Days of Rage (58 page)

At that point a new FBI supervisor, Paul Brana, encouraged by the Bicentennial cooperation between the FBI and the NYPD, proposed a second citywide dragnet, this one to coincide with the second anniversary of the FALN’s debut in late October. They called it “Operation Catch a Bomber”; it took months to arrange. As meetings stretched on that September, the FALN struck twice more, in Chicago on September 10 and New York on September 21. The Chicago bombs were left in a restroom at the Lake Shore Drive Holiday Inn and in a government office. Damage was minimal; a communiqué noted that a “free and socialist Puerto Rico, if necessary, will be written in red blood.” The New York bomb was more harrowing, demolishing a twenty-fourth-story stairwell at the New York Hilton, where Puerto Rico’s governor was to be honored at a banquet that night.

In late October Operation Catch a Bomber went forward, flooding the streets around New York landmarks with hundreds of FBI agents and detectives. It was a complete bust. At the FBI offices on Sixty-ninth Street, Don Wofford and Lou Vizi were at their wits’ end. At one point, in desperation, they brought in a psychic. Nothing worked.

And then they got lucky.

 • • • 

Deep in the rough Puerto Rican neighborhoods around Chicago’s Humboldt Park, there lived an emaciated young man named Raul Velez. He rented a small flat on the third floor of a run-down building at 2659 West Haddon Avenue, five miles northwest of the skyscrapers downtown, and for the past several days he had been watching his new neighbors, a pair of Hispanic men, as they moved things into an apartment across the hallway. They had just purchased the building, they told him, and would be refurbishing it over the next several weeks. Velez studied them closely as they hauled in a suitcase, a footlocker, a large zippered bag, and several packages that looked like Christmas gifts. The two men stayed inside the apartment during the day and disappeared at night.

Velez was short on cash, and so in the early hours of November 3, 1976—a week after Operation Catch a Bomber in New York—he jimmied the lock on his neighbors’ door and made his way inside, hoping to steal whatever he could find for sale to a pawn shop or a pal. Given the remodeling plans, Velez expected to find power tools. Instead, as his eyes adjusted to the gloom inside the apartment, he saw piles of boxes and spools of what appeared to be clothesline. It was labeled
PRIME-A-DET.
Velez had no idea what it was, but he recognized the red sticks packed into the footlocker: dynamite. Hundreds of sticks of dynamite. He sorted through the rest and found a shotgun, two rifles, walkie-talkies, and what he later learned were blasting caps.

Velez struggled to drag it all across the hall into his own apartment, and once he did, he telephoned a friend, George Dunn, who he knew had contacts on the street. Dunn drove over, saw Velez’s surprising score, and by midmorning had helped him move it all a second time, to Dunn’s apartment, several blocks away on Washtenaw Avenue.

It was just a little before noon when Detective John Dugan of the Chicago Police Gangs Unit got a call from one of his snitches, who told him someone named Dunn was spreading the word that he had dynamite to sell. The snitch had agreed to meet Dunn at 1 p.m., at a garage on Rockwell Street. When Dugan and his partner drove up, they saw their informant hunched over a footlocker with Dunn. The two cops walked up, tossed both men against a wall, and found themselves staring at what appeared to be hundreds of red sticks of dynamite.

At first glance Dugan couldn’t believe it was real. But it was, as men from the bomb squad soon confirmed. All told, there were 216 sticks of it, plus an eighty-pound box of raw explosives, plus blasting caps and hundreds of feet of detonating cord—enough to blow up just about any building in Chicago.
Dunn confessed everything, and afterward Detective Dugan swung by and handcuffed Raul Velez. Dugan, thinking he had stumbled on a brewing gang war or even a terrorist plot, wanted to search the apartment Velez had burglarized, but his commander, lost in the minutiae of a busy afternoon, ordered him to finish his paperwork before the end of his shift to avoid any overtime. Dugan appealed to his sergeant, who was curious as well, and while Dugan’s partner completed the paperwork, the two men drove to the building on West Haddon. On the way they radioed for a Spanish-speaking officer to meet them there.

Reaching the third floor, Dugan was surprised to find the apartment’s front and rear doors wide open. There was no furniture, just a single table. On the floor they found a typewriter, some wire, and a dusting of white powder. On the table they found a piece of white paper covered with writing in Spanish. The Spanish-speaking officer glanced at it and gasped. It was a communiqué from the FALN.

