Days of Rage (42 page)

Joseph Remiro, “Bo”:
Remiro was the ultimate angry Vietnam veteran, a hyperactive, hotheaded former infantryman who returned to the United States determined to strike back at the government that sent him overseas. He spent much of his time holding weapons classes for Bay Area radicals. When Little and Wolfe left Peking House, they moved in with Remiro.

Bill Harris, “General Teko”:
The oldest of the recruits at twenty-eight, Harris was another Vietnam veteran. After returning and earning a master’s degree in urban education at the University of Indiana, he moved to Oakland in 1972 in search of a teaching job. A heavy LSD user, Harris ended up sorting mail at the Berkeley
post office and spent his spare time volunteering with black prisoners at the Vacaville BCA.

Emily Harris, “Yolanda”:
Married to Bill, Emily was a peppy Chi Omega at Indiana University until falling for Harris and internalizing his radical politics. She worked as a typist at Berkeley.

Angela Atwood, “General Gelina”:
A flamboyant young actress from the New Jersey suburbs, Atwood met the Harrises while studying theater at Indiana. She joined the couple in Oakland and, between roles in local plays, worked as a waitress at the Great Electric Underground restaurant. When her marriage broke up, in 1973, she moved into the Harrises’ spare bedroom.

Pieced together from the most committed of those at Peking House and their friends, this group came together in fits and starts during mid-1973, gathering momentum once DeFreeze and Mizmoon moved into an apartment on East Seventeenth Street, in a ghetto section of Oakland, that June. Nancy Perry was the first to join, bringing along Willie Wolfe and his pals Russ Little and the angry Joe Remiro; before DeFreeze appeared, the four, all BCA volunteers, had formed a nascent underground cell of their own with prisoners at Vacaville; the “Partisans’ Vanguard Party,” however, existed only in their minds.

These recruits found DeFreeze brimming with ideas for a revolutionary army. He and Mizmoon had been scribbling organizational charts and rules for weeks. From the beginning there was a surreal quality to the aborning SLA, an exaggerated sense of deluded grandiosity, of playacting. DeFreeze envisioned not only a Symbionese Liberation Army—“symbionese” was derived from the word “symbiosis”—but a Symbionese Federated Republic, a Court of the People, and units labeled mobility, medical, provision, and communication. The SLA’s ideology, however, was even hazier than its imagined structure. It sought to abolish prisons, marriage, and rent while attacking “racism, sexism, ageism, capitalism, fascism, individualism, possessiveness,
competitiveness and all other institutions that have made and sustained capitalism.”

In practice, DeFreeze and his acolytes did their best to mimic routines pioneered by Weather: the calisthenics, the weapons training, the study of Marxist texts, even the grueling “crit/self-crit.” But all of it was in service to a worldview that veered between comical and truly insane. Where Weather’s leadership now called itself the Central Committee, DeFreeze styled himself General Field Marshal Cinque—pronounced “sin-kay.” Where Weather took banal code names—Jack, Molly, Mike—the SLA chose monikers out of some imagined African revolution: Fahiza, Cujo, Teko. Where Weather’s communiqués alternated between hippie jargon and sober Marxism, the SLA’s would arrive unmoored from all reality, a notion enshrined by its favored salutation, a line that sounded as if uttered by the villain in a 1930s-era Buck Rogers serial: “DEATH TO THE FASCIST INSECT THAT PREYS UPON THE LIFE OF THE PEOPLE!”

It’s entirely possible that the SLA would have remained just a fixture of Donald DeFreeze’s fevered imagination if not for the sudden arrival of yet another escaped prisoner, this one from Vacaville, in August. His name was Thero Wheeler. Wheeler was a friend of DeFreeze’s and an inmate leader, every bit as revolutionary-minded but a tad more level-headed.

When Wheeler was brought to a rendezvous in Palo Alto, he was surprised to see DeFreeze waiting; he had no idea that his old pal had helped arrange the escape. Wheeler and his girlfriend, a young heiress and Venceremos associate named Mary Alice Siem, began hanging out with Mizmoon and Nancy Perry. There, Wheeler told reporters months later, DeFreeze eagerly brought out a notebook adorned with the SLA’s symbol, a seven-headed cobra, in which he had scribbled detailed organizational and battle plans for his new underground army. “He handed me this book, you know, with all these cobras on the cover,” Wheeler remembered. “He asked me to read it. I did and I thought, man, this is really shit. I told him it was a bunch of garbage, it wasn’t realistic as far as revolution was concerned. Actually, it was bullshit, it was suicide.”

