Days of Rage (49 page)

The FBI, however, unlike much of the American public, knew a lot about Puerto Rican terrorism. Then as now, it’s hard to identify an issue of such national significance about which so many Americans knew—and cared—so little. Yet there had been people in Puerto Rico, a U.S.-owned territory roughly three times the size of Rhode Island, who had been fighting for its independence almost since Christopher Columbus stepped onto a beach there in 1493. The indigenous Taino revolted against the Spanish in 1511. They lost. Native-born islanders (
criollos
) took to arms for reform in 1809. They lost. Anti-Spanish conspiracies—one history counts more than thirty—popped up throughout the nineteenth century. Full-blown revolts against Spain erupted in 1868 and again in 1897. Each left its leaders in prison, with sundry followers skulking off to jungle lairs or U.S. cities to begin plotting anew.

When the United States gained control of the island in 1898, after the Spanish-American War, it appeared the nationalists had given up their guns for political debate. The Puerto Rico Independence Party was formed in 1912, though its cause was soon subsumed by the more powerful Nationalist Party, formed in 1922. The new party’s leaders loudly called for independence, but unfortunately—and this has always been the irony for Puerto Rican nationalists—the vast majority of Puerto Ricans were happy being part of the United States. The Nationalist Party was defeated again and again at the polls, and before long its frustrated leaders decided it was time to return to violence.

The 1930s saw a series of Nationalist marches that devolved into melees, along with various assassination attempts against U.S. judges and governors. Things simmered until 1948, when a U.S.-appointed governor forced through the infamous Law 53, forbidding public calls for independence. Two years later, when the United States moved to declare Puerto Rico a semiautonomous commonwealth, nationalists launched a series of coordinated attacks on police and government buildings across the island, in Mayagüez, Jayuya, Arecibo, and, most notably, in the capital of San Juan, where gunmen sprayed
the governor’s mansion with bullets. The army moved in, and every major nationalist leader was arrested.

Then, on November 1, 1950, as the White House was being renovated and President Truman was living at Blair House, two Puerto Rican revolutionaries tried to rush the building and assassinate him. They succeeded only in forcing a shoot-out with guards, one of whom was killed. One attacker was killed, too; the other was sentenced to death, until Truman commuted his sentence.
*

Four years later, in 1954, four more Puerto Rican revolutionaries filed into the balcony of the U.S. House of Representatives, quietly recited the Lord’s Prayer, then rose, whipped out guns, and opened fire on a crowd of congressmen below. Five legislators were hit, one of them, Alvin M. Bentley of Michigan, struck in the chest. All recovered. The shooters were arrested and given life sentences; gaining their freedom had been a priority for every Puerto Rican radical since.

For the next decade the independence movement lay dormant. By the mid-1960s, however, with revolutionary movements springing up in postcolonial Asia, Africa, and, most notably, Cuba, a new breed of armed militant appeared in Puerto Rico: Marxist by outlook, impatient by nature, and eager to resort to violence to free the island from the hated
yanquis.
Among the most energetic of these firebrands was a salsa musician named Filiberto Ojeda Ríos. Born in the town of Naguabo in 1933, Ojeda Ríos was intelligent enough to enter the University of Puerto Rico at fifteen. In 1950, after a family argument over his future, he dropped out and moved to New York City, where he married, fathered the first of his four children, and played guitar and trumpet in salsa bands. Another musician recruited him into a Marxist study circle, where he was radicalized and joined the July 26 Movement, which supported Fidel Castro in his struggle against the Cuban government. Ojeda Ríos dreamed of launching a similar struggle in Puerto Rico, to which he returned in 1955. Six years later he moved to Cuba, where he
attended the University of Havana and was recruited into Cuba’s intelligence service, the General Intelligence Directorate, known as the DGI. At the time, the DGI’s goal was spreading Castro’s revolution into the countries of the Caribbean and Latin America.

Puerto Rico was in Castro’s sights from the beginning. Accounts of DGI history indicate that Ojeda Ríos was given extensive training in sabotage and spycraft and dispatched to Puerto Rico in 1963, about the same time, perhaps coincidentally, that the first modern Puerto Rican revolutionary group, known as MAPA, emerged. Police quickly arrested MAPA’s leaders, however, and Ojeda Ríos returned to Cuba, where with other Puerto Rican exiles he continued to plan for revolution. According to Puerto Rican newspaper accounts, a turning point came when, during a 1966 meeting with Castro himself, Ojeda Ríos received approval to form an armed resistance group that would carry out sabotage in both Puerto Rico and the U.S. mainland, backed by Cuban arms and money.

