Days of Rage (33 page)

Working with incomplete information, neither man was entirely correct. The BLA was far too disorganized and far too decentralized to be called a true national conspiracy. But it was more than “roving” bands of “crazies.” Daley would not be deterred. Over the vocal opposition of the Manhattan district attorney, Frank Hogan, he persuaded Commissioner Murphy to hold an unusual press conference on Tuesday, February 8, in which Murphy detailed the BLA’s involvement not only in the Foster-Laurie murders but also in the May attacks and the attacks on policemen in San Francisco and Atlanta. He named nine BLA figures sought by police, including Ronald Carter, Joanne Chesimard, and Twymon Meyers. Prosecutors had adamantly opposed going public, arguing that it would complicate any case they brought. The mayor’s office objected as well, finally persuading Murphy not to use the word “conspiracy.”

But the debate—and the killings—were far from over.

 • • • 

The murders of Greg Foster and Rocco Laurie have never officially been solved. But there is little doubt that the killers came from the Ronald Carter−Joanne Chesimard cell based in Cleveland. While political debates raged in Manhattan, Carter and his eight comrades pored over New York newspapers, following the investigation. After two weeks they began to fear they had
stayed too long in one place. “So we took a vote,” Blood McCreary remembers. “We decided to go to St. Louis.”

A safe house there was already in place. On Monday, February 14, they rented a U-Haul truck, which the group crammed with furniture, books, mattresses, and personal belongings. The next morning they left the city in a three-vehicle caravan heading toward St. Louis. “On long trips I drove,” says McCreary, whose family was originally from South Carolina. “I had the Southern manners—you know, ‘Yes, sir,’ ‘Whatever you say, sir’—which we needed at toll booths or if we got stopped. Our younger guys, Twymon and them, they didn’t have the manners. If a cop car stopped us, they always wanted to shoot.”

They reached the St. Louis safe house without incident. “It was late afternoon,” says McCreary. “Later we decided to go looking for out-of-state newspapers. Four of us went: me, Twymon, Ronald Carter, and Sha-Sha Brown. We drove downtown looking for a newsstand. That was a mistake. Seemed like everything was closed. Then I saw the cop’s car.”

It was 9:30 p.m. when the two St. Louis patrolmen, cruising North Grand Avenue in a black neighborhood, spotted a green 1967 Oldsmobile sporting, of all things, a set of cardboard Michigan license plates. The cruiser lit its rolling lights. McCreary was behind the wheel. “I said, ‘We got lights,’” he remembers, “and Ronnie leaned forward—he was in the backseat—and said, ‘Be cool, just pull over.’”

One officer hung back while the second walked to the driver’s-side window. “We had all been taught that, if you get stopped, the first thing you do is roll down all the car windows,” McCreary says. “That way, if you have to shoot, you don’t want glass ex'ploding all over you. So we rolled down our windows. I took out my wallet. When he came to the car, I had everything in my hand. Everything he needed was in my hand. But you know, it wasn’t right. The car had Michigan temporary plates. It was registered in Florida. My driver’s license was my alias, Frank Reece of Windsor, North Carolina. Poor cop, he was as confused as anything. [He says,] ‘I’m going to have to ask you guys to step outta the car.’ And you know, I was doing everything I could to get outta this. I kept saying, ‘Why is that necessary? Why?’

“We all had on shoulder holsters,” McCreary says. “Twymon was beside
me in the front. I saw he had the 9mm between his legs. In the trunk we had like seventeen different guns, an M16, a bunch of Browning 9mms. I had a .357. Sha Sha had a nine-mill. I had been through several situations with Twymon, and I knew that when he was about to shoot, he always started rocking. Rocking back and forth. And I realized he had started rocking in his seat. I’m talking to the cop, and I feel Twymon pulling at my sleeve. He wants me to lean back so he can shoot the cop. I know he’s about to shoot, and I’m trying everything I can do to make this cop go away. . . .

“The cop keeps saying, ‘Get out of the car.’

“I keep saying, ‘Officer, why is that necessary? All our papers are in order. Why is that necessary?’

“And finally, you know, he had enough. He said, ‘Nigger, get out of the fucking car!’ And when he said that, I just leaned back and all I saw then was red and blue streaks of fire going past my face. Twymon was shooting, and then, well, the whole car kind of exploded.”