They called the bomb squad, which suspected they had found an FALN safe house and telephoned a senior FBI agent, Tom Deans. Within an hour a dozen FBI men were on site, studying every corner of the forlorn apartment. Warrants were obtained, and the super directed agents to a storage area where the two Hispanic men had appeared to be doing some kind of work. Busting the lock, the agents found a trove of bomb-making paraphernalia: batteries, propane tanks, wiring, chemicals, wristwatches, a book that had been hollowed out, and photos of several downtown buildings. There were also piles of documents.

Deans realized this was the first FALN safe house ever found, but they appeared even luckier than that. The two Hispanic men had claimed to own the building; it was only a matter of time, Dean surmised, before they could be identified. After bagging and tagging all the evidence, they took the building’s handyman downtown. He told them his father had bought the building on behalf of his son-in-law, who was the real owner. He identified the son-in-law as none other than Carlos Torres, the same man whom agents had found so cooperative when interviewed months before.

Torres was identified as one of the two Hispanic men whose things Raul Velez had stolen. The other was identified after helpfully leaving his résumé among the papers agents seized. He was Oscar López, a Vietnam veteran whose brother was principal at Chicago’s Puerto Rican High School. Both had vanished from their apartments near Humboldt Park. Stakeouts were arrayed around relatives’ homes, but both couples appeared to be long gone.

The next day Tom Deans persuaded the U.S. attorney’s office to issue a warrant for Carlos Torres on weapons charges. All that was known of Torres was that he attended the University of Illinois, Chicago Circle Campus. His wife, Haydee, was said to be three months pregnant. López, meanwhile, was well known in the city’s Puerto Rican neighborhoods. He had been a community organizer who put together protests on behalf of a dozen Puerto Rican causes in the early 1970s. His common-law wife, Lucy Rodriguez, worked for the federal government, as an equal-employment specialist in the Chicago offices of the Environmental Protection Agency.

As one set of FBI agents spread out in search of Torres and López, another pored over everything found at the West Haddon building. Of all the evidence the FBI gathered, the most curious bit was a copy of a letter mailed to a Maria Cueto, who was identified as executive director of the National Commission on Hispanic Affairs (NCHA). The letter was a request for funding from a church in Texas. A phone call determined that the commission was affiliated with the Episcopal Church. What on earth, investigators wondered, was its correspondence doing in an FALN safe house?

It turned out that the NCHA operated out of basement offices at the Episcopal Church’s national headquarters in Midtown Manhattan. FBI agents interviewed Cueto there on November 18, two weeks after the discoveries in Chicago. An Episcopal lay worker from Phoenix whose aunt sat on the church’s Board of Guardians, she politely explained that the NCHA gave money to Hispanic groups involved in all manner of self-help, educational, and commercial efforts. Yes, she said, she knew Carlos Torres. He was a member of her board; he had been in the city as recently as October, in fact, on church business. López had been on the board for a time as well, as had Pedro Archuleta, the man now suspected of stealing the dynamite the FALN had been using. Another suspect, Julio Rosado, had also been a board member; his brother Luis was one of the NCHA’s consultants.

The news flashed through all the FBI investigators and federal prosecutors in New York, Chicago, and Washington. Don Wofford’s head was practically spinning, trying to grasp it all. They had to say it out loud to make themselves believe it: Virtually everyone the FBI now knew to be linked to the FALN, virtually everyone they had ever considered a serious suspect, seemed to be connected to a legitimate charity that was part of the Episcopal Church’s minority-outreach efforts. It made no sense whatsoever, but what other conclusion was there to be drawn than that the church was being used as a front for terrorism?

 • • • 

To this day, forty years after its formation, no one outside the FALN is exactly sure how it came to be. As with the Black Liberation Army, none of the group’s original members has ever spoken a meaningful word about its founding, its evolution, or its crimes. What seems clear, however, is that the FALN was born, of all places, in the hallways of a rough Chicago high school.

The story begins long before, though, in the impoverished mountain village of San Sebastián, in northwest Puerto Rico, where during the early 1950s two brothers surnamed López were growing up on their family’s fourteen-acre farm. Oscar, born in 1943, was seven years older than José. They had no electricity, indoor plumbing, or running water; José would recall that he didn’t see a television until he was nine years old. The family raised pigs and cattle and ate only what they could wrench from the soil with their own hands.