DeFreeze was crestfallen but undeterred. He needed Wheeler badly, because Wheeler had the contacts—to Venceremos, to the Black Panthers, to
people who could sell them guns—that he didn’t. DeFreeze was uncomfortably aware that, other than the nine recruits he had fielded so far—some still of uncertain loyalty—not a single other radical group they had approached had shown the slightest interest in joining forces with them. He pressed ahead nonetheless. They stole weapons, burglarizing the homes of leftists they knew. Up in the Berkeley hills, Joe Remiro showed them how to fire the guns; he taught them karate, too.

All through the fall they debated their first action. An attack on an Avis rental car office—for supporting the “fascist governments” of Portugal, Israel, and others, a draft communiqué explained—was planned but then postponed, as was an assassination of the director of the California prison system, Raymond Procunier. Finally, one evening in October, Thero Wheeler launched into a rant about Marcus Foster, the superintendent of the Oakland school system. Foster, the city’s first black school administrator, was a nationally respected figure, but he had angered the Black Panthers and other radical groups by suggesting that police be brought in to curb school violence and by proposing that students carry identification cards. In Wheeler’s mind this amounted to a fascist plot against black youth.

DeFreeze listened, then leaned forward, and in a tone that halted any further discussion, breathed, “That nigger is gonna die.”

 • • • 

The unofficial birth of the Symbionese Liberation Army came on November 6, 1973, just eight days before the killing of Twymon Meyers and the unofficial death of the Black Liberation Army. No one would ever be entirely sure who the participants were; according to most accounts, it was DeFreeze, Mizmoon, and little Nancy Perry. Whoever it was, they were in place a few minutes after seven that dark, chilly evening, two of them in the parking lot of the Oakland Board of Education, leaning against a wall. A third was crouched in nearby foliage. Just then two men emerged from the building. The first, a deputy superintendent named Robert Blackburn, glanced at the pair in the shadows as he passed, his car keys already in his hand. His best friend, Marcus Foster, the superintendent Oakland had hired away from
Philadelphia, was walking just a few steps behind him when the first shots rang out.

Blackburn whirled around just in time to see the muzzle flashes as the two figures behind him began firing into Foster. There was an explosion, and Blackburn felt a searing pain in his back, a load of buckshot fired from the bushes. He lurched forward just as a second blast struck him a glancing blow. Blackburn staggered, nearly falling, before stumbling almost sixty feet to an outside door. Inside, he slumped to the floor and shouted, “Help! Get help!”

Police were on the scene within minutes. They found a group of school officials standing over Foster’s dead body. Blackburn, taken to the hospital, survived. The shooters had vanished, but detectives found footprints in the bushes and bullet casings. When they examined a spent slug, they noticed something odd: The tip had been drilled out. Chemists would later discover that each of the bullets fired at Foster that night had been filled with potassium cyanide. The superintendent had been shot to pieces, five bullets fired into his back, two more in the front, the last hitting him in the leg.

The Symbionese Liberation Army’s “war” against the United States had begun, but the reaction to its first attack was not at all what DeFreeze had expected. Far from drawing cheers from Bay Area radical groups, Foster’s assassination provoked near-universal condemnation. Black leaders denounced the murder of one of their own; thousands would turn out to attend one of three memorial services. The Panthers decried the “brutal and senseless murder” and initially suggested that “powerful fascist elements” were behind it. Not until the next day did the strange communiqué with the seven-headed cobra arrive at a Berkeley radio station, KPFA. It was from the “Symbionese Liberation Army Western Regional Youth Unit,” and it explained Foster’s murder as the result of his “fascist” student-identification program. “To those who would bear the hopes and future of our people,” it read in part, “let the voice of their guns express the words of freedom.”

Public reaction to the strange communiqué was muted; in the Bay Area, the SLA missive was viewed as yet another bizarre message from yet another bizarre group no one had heard of. The most notable reaction was a yawning silence from the radical left, especially from the prisons, the one place from which DeFreeze might have expected to hear voices of support. Instead:
nothing. The fact was, even for those who still espoused revolution, the assassination of a black leader seemed incomprehensible. Months later, when the SLA became a focus of national interest, the prevailing view of Foster’s murder was voiced by none other than Bernardine Dohrn, who issued a statement from the safety of her bungalow in Hermosa Beach. “We do not comprehend the execution of Marcus Foster,” she wrote, “and respond very soberly to the death of a black person who is not a recognized enemy of the people.”

