Days of Rage (70 page)

For all the bravado, Koch smashed Lincoln Detox like a clove of garlic. As night fell on November 28, 1978, he had HHC’s president, Joseph Lynaugh, summon Surita, Shakur, and ten other staffers to his downtown office at 125 Worth Street. When Shakur attempted to explain that the clinic was run by a socialist collective, Lynaugh cut him off. Almost everyone in attendance was being reassigned, Lynaugh announced, except for Surita; Lynaugh fired him on the spot. As the president spoke, the second part of Koch’s
plan was unfurling in the Bronx. A large group of uniformed police officers surrounded Lincoln Hospital and blocked every exit but that of the emergency room. Determined to physically evict the staff, they came armed with wire cutters, sledgehammers, and crowbars.

At 8:00 p.m., his meeting completed, Lynaugh appeared among the officers. Flanked by the mayor’s press secretary and sundry other city officials, he ordered the two dozen Detox staffers on duty that night to leave immediately. Outnumbered, they complied. The Young Lord leader Mickey Melendez trudged out carrying a basket of personal items. Mutulu Shakur drove up at one point and, seeing that resistance was futile, boiled in anger. The clinic was closed, then reopened under a new name and under strict city control several blocks away. Shakur quit. A number of staffers sued, to no effect. Lincoln Detox’s days as a radical haven were over.

Shakur found himself without a job, but where his fellow staffers lined up outside unemployment offices, he turned to area banks. The gang he had formed with Sekou Odinga had carried out only one armed robbery in the previous year, at a Chase Manhattan branch in Greenwich Village, but in the wake of Lincoln Detox’s closing both the frequency and ambition of these “actions” would rise sharply. It was then that Shakur’s “white edge”—Marilyn Buck and Silvia Baraldini—began to play significant roles in the group’s bank robberies.

“There was an acceleration, yes,” remembers Baraldini. “You know, when you showed you were willing to go to the next level, the requests never stop. What help you could give, you give it. It was hard to say no. For me, the eureka moment was one day [Mutulu] said, you need to be at a certain corner, you open the trunk and put us in and drive away. I don’t remember the corner, the car, or even the year. I was scared shitless. But I did it. That was when I realized this was not just renting cars. This was when I realized what he was doing.” It was around that point, Baraldini says, that she asked her May 19 comrades, Judy Clark and Susan Rosenberg, to help out. Both agreed.

“First we did very precise things that were useful, and we did them because we were white,” Baraldini continues. “Cars, research. The most important
thing was ID. We could buy the special cameras necessary to make it. We could do that with ease, and we did. A white girl like me does that, and no one looks twice. But a black man?”

Thirty-five years later, asked why she joined Shakur and Odinga in their bank robberies, Baraldini folds her hands and heaves a deep sigh. “We had developed a whole political vision of the U.S., how change would come to the U.S., that this involved the blacks getting their own nation. We thought we were helping people to promote that vision. It’s unrealistic, yes, but we believed it. Also, I felt we were rectifying a long history of white people using black people in the U.S., going back to the Civil War. We really thought we were redressing that in some way. That was very important to us, too. There was also a question of resources. They were going to use the money to help the black community, and they did. Or at least I thought they did.”

“Sounds crazy, right?” asks Elizabeth Fink. “Let me tell you, it was crazy then, too. These people, Judy and Silvia, they were driven crazy by their commitment to the blacks. It was like a cult. The question was, how crazy could you be?”

At first only Buck took part in the actual robberies. The first took place at the Livingston Mall in suburban New Jersey, a half hour west of the Holland Tunnel. On December 19, 1978, three weeks after Lincoln Detox’s closing, Shakur and the gang’s three other gunmen drove into the mall parking lot in a stolen Chevrolet Caprice station wagon. Buck followed in a gray van she had rented in the adjacent town of Millburn. Around 10:00 a.m. Odinga and Shakur wandered into the Bamberger’s department store; Shakur was wearing a long black leather coat that concealed a walkie-talkie. A saleswoman noticed him strolling through boys’ wear, seemingly talking to himself. Odinga, meanwhile, nosed through infant apparel. At one point he approached a saleslady and pleasantly asked, “What size does a seven-year-old wear?”

At about 10:15 a Coin Deposit Corporation armored car pulled up outside the store. Two armed guards emerged, one rolling a hand truck. Inside the store, Shakur, Odinga, and Larry Mack followed as the guards ascended an escalator toward the second-floor business office. Once the guards disappeared into the office, however, Mack became nervous and began edging
away. Shakur was trying to lure him back when the guards reemerged, a brown duffel bag piled onto the hand truck. Odinga pulled his pistol and shouted, “This is a holdup! Nobody moves!”

