Days of Rage (5 page)

Once again the sound of sirens echoed through the streets of Manhattan. Alpert and the others were thrilled. For the police, however, the bombings represented an escalation they could not ignore. This was simply unprecedented, three bombings in one night; the city had never seen anything like it. The next morning the NYPD’s cigar-chomping chief of detectives, Albert Seedman, tromped through the wreckage, shaking his head and muttering under his breath. His men had been investigating the bombings since the first one, at United Fruit, and had made no headway whatsoever. He decided to form a special squad of twenty-five handpicked detectives to find the perpetrators.

Seedman considered calling the FBI, who he suspected knew more than he did; after the Federal Building bombing, the head of the Bureau’s New York office, a square-jawed veteran named John Malone, had called to say they were working an informant in the case. That morning, as Seedman was establishing his command center at the RCA Building, Malone called again. “It took a while,” Malone said, “but the informant finally gave up our man.”

“Who is it?” Seedman asked.

“His name is Sam Melville.”

 • • • 

The three explosions ignited a new kind of civic tumult that would become all but commonplace in New York and other cities in the next decade: a rash of bombings followed by a wave of copycat threats, followed by the mass evacuations of skyscraper after skyscraper, leaving thousands of office workers milling about on sidewalks, wondering what had happened. That Tuesday the NYPD was obliged to check out three hundred separate bomb threats. The next day, November 12, the Associated Press counted thirty just between the hours of 8 a.m. and 1 p.m. A dozen buildings had to be emptied, including the Pan Am Building, on Forty-fifth Street, the Columbia Broadcasting building, on Fifty-first Street, and a library in Queens. Afterward the
Times
editorialized that “periodic evacuation of buildings [may become] a new life style for the New York office worker.” The columnist Sidney Zion, noting how powerless the city appeared during a string of bombings now entering its fourth month, said New York “was rapidly becoming Scare City.”
²

Even as Melville and his friends rejoiced that Tuesday, teams of undercover FBI and NYPD men began filtering into their neighborhood. The next day Albert Seedman heard from the FBI’s John Malone. “Our informant says Melville is ready to do another job tonight,” Malone said. “This time they plan to place bombs in U.S. Army trucks parked outside a National Guard armory. The trucks will be driven inside late at night, and the bombs will go off a few hours later.”

“Which armory?”

“He didn’t say.”

There were three: two in Manhattan, one in Queens. “We can cover them all,” Malone said. “In fact, we can ask the army to park plenty of trucks outside each armory. He can have his pick.”

All that day Malone and Seedman took reports from the surveillance teams. By midafternoon they believed that Melville was working in his workshop on East Second Street. Not until it was too late would anyone realize that he wasn’t.

 • • • 

Melville had left the apartment that morning at eight, ducking out to meet his friend Robin Palmer, who had planned a bombing of his own. It was to be a busy day, Melville’s last before returning to North Dakota the next morning. He was determined to go out with a bang—literally—with two separate actions: one with Palmer that evening, the other with George Demmerle later that night. Palmer’s target, which he had scouted himself, was the Criminal Courts Building, at 100 Centre Street, where a group of Black Panthers, the so-called Panther 21, was on trial for an alleged conspiracy to kill New York policemen. That morning Melville built at least five dynamite bombs. Afterward they took the subway downtown to the courthouse and slid one behind a plumbing-access panel in a fifth-floor men’s room. They were careful. No one noticed.

The bomb exploded at 8:35 p.m., demolishing the men’s room, leveling a seventy-foot terra-cotta wall, and shattering windows. Pipes burst, spilling a river of water down through the stairwells. Other than those at a night-court trial three floors above, few people were in the building; one woman sitting on a toilet a floor below the explosion was blown fifteen feet through the air but was unhurt. Albert Seedman took the call while at dinner in Midtown. Roaring downtown in his limousine, he toured the wreckage, broken glass crunching beneath his shoes, so angry he could spit. Melville had done this under their very noses. However, they had all three New York armories under surveillance now, and one last chance to stop him before he struck again.

 • • • 

As Seedman simmered, Jane Alpert returned home from work. She found Melville standing in the dark, peering through the window blinds. He put a finger to his lips. “They’re back,” he murmured.

“You’re sure?” she asked.

“Same white car. Same guys.”

“Sam, if you know it’s the bomb squad, then don’t go out. Stay here until they leave.”

