Days of Rage (60 page)

Vizi, meanwhile, was supervising a review of every person associated in any way with Cueto and the NCHA. One man, a board member, was named Guillermo “Willie” Morales. He lived in Queens. An FBI surveillance team watched him on the street and managed to snap a photo. When Vizi saw it, he immediately recognized the face; it was the face in the sketch the FBI had gotten from the owner of the Bronx luggage store—the one who sold the bags holding FALN bombs. “Identical,” Vizi remembers. “It was absolutely identical.”

The shop owner had retired to Florida. Vizi mailed him a photo of Morales, then waited for a response from agents in Florida. “So he looks at it,” Vizi recalls, “and says, ‘It’s not him.’ I said to our guys, ‘Ask him what the difference is, I can’t see any difference.’ He says, ‘I can’t tell you exactly, but it’s not him.’” Irked, Vizi sent agents to interview Morales. They returned to report that Morales was nothing but polite, unworried, unruffled. He was just an activist helping a good cause, nothing like the uncooperative Maria Cueto. “We believed him, and I just kind of let it go,” Vizi recalls. “That was the biggest mistake I made in the twenty-five years I was in the FBI.”

Because the very polite Willie Morales, agents would later learn to their dismay, turned out to be the FALN’s bomb maker.

 • • • 

With Maria Cueto and Raisa Nemikin sitting mute in a New York jail, prosecutors began pressing other FALN suspects. The Chicano activist suspected of stealing the group’s dynamite, Pedro Archuleta, had been found and was called before grand juries in Chicago and New York. He too refused to
cooperate. He too was jailed. Once again the FALN responded, setting off nine tiny incendiaries at Macy’s, Gimbel’s, and Bloomingdale’s in New York on April 9. A communiqué cited the grand juries.

It was a mark of the times that much of the public—at least the small slice paying attention to the proceedings—seemed far more willing to believe that the FBI was wiretapping radical attorneys than the frankly bizarre notion that two demure church ladies might be working for a terrorist group. Cueto and Nemikin, in fact, drew support from a variety of quarters. That spring hundreds of four-inch stickers began appearing on New York street signs and lampposts, especially in Hispanic neighborhoods. Each featured, against the backdrop of a Puerto Rican flag, a rifle, the letters
FALN,
and three sayings in Spanish:
FREEDOM FOR PUERTO RICO, FREEDOM FOR THE 5 NATIONALIST PRISONERS
, and
END THE GRAND JURY
. The FBI tried analyzing the stickers but couldn’t even discover who was posting them.

Far worse, the National Council of Churches got involved, announcing that the FALN grand juries amounted to an illegal harassment of all churches and all Hispanics. A new group, Joint Strategy for Social Action, began rallying progressive ministers across the country, who responded by writing letters and newsletter articles of their own, all attacking the FBI for its illegal campaign against the churches. Supervisors at FBI headquarters, already reeling from John Kearney’s indictment, were in no mood for even a hint of further extracurricular shenanigans. Inspectors from Washington began appearing at Wofford’s and Vizi’s desks, demanding to know what laws they had broken. Suddenly every agent working the FALN case found himself on the defensive.

Things were even worse in Chicago. There prosecutors had subpoenaed a half-dozen of Carlos Torres’s and Oscar López’s relatives, all of whom refused to testify and, as in New York, responded with legal motions alleging illegal government wiretapping. It took six full months for a judge to sort through it all, during which time the grand jury investigation ground to a halt. When a judge finally ruled in favor of the government that June, three of those subpoenaed, including López’s brother José López, were thrown in jail. The FALN responded with a rare daytime attack, on June 4, detonating a bomb on the fifth floor of Chicago’s City Hall–County Building, not far from the mayor’s office. Damages were estimated at $50,000. The following month a group of FALN supporters launched another counterattack, suing the FBI, the U.S. attorney general, and several individual agents for harassment.

All of it—the internal bickering, the inability to find Torres and López, most of all the controversy over the Episcopal Church—convinced FBI headquarters that the situation was spiraling out of control. The answer, it was decided, was to install a single supervisor who could coordinate the disparate strands of the investigation. Roger Young, a trim, diplomatic forty-four-year-old inspector with a background in intelligence cases, drew the task. The first thing Young did was ask for the FALN file. What he received instead was several cartloads of files. Thumbing through them, he saw that supervisors had opened a new case on every FALN bombing, an obvious effort to avoid any criticism that they were spying on a domestic group. There was no single repository for FALN intelligence, no overarching analysis whatsoever.

