Days of Rage (54 page)

Watering and harvesting the marijuana was a full-time job, but Huffman and Minton had spare time, and they appear to have used much of it building the New World Liberation Front. To this day no one knows whether the NWLF had two members or dozens; Stockton Buck guesses it may have been six or seven, but no one other than Huffman and Minton would ever be publicly identified. Years later the FBI used fingerprint evidence almost exclusively to build an NWLF case. By doing so, it was able to establish that the couple had been engaged in underground activities as early as 1973, when they first moved to Santa Cruz. Their first known action, actually just a communiqué, was mailed to the
Chronicle
on October 1, 1973, commenting on the Weather Underground bombing of an IT&T office on Madison Avenue in New York. Oddly, it was sent in the name of Weather as well, though fingerprints later established that it was Huffman and Minton’s work. It demanded that the state open free health clinics for the poor. There was no actual bombing.

If the IT&T communiqué represented the couple’s initial attempt to dip their toes into the underground pool, they soon realized they wanted an identity of their own. Their first actual bombing, it appears, came on November 27, 1973, at a PG&E substation in Cupertino; this was three weeks after the SLA’s assassination of Marcus Foster. A communiqué, sent in the name of “Americans for Justice,” demanded a 10 percent reduction in utility rates. The explosion briefly cut off power to four surrounding communities. Months later, in February and March 1974, the same group claimed responsibility for three bombings outside Shell Oil facilities in Berkeley, Coalinga, and San Ramon; the communiqués demanded that Shell give away its products for free.

The Americans for Justice bombings garnered few headlines, but they happened to coincide with the SLA’s rise and kidnapping of Patty Hearst. That spring, after DeFreeze and the others were killed in Los Angeles,
BARC
made its open invitation asking other groups to carry out bombings in the name of the New World Liberation Front. Huffman and Minton, it appears, were the first to accept. Their subsequent bombings were all in the name of the NWLF. The first known NWLF action, the dud bomb found outside a General Motors facility in suburban Burlingame in August 1974, was theirs, fingerprints on the communiqué confirmed. So was the Sheraton bombing that October and several—but not all—of the bombings that provided the backdrop to Hearst’s trial. It was Huffman and Minton who carried out the campaign against the San Francisco supervisors. The notorious “candy box” bombs delivered to Supervisors Barbagelata and Kopp were the couple’s work. So was the December 1976 bomb found in Dianne Feinstein’s flower box.

In all, the FBI would be able to tie Huffman and Minton to only sixteen bombings and attempted bombings between 1973 and their final attack in 1978. In all likelihood, the vast majority of the other NWLF bombings were theirs as well. Little is known about life inside their remote marijuana compound, or of their relationship with Jacques Rogiers. It’s possible that the couple simply mailed their communiqués to Rogiers anonymously; it’s possible they never met. It’s also possible, as some suggest, that Rogiers made his living selling Huffman’s marijuana in San Francisco. Nor is there any clue as to why Huffman and Minton stopped their bombings in 1978. “We just could never learn much about them,” recalls Madeleine Boriss, then a Santa Cruz prosecutor. “We could never find any real friends or associates. It was just them.” They did have a dog. His name, perhaps unsurprisingly, was Che.

But Huffman, it is clear, was never the most stable soul. According to a relative interviewed by prosecutors, he was prone to violent mood swings. In the wake of the final NWLF bombing, in 1978, there is considerable evidence that Huffman began losing his grip on reality. Feral dogs and coyotes
roamed the Bonny Doon area in those days, and Huffman became obsessed with them, calling them “demon dogs” whose incessant howling was the voice of Satan. Psychiatrists would later debate whether Huffman was schizophrenic, drug-addled, or just a weird guy, but what’s unavoidable is the sense that, as 1979 wore on, the focus of his anger became Maureen Minton.

The couple had a worker named Dennis Morgan, who helped tend the marijuana farm. Morgan later told prosecutors he became increasingly frightened of Huffman. According to Morgan, Huffman developed a long list of complaints against Minton: She hadn’t watered the weed enough, or she’d watered it too much. She’d neglected to give Che his heartworm medicine. She didn’t respect Huffman’s grandfather. Huffman’s lawyer would later claim that his client believed that Minton herself was possessed by demons. That September Minton told an aunt that, all demons aside, Huffman was incensed that she had had an abortion against his wishes. Morgan later swore that Huffman told him he was “getting rid of Minton and [finding] himself a new lady. One who could bear him children.”

