Days of Rage (51 page)

As they readied for the bank job, everyone buying new guns and firing at targets in a wooded area, news broke of the FBI’s discoveries in Pennsylvania. Suddenly, after almost a year of silence, the SLA was again front-page news. Harris saw no reason to leave Sacramento; not even the Scotts knew they were in the city. Finally, on April 21, after a month of preparations, all eight of them piled into cars and drove toward the Crocker branch. As five of the group burst into the lobby, screaming for everyone to “get your noses in the carpet,” one woman paused. Her name was Myrna Opsahl. She was forty-two that morning, and she had come to the bank with three other women to deposit money from their church. According to witnesses, Opsahl was cradling a heavy adding machine, and rather than fall to the floor, she hesitated. Emily Harris turned and blasted Opsahl with a shotgun. Years later she would claim that the gun went off accidentally. Barely five minutes later the robbers raced from the bank, leaving Myrna Opsahl to bleed to death. Hearst, sitting in a getaway car, joined the others inside a waiting van. When one of them wondered aloud whether the bleeding woman would live, Hearst wrote later, Emily Harris snapped, “Oh she’s dead. But it really doesn’t matter. She was a bourgeois pig anyway.”

 • • • 

The murder of Myrna Opsahl, and press accounts that labeled the Crocker National job an “SLA-style” robbery, convinced the group that it was time to leave Sacramento. The new recruits took news of Opsahl’s death the hardest; for the first time, Patty said later, the romance of revolutionary violence
began to fade. The decision was made to return to where it all began, the only place most of the SLA members felt at all safe: San Francisco.

Kathy Soliah and Jim Kilgore took Patty and rented an apartment on Geneva Avenue, above a dry cleaner’s on the city’s southern outskirts. Everyone else followed a few days later, bringing their weapons and belongings in a pair of U-Haul trucks. A game of musical apartments ensued. Emily Harris announced that she couldn’t stand living with Bill anymore, so Bill moved to a second flat, in Daly City; the others took turns living with him. In the end Emily and Jim Kilgore moved in with Hearst. The new recruits, meanwhile, all took jobs, Kathy Soliah waitressing under an assumed name at the Sir Francis Drake Hotel while the others returned to housepainting, eventually securing a sizable contract to repaint a set of apartments in Pacifica, south of the city. Two of Wendy Yoshimura’s radical girlfriends began attending the SLA’s internal meetings, hoping to join.

Once they were settled, Harris announced that they were renewing their war against the fascist U.S. government. In DeFreeze’s honor, he said, they should carry out his dream and begin killing policemen. If they killed enough, he reasoned, the police would crack down on the oppressed minorities of the Bay Area, who would then rise up and begin the revolution. “That’s a terrible, disgusting idea,” one of the prospective members said. “One of the women I work with is married to a policeman, and he is a very nice person.”

“We’re revolutionaries and we should be killing pigs and pigs’ families,” Emily Harris responded.

“You people are sick,” the woman said, and stormed out.
¹

Mike Bortin just rolled his eyes. “All you people do is talk,” he said. “I think you’re all a bunch of sissies. If you want to go out and kill some pigs, you ought to just go out and do it.”

Harris insisted they needed a plan and challenged Bortin to devise one. A few nights later Bortin took Hearst and cruised past a coffee shop called Miz Brown’s in the Mission District. It was filled with police, on and off duty. At the group’s next meeting Bortin proposed that they walk in with guns blazing; they could kill a dozen cops before anyone knew what was happening. Harris scoffed. They could never win a shoot-out with trained professionals. “You people analyze everything to death,” Bortin said before storming out.

In Bortin’s absence the other newcomers argued that the safest attacks would be nocturnal, Weather-style bombings. The debate raged for days, until Bortin finally returned and plunked down a package of plastic explosives, the kind used on construction sites. “Here’s your explosives,” he told Harris. “All you need is some blasting caps and you’re good to go.”

Later there would be considerable confusion about the rump SLA’s bombings, in large part because they were carried out in the name of the New World Liberation Front, the umbrella group Harris had endorsed a full year before. In the interim a group calling itself the NWLF had already detonated thirty bombs in the Bay Area. Patty Hearst, and much of the press, would later come to believe that the SLA was the only branch of the NWLF, that Harris and his acolytes had carried out
all
the bombings, but as later events would show, that was clearly not true. It’s all but certain that, as Bortin’s introduction of explosives indicated, the SLA hadn’t yet bombed a thing.

