Days of Rage (64 page)

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That first week they hid in a friend’s farmhouse in York County, six adults—Levasseur had brought yet another girlfriend along—and three small children, sleeping where they could and stacking their guns over the fireplace. Levasseur soon rented a house in Somersworth, a mill town just across the New Hampshire border. They were armed and underground now but not yet at the point of no return.

Again Bishop urged that they should rob a bank. Levasseur continued to resist. He needed to study how this was done, he said again and again. Finally, after weeks of discussion, he agreed to accompany Bishop back to Rhode Island, where Bishop said he knew several banks they could hit. “Cameron said he knew the area. I said, ‘What does that mean?’ [He says,] ‘I know the roads, I know banks with armored cars just rolling in. There’s all kinds of money there!’ We just had this nebulous idea that there was something ripe there, ready to pick. That’s how fucked up it was. We had all these guns, we had Marighella’s
Mini
-
Manual
[
of the Urban Guerrilla
] with all these passages I had underlined. Basically we were impatient, we were desperate, and we were stupid.”

They began scouting Rhode Island banks, sitting outside branches all around Providence for hours at a time, not quite sure what they were looking for. Which is what they were doing on the morning of March 12, 1975, the two of them slumped in a white 1967 Chevy in a Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot across from the Old Stone Bank in East Greenwich. Levasseur was in the backseat, a .38 jabbed in his belt. Bishop was behind the wheel, cradling two pistols in a paper sack. Tom Manning had just stepped into the doughnut shop when Bishop spied two men—clearly plainclothes detectives—approaching the car.

“What do we do?” Levasseur asked.

“I got solid ID,” Bishop said. “Don’t worry about it.”

Which were the last words Bishop spoke to Levasseur before the detectives placed them under arrest. As it turned out, a woman had seen them two days before, long-haired men in a car full of guns, telephoned police, and described the car. A sawed-off shotgun was found in the trunk, along with a
map showing the route of a Purolator armored car. When the police ran Bishop’s fingerprints, they realized who they had detained. The arrest of a Top Ten fugitive made national headlines. Photos of both men graced the front pages in Maine.

It was over.

19

BOMBS AND DIAPERS

Ray Levasseur’s Odyssey, Part II

Cameron Bishop was taken to Denver to face the old sabotage charges. Levasseur was detained on a weapons charge. To his amazement, he was granted bail; the authorities had no idea of his plans for revolutionary action. Linda Coleman dipped into her trust fund to pay a Boston bondsman $3,000, the first of a series of outlays that would keep Levasseur afloat in the coming months. A friend drove down to Rhode Island with Pat Gros to pick him up, and they chugged a celebratory six-pack on the drive to his mother’s home in Maine. That night he and Gros made love in a guest room, conceiving what would become their first child.

Then Mary Bishop telephoned from Denver. She pleaded with Levasseur to come west to form a legal defense committee for her husband. He didn’t want to go—Tom Manning was sitting in a Boston apartment, penniless, waiting for direction—but he did; Bishop, after all, seemed to be his last hope of joining the revolution. Levasseur took Coleman and drove cross-country to Colorado, where they joined Mary Bishop in a ranch house Coleman rented for them. That started the problems. The house was too nice, Coleman felt,
and thus not properly revolutionary. She was deeply confused, unsure whether her money was going to true revolutionary purposes or just beer. They began to argue, with Levasseur barking that she was giving him money with strings attached.

The problems mounted when Bishop’s family raised his bail. The Bishops turned out to be well-to-do sheep farmers—not at all the blue-collar people Levasseur had imagined—and, worse, Bishop seemed in no hurry to restart their underground army. “Cameron had always been very big on how it was every revolutionary’s duty to escape, but he didn’t want to skip bail,” Levasseur recalls. “I said, ‘This is it. It’s time to go. We got unfinished business.’ And he kept stalling. Then Mary gets wind of this, and she wants no part of it. So she makes it very uncomfortable for me to be there. One night she got mad and threw a pot at me in the kitchen, so I left.” Before doing so, he and Bishop arranged a “call schedule” whereby Levasseur would telephone him at a series of pay phones once he returned east. Weeks later, when Levasseur began making the appointed calls, Bishop failed to appear for a single one.

