Days of Rage (63 page)

He became a regular presence at the Maine State Prison, caucusing with inmates as the guards glared. Outside the walls he attracted an entourage of tough-eyed ex-convicts, many of them members of Maine’s Iron Horsemen motorcycle gang. Stalking the streets of Augusta, always on the way to some critical meeting or demonstration, wearing do-rags, black shirts, and a long black leather jacket, a pistol sometimes jammed in his belt, he began affecting the gang’s look.

By the spring of 1973, however, after fifteen months of nonstop organizing, Ray was beginning to burn out. That May, desperate to wean himself from the scotch-and-amphetamines diet that fueled him, he drove his motorcycle across Canada, then down into California, where he sought in vain to meet the Bay Area radicals he had read about. His dreams of becoming an American Che, placed on hold since leaving prison, returned at gale force; alone at night, he read everything he could find on the tactics of guerrilla warfare. “The underground thing was always there, all the time,” he remembers today. “That’s what I really wanted to do. I needed to hook up with people who saw the need to take things to another level. I just couldn’t find anyone.”

His return to Maine marked the final phase in his revolutionary development. That winter he began meeting with another prison-rights group, the Portland-based Statewide Correctional Alliance for Reform (SCAR), and by the spring the two groups had merged. He found an apartment in Portland, enrolled at the University of Maine branch there, and spent every extra hour in community work, teaching high school equivalency classes in the jails, meeting with prisoners across the state to air their grievances, even leading karate classes at SCAR’s new headquarters, on the second floor of an old seamen’s hall on the waterfront. Levasseur had it named George Jackson Hall.

From the outset, however, he and his motley collection of bikers and ex-convicts mixed uneasily with the other SCAR volunteers. “It was a bit of a culture clash,” remembers Alan Caron, SCAR’s executive director at the time. “SCAR was a bunch of minimum-security guys, with mostly drug-related offenses. We were kind of late-sixties political, Crosby, Stills & Nash political. Ray was pretty far out there politically. His hero was Joseph Stalin. Our view was ‘Hey, you gotta have everybody involved.’ Well, that turned out to be deplorable naïveté. Ray came in slowly, quietly, did the work, teaching the GED in jails, built a network of supporters, then before I knew it, they began to push to make the group a white version of the Black Panther Party.”

For the next year Levasseur seemed to be everywhere, speaking at Portland-area schools, attending inmate-rights conferences in Boston, lecturing about George Jackson and Che and Mao and all his heroes to groups at the SCAR hall, starting a SCAR-backed bail fund for the indigent, even testifying in favor of inmate rights before the legislature. He remained an angry young man, it was true, but for the first time he found himself working side by side with social workers, local clergy, and other volunteers devoted to helping Portland’s needy; it was the Episcopal Church, in fact, that gave him the $3,000 he needed to start SCAR’s bail fund. To outsiders Levasseur remained a fearsome presence. But not to the priests, professors, and pupils reporters would interview about him in the years to come. They used words like “brilliant,” “committed,” and “compassionate.”

It was in Portland that he made three friends who would be at his side in coming years. Two were his lovers. Pat Gros, a slender, cheerful hippie girl who had fled her Maryland home in 1967 for San Francisco’s Summer of
Love, had ricocheted among dozens of demonstrations and secretarial jobs until washing up, aimless and adrift, in Portland, where she endured a green-card marriage to a German puppeteer until Ray caught her eye at a demonstration. The sight of rugged Ray Levasseur, with his black beret and radiant smile, simply melted her. Going to work as a SCAR volunteer, she was transfixed. To Ray she was just another girl whose bed was always available.

The second woman had a more distinctive background. Pretty, with long dark hair, Linda Coleman grew up in a Long Island mansion, the daughter of a prominent family that traced its ancestry to Manhattan’s original settlers; her grandmother was Joan Whitney Payson, the owner of the New York Mets baseball team. Shuttled between relatives as a girl, then banished to boarding school, Coleman fled Hampshire College that fall for Portland with a newfound thirst for radical politics and a shameful secret: She was rich, thanks to a $150,000 trust fund she received on her twenty-first birthday. Eager to shed her white-skin privilege, she began working at the SCAR offices between classes at a local hospital. She too glimpsed Levasseur at a demonstration, was struck by his charisma, and was soon sharing his bed. Levasseur liked Coleman. He liked her money even more. Neither she nor Pat Gros pushed for a commitment. “You gotta understand, Ray makes no commitments,” quips one old friend. “His only commitment is to the revolution.”