But it would now. Rejoining the group, Wendy Yoshimura served as its explosives expert. Everyone gathered in the Geneva Avenue flat to watch her build a pipe bomb—gunpowder jammed into a two-inch pipe. She and Harris burned the powder in different recipes on a mattress in the rear courtyard until one afternoon when Hearst noticed smoke billowing from behind the building. Apparently they had left something burning. Just then there was a pounding at the door. “Fire department!” a voice shouted. Firemen rushed into the apartment, dragging hoses behind them, and quickly extinguished the fire. When Yoshimura explained she had seen teenagers playing with matches earlier in the day, they left. Afterward everyone was able to laugh about it.

Harris chose the first two targets: police stations in the Mission District and on Taraval Street. Overruling Yoshimura, he insisted on building the bombs himself, packing toilet paper in with the gunpowder, despite Yoshimura’s insistence that there was no need. On the night of August 7, Patty and Jo Soliah took one of the bombs in a plastic bag and strolled by the Mission station; once they were certain no one was watching, Soliah slid it under a parked police car. Yoshimura and the others returned to the apartment with their bomb still intact, insisting there were too many people around the Taraval Street station to plant it. The next morning, when they checked the newspapers, they found a small item about a dud bomb found under a Mission
District police car. Harris was apoplectic, his face red and trembling as he excoriated everyone for incompetence and insubordination.

Mike Bortin, always ready to challenge Harris, teased him mercilessly. “Great job,” he smirked. For once Harris had little to say.

The next day they built three new bombs, minus the toilet paper, and drove to a remote area of Sonoma County to test them. They were tiny, only three inches long, but they detonated. Harris announced that they would strike next at the police department in Emeryville, beside Berkeley on San Francisco Bay. Emily Harris and Steve Soliah planted the bomb on August 13, Soliah scrambling up a slope to slide it under a patrol car. Minutes later it went off, destroying the car. Writing the communiqué proved harder than the bombing. Harris wanted to rename themselves the Jonathan Jackson unit of the New World Liberation Front. Kilgore objected, saying that suggested they were black revolutionaries. Eventually they compromised, calling themselves the Jonathan Jackson/Sam Melville unit of the NWLF. “Remember, pigs,” the communiqué read in part. “Every time you strap on your gun, the next bullet may be speeding toward your head, the next bomb may be under the seat of your car.” In the only nod to the SLA, they used DeFreeze’s old signoff line: “Death to the Fascist Insect That Preys on the Life of the People.”

Bursting with confidence now, Harris announced that their next action would be simultaneous attacks in Los Angeles and at the site of Jonathan Jackson’s death, the Marin County Courthouse. Harris built the bombs, bigger ones this time, gunpowder packed with concrete nails inside a foot-long pipe. He called it an “anti-personnel” bomb and rigged up a contraption that would affix it to the bottom of a car and, in theory, detonate when the car moved. Steve Soliah, riding a bicycle, placed the first bomb at the courthouse, outside the sheriff’s office. Another they slid under a police car. Both went off with no problem. They dropped off the communiqué outside a radio station.

Later Harris returned, incensed, from Los Angeles with Jim Kilgore and Kathy Soliah, who was sporting a new black eye. Their “mission” had degenerated into farce. They had gotten into an argument over what to bomb. Sitting in traffic, Kilgore got so mad he punched Soliah in the face, at which point Harris began punching him, even as drivers behind them began honking their horns. Later that night, having calmed down, they managed to slide two bombs under a pair of police cars, one in Hollywood, the other in East Los Angeles; afterward they checked into a motel, switched on the television, and waited for news of their triumphant attacks. Unfortunately, Harris’s new triggering device didn’t work. When the first cruiser was driven off, the bomb just lay there in a trash bag in the street, at which point two young boys found it and began kicking it around like a soccer ball. When the bomb fell out of the garbage bag, an adult saw it and called the police. Rushing to check nearby cars, they found the second bomb before it could explode. “Everything,” Hearst wrote later, “pretty much spiraled out of control after that.”