It was never enough. Around the time José was born, his father immigrated to Chicago, where a small number of Puerto Ricans had preceded him. He found work in a factory making steel pipe and in 1957 sent for Oscar and his sister. José and his mother followed two years later. The Lópezes lived with six other families in a filthy, roach-infested building at the corner of Wood and Haddon streets. It was a Polish neighborhood, and the Poles detested the Puerto Ricans. When Oscar and José walked to school, the Polish women made displays of sweeping the sidewalks in front of the homes, forcing the boys to walk in the street. Some spit at them. “Dirty Puerto Ricans,” they muttered.

Both Oscar and José were highly intelligent, not that teachers noticed. At the neighborhood school the boys were herded from the classroom into a set of walk-in closets reserved for children who spoke little or no English; the school had no Spanish-speaking teachers. While the Anglo and Polish children received their lessons, the Puerto Rican kids simply sat in the closets, waiting for a friendly teacher to stick her head in every now and then and attempt to give a lesson.

Shortly after José’s arrival a cluster of heavy pipes fell and crushed his father’s right hand, rendering him unable to work. He left the family. The boys’ mother, who couldn’t read or write and spoke no English, was obliged to take a 90-cent-an-hour job at the Rainbow Cleaners on Division Street, walking the twenty blocks back and forth twice a day to save the quarter in bus fare. The family barely managed to scrape by, and perhaps unsurprisingly José and Oscar developed deep reserves of anger and resentment, as did many of their parents’ friends. In the early 1960s, when the Cuban Revolution was still shiny and new, some of these friends joined pro-Castro groups. One, a local barber, would bring José and Oscar pamphlets, which they read with zeal. Both boys eagerly listened in when the older men griped about the anti-Latin bias they fought each day, how things were better under Castro, how Puerto Rico itself would be better off independent like Cuba.

When he was old enough, Oscar joined the army and was sent to Vietnam. José remained behind, working a paper route to help his mother. He read front to back the newspapers he tossed and soon became interested in politics. One of the old Polish precinct captains drew him into election work in 1964, hoping he could build bridges to the Puerto Ricans, and José immersed himself in the era’s radical writings, reading up on Malcolm X and Puerto Rican history. A top student and a conservative dresser, he was elected student council president at Tuley High School, then president of a citywide student group. He threw himself into student politics, protesting against the war, calling for Puerto Rican independence, and making alliances with black student groups. He went on to Loyola University, and upon graduation in 1971, at the age of twenty-one, took a job teaching history at his old high school.

Tuley High, an otherwise unremarkable redbrick building on North Claremont Avenue, named for an influential nineteenth-century judge, would
become the unlikely cradle of the FALN. Tuley’s most notable alumni were Notre Dame football coach Knute Rockne and the writer Saul Bellow. While the surrounding neighborhoods changed during the 1950s and 1960s, the school didn’t. When José López joined the faculty, Tuley was already a seething cauldron of Puerto Rican resentment. A majority of the students were now Latin, an astounding 70 percent of whom dropped out before graduation. Yet the administration seemed deaf to their needs. There remained few Spanish-speaking teachers. Puerto Rican families ate beans with almost every meal, yet the principal, Herbert Fink, refused to serve beans in the cafeteria. It is a point of pride among many Puerto Ricans to hear a man out, yet when parents brought the principal complaints, Fink routinely cut them off. Jokes about Puerto Rican laziness were routine. On one of his first days at work, José ambled into the teachers’ lounge and saw an instructor dozing beneath a sign that read,
DO NOT DISTURB. PUERTO RICANS AT WORK
. Everywhere he looked José saw Puerto Ricans ridiculed and ignored.

He began to agitate for change. He found an ally in a school counselor, Carmen Valentín, who would later become an FALN member. One of his history students, Dickie Jimenez, got involved; he too would eventually join the FALN. But José’s greatest ally proved to be his brother, Oscar, who returned from Vietnam to become a social worker in his old neighborhood. Where José was studious and conservative, Oscar was a sidewalk whirlwind, sturdily built, handsome, a mass of bushy curls over a full, dark mustache. As a staff member at the Northwest Community Organization, Oscar stalked the streets around Tuley High in an old army jacket, fighting to improve the full range of Puerto Rican ills in Chicago, agitating for bilingual education, immunization programs, and job opportunities—unemployment ran at 33 percent in the Puerto Rican neighborhoods—and against gangs and slumlords.