Days of Rage (97 page)

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The story of the BLA’s sojourn in Atlanta is based on interviews two captured BLA members gave to the NYPD months later, along with newspaper accounts of their crimes and interviews with policemen who investigated them.

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Chesimard’s identification, while likely, is not ironclad. The witness, Paul Costa, also identified another BLA member, Andrew Jackson, who was in Florida at the time.

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Jackson was a California prison inmate and best-selling author who had been killed the previous August. See chapter 12 for details.

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Authorities later arrested two of the men’s girlfriends and accused them of smuggling in hacksaw blades.

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According to Avon White, gunmen that night were Kearney, Zayd Shakur, and Fred Hilton. Only Kearney, armed with a Browning automatic, appears to have fired. Shakur and Hilton remained in the parked car. The shooting of the Imperato brothers led to a change in NYPD policy that remains in place to this day: Relatives can no longer ride in the same squad car.

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Some sources claim that the name New World Liberation Front originated in a statement by Eldridge Cleaver in 1969. Cleaver envisioned it as an alliance of radical whites and Third World blacks.

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It was the same bank Sam Melville had bombed in the days after the Woodstock festival five years earlier, in September 1969.

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Wofford joined the FBI in 1972 to avoid a second stint in Vietnam. The oldest student in his class at the FBI Academy, he served two years in Norfolk, Virginia, before his transfer to New York.

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This man, Oscar Collazo, served twenty-nine years in prison until ordered released by President Carter in 1979. Collazo was among several Puerto Rican nationalists decorated by Fidel Castro that same year.

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The names are pseudonyms. The couples were never publicly identified.

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Or, according to government prosecutors, John Hazinski.

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In 1976
Time
magazine carried a story that detailed how a major break in the case came when agents in the “Dirty Dozen” uncovered piles of incriminating Weatherman files in an office safe maintained by the onetime New York assistant director John Malone. Today neither Bill Gardner nor other prosecutors interviewed for this book can remember any such discovery. The only important FBI documents investigators found, Gardner emphasizes, were those he himself found at FBI headquarters at the outset of the investigation.

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The indictment against the FBI’s John Kearney was simultaneously dropped.

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Among the PLO’s other attorneys was Dennis Cunningham, who led the FBI to Bernardine Dohrn and Jeff Jones in the Weather “Encirclement.”

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Seven days after the bombings, the “Son of Sam” killer, a mentally unbalanced man named David Berkowitz, was finally arrested.

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Five days after the Mobil Oil bombing, an office worker at one of the targeted buildings, 1270 Avenue of the Americas, glimpsed an envelope lying on an eighth-floor windowsill. Inside it police discovered an unexploded FALN bomb, apparently a dud that had been intended to detonate along with the two other August 3 explosions. Despite repeated NYPD searches, no other FALN bombs were found.

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Just before 4:00 that afternoon a pipe bomb exploded in a fountain outside the New York Public Library, lightly damaging a statue. This explosion was probably not an FALN bomb, the FBI concluded.

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The name rhymes with “harasser.”

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Kathie Flynn lost her appeal, jumped bail, and lived underground for a period of months. According to Levasseur, she eventually turned herself in to authorities.

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Pat Gros and Linda Coleman, who did not join the others underground, attempted to keep the bookstore open for several weeks, then quit and shut its doors.

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Agents later recovered the rest of Picariello’s dynamite, almost six hundred pounds of it, buried near Portland.

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Levasseur had hoped to place a bomb at a bank in downtown Boston but discovered that police security linked to the Bicentennial celebration made it impossible.

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This robbery was never publicly linked to Levasseur and Manning. However, in interviews for this book, Levasseur volunteered details of the robbery and its approximate date. These details clearly match the March 2, 1978, Waterbury robbery described in contemporary newspaper accounts, though Levasseur, concerned about legal ramifications, declined to confirm they were the same.

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Both Ferguson and Oliver served brief prison sentences for their role in the aborted robbery. Neither gave Shakur’s name to police.

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May 19 is the birthday of both Ho Chi Minh and Malcolm X.

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Officer Ryan would later claim that he looked in on Morales at 7:00 a.m. and saw “a form” in his bed. The disappearance would be discovered a half hour later, leading police to speculate that Morales had escaped during that half-hour window of time. This is highly unlikely.

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Police did say they suspected that the man in the mailman disguise was probably the same “mailman” seen loitering outside a neighborhood bank the week before. The man had been reported to police, bizarrely, after a woman noticed he was wearing high-heeled shoes.

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James Kelly suffered a concussion but soon returned to work. Joe Trombino too recovered from his wounds, though he never fully regained the use of his left hand. He remained a Brink’s guard for twenty years. Trombino died while making a pickup in the basement of the World Trade Center when it was attacked by terrorists on September 11, 2001. He was sixty-eight.

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Police located the Levasseur home in rural Germantown a week later. It yielded no further useful information.

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The name Jennifer Browne is a pseudonym.