Days of Rage (78 page)

The troopers approached the passenger-side door, tapped on the window with a flashlight, and motioned for Toure to get out. When Landry asked what was in his jacket and reached for it, Toure blocked his hand, but not before Landry realized that he was wearing a bulletproof vest. Landry immediately told Toure to put his hands on his head. “This guy has something,” Landry barked to Crosby. “Watch the driver.”

Just then Laaman reached his hand inside his jacket, where he hid a 9mm pistol. Landry drew his service revolver. Laaman leaped from the car, crouched down, and fired several shots across the car toward the troopers. Officer Landry grabbed Toure and dropped to the pavement. Officer Crosby ran for the protection of a Dumpster. Laaman fired several shots at Crosby, then sprinted for the dark woods at the edge of the rest area. Crosby raced to his car and radioed for help.

Toure was taken into custody and, under questioning at the police barracks in Foxboro, identified Laaman. An all-points bulletin was issued; dozens of police plunged into the area, shining searchlights into the woods up and down the interstate in an effort to find Laaman. Somehow he managed
to elude them. Once again it was Pat Gros, asleep back in Yonkers, who took the call. Because she was the only one of the group not being sought by police, Levasseur let her retrieve Laaman. Barbara Curzi, meanwhile, drove toward the North Attleboro rest stop around 4:15 that morning and, seeing it swarming with police, continued driving south. By the next day everyone, including Laaman, Curzi, and all three of their children, was safe in the Yonkers apartment.

For the third time in four months, they had somehow survived a run-in with the authorities. But Levasseur, worried that Kazi Toure would talk, quickly realized they couldn’t stay long. He sent Gros to Albany, where she found them two apartments. Laaman and his family initially bunked with the Levasseurs, all six of them packed into a dingy basement apartment on an alley. The Mannings found a place nearby. No one was especially happy with the arrangements, which were a far cry from the spacious farmhouses they had enjoyed before the Lamonaco killing.

Once they were settled in Albany, the top priority became money. All four men were now far too hot to work normal jobs, which meant that money for the expenses of three entire families, seven adults and nine children—everything from beer and food to diapers and baby formula and lunch boxes—would need to come from bank robberies, a situation Levasseur dreaded. Worse, the Mannings had lost everything in fleeing, the Levasseurs almost everything; everyone needed furniture and cars. Levasseur also wanted to raise cash for Toure’s bail. So they moved quickly, finding the first bank, a branch of Chittenden Trust in South Burlington, Vermont. They hit it on April 2, four of them now, in a stolen getaway car—ski masks, body armor, guns waving, shouting, scooping up cash bags. The take was $61,000.

But it wasn’t enough, not if they were to escape their run-down apartments in Albany and establish a new base of operations. They began scouting the next bank immediately, a branch of the Syracuse Savings Bank. As in Vermont, they rented a safe-house apartment nearby, along with a garage where they could keep the stolen cars they began using for reconnaissance. Once everything was set, on June 25, they rushed the bank lobby just after 11:00 a.m. Everything was going smoothly until Richard Williams went to grab the cash bags, which were lying on the floor inside the barred door to
the vault. Somehow the door swung shut behind him—and locked. Williams grabbed the bars.

“I’m locked in!” he yelped.

Tom Manning grabbed an assistant manager by the collar and shoved her toward the locked door. “Open the door, bitch!” he ordered.

It was as tense a moment as the group had experienced inside a bank. The manager fumbled with her key ring as Manning hovered, his pistol at the ready. “Anybody moves, they’re dead!” Levasseur shouted.

It took interminable seconds before a key was produced. After a moment Williams was freed. They sprinted from the bank, never noticing a police car sitting at a McDonald’s across the street. As he sped away Ray thought they were being tailed. They had just taken up their guns, preparing to open fire, when the suspicious car disappeared. They made it back to Albany safely but noticed a neighbor watching them as they strode into the Levasseurs’ basement apartment. Worried, they hovered over a scanner all that night and the next, until they were certain the police weren’t onto them. The haul, however, more than made up for the anxiety. It came to $195,000, by far their largest to date.

