Days of Rage (69 page)

Three months later came a more ambitious set of attacks: simultaneous actions in New York, Chicago, and Washington. The date was May 22. At 9:40 a.m. a pipe bomb exploded in a trash can in front of the Justice Department in Washington; no one was hurt. Twenty minutes later tiny Ping-Pong-ball incendiaries burst into flames at shops inside all three major New York−area airports, Newark, LaGuardia, and JFK. An hour later, in Chicago, a caller from the FALN phoned in bomb threats at O’Hare Airport and an adjacent hotel; no bombs were found.

FBI agents in all three cities scrambled to gather evidence and leads, but there was nothing to be learned. The FALN seemed able to strike anywhere, at any time, without interference. At the FBI offices on East Sixty-ninth Street, morale plunged to new lows. Then, after months without progress of any kind, things suddenly changed. It was a hot summer day, July 12, 1978. The call came from Queens.

 • • • 

Late that afternoon, in a fetid second-floor apartment on Ninety-sixth Street in the East Elmhurst section of Queens, the FALN’s main bomb maker, Willie Morales, hunched over a workbench building his fourth device of the day, a pipe bomb. It consisted of a single stick of dynamite, wrapped in its original red paper, which Morales carefully slid into a sixteen-inch length of pipe, finishing the bomb by screwing on a metal cap. He worked alone, drops of sweat rolling down his sides in the heat, the only sounds the salsa music blaring from cars outside.

Morales was twenty-eight that day, a small, wiry man with unruly black curls. He liked to be called Guillermo. It had been eighteen months since his interview with FBI agents, who had dismissed him as a quiet, passive nobody. Like all his FALN brethren, he was an unlikely revolutionary. Morales had grown up in East Harlem and gone to college, earning a degree in film from the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan. He had worked a smattering of jobs: lab technician at the Department of Health, reading instructor at Public School 96, counselor for the Police Athletic League, lifeguard, even drug counselor in charge of referring addicts to drug treatment centers. Unlike the others, he wasn’t sought by police and thus had never gone underground. For several years, until he’d recently been laid off, he was a ticket agent for Trans World Airlines, usually working at its 2 Penn Plaza office.

He had been working in this apartment for three months. Carlos Torres rented it for him. His only furniture was a thin cot by the front window, where he slept. It was a Hispanic neighborhood, where the pulsing rhythms of salsa and mariachi blared from car radios on those humid summer days. He fit in easily here; no one bothered him. In a rear closet he kept his materials: sixty-six sticks of dynamite, containers of black and smokeless gunpowder, plus sixty pounds of potassium chlorate, a chemical used in making explosives. Morales was especially adept at crafting the Ping-Pong-ball incendiaries the FALN liked to leave in Macy’s and Gimbels. He had hundreds of balls. The closet also held two M1 carbines, a .45-caliber semiautomatic rifle, and a sawed-off shotgun.

As he worked Morales kept a homemade bomb-making manual beside him; its cover was adorned with the words
IN THIS WE TRUST
. Every bomb he made was exactly like its counterpart in the manual. Every single one detonated when the big hand on a wristwatch struck “9,” just like the bombs Ron Fliegelman built for the Weather Underground. All three of the bombs he had built that day were set to explode, presumably intended to be taken to their locations that evening.

No one would ever figure out exactly what went wrong that sweltering day in the apartment on Ninety-sixth Street. What the FBI ultimately heard but could never confirm was that Torres had prepared the timer on that final
pipe bomb and had made a mistake. The hour hand on the wristwatches had to be shaved smooth to insure proper detonation, and Torres, it was said, had whittled the wrong hand: not the hour hand but the minute hand. Thus when Morales set the bomb to go off in a matter of hours, he actually had only a matter of minutes.

At 5:20, as Morales was screwing the metal cap onto that last bomb, it exploded in his hands. The boom could be heard up and down the street. The blast blew off most of Morales’s hands, sending his severed fingers zinging madly through the apartment. The metal cap he was holding rocketed into his chin, fracturing his jaw in at least five places, knocking out a number of teeth, ripping off his lips, and destroying his left eye; his face was a bloody mess. He must have been unconscious for a time, but if so, he quickly came to.