The officer beside the car fell, struck in the stomach and legs. As the Olds roared off, he fired all six shots in his revolver. As luck would have it, two narcotics officers were on a stakeout a block away and heard the shooting. They gave chase. Spying their pursuit, McCreary mashed the accelerator, hitting speeds close to 100 miles per hour as the Olds zigzagged through narrow streets toward the Mississippi River waterfront. By the time he got there, there were four police cars behind him, their sirens echoing through the downtown streets. When one approached his fender, he swung the steering wheel violently to the left. The Olds veered into a vicious left turn, turning completely around, until it hopped a curb, all four tires blown, and came to rest against a high chain-link fence bordering a vacant lot.

When the car stopped, McCreary turned to face Ronnie Carter, only to find him slumped forward, a sick gurgling noise coming from his throat. He had been shot in the chest; an autopsy would reveal that he had accidentally been killed by a BLA bullet fired by Sha Sha Brown. McCreary leaped outside. A hail of bullets drove him toward the chain-link fence. “We were trying to get to the trunk,” he recalls. “If we could’ve gotten the M16 or the .30-06, we would’ve gotten away.”

Up and down the wide boulevard, policemen were crouching behind their
cruisers, firing. The three BLA men ran to the fence. McCreary turned and provided covering fire as Meyers and Sha Sha Brown climbed it and vaulted into the vacant lot. When he ran out of ammunition, McCreary threw down his pistol and surrendered. The police captured Brown a few blocks away, bleeding from a wound in his wrist. Only Twymon Meyers managed to get away, disappearing into the night.

In the first confused hours after the incident, there was nothing to link it to the BLA; both McCreary and Brown gave false names. What triggered a barrage of early-morning phone calls to New York was the discovery that a pistol Brown had thrown down had until two weeks before belonged to Officer Rocco Laurie. This changed everything: For the first time the NYPD felt obliged to reveal everything they knew.

At a press conference two days later, Commissioner Murphy called on the White House, the attorney general, and the FBI “to give the highest priority to the hunt” for the Foster-Laurie assassins and the BLA. After Murphy spoke, the NYPD’s assistant chief inspector, Arthur Grubert, detailed the attacks on police in New York, San Francisco, and Atlanta and gave reporters the most reasoned, lucid overview of the BLA to date. He noted:

Intelligence fails to identify a formal structure of a firm organization known as the Black Liberation Army. It is more likely that various extremist individuals, 75 to 100 in number, are making use of the name Black Liberation Army in order to give some semblance of legitimacy to these homicidal acts. These individuals form and dissolve and reform in small groups, or cells.

The NYPD might not want to call the BLA a true “army,” but what it described sounded martial enough. The
Times
’s skepticism, for instance, began to fall away. The headline of its front-page story on February 17 was
EVIDENCE OF “LIBERATION ARMY” SAID TO RISE
. It was then, with its notoriety near a zenith, that the BLA went utterly silent. Not a single word would be heard again for months.

10

“WE GOT PRETTY SMALL”

The Weather Underground and the FBI, 1971−72

The Weather leadership’s narrow escape from the FBI in March 1971, and the unprecedented raid on one of its San Francisco apartments—what came to be known in Weather lore as “the Encirclement”—marked a turning point for the organization. Though it would continue to mount actions and issue communiqués, Weather would never again be as active or as relevant as it was during its first year underground.

Its numbers were dwindling. There is ample evidence, in fact, that after mid-1971 Weather was a far smaller organization than has been previously understood. Four hundred radicals had attended the Flint War Council. Maybe a hundred went underground. Maybe fifty remained active after the Townhouse. The precise number of later cadres may never be known, in part because many people called themselves Weathermen despite doing little clandestine work. In 1972, for example, the Los Angeles collective consisted of six or seven people who never participated in a single bombing. One estimate puts thirty-five people underground during the 1972−73 time frame, a count
endorsed by several alumni. But the number who actually performed clandestine work, who carried out bombings after the middle of 1971, was smaller still.

“We lost most of the people after the Townhouse,” says Ron Fliegelman. “After the Encirclement, we lost even more. I’m telling you, we were down to ten or fifteen. The leadership, me, the Cathys [Cathy Wilkerson and Kathy Boudin], Paul Bradley. The core group, the ones who did things, was ten or twelve people, no more than fifteen.”