It was a close call, too close for Gros and the other women. Levasseur didn’t need to be reminded that they were robbing banks too close to home. They needed to move, and soon; the children had to be enrolled in classes by the time school started in August. After several scouting expeditions, they decided on their farthest relocation yet, to Ohio, a manageable eight-hour drive from the Interstate 90 corridor where Levasseur was most comfortable finding new banks. Flush with $250,000 in cash—a portion was sent to Boston for Toure’s bail—Gros rented all three families houses within blocks of each other in a blue-collar neighborhood in Cleveland. The Levasseurs would now be the Petersons, the Laamans the Owens family, the Mannings the Carrs. Williams, however, decided not to join them. He remained part of the group, but for the time being he moved to a house he rented in North Carolina. After a few months Levasseur decided to move his family away from the others, renting a house in rural Deerfield, east of Akron. He felt comfortable in the countryside; the nearest neighbors were a quarter mile away.

By the fall of 1982 everyone was settled into new homes, and the group’s focus shifted once again, to a renewed bombing campaign. It had been almost
four years since their last action, and Levasseur was determined that the United Freedom Front (UFF), as they decided to rename the group, would stage a memorable return. Over the next two years they would go on to detonate ten more bombs, almost all in suburban New York: at an IBM office in Harrison in December 1982; an army reserve center on Long Island in May 1983; an army recruiting office in the Bronx in August 1983; a Motorola office in Queens in January 1984; and other offices of IBM, General Electric, and Union Carbide. All the bombs detonated when the buildings were empty; no one was seriously hurt. There were newspaper articles after each but no great hubbub. Levasseur’s communiqués attacking corporate wrongdoing were largely ignored.

It was exhausting work. By 1983 Levasseur and Gros had been underground for seven years, and the cumulative strains were beginning to show. Gros’s, in fact, increased as her three girls grew. Carmen was turning seven; the youngest, Rosa, was three. They had been forced to explain to the girls that they were fugitives. Without explaining the details of bank robberies and bombings, they said they were being sought for their political beliefs. Still, Gros felt that Carmen was beginning to understand what they had done. “They heard everything,” Gros recalls. “When we were in meetings, in the basement. They knew.”

Just before Christmas that year Gros was walking up the stairs at Laaman and Curzi’s house when she suddenly suffered a panic attack, her first. Her heart racing, she allowed Curzi to drive her to an emergency room, where a polite young doctor, addressing her by her latest alias, leaned forward and said, “Mrs. Peterson, this is all about stress. You need to find a way to relax.”

Levasseur wasn’t in a position to comfort her. He was rarely home. In the fall of 1982, after their fifth successful expropriation along the I-90 corridor, he had decided it was time to change their area of operations. A Syracuse television station had broadcast a series of features on the UFF and its robberies, and thousands of new wanted posters were flooding upstate New York. He scouted Pittsburgh, Baltimore, and Washington but worried that the thick traffic in all three areas would make getaways uncertain. Eventually they settled on two Virginia cities, Norfolk and Richmond, which were large
enough to hide in but small enough to navigate. They rented safe houses in both, then closed the New Haven apartment and opened one in Yonkers. Levasseur left the house in Ohio early most Monday mornings, driving the eleven hours to Virginia via Pennsylvania and Maryland to avoid New Jersey and typically wouldn’t return until the weekend. When they weren’t scouting banks in Virginia—they managed to rob two of them without event, both in Norfolk—they were studying new bombing targets in New York. Before long the constant travel began to wear him down.

“I was beginning to feel like a long-haul trucker,” he recalls. “We were on the road
all
the time. All we did was recon trips, take a bank and then run back to New York to ram a bomb up IBM’s ass.”

He knew they couldn’t do this forever. Then, on January 2, 1984, a slow news day, he was startled to switch on the CBS
Evening News
and see Dan Rather lead the broadcast with a story about the UFF, the bombings, the robberies, the kids, everything. There they were, he and Gros and the kids, the Mannings, everyone, right there on television. Deeply shaken, he sat down with Pat. Maybe, he said, it was time she turned herself in. They could leave the girls with her mother in Maryland. No doubt she would get a short sentence, maybe a year, then she and the girls could be free. “I said, ‘You know, we’re wearing down,’” Levasseur recalls. “‘The kids are making us vulnerable.’ But Pat wouldn’t do it. She didn’t want to break up the family.”

