Days of Rage (50 page)

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Just after midnight on June 14, 1975, two young couples, Bill and Sara Evans and Jim and Cynthia Teitelbaum, strolled through the warm night air in The Loop section of downtown Chicago, a world away from the FALN bombings in New York.
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They were walking past the First National Bank at the corner of Monroe and Dearborn when they noticed a curly-haired man with a bushy mustache crouching by the front entrance. Thinking he was homeless, they turned away and headed down the street to a bar, where they enjoyed a nightcap. Afterward, heading back to their car, the two couples again passed in front of the bank and spied a camera bag on the sidewalk.

Curious, Jim Teitelbaum picked it up and carried it to the car, where he slid into the backseat. As Bill Evans, at the wheel, drove away from the curb, Teitelbaum struggled with the bag’s zipper, which seemed to be covered in a sticky substance. After a few moments he managed to open the bag. Peering
inside, he saw a tangle of wires, a small propane tank, and several sticks of what could only be dynamite.

“It’s a bomb!” he shouted.

Evans screeched to a halt at the curb. Teitelbaum opened the car door and threw the bag onto the sidewalk as the others scrambled out the other side into the street. As the bag landed, all its components, including the dynamite, tumbled out onto the pavement.

It didn’t explode. Teitelbaum and Evans exchanged glances. Should they run? Or abandon it on the sidewalk? Deciding he couldn’t risk harming an innocent pedestrian, Teitelbaum leaped from the car and gave the bomb a hard kick toward the Mid-Continental Plaza Building. He had just turned and taken several running steps toward the car when the dynamite exploded. The boom reverberated through the streets. Its force threw Teitelbaum to the pavement. Patting himself down, he found he was miraculously uninjured, save for a few pieces of shrapnel that had seared into his back. Windows shattered up and down the streets.

Chicago police were on the scene in minutes. The bomb left a foot-wide crater in the sidewalk. Twenty minutes later, as uniformed officers began roping off the area, the distant boom of another explosion echoed through the night. The second bomb detonated in front of the United Bank of America, shattering windows but injuring no one. Ten minutes later a woman called the Associated Press, claimed the bombings in the name of the FALN, and directed police to a communiqué in a phone booth at Chicago’s Union Station. When police retrieved it, they discovered that it spoke of three bombs, the third at the Federal Building. A search there lasted into the next day but uncovered nothing.

The Chicago bombings triggered a vigorous debate between the FBI’s New York and Chicago offices. Older agents, accustomed to MIRA and similarly lackluster Puerto Rican groups, argued that this was more of the same, most likely one or two angry New Yorkers who had set off bombs in Chicago to make themselves appear more significant than they were. Wofford and Vizi didn’t believe it. They suspected something larger afoot, especially after the Weather Underground took credit for a June 16 bombing at a New York branch of the Banco de Ponce that the FALN had already bombed. (Thirty
years later Weatherman David Gilbert acknowledged that he had set this bomb himself.) Wofford and Vizi, working fourteen hours a day six days a week, scoured their yellowing reports for anything that might link the FALN to the Weather Underground or to their mutual friends in Cuban intelligence, an effort that gained steam after Fidel Castro announced publicly that August that the Cuban government would give the FALN whatever support it could. For the moment, though, the FALN itself remained a phantom.

Then, on October 27, the anniversary of the first bombings in New York, came the most ambitious set of attacks to date. Just after midnight, in the span of a single hour, ten pipe bombs detonated in three cities: two in Washington, outside the State Department and the Bureau of Indian Affairs; five in New York, outside four banks and the United Nations; and three in Chicago, outside the Continental National Bank, IBM Plaza, and the Sears Tower. The explosion at Continental, two blocks from the FBI office, was so loud it shook the night supervisor’s desk. A guard at the Chicago Standard Oil Building, meanwhile, reacting to the echoing booms, searched the surrounding plaza and stumbled upon something strange: an abandoned bouquet of roses in green florist’s paper. Inside, to his horror, he glimpsed five sticks of dynamite. A member of the Chicago bomb squad, Frank Kasky, arrived in time to disarm the device. Kasky’s work gave authorities their first unexploded FALN device.