“That wasn’t necessarily a bad thing,” says Brian Flanagan. “People like me, who were aboveground, could do a lot more things. I mean, how many people did you really need underground at that point?”

“It’s true, we got pretty small,” says Rick Ayers. “A lot of people went up [aboveground]. We sent a lot of people up. That was actually a conscious decision. We wanted a new sort of organization, with members aboveground, where they could do more for us. So you had an underground structure where the members weren’t all fugitives.”

In the wake of the Encirclement, the leadership and the San Francisco cadres scattered. “After the Encirclement, we had to do what was essential, which was fall back on support,” recalls Ayers, who had moved to Los Angeles. “We ran to a lot of friends and asked for help, but it slowed things down, for sure. We had to devise other ways and other kinds of ID. It was like starting over. Again.” Many cadres fled to new cities and new identities to await orders that, in some cases, didn’t come for months. David Gilbert went to ground in Denver, while others fled to Seattle. Mark Rudd, now thoroughly alienated from the leadership, fled active work altogether, resettling with his girlfriend in Santa Fe. Others simply melted away. Still others fell victim to the paranoia that gripped the underground after the San Francisco raid.

One such situation involved a former Kent State student who had rented the apartment on Pine Street. As several Weather alumni tell it, the student was experimenting with gay life, and the habits he developed in San Francisco worried many. “He would pick up guys at bathhouses and bring them back to the safe houses, and you can’t do that, not without being compromised,” recalls Paul Bradley. After the Encirclement, the student was transferred to New
York, where his problems continued. “None of us had dealt with gay issues at that point,” recalls Fliegelman. “He would go off and do stuff, and he could be compromised, so he ended up having to leave.”

The Encirclement obliged Robbie Roth’s busy New York collective to scatter as well. Eleanor Stein sat on the floor of its apartment in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, spread out a piece of butcher paper, and charted all the connections between the West Coast and East Coast IDs; there were enough, it was decided, that the New Yorkers needed to relocate.

“I remember it took a solid week to scrub every surface of that place, erasing every fingerprint,” recalls Jonah Raskin, a frequent visitor. “It was an unbelievable headache.”

The whereabouts of the West Coast leadership—Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, and Jeff Jones—after they left San Francisco in spring 1971 have remained a secret for forty years. In his memoir
Fugitive Days
, Bill Ayers portrays their lives as nomadic, moving between working-class hideouts, including “a perch above a goat shed on a commune, and later in the groundskeepers’ quarters of a mansion near Laurel Canyon [in Los Angeles]” as well as “a basement room in a monastery in Mundelein [Illinois] . . . and a stone house on the Olympic Peninsula [in Washington state].” However complete this list may be, the one place Ayers doesn’t mention is the actual home the leadership found shortly after the Encirclement, which would serve as the group’s informal West Coast headquarters for several years. It was not, as Ayers wanted his readers to believe, some decrepit flat in an out-of-the-way slum. In fact, it was a sunny bungalow just steps from the ocean in Hermosa Beach, an Orange County beach community thronged with surfers and hippies.

“It was really cozy, you could hear the surf,” recalls Marvin Doyle. “It was on this little street on an alley, jammed in against other similar places, with a postage-stamp-sized patio. The rooms were decorated in ‘tasteful hippie.’ Bernardine had rococo tastes, a lot of pillows and nice patterned cloths on the furniture, in rich colors and textures. I remember she used madras bedspreads for curtains.”

The Bay Area, however, was far too important for Weather to abandon. From the moment they left, in fact, Dohrn was determined to reestablish a presence there. “It was a power center, of the Left, and you didn’t want the FBI to beat you, you wanted to show them you couldn’t be defeated, that you could come back hard and fast,” recalls Doyle, who, in the absence of other San Francisco cadres, emerged as a key intermediary in Dohrn’s orbit. The first Weatherman to return to the city was Paul Bradley, who was developing a lifelong love for the area. He managed to rent a secluded carriage house on Vallejo Street in the Russian Hill section; it was perfect, nestled in a garden behind an apartment building, with a single entrance to the street. Bradley lived there for several years; out-of-town visitors, including the leadership, were always welcome. Later a second flat was rented, in the Sunset area. Once he was established, Dohrn asked him to approach Doyle.