 • • • 

By 1984, despite eight years of intensive investigation and the combined efforts of the FBI and police from six states, the authorities had no clue where Levasseur and his people were hiding, and no serious leads to pursue. The fact was, the two-year-old Bosluc task force had run out of energy. The prevailing view among its fifty or so members appeared to be that the UFF, like the FALN, would eventually make a mistake and get arrested, probably by some lucky sheriff.

That February, in a bid to revitalize the task force, the FBI brought in Leonard Cross, a clerkish, easygoing ex-marine who had earned accolades for breaking up a Croatian terrorist group believed to be responsible for
bombings in New York. After several weeks debriefing task-force investigators and thumbing through the twenty-two thick volumes of reports they had amassed, Cross could see they were getting nowhere. About the only fresh idea he heard was in Maine, where an ex-con was scheduled to go on trial for helping the group in its very first bank job, all the way back in 1975. The Portland office planned to stake out the trial, on the remote chance Levasseur might stage a rescue attempt.

Probably the most innovative analysis, Cross saw, was being done by John Markey, an agent in Burlington, Vermont, who had been tracking the UFF’s bank robberies since the South Burlington job in April 1982. At the time the UFF’s involvement was only a hunch; with no “chatter” among Vermont criminals following a very professional job, Markey suspected that only Levasseur had the talent to pull it off. After four similar robberies along Interstate 90 in upstate New York, Markey issued a flier to every bank in the Northeast warning about the UFF. Indexing the dollar amounts of its hauls with the robbery dates, he estimated the group was living on $733 a day. At that rate, Markey warned, Levasseur would strike next between May 1 and June 12, 1984—and not, given the publicity lavished on Markey’s flier by a Syracuse television station—in New York or New England. When the UFF robbed a bank in Norfolk, Virginia, on June 5, Markey telephoned the case agent and quipped, “It’s your lucky day. I’m gonna tell you who just robbed your bank.”

Back in Boston, Len Cross’s first order of business was a reorganization. He had Bosluc redesignated a “domestic terrorism” task force, which streamlined its organization and upgraded its importance. He had a clerk break up the twenty-two volumes of reports into files for each bombing and bank job. Then he covered an entire wall of the Boston office with a map of New England, handed several boxes of color-coded pushpins to three agents, and had them mark the map with the UFF’s every bank job, bombing, and address. When they finished, Cross stood before the map, hands on hips, and saw the pattern he hoped to find. The pushpins blanketed the Northeast, with the exception of a circular area centered on western Massachusetts, lapping into southern Vermont, northwestern Connecticut, and New York east of the Hudson.

“You know,” he mused, “a pig never shits where it eats.” The UFF, he was willing to bet, was hiding inside that circle.

To find out where, Cross devised what became the largest and most intricate manhunt in FBI history. He divided the target area into more than one hundred grids, most about ten miles square, and assigned an FBI agent and a state trooper to each. What made the UFF vulnerable, he thought, was their children. Computers were used to compile an exhaustive list of the four kinds of facilities Levasseur and the UFF families were known to haunt: Montessori and similar schools, pediatricians, pharmacies, and health food stores. The goal of “Operation Western Sweep,” as it was called, was to display photos of the UFF fugitives at every such facility in southern Vermont, western Massachusetts, northwestern Connecticut, and most of eastern New York; they also planned to show photos of the remaining Brink’s fugitives, including Marilyn Buck and Mutulu Shakur. By the time the operation was set to begin, in the first week of June, nearly two hundred agencies, from the FBI to local sheriffs, had agreed to contribute to the canvass.

Cross set up his war room in the middle of the target area, at a state police barracks in Westfield, Massachusetts. After a press conference on June 4—the day before the UFF struck in Norfolk—police and federal agents flooded into their zones; they checked schools, pharmacies, and pediatricians in 101 towns in western Massachusetts alone. Every evening someone from each grid square would bring reports to troopers stationed at the state border, who drove the reports to Westfield, where Cross had them entered into his computers.

For two solid weeks FBI agents and troopers visited every target in the zone. By June 19 they had finished, and Cross could finally, after weeks of preparation, see what they had achieved: nothing. Not a single hard lead.