Days of Rage (72 page)

López struck again three weeks later. Everyone gathered at the Milwaukee house on January 13, 1980, as Carlos Torres stood before the basement chalkboard and named their target: the Wisconsin National Guard Armory in Oak Creek, south of Milwaukee. The armory contained automatic weapons and bazookas that would keep the FALN in guns and ammunition for months, if not years. It also held explosives, allowing López to replace the old, sweating dynamite they had only belatedly realized was unstable; at one point, when Mendez was shown a bomb, one of the women pushed him away, telling him it might go off. They were expecting the raid to be child’s play; Torres, who had scouted the building, said there was rarely more than one officer on duty. Six FALN members dressed in battle fatigues drove up outside the armory the next morning. The three women rushed inside first, only to find the lobby empty. Whether by accident or an effort to announce their presence, someone fired a shot. An officer on duty, Lieutenant Lawrence
Gonzales, emerged from his office just as López and the others charged inside.

Torres put a gun to Gonzales’s head and demanded he show them the weapons room and turn over the combination. Gonzales led them to the room but said he didn’t know the lock’s combination; none of his keys fit. As they struggled with the lock, López circled outside the building, where he was startled to see a janitor hanging out a bathroom window, trying to call for help. “Get your ass back in there or I’ll blow your head off,” López shouted, waving a gun.

Inside, the door still would not budge. Gonzales tried to tell them the guns didn’t have firing mechanisms anyway, as a safety measure; those were stored at a nearby police station. Torres wouldn’t listen. In desperation he and López took a fire axe and hacked at the door for the better part of an hour. It wouldn’t break. Finally, incensed, López took a rifle and some explosives manuals and stalked out.

No one knew that the FALN was behind the botched raid. Its failure did nothing to dissuade Oscar López. His next move, in fact, turned out to be the group’s most ambitious to date. It happened on the morning of Saturday, March 15, 1980, two months after the Oak Creek raid. A few minutes after 9:00 three men and a woman dressed in ski parkas—their identities were never revealed—walked into an office building on Fifty-ninth Street in Midtown Manhattan, just off Park Avenue. Ignored by security guards, they headed to the elevators, pressed “9,” and a few moments later emerged outside offices housing the New York City campaign headquarters of the Republican presidential candidate George Bush, who was locked in a primary duel with Ronald Reagan. Bush had just won Puerto Rico’s first-ever primary, a development that radicals believed brought it one step closer to statehood.

The doors were locked. All four whipped pistols from their parkas, then slid pillowcases with eye slits over their heads. When the first worker arrived, a few minutes later, they pointed a pistol at him and demanded a key. He didn’t have one. They bound his hands with tape. One by one, six more workers strode off the elevators, none with a key, and were tied up. “When I got off the elevator, there were two people standing with masks over their heads
and pointing guns at me,” one volunteer said later. “‘Don’t say anything, nobody will get hurt,’ they said. I asked if this was some kind of joke. They said, ‘This is a political action.’”

When a senior staffer finally arrived with a key, the raiders split into pairs, one remaining by the elevators while the second shoved the volunteers into the office. Inside, one of the masked men demanded a set of voter-registration lists. He was told they weren’t available. Irked, the two raiders then spent ten minutes spray-painting FALN slogans on the office walls. One read simply,
FALN
. Another read,
STATEHOOD MEANS DEATH
. Afterward they fled.

Meanwhile, in Chicago, Oscar López and a three-person team wearing ski masks burst into the two-story Illinois headquarters of the Carter-Mondale campaign. “This is an armed takeover!” he shouted, brandishing a shotgun. They herded three volunteers into a corner, bound them with tape, then ransacked the office, ripping out telephones and spray-painting slogans on the walls. They repeated the process on the floor above before running out. No one was hurt. This time they found the voter lists. A few days later letters were mailed to 150 delegates; each contained veiled threats should Puerto Rico be made a state. Other delegates reported threatening phone calls. In one, the caller hung up after muttering, “Watch out for the bomb.”