Whatever the reason, there is little doubt as to what happened on the bright Sunday morning of September 23, 1979. Standing in their yard, Huffman ordered Minton to kneel before him. For some reason he slid a draftsman’s knife into her mouth. Then, lifting a long-handled axe, he swung it viciously down onto her skull, all but splitting her head in two. Minton died instantly. Huffman then took a two-by-four and beat her body, hoping, his attorney would later claim, to knock the demons out of her corpse. Apparently unsatisfied, he then took a scalpel and cut out a section of her brain. His attorney would insist that Huffman believed Minton’s brain matter had magical powers.

A few hours later Huffman packed a suitcase and threw it in his car, along with $32,000 in cash, ten bags of marijuana, a book (
The Greatest Story Ever Told
), and a paper sack containing a portion of Minton’s brain. He drove down to the Pacific Coast Highway and turned north toward San Francisco. A few miles up the road, just past the beach at Greyhound Rock, he picked up a German hitchhiker, driving off so quickly he left the young man’s girlfriend in the road. Huffman, who appeared highly agitated, was talking a mile a minute, and the poor German couldn’t understand a word he was saying. He pleaded with Huffman to stop the car, at which point Huffman produced a knife and began slashing at him. A struggle ensued, during which the car skidded to a stop outside the Short Stop Market in Half Moon Bay.

The hitchhiker leaped from the car and raced toward a young man named Corey Baker, who was standing in the parking lot. Huffman emerged and began yelling something unintelligible. Baker approached him, noticing a strange whitish-gray substance on his hands. He thought it was fish guts. It wasn’t. He told Huffman to calm down and go wash his hands. Huffman responded by punching him, grabbing a fountain pen, and attempting to poke out his eyes. Baker ran. Huffman drove off. An hour later a police car managed to force him off the road near the town of Pacifica. Huffman got out of the car, swearing and spitting, his eyes rolling back in his head. When an officer pulled his gun, Huffman held up his book and the bag of brains, as if to shield himself. Officers wrestled him to the ground. Later, when they visited the cottage, they found Minton’s body. Huffman was tossed into jail.

Once he calmed down, Huffman telephoned Tony Serra, who agreed to represent him. At that point, Serra insists, this was a simple murder case. He had no clue that Huffman was behind the NWLF bombings; the authorities wouldn’t learn of the connection for months. Not long after the arrest, Serra says, Huffman attempted to hang himself in his cell. Cut down at the last minute, he was rushed to a hospital, where doctors saved his life. But there was lingering brain damage of some sort. Afterward, Serra says, Huffman’s speech became slurred, the name Tony came out “Dunny.” At the hospital Huffman motioned for Serra to lean in close. “Dunny,” he whispered.

“He told me where he had buried all his cash, hundreds of thousands of dollars, plus a huge freezer of marijuana,” Serra remembers. “I go, ‘Far fucking out!’ So I go out there one night, with two shovels, two friends, and we dig where he told us, beneath a ladder in this old shed. And we found this massive freezer. I was so pumped! Wow, five hundred pounds of marijuana! And then we open it and the thing is empty!” Serra later returned to the cottage and dug dozens of holes in the yard. He never found a thing.

The first hint authorities received that Huffman might be involved in bombings came a few months after his arrest, when an informant suggested as much to the San Jose police, who passed the tip on to the FBI. “It was really
vague, you know, that Huffman might be good for some bombings,” recalls Stockton Buck. Huffman and Minton’s fingerprints were forwarded to the Bureau, which began checking them against unidentified prints found on NWLF and other communiqués as far back as 1971. Among the first hits they got were those found on the candy box bombs. Eventually the FBI made sixteen matches in all. Many NWLF communiqués held no identifiable prints, however, so it’s possible Huffman and Minton sent many of those as well. The only other evidence emerged after the new occupant of their Bonny Doon bungalow found a package buried in the yard. Inside was $30,000 in decomposed cash, along with hundreds of pages of NWLF literature: communiqués, codes, manifestos, surveillance rules, revolutionary tracts, and munitions manuals.