The following week, after the Oakland school system suspended the ID program to “reassess community and student feelings,” the SLA issued a second communiqué defending itself, mentioning Foster’s onetime membership on the Philadelphia Crime Commission:

The forces of the Symbionese Liberation Army . . . remind the enemy rich ruling class that the people will always understand the effectiveness and tactics of revolutionary justice, and will never be deceived by the distortions and lies of the fascist news media. Marcus Foster has been likened to one of our slain leaders. We ask, who ever heard of a Martin Luther King on the Philadelphia Crime Commission? . . . We are well aware the fascist news media seeks to condition us by repressing the truth.

The manhunt for Foster’s killers prompted immediate changes in the SLA. Thero Wheeler, wanting no part of a murder rap, fled. DeFreeze, however, only redoubled his preparations for war. Along with Mizmoon, he and most of the others moved into a house in suburban Clayton, just north of Berkeley, where they introduced themselves to neighbors as the DeVoto family. Behind nailed-down shutters and window shades, they spent their days in a furious routine of calisthenics, weapons training, bomb building, and writing. They wrote at least ten separate communiqués, each intended to be a public explanation of a bombing of some multinational corporation, or the assassination of one of its executives; the targets included companies such as ITT, Bank of America, and General Tire. The other members, including the Harrises and Angela Atwood, were frequent visitors.

For the moment, at least, they were able to operate safely and secretly at the Clayton house; as yet the police had no clue who the SLA was, much less
where it was hiding. Then, suddenly, came the moment that changed everything. On the night of January 10, 1974, a policeman in the adjoining suburb of Concord, David Duge, spied a van moving slowly down a residential street. Thinking it might be burglars casing the neighborhood, he pulled it over. Inside were Joe Remiro and Russ Little. They said they were lost, which was true. A check of their driver’s licenses came back clean. But something about the pair struck Duge as suspicious. When he asked Remiro to step out of the car, he saw the bulge beneath his untucked shirt.

Their eyes met. Remiro went for his gun. Officer Duge ducked behind his cruiser. When he stuck his head out, Remiro fired two shots. Duge fired two back. After a second exchange of fire, Remiro sprinted into the darkness. With a squeal of tires, Russ Little drove off in the van. After Duge radioed for help, a second cruiser arrived. They had just driven forward a single block when, to their amazement, they saw the van driving back toward them. Little, guessing that police would follow his trail, had circled back. The officers leaped from their cars and pointed their guns at the van. Little emerged, hands held high.

Police swarmed into the area in search of Joe Remiro. Finally, just before dawn, an officer saw someone dart between two houses just a few blocks from the shooting site. When a second officer arrived, they walked up a darkened driveway, one officer loudly pumping a shell into the chamber of a shotgun. From the darkness someone called out, “I’ve had it. I give up.” Remiro was led away in handcuffs.

By sunrise, no one in the police ranks yet had any sense that Remiro and Little were part of the SLA, much less that DeFreeze and three others were living barely two blocks away. As luck would have it, the SLA learned of the arrests before the police learned of their whereabouts. At six fifteen that evening neighbors saw a Buick Riviera wheel out of the “DeVoto family’s” sloping driveway, moving so fast that its undercarriage struck the pavement with a
whomp
. Before leaving, DeFreeze and the others had drenched the home with gasoline and gunpowder, lit a fuse, and run. The conflagration they planned, however, didn’t come off. There wasn’t enough oxygen in the enclosed house, and when the first fire truck appeared, the blaze was quickly put out.

The firemen saw everything: two gunpowder bombs, an aerosol-can
bomb, not to mention the thousands of pages of loose paper and notebooks—the plans, the charts, the communiqués, their research—that laid out the who, what, when, where, and how of everything the SLA had been doing. The SLA was gone; the Harrises and Angela Atwood disappeared that same day. But police now had a clear idea what and who they were up against. They might have learned much more had anyone bothered to study a green spiral notebook found at the house. It was adorned with Nancy Perry’s tiny handwriting. One page was a numbered list of subjects she planned to research at the library. They included the Touche Ross accounting firm, the University of California Board of Regents, and Bank of America. Only later would police realize the significance of item No. 1. It read: “That daughter of Hearst.”