They began to suspect that police had covered up the news. That afternoon they made an anonymous call to WBAI, the radical radio station,
and an hour later it finally carried the news. The two bombs, set beside the warehouse, had blown a hole in an outer wall and wrecked a door. Unfortunately, they learned, United Fruit no longer used the facility. It was being used instead by a tugboat company. Melville was crestfallen. “I used up forty sticks of dynamite on that job,” he complained. “That’s one quarter of what we’ve got.”

Their friends were furious at being left out of the plan. But that wasn’t what delayed their new bombing campaign. Alpert came home from work one evening and found Melville in bed with one of her friends. Afterward he wanted to break up. Then he changed his mind. They began to fight, then they agreed to try sleeping with other people. Melville was morose. And then came that rainy weekend they all went up to Woodstock and then sullenly drove back to New York and Alpert came home from a long day at work and Melville confessed he had planted a new bomb without her.

“Where did you plant the bomb?” Alpert asked.

“At the Marine Midland Bank.”

The name meant nothing to Alpert. It wasn’t a target they had discussed. It stood at 140 Broadway, a few blocks up from Wall Street.

“Why Marine Midland?” Alpert asked.

“No particular reason,” Melville said. “I just walked around Wall Street till I found a likely-looking place. It’s one of those big new skyscrapers, millions of tons of glass and steel, some fucking phony sculpture in the front. You just look at the building and the people going in and out of it, and you know.”

“What time did you set the bomb for?” Alpert asked.

“Eleven o’clock.”

Alpert stared at the clock. Barely an hour away.

“Sam, you never even cased that building,” she said, worried. “Do you know what the Wall Street area is like at eleven o’clock on a weeknight? People work there until after midnight. Cleaning women. File clerks. Keypunch operators. Did you make a warning call or anything?”

Melville shifted.

Alpert all but dragged him to a pay phone up the street. She made the call, reaching a security guard. She told him about the bomb and pleaded with him to evacuate the building. The guard seemed annoyed.

“I’d like to help you, lady, really, I would,” he said. “But I don’t leave this post until midnight when I make rounds.”

“But the bomb’s going to go off at eleven.”

“I see your point.” The guard sighed. “I’ll do what I can.”

Back in the apartment, Alpert and Melville sat by the radio, waiting. The news came a few minutes after eleven.

Melville had simply wandered into the building and left the bomb next to an elevator on the eighth floor. That night about fifty people, almost all women, were working on the floor, inputting data into bookkeeping machines. When the bomb went off at 10:45 p.m., the explosion destroyed several walls, blowing an eight-foot hole in the floor and dumping a ton of debris down into the seventh floor, where more people were working. Windows shattered, generating a blizzard of flying glass; several women’s dresses were cut to shreds. Sirens echoed through lower Manhattan. Ambulances carted away twenty people who had been injured, none of them seriously.

Alpert was apoplectic—not because of the injuries but because of Melville’s motivation. The bombing, she saw, had nothing to do with the war or Nixon or racism. She knew Melville better than anyone, and she knew this was about her. As she wrote years later, “Because I had threatened to abandon him, for even one night, by sleeping with another man, he had taken revenge on a skyscraperful of people.”

Afterward they drafted a communiqué, which called the bombing an act of “political sabotage.” Jane typed up three copies and sent them to
Rat, the Guardian,
and the Liberation News Service. Alpert was actually at
Rat
when the paper’s editor, Jeff Shero, slit open the envelope and read it.

“Far fuckin’ out!” he yelped.