The raids were front-page news. The FBI did all the things it was supposed to do but once again found little to pursue. Its investigation to date, just about everyone admitted, had been a dismal failure: the defeats at every conceivable grand jury, interviewing and failing to arrest Carlos Torres and Willie Morales, Morales’s escape. In New York supervisors came and went; none made any real difference. Lou Vizi, who had been at Fraunces Tavern, gave up, accepting a transfer to a robbery squad. Eventually his partner, Don Wofford, gave up, too.

The FALN was a ghost. “I can remember very clearly the feeling at that point,” a retired FBI man recalls. “There was a sense that these guys might go on doing this, the bombings, literally forever.”

 • • • 

On Thursday, April 3, 1980, Oscar López gathered his people in front of the basement chalkboard at the Milwaukee house. Everyone was there, including
the New Yorkers, Carlos and Haydee Torres, even Dylcia Pagan, the activist dating Willie Morales. Their target was an armored car, and López went over the robbery and the escape plans in detail. It was the beginning of Easter weekend. The cops, he said, would be half-asleep.

The next morning Freddie Mendez joined the others donning their disguises. Most dressed in jogging suits, intending to masquerade as runners and college students. On the way out López opened a large box packed with weapons: rifles, handguns, knives, smoke grenades. Everyone took something. Mendez joined a group filing into a stolen van. López and the others jumped into waiting cars. Everyone headed south toward Chicago.

The action began a few minutes after one. A man and a woman stormed into a Budget rental-car office in Evanston, the leafy city where the campus of Northwestern University stretches along Lake Michigan. “Everybody down!” the man shouted. A dozen agents and customers, including a man with his nine-year-old son, were inside, and it took several minutes to tie them up. “Don’t cry,” the father told his son. “Just pray.” Within minutes the robbers were gone, driving off in a Budget panel truck.

At 1:40, after one of the agents struggled free and called the police, descriptions of the pair and the stolen truck were broadcast across the area. At Northwestern, where the campus police were accustomed to helping out local officers, a dispatcher quickly rebroadcast the alert. Much to his surprise, a Northwestern officer radioed in fifteen minutes later. The truck was sitting in a campus parking lot just off its main thoroughfare, Sheridan Road.

As it happened, a team of five Evanston plainclothes officers was working surveillance nearby. They responded within minutes, quickly spying the stolen truck. The senior officer that afternoon, Sergeant Jerry Brandt, parked his unmarked car a few rows away, then popped the hood and, along with the others, pretended to be inspecting its engine. Shooting furtive glances toward the truck, they couldn’t see anyone in or near it. Then, at 2:15, they watched as a small Hispanic man in a jogging suit appeared and walked toward it.

An hour or so later a white van drove up, and a Hispanic woman in a raincoat hopped out and began talking with the man. Together they opened the
back of the Budget truck. Peering through binoculars now, Sergeant Brandt spotted rifle butts peeking out from beneath a carpet of some kind. He glanced at his men. “Let’s go,” he said.

The two suspects were still standing behind the truck, their backs turned, as Brandt and his men jogged through the parking lot, weapons low. Brandt took the woman. At the last minute she turned, shoving her hand into her raincoat, where Brandt was certain she held a gun. She began to struggle, slapping him with her left hand.

Three other officers slammed the man against the van, hitting him so hard that he lifted off the ground. He reached for a pistol jammed in his waistband, but an officer named Mike Gresham placed a .357 Magnum to his forehead first. “It’s all right, it’s all right,” Gresham purred. “Take your time going for that gun. I can wait.”

Sergeant Brandt, meanwhile, was still struggling with the woman.

“Hey, somebody, give me a hand over here!” he barked.

“Whatsa matter, Sarge?” one responded. “Can’t handle ninety-nine pounds of pissed-off female?”

With the others’ help, the woman was subdued. They found a revolver in her pocket, a .38 in the man’s waistband, and three more guns in the van. Neither prisoner would talk, but the officers noticed something strange: The man was wearing a fake mustache. The pair were taken to Evanston police headquarters. Detectives from Chicago were called to begin questioning them.
³

And that was that—or so it seemed. Except minutes before all this happened, the Evanston police switchboard had taken a call from a housewife who lived several blocks south of the campus. A group of young people in jogging suits were standing around a parked van, she said, smoking what she suspected might be marijuana. Two officers—Pat Lenart and Bill “Red” Lamerdin—responded within minutes. There they found not one but two vans, parked a block apart, and agreed to take one each. Lenart walked toward the first van. He could see a woman in the driver’s seat. Approaching her window, he was about to say something when the engine revved.