He gave her a long, lingering hug. “I can’t stay,” he said. “I promised George I’d meet him.”

Then he kissed her once more, picked up his knapsack, slung it over his shoulder, and left. Inside the bag were four ticking bombs.

 • • • 

This time they saw him. An FBI agent atop a neighboring building watched as Melville and George Demmerle emerged onto the roof and scrambled across six adjacent rooftops before sliding out a doorway onto East Third Street. Melville was wearing an olive-drab air force uniform, Demmerle work pants and a denim jacket. Once on the street, they split up.

FBI agents trailed Melville as he trotted down into the subway. Taking the No. 6 train north, he emerged onto the platform at Twenty-third Street. Above, two FBI agents and an NYPD detective named Sandy Tice were waiting in a battered blue Chevrolet. They watched as Melville popped out of the subway entrance and strolled east on Twenty-third. The Chevrolet slowly followed, fifty yards back. At the end of the block, Melville turned left, onto Lexington Avenue. Tice got out and followed on foot.

It was 9:45 p.m. Keeping well back, Tice followed Melville almost all the way to Twenty-sixth Street, when he spotted George Demmerle lingering on the corner at Twenty-fifth, presumably serving as a lookout. Tice stepped to one side, studying the menu outside an Armenian restaurant, as Melville disappeared around the corner onto Twenty-sixth, heading straight toward the armory, where three army trucks were lined up along the curb.

A minute ticked by. Demmerle remained moored in place. Tice meandered back south a block, fearing he would be seen. After another minute or so, Melville reappeared on the corner of Twenty-sixth and Lexington. To Tice’s relief, he still had the knapsack slung over his shoulder.

A moment later Demmerle followed Melville back down Twenty-sixth Street. This time Tice ran forward to follow. When he turned left onto Twenty-sixth, he was startled to see the two barely twenty feet in front of him. Ahead, on the south side, loomed the enormous redbrick armory. The block was nearly empty; certain he was about to be spotted, Tice looked for cover. Just then a man in a tight suede suit walking a tiny Pekinese strode by. Thinking fast, Tice winked at the man and asked, “Sir, can you tell me where a man might find a little action around here?”

Ahead, Tice could see Melville squatting down beside one of the trucks, digging for something in his knapsack. Before the man with the Pekinese could answer, Tice spotted his two FBI partners, guns drawn, sprinting toward Melville from the far end of the block.

“Drop it!” one yelled as Melville hefted the knapsack.

Tice broke into a run.

“No! No!” he shouted. “Don’t drop it, for Christ’s sake!”

Melville froze. The two FBI agents shoved him and Demmerle against
one of the trucks as Tice ran up and snatched the canvas bag. He put his ear to it. He heard ticking.

“Where’s the bomb squad?” Tice shouted.

The FBI men began searching Melville, who made a face. “Relax,” he said. “They’re not set to go off until two o’clock.”

 • • • 

News coverage of Melville’s arrest spawned another wave of bomb threats across the New York area the next day, with more than three hundred that Friday alone. Dozens of buildings had to be evacuated, including the New York Stock Exchange, Lincoln Center, the General Post Office, the Union Carbide Building, both the
New York Times
and the
Daily News
buildings, the
Newsweek
building, the Queens Criminal Court, the U.S. Army Military Ocean Terminal in Brooklyn, the Susan Wagner High School on Staten Island, and three schools in Great Neck, Long Island.

By then police had already arrested Jane, who joined Melville and George Demmerle in jail. All but Melville made bail. Not long after, Demmerle was revealed to be the FBI’s informant; he had been working for the Bureau since 1966. Melville and Jane’s friends in the Movement, meanwhile, hailed the couple as heroes. As Jane was led out of court, a crowd of supporters raised fists and shouted, “Right on!” which the
Times
identified as “a new left, black revolutionary phrase of support.” The applause continued two weeks later during a rally at a Times Square hotel, where 350 supporters listened as Allen Ginsberg read his poetry and the actress Ultra Violet, Andy Warhol’s muse, sang.

Six months later Jane and Melville pled guilty to conspiracy charges. Melville was sentenced to thirteen years on a federal complaint and eighteen on state charges. He was sent to the Attica Correctional Facility, outside Buffalo, where he wrote a series of letters that were published as a book,
Letters from Attica
. After the prison erupted in a massive rebellion in September 1971, police characterized Melville as one of the inmate leaders. On September 13, as state troopers stormed the prison, he was killed in Attica’s D Yard. State officials claimed he was shot as he prepared to throw a Molotov cocktail. Later, lawyers for the inmates insisted he had been murdered. Even before his death Melville had been an inspiration to many young revolutionaries who dreamed of a war against the U.S. government. He was the first, the trailblazer. In death he became perhaps their greatest martyr.