The group Ojeda Ríos formed, the Armed Revolutionary Independence Movement, known by its Spanish initials, MIRA, became one of an alphabet soup of ragtag revolutionary groups that sprang up on the island in the late 1960s. MIRA launched its first attacks in 1969, detonating bombs outside police stations and government installations. Unlike other island groups, it also established a New York cell, which staged a series of thirty-five or so minor bombings in the city beginning in November 1969, including a pipe bomb that exploded outside the main branch of the public library and one that didn’t outside the General Electric building. MIRA’s little-noticed campaign, relegated to the back pages of city newspapers, climaxed with explosions inside two Bronx movie theaters on May 1, 1970, two months after destruction of the Weatherman townhouse. Ten people suffered minor injuries.

Two weeks later police arrested a Puerto Rican radical named Carlos Feliciano as he placed a hollowed-out loaf of bread outside an army recruiting station in the Bronx. The bread was fresh, as was the bomb nestled inside. Feliciano was a MIRA operative who had served five years for a murder committed after the 1950 uprisings. A father of six, he was alleged to have committed all thirty-five bombings, charged with two, and convicted of one. In Puerto Rico police swooped in and arrested Ojeda Ríos, who promptly skipped
bail and disappeared. This marked the end of MIRA, although its attacks continued for a short time in New York, with more than a hundred oddly tiny bombings stretching into 1971. The devices consisted of chemicals secreted inside cigarette packs and Ping-Pong balls. The detonations caused minimal damage—for example, a grand total of $50 from the cigarette pack that exploded in the carpet department of B. Altman & Co. in March 1971. Afterward police arrested two Puerto Rican students who claimed to be MIRA members, perhaps its last; they received jail terms of five and seven years.

By 1975 MIRA was a dimming memory, but its mastermind, Ojeda Ríos, remained at large. Many in the FBI, especially those with experience in Puerto Rico, suspected that he had now graduated from exploding Ping-Pong balls to indiscriminate murder. But where he was, or where this FALN would strike next, no one had a clue.

 • • • 

Don Wofford and Lou Vizi studied the three FALN communiqués carefully. Dense with Marxist verbiage, they seemed to hold echoes of Weather texts. A number of agents suspected the FALN was a cover for Weather, that the older group was taking on a new cause under a new name; just that summer,
Prairie Fire
had called for Puerto Rican independence. Others suggested the group was a tool of Cuban intelligence. Wofford’s supervisor, Harry Hogue, suggested that they study the acres of files the squad had built over the years: “The answers are in the files. Believe me, the files will solve this case.” Privately, Wofford scoffed. “The answers are in the files, my ass,” he muttered to Vizi. “These people are new. They’re cutting edge. They’re not the same old guys we’ve been chasing for years.” Still, Wofford did begin thumbing through the files, which clerks wheeled to his desk by the cartload. As he read, one
independista
in particular drew his attention. His name was Julio Rosado.

A former newspaper reporter in San Juan, Rosado embodied the independence cause in New York. His name seemed to be on every protest permit. He and his brothers, Andres and Luis, had been thoroughly investigated during the MIRA bombings; by Wofford’s count, there were ten volumes of reports
on Julio alone. “As far as suspects, the Rosados were head and shoulders above everyone,” Wofford recalls. “They knew everybody in the movement. They were everywhere. They
were
the movement. The older agents still had an informant or two, and when we asked who could pull off something like Fraunces, who had the vision and leadership, Julio’s name came zinging back every time. Julio, Julio, Julio, Julio. It was all we heard. He became my main focus.”

On the day after the bombing, Wofford dispatched a pair of agents to interview Rosado at his apartment, on Brooklyn’s Eastern Parkway. They returned to Sixty-ninth Street excited, reporting that Rosado, confronted at his apartment door, had gone white and begun shaking the moment they fired questions at him. Before he slammed the door in their faces, the two agents got the strong sense he had something to hide.