It was at that point, after realizing he was still alive, that Willie Morales did several amazing things. Despite having nine of his fingers blown off—only his left thumb remained intact—and despite having dreadful burns across his face, he still had the strength and presence of mind to gather an armload of FALN documents, which he somehow lugged into the bathroom and began trying to flush down the toilet. He left a trail of blood the whole way. When the bathroom door closed behind him, he had to fight to reopen it, as evidenced by the bloody stump marks he left on it.

Once the papers were flushed, Morales limped to the apartment door, locked it, then closed and locked each of the windows. Finally he went to the gas stove, blew out its pilot lights, and cranked the gas up to high—apparently twisting the knob with what remained of his mouth. Police sirens were already filling the air at that point. What Morales wanted, the FBI later surmised, was for the police to force their way into the apartment. Maybe an axe or a gun would do it, maybe the light switch. Whatever it was, he would need only the tiniest spark to ignite the gas spreading through the apartment. He was going to die, Morales suspected, but if so, he would take a dozen cops with him.

Firefighters were the first to arrive, stomping up the stairs in their heavy boots. They used an axe to crash through the door. Luckily, nothing produced
the spark Morales had hoped it would. Immediately the firemen smelled the gas and saw the blood—blood everywhere. Waving their arms to dissipate the gas, they entered the apartment and stepped to the front windows to release it, which is when they found Morales sprawled, barely alive, on his cot. This was no ordinary explosion, the firefighters saw. This was a matter for the police.

Detectives from the NYPD’s bomb squad were among the next to arrive, walking in as attendants carried Morales on a stretcher to a waiting ambulance. As yet no one had a clue who he was, nor could they tell at a glance. By the time paramedics began swathing his arms and upper body in bandages, Morales’s head had swollen to the size of a basketball.

Don Wofford took the call a half hour after the blast; anytime anything blew up in New York City, the FBI agent got a call. He sent a half dozen agents to Queens, and one, Danny Scott, joined the NYPD’s William Valentine at Elmhurst General Hospital, where they found Morales lying on a gurney wrapped in bandages, a bloody mummy. Valentine had been working FALN bombings for years. Studying the man’s size and shape, he grabbed a tape measure and took his measurements. It was only a hunch, Valentine said, but he thought this might be Willie Morales.

After a bit Morales was able to mumble a few words. He told doctors his name was “William” and gave an address for his next of kin. Agent Scott drove to the address in East Harlem, the same building, he realized, to which he had tailed Puerto Rican activist Dylcia Pagan several times. Inside, he climbed the stairs and knocked on an apartment door. Pagan answered. Scott asked whether William was home.

“He’s out visiting a relative,” Pagan said. “Why?”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure, why? Is something wrong?”
⁴

Scott explained about the man in the hospital. “We just wanted to be sure it wasn’t your William,” he said. Pagan turned pale. She said it couldn’t be her William, but Scott could see that it was. Later that evening she appeared at the hospital. Morales was considerably more pleasant to her than he had been to Detective Valentine. Alluding to the bombed-out apartment, Valentine asked, “What happened in there?”

From beneath his bandages Morales managed a mumbled reply: “Fuck you. Fuck yourself.”

Valentine just smiled. “Fuck me?”

“Fuck yourself.”

“It’s you that are fucked, pal,” Valentine said. “You’ll be wiping your ass with your elbows.”
⁵

Back at the apartment detectives and FBI agents busied themselves snapping photographs and combing through the debris. The bomb squad gingerly wrapped the three remaining pipe bombs in bomb blankets, then drove to a police range in the Bronx and detonated them in a pit. FBI agents fanned out to interview neighbors. All four of the wanted FALN members—Carlos and Haydee Torres, Oscar López and his companion, Lucy Rodriguez—were identified as visitors to the apartment.

Late that night, as agents and detectives continued studying the apartment on Ninety-sixth Street, Ping-Pong balls burst into flames at Macy’s and a Korvette’s store in Manhattan. The next day an FALN communiqué was delivered to the United Press office; it was identical to one found in the apartment. In the following days, as Morales was arraigned and indicted on explosives charges, the apartment began to yield an abundance of clues. One of the rifles had been reported stolen by a Chicano activist the FBI had been investigating in Denver. Best of all, the wreckage of Morales’s workbench revealed a small Gestetner copier. It turned out to be the same machine Maria Cueto had purchased for the NCHA in September 1974, four months before the Fraunces Tavern bombing, and an FBI analysis indicated that it had been used to produce the five-star FALN logo atop the Fraunces communiqués.