Much of his job, Young could see, would simply be building relationships between the far-flung field agents. No one knew anyone, which made it easier to ignore their requests. He called a conference of FALN agents in Virginia that June, only to have the most important office, New York, refuse to attend. Citing John Kearney’s indictment, New York supervisors said they were unsure whether such a conference was even legal under terms of the Privacy Act. They weren’t taking any chances that the ACLU would find out and start picketing the office.

By midsummer 1977, despite Roger Young’s best efforts, energy was fast ebbing from the FALN investigations. The grand juries were getting nowhere; Maria Cueto, Raisa Nemikin, and a half-dozen others were stuck sitting in jail, utterly mute. In New York the FALN squad was reorganized and rolled into a new, enlarged bomb squad. Supervisors transferred; new ones arrived. Several new cases—bombings by the Jewish Defense League, anti-Castro Cubans, Croatian separatists—each drew a stream of agents away from pursuing leads on the FALN.

Out in the streets, no one cared. Inflation was rising, cocaine and other drugs were rampant, crime was out of control; on the radar of an American’s daily worries in 1977, the FALN registered not at all. Among workaday Americans, few gave a whit about Puerto Rico, much less its independence. Bombs had been exploding in the United States for a decade now and would probably be exploding for decades more: Who cared whether they were planted by crazy Puerto Ricans, crazy blacks, crazy hippies, or crazy aliens from outer space? They were just bombs, a new fact of American life.

Nowhere was this sense of resignation more evident than in New York, a city that seemed to be entering its death throes. Gotham’s financial crisis had devolved into a new ring of urban hell. When police went on strike, someone posted a sign near LaGuardia Airport that read,
WELCOME TO FEAR CITY
. Every night fires burned out of control in the Bronx. On July 13 the city suffered a massive blackout, leading to widespread looting. Yet even then all anyone wanted to talk about was the crazed murderer stalking young lovers in the outer boroughs—the “.44 Caliber Killer,” some called him, others “Son of Sam.” In the early hours of Sunday, July 31, he opened fire on a couple necking on a quiet Brooklyn street, killing the girl, his sixth murder victim.

Between bombings, riots, blackouts, and serial killers, the last shreds of civilization appeared to be disintegrating. The city, it seemed, was slowly being lowered into its grave. From Staten Island to Riverdale to Kew Gardens, most New Yorkers found it easy to ignore the distant thud of the FALN’s bombs. Like muggings and garbage and heroin and the homeless, they were simply part of life in a dying city, a softly throbbing bass line deep in the rhythms of a funeral dirge.

 • • • 

A wilting summer heat was already rising from the sidewalks of Manhattan on the morning of Wednesday, August 3, 1977, when a slender young woman—a girl, really—walked into the Employment Services office at Mobil Oil headquarters on East Forty-second Street a little before nine. It was three days after Son of Sam’s latest killing;
FRIGHTENED SUBURBS ON GUARD,
blared the
Post
’s front-page headline. The girl, who wore a straw hat and enormous sunglasses, asked the receptionist for a job application, took one, then sat at an empty desk to fill it out. She wrote her name as “Sandra Peters,” then paused and glanced around the room, smiling at one or two other job seekers. After a moment the girl rose and returned to the receptionist, saying she needed more information before she could complete the form. Then she turned to leave—until the receptionist stopped her, saying she needed the form back, completed or not. The girl smiled, returned the form, then walked out. No one noticed the umbrella she left hanging from a coatrack.