 • • • 

For their next bombing, a group of their friends pitched in. On September 18, 1969, as President Nixon delivered a speech at the United Nations, two miles north, Alpert and the others gathered around Melville as he assembled a bomb. He used fifteen sticks of dynamite, a blasting cap, and a Westclox alarm clock. When he finished, he lowered the device into a handbag Jane
had stolen. Wearing a white A-line dress and kid gloves, she slid the bag’s strap over her shoulder, gave the group a salute, and left. She took the bus downtown, cushioning the bag on her lap, and got off at Foley Square, home to the U.S. Courthouse, with its vast, colonnaded façade; the New York County Courthouse; and Alpert’s destination: the two-year-old Federal Building, a forty-two-story rectangle of glass and steel. At the elevator bank, Alpert pressed the button for the fortieth floor. Reaching it, she stepped into an empty hallway. She left the bomb in an electrical-equipment closet.

Around 1 a.m. the conspirators gathered on the roof of an apartment house in the East Village. They had trained a telescope on the upper floors of the Federal Building. All the skyscraper’s lights remained ablaze. High atop the building, an airplane beacon blinked its orange eye. They waited, taking turns at the telescope. The minutes ticked by like hours. Then, suddenly, a few minutes before two, every light in the Federal Building silently winked out.

“Holy shit,” someone breathed.

“An explosion of undetermined origin,” the
Times
called it the next morning, by which time Melville had already learned they had bombed not the Army Department, as planned, but an office suite belonging to the Department of Commerce. The blast had blown a six-foot hole in a wall and a twenty-five-by-forty-foot hole in the ceiling, mangling furniture and file cabinets on the floor above. No one had been injured.

A few days later Alpert was walking into the
Rat
offices when she saw police cruisers outside. She stopped at a pay phone and called in. An editor said the cops wanted the Marine Midland communiqué. Alpert killed time in a diner before returning. The cops were gone. But she knew that she and her friends had been sloppy. Too many people were too chatty. Still, she allowed herself to relax when Melville left for a radical gathering in North Dakota.

Melville was still away when some of the others, led by a young militant named Jim Duncan, decided they wanted to bomb something, too.
*
Duncan targeted the Selective Service induction center on Whitehall Street in lower Manhattan, the building where every man of age in the borough had to register for the draft. On the night of October 7, Duncan left his bomb in a fifth-floor bathroom. When it detonated, at 11:20 p.m., the explosion wrecked the entire floor, scattering debris throughout the building and blowing out windows. No one was injured. The communiqué, which Duncan wrote himself, was mailed to media outlets across the city. It said the bombing was in support of the North Vietnamese, “legalized marijuana, love, Cuba, legalized abortion and all the American revolutionaries and G.I.’s who are winning the war against the Pentagon [and] Nixon. [S]urrender now.” The reaction at
Rat
, and among everyone they knew in the Movement, was joyful.

Afterward, Jane and the others planned their most ambitious attack to date: a triple bombing, aimed squarely at centers of American corporate power. They planned to strike on Monday, November 10, 1969. The day before, Melville returned, having run out of money; once he got some, he said, he was going back to North Dakota. He spent the day talking with his pal George Demmerle of the Crazies, excitedly telling him everything. The two agreed to bomb something together that week. Jane was beside herself. None of them much cared for Demmerle.

Still, they decided to go ahead. Jane typed up the communiqué in advance, mailing it to the newspapers. On Monday they built the bombs. That night they left them at their targets: the RCA Building at Rockefeller Center, the General Motors Building at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-ninth Street, and the headquarters of Chase Manhattan Bank. Everything went smoothly. By midnight everyone had returned to the apartment. Then they phoned in their warnings and waited.

The bombs began detonating at 1:00 a.m. The first exploded on the empty sixteenth floor of the Chase Manhattan building just as police, reacting to the warning call, finished a fruitless search; the blast ripped through an elevator shaft, sending debris cascading all the way to the street. The bomb on the twentieth floor of the RCA Building detonated in a vacant office suite, panicking dozens of guests in the Rainbow Room restaurant, forty-five floors above; men in tuxedos and women in gowns scurried down a freight elevator and stairwells to the street. The office suite was demolished; dozens of windows were blown out. The bomb at the General Motors Building accomplished much the same.