One guard went for his gun but stopped when Shakur ran toward him, waving a pistol of his own. “On the floor! On the floor!” Shakur shouted. Both guards complied. At that point Larry Mack began walking toward the escalator. “Come back here!” Shakur shouted at Mack. “Come back here now!” Mack stepped back for a moment, then ran down the escalator all the way to the getaway car, where Tyrone Rison was waiting. When their two comrades didn’t reappear after several minutes, Rison forced Mack to scramble back inside to see what was wrong. He found Shakur and Odinga hunched over the two prone guards, trying in vain to get handcuffs around their ankles. The cuffs were too small.

They left the guards as they were, then pushed the hand truck down the escalator and out to the car. In the duffel bag was $200,000 in cash. Rison drove to a rendezvous point, abandoning the stolen car, and the four men climbed into Marilyn Buck’s waiting van, which had been legitimately rented and thus was unlikely to draw the attention of pursuing police. Buck drove them back across the George Washington Bridge to a safe-house apartment they had rented just over the Bronx border in the suburb of Mount Vernon. It was their smoothest and by far most lucrative robbery to date, and Buck had acquitted herself with aplomb.

The Family was ready for bigger things. Marilyn Buck, having spent time in prison herself, had a special affinity for those behind bars. That fall she drew up a list of underground figures they might help escape. At the top of the list was none other than Willie Morales, who went on trial in a Queens courtroom in early 1979. Found guilty, he appeared for sentencing April 20. An unruly crowd, packed with policemen, FBI agents, and dozens of Puerto Rican, black, and white radicals, jammed the courtroom. Shoving matches broke out. The NYPD’s William Valentine escorted Morales out of the courtroom. At one point Morales looked Valentine in the eye and said, “You’re a dead man.”

Morales was taken to Bellevue, where he was given a cell in the third-
floor prison ward as he waited for doctors to finally install the artificial hands he had been demanding. Ahead stretched years, maybe decades, behind bars. To all appearances, Willie Morales’s career as a Puerto Rican revolutionary tilting against the imperialist
yanquis
was over. In fact, it was only beginning.

21

JAILBREAKS AND CAPTURES

The Family and the FALN, 1979−80

Even today, more than thirty-five years later, no one outside the FALN or the Family knows precisely how they did it or even who took part. But the planning, it was clear, had taken weeks, and few of the policemen and FBI agents who later investigated the plot to rescue Willie Morales had any doubt that it was spearheaded by Marilyn Buck, Sekou Odinga, and the FALN. Silvia Baraldini, while declining to discuss details, confirms that she received a “formal” request for aid from the FALN. “We were asked to do this one aspect, to bring in the tools,” she says. “We were white, and women, so of course we could do this on our own. And we did.”

Another key participant, it’s been suggested, was the radical attorney Susan Tipograph, who represented not only Marilyn Buck but Willie Morales. Tipograph, it should be emphasized, was never charged in the case and has always denied any involvement. But prosecutors would later file affidavits that would strongly imply that it was she who smuggled the wire cutters to Morales.

At the time, May 1979, Morales was being held in the third-floor prison
ward at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan. Tipograph visited regularly. All visitors were required to be searched, but as federal prosecutors noted in a court filing four years later, “Tipograph became increasingly vehement that the attorney-client privilege protected her from a search by correction officers. On one occasion, when correction officers denied her request to be exempted from a search, she surrendered a knife only after repeated questioning.”

According to prosecutors, on the evening of Friday, May 18, Tipograph arrived on the third floor and again objected when officers asked to search her. This time, for whatever reason, they relented. She was not searched, nor was her bag, nor was she made to walk through a metal detector. Somehow, at some point after this visit, Morales came into possession of a fourteen-inch pair of wire cutters. He hid them with the assistance of another prisoner, who helped him tie a series of shoelaces around his waist. To this he attached a small hook. When Morales placed the wire cutters on the hook, they dangled between his legs, unnoticeable under his bathrobe.

Over the next two nights Morales, working only with the stumps of his hands, used the wire cutters to clip through the wire of the metal grate that covered his cell window. None of the six guards saw or heard a thing as he worked. Then, at 2:30 a.m. on May 21, a Monday, Morales asked to go to the bathroom. The officer responsible for him, Thomas Ryan, led him to the toilet and back. At some point after that, Morales finished cutting a one-foot-square hole in his window grate. Then he raised the window and punched out its screen.