Damage from the ten bombs came to a quarter of a million dollars. A caller to the Associated Press directed authorities to a communiqué in New York, which thanked Castro for his “moral support.” In twelve months the FALN had now detonated twenty-five bombs. In Washington FBI supervisors were growing impatient. Shouting matches erupted between Washington and Chicago, where agents for the first time were sent burrowing into the Puerto Rican community, much of it centered on Humboldt Park. They managed to identify a handful of neighborhood leaders who had spoken favorably of Puerto Rican independence, including a high school principal named José López and a reverend named José Torres. Neither said much. At one point agents interviewed Torres’s twenty-three-year-old son, Carlos. They found him polite and respectful, wrote up a report, and forgot about it, with no clue whatsoever that they had just spoken to one of the FALN’s masterminds.

15

“THE BELFAST OF NORTH AMERICA”

Patty Hearst, the SLA, and the Mad Bombers of San Francisco

In the final days of June 1974, a month before the publication of
Prairie Fire
and six weeks before Richard Nixon’s resignation, Patty Hearst found herself sitting beside the sports writer Jack Scott in the back of a blue Ford LTD being driven by his parents, an elderly Las Vegas couple who had happily agreed to drive the country’s most wanted fugitive across the country. All Patty wanted was a way out of a police dragnet. All Scott wanted was a book. Bill and Emily Harris followed in separate cars. After five days the group reached New York, heading to Scott’s Upper West Side apartment.

Thus began what the press would call Patty’s “lost year,” a period when she and what remained of the Symbionese Liberation Army vanished from view. By this point, Patty wrote years later, she had abandoned any hope of leaving the group or escaping; she thought of herself as an SLA soldier and was resigned to whatever fate that brought. Those first few months they spent on the East Coast. Scott and his wife rented a farm in the Pennsylvania countryside, outside Scranton, where Patty was joined by the Harrises and a new recruit named Wendy Yoshimura, a Berkeley radical who had helped
detonate several bombs in the Bay Area in 1971 and 1972. Back in California, Kathy Soliah was promising to gather new SLA members; once she did, Harris said, they would return west and renew combat operations. In the meantime they busied themselves doing calisthenics, reading, and arguing; Harris was a volatile martinet, forever screaming at Emily and the others over slights real and imagined. The Scotts visited every week and several times actually brought along friends, including a Canadian writer who began interviewing them all for the book Scott hoped to write but never would.

At the end of July the Scotts suddenly announced that the farm was no longer safe. Everyone moved to a second farmhouse, this one outside the remote New York village of Jeffersonville, which, as it happened, was barely fifty miles south of the vacation home where Jeff Jones and Weather’s New York cell were hiding. They remained there for two months, out of sight, until word finally arrived from Soliah. She had the recruits ready; better yet, the trial of their onetime SLA comrades Joe Remiro and Russ Little had been moved to Sacramento. Harris approved a plan for everyone to rendezvous in the California capital. There they would try to break their friends out of jail.

In the last week of September the Scotts took Patty and drove west. The trip was uneventful, save for a traffic stop one night in Indiana. In Utah they turned south for Las Vegas, where Scott deposited Patty at a motel until someone could fetch her. Two days later Kathy Soliah’s boyfriend, Jim Kilgore, arrived, a .38 pistol jammed in his belt. They took an overnight bus to Sacramento, where Soliah had rented a house—“basically a wooden shack,” Hearst called it—in a rundown neighborhood near downtown.

There Patty met the new recruits Soliah had rounded up. In addition to Kilgore, they were Soliah’s laid-back brother Steve, her sister Jo, and a pugnacious Berkeley housepainter named Mike Bortin. Everyone was warm and kind, which Patty needed after four months stuck with the bickering Harrises, and for two weeks she was able to relax. Everyone sat around talking, hashing over the SLA’s errors; the Soliahs felt strongly that the group needed to read up on conventional Marxist texts to craft a message to win the hearts and minds of the Bay Area Left. They fed everyone by shoplifting.

Everything changed the moment the Harrises arrived. Bill, the little general, antagonized everyone by spouting orders and excoriating anyone
who questioned him; he was Donald DeFreeze’s anointed successor, and he expected his “troops” to give him the respect they had given their fallen leader. When Wendy Yoshimura returned from the East Coast, a screaming match with Harris ensued, and she left for a time. The Harrises fought constantly, and more than once Bill punched Emily, blackening her eye. Between arguments the group did its best to plot the escape of Remiro and Little. But for weeks not much happened. The new recruits shuttled between San Francisco and Sacramento; when visiting the capital, they debated targets, strategies, and politics. As for Patty Hearst, she was just happy to still be alive.