Wofford had the Rosado brothers placed under twenty-four-hour surveillance. Julio’s apartment was in Brooklyn, while agents rented an apartment across from Andres and Luis’s building, on Manhattan’s Second Avenue, training binoculars on every entrance. Trailing the trio through the streets of New York proved challenging, however. All three seemed to be expert at countersurveillance techniques, jumping in and out of subway cars at the last minute, even sliding through the back doors of stores, to elude their pursuers. “These people were good; they were amazing,” Lou Vizi recalls. “Let me tell you, they taught
us
about surveillance. We were so young, we had to learn all this stuff.”

The second focus of the FBI’s investigation, meanwhile, took shape in Spanish Harlem, where Wofford was intrigued by a Puerto Rican activist who had organized protests over the death of the young artist in the Angel Poggi case. Her name was Dylcia Pagan, and like Julio Rosado, she had worked as a journalist, first as a gossip columnist for a Spanish-language newspaper, then as a producer developing children’s programming at the local CBS affiliate and other stations. “She was a real dynamo,” Wofford recalls. “She seemed to know everyone in Spanish Harlem.” Wofford put Pagan under round-the-clock surveillance, usually posting teams on rooftops near her apartment.

For the moment, however, neither Pagan nor the Rosado brothers were
leading them anywhere. Wofford pressed the U.S. attorney’s office for warrants to search or bug their apartments, but prosecutors turned him down every time, saying he didn’t have probable cause. In one meeting Lou Vizi lost his temper. “I was just screaming at the guy, ‘What do you want? What do we have to give you to get this warrant?’” he recalls. “My supervisor had to drag me out of there.”

Other FBI offices were scarcely more helpful. Wofford expected the San Juan office, which had been chasing Ojeda Ríos and other revolutionaries for years, to be a trove of leads. To his dismay, San Juan refused even to respond to many of his inquiries. He and Vizi appealed to headquarters but ran smack into the realities of FBI bureaucracy. Individual SACs (special agents in charge) ran their offices as personal fiefdoms, and with J. Edgar Hoover dead and gone, there was no one in Washington willing to make San Juan play ball. “We sent hundreds of leads to San Juan,” Vizi recalls. “You could wait till retirement and never get anything. Eventually I remember the San Juan SAC sent us something that basically said, ‘Stop busting our balls. The bombs are going off in New York, not here. It’s your problem.’”

Wofford, Vizi, and dozens of other agents were still working around the clock when, on the night of April 2, the FALN struck again. The first bomb exploded at 11:42 p.m., on the southwest corner of Madison Avenue and Twenty-seventh Street, shattering four large plate-glass windows in the New York Life Insurance Building. Five minutes later the second bomb detonated, outside the Metropolitan Life Insurance building at Park Avenue and Twenty-fifth Street, shattering sixty windows. A pedestrian was struck by flying glass and treated at Bellevue Hospital. At midnight the third bomb exploded, outside the Bankers Trust Company on Park Avenue at Forty-eighth Street. Ten minutes later a fourth and final bomb exploded, amid a pile of green trash bags outside a Blimpie fast-food restaurant, next door to the American Bank and Trust Co. on Forty-sixth Street at Fifth Avenue.

At 1 a.m. someone with a Spanish accent called the Associated Press and directed police to a communiqué inside an Eighty-eighth Street pay phone. The communiqué was dramatically different from previous missives; while again demanding the release of Puerto Rican prisoners and condemning CIA “repression,” it was almost apologetic about the Fraunces Tavern bombing:
“Our attack on January 24, 1975, was not in any way directed against working-class people or innocent North Americans. The targets of our attack were bankers, stock brokers and important corporate executives of monopolies and multi-national corporations.”

Wofford and Vizi spent days orchestrating agents who canvassed all four bomb sites looking for witnesses. The bomb components, analyzed by the NYPD’s bomb squad, produced no new leads. “No one saw shit,” Vizi told Wofford one afternoon as he slumped at his desk. “Same logo, same typewriter, same everything. We got nothing.”

The only good news was that the FALN, presumably in reaction to criticism it had received for the deaths at Fraunces Tavern, had returned to nighttime bombings that put fewer people at risk. Wofford was now convinced that the FALN was a genuine new radical group and that the only way to stop it was to become the FBI’s one-man clearinghouse for everything FALN. He was still studying the old reports that June when the FALN suddenly opened a new theater of operations.