Back in San Francisco violent arguments broke out, all exacerbated by ongoing sexual tensions within the group. Everything came to a head one long night at the Geneva Avenue apartment when, amid clouds of cigarette smoke, half-eaten pizza crusts, and beer and wine bottles, Harris announced that the only cure for the SLA’s dysfunction was black leadership. He proposed approaching a paroled San Quentin inmate they knew and asking him to take over. The newcomers hated the idea, afraid to bring in outsiders. As Harris and Kilgore screamed at each other, Emily Harris lamented the loss of the clarity DeFreeze had brought to the “old” SLA. Kilgore’s response provided an unwitting epitaph for the group: “That’s all a bunch of crap! What did the old SLA ever accomplish? You killed a black man, kidnapped a little teenaged girl and robbed a bank. What the hell did that amount to?”
²

Finally, with half the group screaming and red-faced and the other half in tears, Harris shouted, “That’s it! It’s all over!” He and Emily were going in search of black leadership. The others could do as they pleased. The next day the Harrises rented an apartment on Precita Avenue in Bernal Heights, not far from San Francisco General Hospital. And just like that, with no good-byes, they were gone. Patty and the others moved into the remaining safe house, in Daly City. It was then, on August 29, that the Soliahs’ father, Martin, appeared in San Francisco and informed his three children that the FBI was looking for them. Harris ordered everyone to leave the Daly City flat; to make sure they did, he gave the landlord notice. Thrown out, Hearst and the others were cruising the Outer Mission District one evening when they
saw a
FOR RENT
sign at a small apartment building. The address was 625 Morse Street.

For the next two weeks there was little communication between the Harrises and the others. Patty heard that the couple had found their would-be black messiah, lying stoned in a bush at a rally. For the first time she began thinking of turning herself in. She was exhausted. The SLA was falling apart. But the others persuaded her to stay. “You’re a symbol of the revolution,” one told her. “You give the people hope.”

 • • • 

By midsummer the FBI had finally picked up the SLA’s trail. One of Jack Scott’s friends, who had visited the group in Pennsylvania, gave agents Wendy Yoshimura’s alias, “Joan Shimada.” Someone by that name had registered a car in New Jersey, then sold it to a girl named Cathy Turcich. When agents visited the Turcich family on July 19, her parents volunteered that Cathy’s sister was one of Yoshimura’s oldest friends; she was waitressing in San Francisco, in fact, and was in touch with her. When agents visited the restaurant, the Plate of Brasse, they found that Turcich had disappeared. But when they showed employees photos of Yoshimura’s known associates, someone picked out a photo of a waitress named Kathleen Anger. It was Kathy Soliah. Soliah was also gone; a call from New Jersey had tipped everyone off. Both the FBI and the police, however, were well aware that Soliah and her friends were behind BARC, the pro-SLA group that published
Dragon
. A week later, playing a hunch, a Sacramento police detective ran all the BARC group’s fingerprints against one found on the Crocker Bank getaway car. It was Jim Kilgore’s.

The FBI poured men into Sacramento. But the break came after agents struck up a relationship with Martin Soliah, who lived in Palmdale, in the high desert east of Los Angeles. He was horrified to learn that his children might be mixed up with the SLA. He tried to reach them but couldn’t, then managed to arrange a dinner on August 29 in San Francisco. The FBI agreed to let him go alone. When Martin came clean, telling his children he was working with the Bureau, Kathy exploded. “How could you do such a thing?” she demanded. “Don’t you know you can’t trust the FBI?” They spent seven hours walking and talking, the father beseeching the children to come home, the children denying everything.

Martin Soliah returned, crestfallen, to the FBI agents waiting at his hotel. The family meeting seemed a total loss—until he mentioned one thing. At some point his son Steve had volunteered that he and Michael Bortin and Jim Kilgore were still painting houses. Within days agents fanned out across the Bay Area, showing photos of the SLA to supervisors at every painting job they could find. It took two weeks, but on the morning of Monday, September 15, a pair of agents approached Bill Osgood, manager of the Pacifica Apartments, and showed him the SLA photos. “That one,” Osgood said, pointing to a picture of Bortin. That was “John Henderson,” he said, the boss of the “hippie painters” repainting the apartments.

At 10:30 a.m. the two agents, sitting in a parked car, saw Kathy and Jo Soliah drive up. Surveillance teams took up positions all around the complex. At 5:30, when the Soliahs were finished for the day, agents followed their 1967 Ford as it drove into San Francisco, eventually stopping at 625 Morse, where the women disappeared inside. The next morning agents spied Steve Soliah leaving the apartment, followed him to Pacifica, and at day’s end trailed him to a second address, 288 Precita in Bernal Heights.