Days of Rage (83 page)

Twymon Ford Meyers, the young BLA gunman who may have been the underground era’s deadliest soldier.

Deputy Police Commissioner Robert Daley and two New York police officials examine the East Village scene of the BLA’s gruesome murders of Officers Gregory Foster and Rocco Laurie, January 27, 1972. Chalk outlines on the sidewalk indicate the position of the officers’ fallen bodies.

New York police and fire engines responding to the FALN’s bombing of the Fraunces Tavern restaurant, which killed four diners, January 24, 1975. Oscar LÓpez, top left, was the FALN’s mastermind, a onetime community organizer in Chicago who orchestrated dozens of bombings and armed raids in New York and Chicago between 1974 and 1980. Marie Haydee Torres, bottom left, was convicted of planting the deadly FALN bomb at Mobil Oil headquarters in New York in 1977. Willie Morales, top right, survived an accidental explosion that blew off nine of his fingers and much of his face in July 1978. His subsequent escape from Bellevue Hospital’s prison ward was one of the underground’s crowning achievements.

February 22, 1974: Hundreds of Oakland residents line up for the Randolph Hearst family’s initial food giveaway, part of the ransom the Symbionese Liberation Army demanded for the release of Hearst’s daughter, Patty.

Patty during a 1972 vacation in Greece.

A surveillance-camera photo of Patty Hearst in her first appearance as an SLA soldier during the robbery of a Hibernia Bank branch in San Francisco, April 15, 1974.

The eight members of the SLA’s first incarnation. Donald DeFreeze, the escaped prisoner who styled himself “General Field Marshal Cinque,” stands in the middle of the back row.

A woman and her children flee the SLA shoot-out in South Central Los Angeles, May 17, 1974.

Ray Levasseur, a French Canadian radical, led the most unusual of the 1970s-era underground groups: two blue-collar couples (later three) and their children who detonated bombs and robbed banks up and down the East Coast between 1976 and 1984.

Police and fire officials examine the damages from the group’s first bombing, of Boston’s Suffolk County Courthouse, 1976.

Several members of the group as portrayed in an FBI circular around 1982.

Levasseur in 1989.

Sekou Odinga, perhaps the most respected militant of his age, masterminded more than a dozen bank robberies and took part in a pair of daring jailbreaks during an underground career that spanned thirteen years.