At their desks on Sixty-ninth Street, Don Wofford and Lou Vizi felt that the pieces were finally coming together. They searched Pagan’s apartment, found some FALN literature, and had her brought before the grand jury to provide fingerprints and voice samples. Pagan got the subpoena suspended after claiming she was pregnant with Morales’s child, as in fact she was. She would give birth the following spring.

As the investigation progressed, Morales was shuttled among Kings County Hospital, the Rikers Island jail, and Bellevue Hospital. Claiming he
was a prisoner of war, he refused to say much more than “fuck you” to detectives. Three radical lawyers took his case, and they peppered a judge with all manner of motions, including a request that Morales be treated according to the Geneva Convention, then “turned over to military authorities” and “removed to a neutral country.” They complained incessantly about the quality of his care, saying he had been denied the right to artificial limbs. Hospital officials insisted they planned to make them once he was healthy. Finally, in January 1979, Morales’s attorneys filed their most unusual challenge. In a lawsuit they alleged that police had “illegally confiscated” his severed fingers. The police had taken the fingers as evidence. Morales complained that they should have been sewed back on.

 • • • 

All through 1978, as Mutulu Shakur’s band of revolutionary bank robbers added new members and ambitions, Shakur’s base at Lincoln Detox in the South Bronx came under increasing pressure from city regulators. The trouble had been building for years. The city’s Addiction Services Agency (ASA), which nominally ran the clinic, had cut off all funding in 1973 when Detox refused to provide census data or treatment records to justify it. But the clinic still received money from a separate city agency, the Health and Hospitals Corporation (HHC). Thus one agency, ASA, had oversight but no leverage to enforce it, and a second, HHC, handed over money with little supervision. Neither had the power to rein in the clinic’s director, Luis Surita, who found it easy to strong-arm both agencies even when improprieties surfaced.

And surface they did. A 1973 ASA audit found that Detox was treating barely half the number of drug addicts its contract specified. Another noted that its treatments were four times more expensive than those at other city clinics. An HHC review in 1976 found nearly $1 million in unsubstantiated payroll, along with phenomenal absentee rates among staff members, as high as 71 percent in some cases; only half of forty-five paid staffers were on duty one day when HHS auditors arrived. The staff, meanwhile, charged the clinics for thousands of dollars of personal phone calls. In 1977, when HHC demanded the clinic’s personnel records, it simply refused, claiming the
records were private. That December, when a federal grand jury investigating kickback schemes subpoenaed records on thirty-six patients, one of the clinic’s doctors refused and moved to quash the subpoena.

As New York City sagged into the worst fiscal crisis in its history, neither its beleaguered mayor, Abe Beame, nor any of his subordinates could summon the will to do battle with the clinic’s angry radicals, who increasingly operated as an independent entity unanswerable to any authority. Every year or two either ASA or HHC would make noises about evicting Detox from the hospital. Time and again the staff organized angry protests in response. In the worst, in 1975, a group of Detox staffers stormed HHC’s downtown Manhattan offices and barricaded themselves inside while they smashed furniture and windows in the president’s anteroom. After that HHC officials appeared notably reluctant to confront the clinic.

That attitude disappeared abruptly in January 1978, when New York welcomed a new mayor, the feisty Ed Koch, who was sick and tired of radicals abusing city resources. Teamed with a media-friendly assemblyman named Charles Schumer (later the New York senator), Koch was unafraid of the denizens of Lincoln Detox and determined to put them out of business. “Hospitals are for sick people, not thugs,” he groused in the
Times
. Detox officials, the mayor recalled years later, “ran it like Che Guevara was their patron saint, with his pictures all over the wall. It wasn’t a hospital. It was a radical cell.” The clinic’s leaders, including Shakur, were determined to fight. When city officials called a meeting to discuss closing the clinic, one staffer declared, “I don’t work for you. I work for the people of the South Bronx.” When HHS officials told Surita that it intended to evict Detox from Lincoln Hospital, Surita retorted, “War is declared—cold war for now.”
⁶