The third friend was Tom Manning, a handsome South Boston ex-con with a volcanic temper and great artistic talent. Like Levasseur, Manning had returned from Vietnam angry and aimless; after robbing a liquor store, he was sent to Massachusetts’s grim Walpole State Prison, where he nearly died after being knifed by another prisoner. After his release he had met and married a sixteen-year-old runaway from Kezar Falls, Maine; he and Carol had settled in Portland, where she gave birth to a boy they named Jeremy. When Manning saw SCAR’s newspaper, he signed up as a volunteer and quickly emerged as Levasseur’s loyal sidekick, a position he would maintain for years.

This was 1974, the high-water mark of the SLA and the second-generation underground groups, and Levasseur had begun peppering his conversations and lectures around Portland with references to the need to “take things to the next level,” to consider that violent revolution might be the only way to bring permanent change to “Amerika.” SCAR’s director, Alan Caron, thought such talk was delusional and risked alienating their supporters. By that summer it was clear the two men were heading for a showdown. “It was a choice between Alan and Ray,” recalls a onetime SCAR member. “On one side you had the armchair revolutionaries. On the other were the real revolutionaries. They had these huge arguments. With Ray there were always these vague discussions of violence and the absolute necessity of violence. ‘Sometimes you gotta go there, and the time is getting close! We’re being attacked! You know, we have to fight back.’”

Many found this kind of talk frightening. “I remember at my last meeting with Tommy and Ray,” Caron recalls, “Tommy spent a lot of time describing to me, while Levasseur chortled, what revolutionaries in Africa were doing to moderate leaders. They were killing them. And he goes, ‘A lot can be learned from Africa, you know.’ I was convinced by then that they were certifiably insane, or coked up on speed. Whatever it was, these guys were way, way out there. The last time I saw them, they came to the SCAR office and physically attacked me, beat me up, and told me to keep my mouth shut. I literally lived in fear of being killed for years after that.”

The showdown finally came in August 1974, and Levasseur and a dozen of his SCAR acolytes resigned. Rather than start a competing group, Levasseur decided to take an entirely new tack, opening a ramshackle two-room bookstore on downtown Portland’s main street, Congress Street. The Red Star North Bookstore, adorned with a large red star in the window and posters of Che and Ho Chi Minh, sold only radical literature, including the Berkeley papers and
Dragon.
The workers were volunteers. At night Levasseur led a study group that pored over his favorite Marxist texts. “It was tough for a lot of us to keep up with Ray’s intellectual capacity,” remembers Linda Coleman.

From the outset the bookstore drew the close attention of Portland police. Detectives sat outside at all hours, photographing everyone who came and went. Levasseur would stand in the doorway, staring at them over his uplifted index finger. Tensions quickly escalated. By the fall someone had begun sliding notes under the bookstore’s door, threatening to rape the women
volunteers and kill the men. Each note was adorned with swastikas and Ku Klux Klan signs. Down at the harbor, meanwhile, the SCAR office began receiving taped phone calls of screaming women, machine-gun fire, and a bugle playing taps.

Then, near the height of tensions, a bizarre scandal struck the Portland Police Department. A policeman was arrested for soliciting three other officers to perform the vigilante-style execution of a trio of criminals; the city council initiated a series of hearings. Levasseur believed what everyone in Portland’s radical circles believed: that there was a genuine, Central America−style death squad operating inside the Portland police, and that it was this group that was terrorizing SCAR and the bookstore. On the street there were rumors that the death squad had a list of twenty or more local troublemakers to kill. Levasseur’s name was said to be at the top. As everyone expected, it was Levasseur who led the demonstrations outside Portland’s city hall.

That fall, just as the bookstore opened and the police scandal broke, Tom Manning confided to Levasseur a secret that changed their lives forever. His brother-in-law, Manning said, was a onetime SDS radical named Cameron Bishop, who was on the FBI’s list of Ten Most Wanted Fugitives. He knew people in the Weather Underground. And he wanted to talk to Levasseur about his dream: starting an underground unit that would strike back at Amerika.