Forty feet below, stationed at positions up and down a courtyard that stretched along the building, stood several members of the Family, perhaps as many as a dozen. The only one who ever confirmed his involvement, in a later interview with the FBI, was Tyrone Rison, the Vietnam veteran known as “L.B.,” who said he guarded one end of the alley with an assault rifle. Marilyn Buck was almost certainly there. They had a ladder and placed it against the redbrick wall beneath Morales’s window.

By that point Morales had unfurled a ten-foot-long, flesh-colored bandage, tied one end to his bed, and tossed the other end out into the cool night
air. It wouldn’t reach down to the ladder, but it was the best Morales could muster. Somehow he wriggled through the hole he had cut. Then—and this was the part that flummoxed everyone afterward—the man with no fingers used the bandage as a rope to lower himself down the side of the building. He had wet the bandage to strengthen it, but in a matter of moments it snapped. FBI agents later surmised that he fell twenty feet onto a window-mounted air-conditioning unit below, which showed a sizable dent afterward; Morales would later blame the fall for minor kidney damage he suffered. He landed on the dewy grass below, leaving two deep footprints in the turf.

No one had heard or seen a thing; Officer Ryan, his supervisors later alleged, slept through the entire escape. One imagines that Morales exchanged a series of quick, elated hugs with his rescuers, who quickly slid him into a waiting car. By the time guards finally noticed his disappearance, an hour after dawn, Willie Morales was safely tucked away inside Marilyn Buck’s small safe-house apartment in East Orange, New Jersey, an hour’s drive west, eager to rejoin his comrades in the FALN.
*

 • • • 

From the FBI’s Sixty-ninth Street offices to City Hall to the Department of Correction, official New York was thunderstruck by the brazen escape.
HANDLESS TERRORIST ESCAPES
, proclaimed the
Post
headline. How on earth had a one-eyed man with no hands managed to cut his way out of a cell and shimmy down the side of a building? How had he gotten the wire cutters? Above all, why hadn’t anyone noticed? Below Morales’s window police found a broken stretch of bandage, a pair of hospital slippers, and Morales’s glasses. The wire cutters had been left on the floor of the cell. As officers fanned out across the city in a fruitless manhunt, the city’s corrections commissioner, William J. Ciuros Jr., stepped before the microphones at City Hall, admitted “there was sloppiness on our part,” and announced that Officer Ryan was
being suspended for “negligence in permitting the escape.” Three months later Ciuros himself and several of his aides were fired.

All day the escape was the talk of New York. Pete Hamill of the
Daily News
interviewed a dozen Puerto Ricans attending a prizefight at Madison Square Garden that night. “The guy had no hands, and he gets out of the third floor? Hey, if I had no hands, I couldn’t even get breakfast, and Morales got out of the third floor at Bellevue?” a man named Pablo Miranda said. “He oughta get a medal, man. [You know] someone was downstairs with a car, man. The guy’s in a bathrobe, he can’t get on the IRT.” A buddy chimed in, “Yeah, imagine a P.R. tryin’ to get in a cab at 3 o’clock in the morning—in a bathrobe?”

“He’d have no legs, man,” Miranda yelped. “Cabby’d run him right over, man.”
¹

 • • • 

Even before Morales was whisked to safety, the Family had begun planning its next jailbreak. Their target this time was a woman they all admired, who personified the black struggle and had been behind bars now for six long years: Assata Shakur, better known as the “heart and soul” of the Black Liberation Army, Joanne Chesimard.

Her fame had only grown since the night she was captured on the New Jersey Turnpike. Most of the May 19 women, from Judy Clark to Susan Rosenberg, had demonstrated outside her trials. Between 1973 and 1977 there had been an amazing seven of them in all, from bank and bar robberies to an attempted-murder charge for one of the BLA’s police shootings. With so few witnesses, six ended in dismissal or acquittal. Throughout, Chesimard proved a passionate defendant, shouting at judges and frequently being dragged from courtrooms. And it was her passion, in a way, that allowed her to stave off convictions. In the first proceeding, her trial for murdering New Jersey trooper Werner Foerster during her 1973 capture, she was granted a mistrial after becoming pregnant. The father was another BLA member, Fred Hilton, and it was said the child was conceived in a holding cell during one of the
trials; for years afterward retired officers would tell fanciful tales of having watched the two having sex. She later gave birth to a baby girl. Chesimard was tried for Foerster’s murder a second time, in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in 1977, in a trial marked by protests for which Silvia Baraldini served as spokesperson. She was found guilty on March 25, and given a life sentence.