Fifteen minutes later and a block away, a man walked out of the U.S. Defense Department’s twenty-first-floor office in the Christian Science Building, at the corner of Madison Avenue and Forty-fourth Street. In the hallway he passed a co-worker just as she glanced at a windowsill and noticed a lady’s handbag tucked awkwardly behind the Venetian blinds. Curious, the two took the bag inside their office and tried to open it, thinking they might find a driver’s license and return it to the owner. But the zipper wouldn’t work; it appeared to be glued shut. A supervisor, Thomas J. Sweeney, walked over to help. Someone produced a cigarette lighter, and Sweeney applied it to the zipper, attempting to melt the glue. It worked. Sweeney unzipped the bag and, to his astonishment, found himself staring at a tangle of wires and an alarm clock. He called for everyone in the office to move to the opposite end. All fifteen people were crouching behind desks at a far set of windows when, twenty seconds later, at 9:37, the bomb exploded, blowing a hole in a concrete wall, shattering windows, and sending the office door careening into the hallway. Miraculously, no one was hurt.

Three minutes later, at 9:40, a call came in to the WABC-TV
Eyewitness News
desk. The caller was out of breath, so nervous he garbled his identification, saying, “This is the F.L.A.N.” He told a clerk that bombs had been set at 410 Park Avenue, the site of a Chase Manhattan branch; 1270 Avenue of the Americas, the site of several Latin American consulates; 245 Park Avenue, the American Brands Building; and Mobil Oil’s headquarters. Five minutes later a second call came in to
Eyewitness News
. This time the caller
repeated the same information but added that additional bombs had been placed in both towers of the World Trade Center. A few minutes after that, yet another call was made, to the
New York Post
, saying an FALN communiqué could be found at the base of the Cuban revolutionary José Martí’s statue in Central Park.

Within minutes sirens began echoing across Manhattan as police scrambled to rope off and search the targeted buildings. A pair of uniformed officers were the first to arrive at Mobil headquarters, where they began scanning the lobby for a bomb. As they did, Charles Steinberg and Ivan Gerson, two managers from a small employment agency, sat inside the Employment Services office, waiting to see if any jobs were available for their applicants. They had been sitting for almost ten minutes when the bomb—hidden in the umbrella left on the coatrack—detonated beside them. The force of the blast could be felt for blocks. The room’s windows exploded outward, propelling a storm of blue-green glass across Forty-second Street. Pedestrians dived for cover.

Steinberg, a twenty-six-year-old newlywed, collapsed like a doll, his suit covered in blood; he died instantly. The office was wrecked: bits of furniture jutting from the walls, glass everywhere, and seven other people scattered around, left bloodied and moaning. In minutes police arrived on the scene and began evacuating the building. Two men with critical injuries, mostly the result of flying glass, were carted to Bellevue Hospital, along with five others, including a man who suffered a heart attack during the evacuation. There’s “a lot of blood and a big pile of human mess,” a cop told a
Daily News
reporter. “That’s all I can call it. Human mess.”

A summer rainstorm blew in as bystanders milled about beneath their umbrellas, trying to understand what had happened.

“They say it’s that Puerto Rican group,” a woman remarked.

“The FALN,” a black man replied.

“What do they want, anyway?” the woman asked.

“I think they want freedom for Puerto Rico.”

“For who? Puerto Rico isn’t free?”

“They don’t think so.”
²

Across the city, police and security guards began evacuating the other targeted buildings. It quickly became a mammoth undertaking: Hundreds, soon thousands, of office workers hustled out into the morning rain, standing beneath umbrellas in clumps on Park Avenue, on the Avenue of the Americas, and especially at the World Trade Center downtown, where Port Authority officers with bullhorns herded all 35,000 people in the two towers out into the streets. It was the first evacuation in the Trade Center’s four-year history; the resulting crowds soon snarled traffic across Lower Manhattan. People craned their necks, staring upward, waiting for something to explode.

Even as the evacuations got under way, city switchboards lit up with bomb threats and warnings, a trickle at first, then dozens, then hundreds. Some claimed to be from the FALN, others from Palestinian groups, while still others came from wary citizens who suddenly thought every stray trash bag or coffee cup might be hiding a bomb. Police operators alone took more than two hundred calls, most of which the NYPD was forced to ignore. Still, seven floors of the Empire State Building were cleared when someone called in a bomb threat on the eighty-second floor. All day, up and down Manhattan, chaos reigned. By nightfall more than 100,000 people had been evacuated from their offices. Many went home. Others lingered nearby, watching police murmur into walkie-talkies and shaking their heads at what life in New York had come to.

“First Son of Sam, now this,” a woman moaned to the
Daily News
. “You don’t get any peace around here anymore.”