Levasseur returned to New England in July 1975 on a bus, confused and depressed. Manning was now a fugitive, having failed to appear for his court date, and Levasseur soon would be; he had no intention of returning to Rhode Island to face his charges. Once it grew clear that Bishop was not rejoining them, it was obvious that if they were ever to set up an underground cell, they would have to do it alone.

“Our thinking,” Levasseur recalls, “was seriously idealistic or serious tunnel vision. We wanted to be part of what these other groups—the SLA, Weather—were doing out there. We felt, there’s a fucking war going on out there, and we want to be part of it. We wanted to be somewhere between the Weather Underground and the BLA. Weather had done some good actions. I liked
Prairie Fire
. But we felt we would have to go beyond what they were doing. The BLA, they also had good actions, but I didn’t want to be just a squad that targeted police. That was too narrow. Not that I objected on moral grounds. I had no problems offing cops. None. But it was just beyond our capability. It would be way too much heat for us, and I didn’t think we could withstand that.”

Two men didn’t make much of an army, however. What they needed was
recruits. Renting an apartment in Portsmouth, New Hampshire—later they rented a second in Springfield, Massachusetts—they began sending out feelers to their ex-convict friends. Their first recruit turned out to be an unfortunate one, Joey Aceto, a diminutive twenty-two-year-old burglar paroled in Maine that April; Aceto had been in and out of institutions since boyhood and, unbeknownst to Levasseur, had a record of drug use, suicide attempts, and snitching on fellow inmates. At the Springfield apartment Levasseur mounted an elaborate indoctrination for Aceto, plying him with revolutionary books Aceto did his best to understand.

The next task was raising money. Much of their time was spent driving back and forth to Portsmouth, where they began casing their first bank. This time they were determined to do things correctly. Levasseur studied the bank’s layout and personnel in detail, tailing the manager to his home, then devised an elaborate getaway plan by sea, arranging for a shady lobster boat captain to spirit them away from Portsmouth by boat. On their first rehearsal run, however, the boat began taking on water and had to be beached on a sandbar.

That scrubbed the Portsmouth robbery. Angry and running low on money, they cast about for a new bank to target. Levasseur remembered a branch of the Northeast Bank of Westbrook he had thought of casing in the Lunt’s Corner area of Portland. On impulse they decided to rob it. On October 4, 1975, just days after abandoning the New Hampshire bank, Manning drove a stolen car up to the Portland bank. Levasseur—wearing a black afro wig and heavy dark sunglasses—led Aceto and a last-minute addition, another ex-con pal, into the bank, guns drawn. As they did, Levasseur glanced toward the drive-through window and gasped.

“There’s a cop at the window!” he shouted. “Come on!”

As luck would have it, an off-duty policeman named Paul Lewis was sitting in his wife’s car at the drive-through window. Hearing a commotion behind him, he realized that the bank was being robbed. Shoving his wife out of the car, he took the wheel, made a screaming U-turn, and arrived in front of the bank just as the three robbers sprinted from the entrance, dropping bags of cash in their haste to get into the getaway car. Manning slammed the accelerator and shot down a side road into a wooded area; when they spied Lewis giving chase, Manning veered to a stop at the curb. Lewis did the
same, reaching for the pistol beneath the seat—only to realize that the gun was in his car, not his wife’s. At least one of the robbers pulled a .45-caliber pistol and squeezed off several rounds that hit the front of Lewis’s car. As Lewis cowered behind the wheel, powerless to respond, the robbers drove off.

Though they made their getaway—the take was barely $2,000—the incident left Levasseur shaken. This was not a game. This was life and death. He swore to himself he would never be so careless again. He began studying everything he could find on bank robberies; when he read how a Canadian revolutionary group, the Front de libération du Québec, never stayed inside a bank more than five minutes, he pledged to rob banks even faster. And in the short term, he realized, they would have to strike again. Linda Coleman was paying for almost everything, but even her pocketbook wasn’t bottomless.

They found the next bank in Augusta, a branch of the Bank of Maine. Again Levasseur tried to be creative. He built a fake bomb using road flares—“They look just like dynamite,” he says—and left it at a supermarket across town. On the morning of December 12 he phoned in the bomb threat. Once half the Augusta police force responded, they hit the bank, Levasseur, Manning, and Aceto charging inside, guns drawn, while Manning’s wife, Carol, stayed outside, driving the getaway car; it was the first and only time she would take part in one of the group’s actions. Levasseur and Aceto vaulted the counters and in less than a minute made it out the door with $12,000. They got away clean.