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The FBI’s inability to find Patty and the Harrises, in the wake of Watergate and accompanying leaks and investigations into the Hoover-era black bag jobs and abuses, was yet another blow to its faltering reputation. At every press conference, at every dinner, Director Clarence Kelley was pelted with questions: Why couldn’t they find Patty Hearst? Where was she? The Bureau tried everything, prevailing on the
Journal of the California Dental Association
to publish the fugitives’ dental records, even printing wanted posters in Spanish—a first—which it distributed to police in Mexico and Central America. By the end of 1974, however, they hadn’t uncovered a single significant lead.

The break finally came on January 31, 1975, when Jack Scott’s tipsy brother, Walter, wobbled into a Scranton, Pennsylvania, police station at 2 a.m. Walter Scott, who was forty-one, was a renowned fantasist in Scranton’s bars, an ex-marine who often claimed to be doing secret work for the government. Even so, police had to listen when he claimed that his chatty brother had been hiding Patty Hearst on a nearby farm. By dawn Walter was being debriefed by the FBI. He knew the farm was somewhere in neighboring Wayne County, and from his description agents were able to find it. When they finally searched it, they found not only Bill Harris’s fingerprints, on a piece of glass, but Wendy Yoshimura’s, on a newspaper stuffed under a mattress. A grand jury began hearing testimony about the Scotts, who swiftly disappeared, but it was the discovery of Yoshimura’s prints that would prove more significant.

Even as news broke of the FBI’s find—the Scott family would be in the headlines for months—the SLA finally turned from talk to action. On February 25, with the group almost out of money, two of the new recruits, Jim Kilgore and Mike Bortin, robbed a branch of the Guild Savings & Loan in a Sacramento strip mall, racing out with $3,729; the police never had a clue it was the SLA. Around the same time the newcomers finally convinced Bill Harris that his plans to free Remiro and Little were suicidal and abandoned them. On March 1, the pair tried to escape anyway, rushing a pair of guards as Little jabbed a sharpened pencil four inches into one guard’s throat; the two were finally tackled and subdued as Remiro was unlocking a gun cabinet.

Afterward Bill Harris ordered that the robbery proceeds be used to buy cars and guns and rent two additional apartments for the group. But the cash, which ran out shortly, did nothing to reduce the growing tensions within the aspiring guerrilla band. Harris seemed to live in a state of constant rage. His primary target was Hearst, whom he endlessly denounced as worthless and unable to shed her bourgeois hang-ups; more than once, she claimed later, he punched her in the face, too. Harris was almost as incensed at Bortin, who refused to give up his LSD habit despite the SLA’s rules against drugs. Sometimes, when Harris was off on a tirade, his target would respond by raising the single criticism he had no answer for: Harris, the others felt, was not a credible field general because he was white. “Only a black or a Third World person can understand the plight of the oppressed masses,” Patty quoted Emily Harris as saying. They would love a black general, everyone agreed, if only they could find one.

But nothing produced more schisms within the group than sex. As they remained marooned inside three grungy Sacramento apartments, the gamesmanship devolved into a kind of sexual
Lord of the Flies
. When Bill Harris began sleeping with Kathy Soliah, Emily retaliated by sleeping with Steve Soliah. When Harris, in a jealous rage, confronted Steve with a gun, Steve left Emily and started sleeping with Hearst. Emily, in turn, began sleeping with Jim Kilgore. When that didn’t work out, Kilgore began sleeping with Wendy Yoshimura, who flitted in and out of the group. Everyone was having sex with everyone, it seemed, and everyone was angry about it. When they weren’t arguing about sex, they were arguing about what to do next. After they robbed Guild Savings, Harris wanted to hit a larger bank. By Patty’s count they cased at least fifteen Sacramento-area banks before deciding on a branch of the Crocker National Bank in suburban Carmichael. Harris wanted this to be an “SLA action,” meaning they would announce their responsibility, letting the world know that the SLA was again operational. The newcomers angrily resisted, arguing that, with only eight members, they were too weak to confront police. Kilgore and Bortin, their confidence growing, challenged Harris’s ability to lead the Crocker National action. Harris won out by shouting everyone else down.