Jane Alpert, meanwhile, didn’t go to prison. Instead, like dozens of other young radicals that spring, she went underground.

02

“NEGROES WITH GUNS”

Black Rage and the Road to Revolution

The United States has a long history of political violence, from its birth in revolutionary battles to a bloody civil war to two centuries of occasional race riots, draft riots, and labor riots. Acts of political terrorism, at least until the past twenty-five years, have been comparatively rare; before the modern era, the most significant was a series of bombings by an anarchist group that climaxed in the September 1920 attack on Wall Street. With the possible exception of the Ku Klux Klan, the United States until 1970 had never spawned any kind of true underground movement committed to terrorist acts.

There are so many myths about the 1970s-era underground. Mention today that an armed resistance movement sprang up in the months after My Lai, the Manson family, and Woodstock, and the most common response is something along the lines of “Oh, wasn’t that a bunch of hippies protesting the Vietnam War during the sixties?” This couldn’t be more wrong. The radicals of this new underground weren’t hippies, they weren’t primarily interested in the war, and it wasn’t the 1960s. The last years of that decade did see
a rise in campus violence, it’s true, but the first true protest-bombing campaign, by Sam Melville’s group, didn’t arrive until mid-1969, and headline bombings didn’t become widespread until 1970. And while Melville and his peers certainly embraced the counterculture, they were the furthest thing from hippies, who tended toward hedonism and pacifism. The young radicals who engaged in bombings and the assassination of policemen during the 1970s and early 1980s were, for the most part, deadly serious, hard-core leftists. Members of the Black Liberation Army read Mao as part of their mandatory daily political-education classes.

An even more prevalent myth, however, is that the radical violence that commenced in 1970 was a protest against the Vietnam War. In fact, while members of this new underground were vehemently antiwar, the war itself was seldom their primary focus. “We related to the war in a purely opportunistic way,” recalls Howard Machtinger, one of the Weather Underground’s early leaders. “We were happy to draw new members who were antiwar. But this was never about the war.”

What the underground movement was truly about—what it was always about—was the plight of black Americans. Every single underground group of the 1970s, with the notable exception of the Puerto Rican FALN, was concerned first and foremost with the struggle of blacks against police brutality, racism, and government repression. While late in the decade several groups expanded their worldview to protest events in South Africa and Central America, the black cause remained the core motivation of almost every significant radical who engaged in violent activities during the 1970s. “Helping out the blacks, fighting alongside them, that was the whole kit and caboodle,” says Machtinger. “That was all we were about.”

“Race comes first, always first,” says Elizabeth Fink, a radical attorney in Brooklyn who represented scores of underground figures. “Everything started with the Black Panthers. The whole thrill of being with them. When you heard Huey Newton, you were blown away. The civil rights movement had turned bad, and these people were ready to fight. And yeah, the war. The country was turning into Nazi Germany, that’s how we saw it. Do you have the guts to stand up? The underground did. And oh, the glamour of it. The
glamour of dealing with the underground. They were my heroes. Stupid me. It was the revolution, baby. We were gonna make a revolution. We were so, so, so deluded.”

The underground groups of the 1970s were a product of—a kind of grungy bell-bottomed coda to—the raucous protest marches and demonstrations of the 1960s. If the story of the civil rights and antiwar movements is an inspiring tale of American empowerment and moral conviction, the underground years represent a final dark chapter that can seem easier to ignore. To begin to understand it, one needs to understand the voices of black anger, which began to be noticed during the 1950s. All of it, from the first marches in Alabama and Mississippi all the way to the arrest of the last underground radical in 1985, began with the civil rights movement, a cause led by black Americans. And what was true at its inception remained true through the ’60s and into the ’70s-era underground: Blacks, for the most part, led, and whites followed. It was black leaders who initiated the first Southern boycotts; black leaders who led the sit-ins and gave the great speeches; black leaders who, when other avenues appeared blocked, first called for violence and open rebellion. At the end of the ’60s, it was violent black rhetoric that galvanized the people who went underground.