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Cameron Bishop was a legend in radical circles. In February 1969, as a twenty-six-year-old SDS organizer at Colorado State University, he had committed perhaps the
first major act of antiwar sabotage: the dynamiting of four electrical transmission towers that served a Colorado defense plant. He became only the second American charged in peacetime under a World War I−era sabotage law, and in April 1969 he became the first self-styled revolutionary placed on the FBI’s Most Wanted List. Bishop vanished into the underground, eventually, as luck would have it, meeting Tom Manning’s sister Mary while hitchhiking through a Maine blizzard in 1971. They had married and settled in Rhode Island, where Mary gave birth to two children and Bishop held a factory job.

Levasseur met Bishop in a Boston fast-food joint and was dazzled. After five years in hiding Bishop badly wanted back in the revolutionary game. He was everything Levasseur dreamed he would be: the son of poor sheep farmers, a onetime army paratrooper, and a tough talker who praised the SLA and dismissed the Weathermen as “bourgeois rich kids.” Together, Bishop proposed, they could launch a bombing campaign that would bring the American ruling class to its knees. Afterward Levasseur returned to Portland, exhilarated. “This was my opportunity,” he recalls. “This was everything I had been waiting for.”

Almost immediately, however, a problem arose. “Things started moving too fast,” Levasseur remembers. “I got a call from Tom: Cameron’s picture had run on a Rhode Island TV station, and Mary and Cameron and their kids were coming up to Portland. I was like, ‘What?’ He’s a Top Ten fugitive! I’ve got a death squad here. We’re under round-the-clock surveillance! What the fuck?” Within days the Bishops moved in with the Mannings at their cramped apartment in the Munjoy Hill neighborhood. Mary Bishop went to work at the bookstore. Cameron Bishop began urging Levasseur to form an underground cell—immediately. When Levasseur protested that they had no money, no way of supporting themselves, Bishop said they would do what the BLA and the SLA had done: rob banks.

“Cameron was a big fan of expropriations,” Levasseur remembers. “But he had never done one. He had an attitude, and a gun, but he’d never done it. Cameron was really pushing this. I thought it was totally premature. I was game for a lot, but robbing a bank? That was ludicrous. None of us had experience at anything like that. That was just too much. I really resisted. On the other hand, I felt a commitment to Tom and Cameron. I felt myself getting drawn into it.”

In desperation Levasseur began casting about for an alternative. An ex-con friend suggested sticking up a Portland department store on payroll day. Levasseur had ethical concerns, refusing to rob any store that was locally owned. “Expropriation is only justified if it’s a large company that’s already ripping the people off,” he says. “So no mom-and-pop stores. It had to be part
of the ruling class.” They studied the job for weeks, and after satisfying himself that the store was owned by the ruling class, they decided to move. Levasseur declines to divulge details—he was never linked to the robbery—but finally, in November, the store was robbed. “We didn’t get much, a few thousand dollars,” he says. “It was mostly checks.”

The robbery, however, did little to quell Bishop’s demands that they immediately go underground. Levasseur stalled. His politics may have been radical, but in matters of risk he was highly conservative; planning and precision were hallmarks of his underground career. Levasseur and Bishop were still debating whether and when to go underground when, just before Christmas, Portland police raided the bookstore and arrested Levasseur for carrying an open can of beer. By the time he made bail he could feel control of matters slipping away. Tom Manning had inexplicably beaten up his landlord and now had a court date looming; he could be sent to jail if they remained aboveground. Worse, Levasseur had borrowed a girlfriend’s car for the store robbery; she had gotten angry and was threatening to turn them in.

“There was a craziness that was building,” Levasseur recalls. “Things were just moving too fast. When I first met with Cameron, I envisioned something planned out, something careful. But things were pushing us. Cameron kept going, ‘We gotta go. We gotta go.’”

Then came the final straw. Linda Coleman walked into the bookstore one morning and discovered that it had been ransacked. On the floor she found Mary Bishop whimpering in a fetal position. She had been raped, she said, by two men who held a broken bottle against her neck. Levasseur had no doubt as to who was responsible: the Portland police, the fascist pigs who wanted them all dead. Bishop again demanded they go underground. Facing a kaleidoscope of pressures, real and imagined—the police, Manning’s court date, the vengeful girlfriend, his commitment to the Bishops, not to mention his long-held dream of forming his own underground cell—Levasseur capitulated. By the next day he and the Mannings and Bishops had vanished from Portland’s streets.
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