Inside were nine members of the FALN, waiting for an armored car they expected at Northwestern. They had guns.

 • • • 

What happened next was described in court testimony years later by Freddie Mendez, who was in the rear of the van with Carlos Torres and seven others. The driver was Oscar López’s companion, twenty-nine-year-old Lucy Rodriguez. “Cops,” she said. “What do I do?”

“Brush him off,” Torres said, suggesting she be as courteous as possible. As Officer Lenart approached, Torres whispered with his men. Two wanted to jump out shooting. Torres told them to be cool—he had “brushed off” police before. Rodriguez saw Lenart place a hand on his pistol. Torres said, “Start the engine.”

Reaching the van, Lenart ordered Rodriguez to stop the engine and roll down her window. After a whispered exchange with the men behind her, she complied with a weak smile. Lenart said he was investigating a report of “kids” running into the van.

“No, officer,” she said. “There are no kids in this van.”

Lenart asked for her license. She fumbled in her purse, then rolled up the window and once again started the engine, apparently so Lenart couldn’t hear her talking with the men in the back. Lenart again told her to turn off the engine. Again she complied. Lenart noticed she kept glancing at his gun. He sensed that something wasn’t right. Just then the second officer, Red Lamerdin, having determined that the second van was empty, coasted to a stop on his motorcycle behind the van. Lenart motioned for him to watch the far side.

“Another cop,” Rodriguez whispered.

Torres pushed through the curtain and sank into the passenger seat. Outside, two more officers arrived. Lenart stepped around the front of the van and told Torres to roll down his window.

“Officer, what’s the problem?” he asked.

Lenart explained as Rodriguez disappeared into the back. Another man took her place behind the wheel. Lenart thought this was getting ridiculous. “I want everybody to get out,” he said. A moment later one of the officers jerked open the van’s rear doors. To their surprise, seven people emerged, four men and three women, followed by the two men up front. “You see, there’s nothing going on,” Torres said. “It doesn’t smell like reefer, does it?”

As everyone stood behind the van, Freddie Mendez started to edge away. An officer told him to freeze. Suddenly Mendez placed a hand to his mustache. One of the officers noticed something strange: It moved. Just then another officer noticed what appeared to be a gun butt protruding from one of the women’s purses. “Gun!” he shouted.

Officer Lenart ordered the men to lie on the ground. The suspects slowly stretched out facedown on the pavement. It was then the officers noticed how oddly everyone was dressed, wearing what appeared to be layers of clothing beneath their jogging suits. At least two more, like Mendez, were wearing fake facial hair. This was just too weird. Lenart decided to take them all in for questioning.

The nine of them said little as they were taken to headquarters. Scattered into interview rooms, not one would say a word, not even after being asked about the four pistols and the shotgun found in the van. One or two indicated that they spoke Spanish. Finally Mendez opened his mouth, saying he hadn’t done anything.

The Evanston police had no clue who these silent people were—one or two officers thought they might be Middle Eastern—but everyone realized this was something more than a hold-up crew. They phoned the FBI. By nightfall three agents had arrived, including, as luck would have it, Greg Rodriguez, a Spanish speaker who had worked the West Haddon episode in 1976. He recognized Lucy Rodriguez and Carlos and Haydee Torres. When he called them by name, Haydee Torres spit at him. “You’re a pig,” her husband said, “and every pig has his Saturday, and yours will come soon.”

Though the other eight suspects could not be identified, and though Oscar López and Willie Morales were clearly not among them, the FBI men agreed: This must be the FALN. By midnight Evanston headquarters was swarming with FBI agents and SWAT teams, the latter brought in to ring the building in the event López staged a rescue attempt. Because the prisoners wouldn’t speak, it took days to identify them. All, it turned out, had been active in Puerto Rican independence groups. Carmen Valentín, the fiery counselor from Tuley High, was one. Elizam Escobar was an artist living in New York, Dickie Jimenez a student at the Illinois Institute of Technology.
Adolfo Matos worked at a Manhattan parking garage. None had been suspected of belonging to the FALN.