Finally they had done something right. Fearing a police dragnet in Maine, they decided to relocate to New York City for a few weeks, taking an apartment on the Lower East Side and attending several parties packed with radicals. At one someone whispered that Bernardine Dohrn was in attendance. At a party at William Kunstler’s apartment, people said the SLA’s would-be memoirist, Jack Scott, was there. One evening Linda Coleman brought Levasseur to her family mansion on Long Island. He left shaking his head. He found the display of wealth obscene.

They couldn’t decide what to do next. They needed more money, that much was clear. The three men—Levasseur, Manning, and Aceto—fell to arguing. Levasseur wanted time to plan, to look at banks and potential bombing targets. Manning wanted to rob a market they knew in Portland;
Levasseur insisted that the target wasn’t properly revolutionary. Aceto argued for killing policemen. “Aceto just wanted to kill cops,” Levasseur recalls. “I got sick of it. We had some pretty intense arguments. We didn’t have enough money to mount a political action, and I was starting to sour on the idea of more expropriations. We had already done two, and where had that gotten us? I told them, ‘Before I’ll steal from some mom-and-pop store, I’ll find a job.’ That view was not always very popular.”

They split up. Searching for a remote place to live, Levasseur drove his battered brown Chevy to the town of Calais, in far northern Maine on the Canadian border, where he rented a spartan apartment. He was soon joined by Pat Gros, who that January had given birth to their first child, a daughter they named Carmen. Ray missed the birth, but mother and child’s arrival in Calais made a deep impression on him. For the first time he had a family to support; after months of treating Gros as just another girl, he fell in love with her in those winter months in northern Maine, building her a kitchen table from two-by-fours and slow-dancing to the radio at night. He wrote her an impassioned letter to mark the beginning of their new family, in which he tried to explain his philosophy of “armed love.”

To me you are just as much my sister—a comrade—a revolutionary—another young warrior to add to the voice—our voice—the voice of the oppressed. . . . My love is for the oppressed. Blacks, Browns, Native Americans, poor whites, rising women. With me it’s the mill workers, shoe shop workers, cleaning women, the millions of unemployed laborers. . . . Armed love [means] picking up the gun with one hand and reaching out to the oppressed people and fellow comrades with the other. . . . So—what I feel is what Comrade George Jackson called, “Perfect love, perfect hate, that’s the insides of me.” Love for the oppressed—death for the oppressor. . . . Armed love is deep and lasting and I will take it to the wall and beyond. I believe we can all be together and happy some day. Building the new life.

Levasseur and Gros’s idyll in Calais was marred only by the arrival of the sullen Joey Aceto. When Levasseur took a construction job, he returned
home most days to find Aceto swilling cheap wine, demanding they do something. Levasseur suggested that Aceto get a job; he wouldn’t. Finally, after papering over their differences with Tom Manning, everyone rendezvoused in Portland to organize the new cell. Linda Coleman showed up, as did a new recruit, a bushy-haired twenty-seven-year-old ex-con named Richard “Dickie” Picariello, who had been an inmate leader at Maine State Prison.

In a series of meetings at a Ramada Inn outside the city, they chugged beers and debated everything: what to call themselves, what actions to mount, who would actually go underground. Eventually they decided to call themselves the Sam Melville Jonathan Jackson unit. As for actions, Picariello argued for prison breakouts and assassinations. Asked whom he wanted to kill, he mentioned utility executives who were raising electric rates, a suggestion that startled Coleman. “Dickie wanted to off Maine Power & Light officials because of rate hikes: I’m like, ‘What?’” she recalls. “I think that was the first time I began having second thoughts.”

Levasseur’s argument, as usual, won the day. Like Weather and the FALN, they would attack symbols of the fascist U.S. government. The only question was whether to bomb empty buildings or full ones. The women, especially Gros and Carol Manning, argued for empty. But Levasseur would not be deterred. Anyone who got hurt, he announced, was “collateral damage” in their war against the government. The final step was the dynamite. Levasseur had no idea how to get some: Could they just buy it? He dispatched Coleman to a law library. She came back with bad news: Ex-cons couldn’t buy dynamite in Maine. They would have to steal it.