Amazingly, Huffman’s ties to the NWLF remained a secret for four years. For much of this time he remained in jail as psychiatrists debated whether he was fit to stand trial for Minton’s murder. Finally, in April 1983, he was ruled fit. The trial took place in Monterey. Huffman pled not guilty by reason of insanity; about the only sound he made during the proceedings was an occasional doglike growl. Tony Serra told the jury Huffman was “stark raving mad.” Another defense attorney termed him “absolutely wacko.” The jury disagreed, finding him guilty of second-degree murder.

The following week federal prosecutors finally unsealed a months-old indictment against Huffman for the NWLF bombings; because each carried a five-year statute of limitations, he was charged with conspiracy. The story made the front pages of the San Francisco papers but disappeared after a day or two. Outside the Bay Area it was all but ignored. The last NWLF bomb had detonated barely five years before, but it might as well have been fifty, so thoroughly had the world changed. The
Chronicle
story sounded as if the NWLF arose during the Dark Ages, terming Huffman, probably the decade’s most prolific bomber, “part of a world that eventually disappeared.”

In the end Ronald Huffman pled guilty and went to prison. No one connected with his case, including his attorneys, has a clue what happened to him after that. An administrator in the Santa Cruz County district attorney’s office, however, confirms that Huffman died in a California state prison in 1999. Where he is buried, or whether anyone cared, remains a mystery.

16

HARD TIMES

The Death of the Weather Underground

The release of
Prairie Fire
on July 24, 1974, proved a transformative moment for the remaining members of what was now known as the Weather Underground Organization. The book itself, distributed to alternative bookstores, coffeehouses, and left-wing hangouts from coast to coast, successfully reintroduced the group to radical conversations everywhere. At some point,
Prairie Fire
morphed into something far more than simply a book. It became the first step in Weather’s most crazily audacious plan ever: a grand scheme for the entire leadership not only to “resurface” publicly but to do so while simultaneously gathering the radical left into a single overarching coalition that they themselves—Jeff Jones, Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, Eleanor Stein, and Robbie Roth—would emerge to personally command.

What’s more, it was all to be done in secret. In hindsight it was almost laughably brazen: The radical left, home to some of the most suspicious people in U.S. politics, was literally going to be
fooled
into returning Weather’s leadership to the exalted positions they had abandoned on leaving SDS four years before.

The plan sprang from months of anguished discussion of Weather’s irrelevancy. By 1974 it had become an open point of debate among the leadership: They were achieving precisely nothing. Remaining underground wasn’t having the slightest influence on anyone in the radical left; it was only cutting them off from a movement seemingly reenergized by the Watergate scandal and the myriad FBI and CIA abuses already spilling into the press. Staying underground “was an increasingly high-cost fantasy,” Bill Ayers recalled. “What was it accomplishing?” Dohrn herself agreed, noting in a 2004 interview that “to do what we were doing, in the sense of doing a couple actions a year and releasing communiqués, seemed inappropriate [in 1975]. And I think it was inappropriate. It didn’t have the kind of shock value and interpretive value that it had during the war.” Jeff Jones was even more blunt, also in a 2004 interview: “The underground had run its course by 1975.”
¹

The initial idea, which came to be known as “inversion,” emerged from talks Jones had with Eleanor Stein’s mother, Annie. “There was a feeling,” recalls Dohrn’s friend Russell Neufeld, who emerged as a key player in Weather’s new plans, “and Annie Stein was its most passionate advocate—Annie had super-strong opinions on almost everything—that Weather had squandered its ties to the Movement and needed to find a way to regain its leadership. Annie convinced Jeff and Eleanor of a lot of this, and Jeff and Eleanor convinced the rest of the leadership.” There was skepticism at first, but Jones and Eleanor pushed. This, they argued, was their last, best chance to ever be political leaders again. “The idea was, Weatherman’s leadership was going to take control of what remained of the Movement,” recalls Cathy Wilkerson. “It was beyond ridiculous. We could never get away with it. Any person in their right mind should have known we were behind this, but you know, we were all enveloped in the vapor. Leadership, it was like a drug. We really thought we were the Chosen People.”