Days of Rage (71 page)

In early 1979, when the Family began planning her escape, Chesimard was being held at a women’s prison in New Jersey. To free her, and to raise money they hoped to give her to escape the country, they decided on another robbery, their first since the heist at the Livingston Mall nine months earlier. The robbery they staged at New Jersey’s Paramus Mall on September 11, in fact, was a carbon copy of the earlier raid: another Bamberger’s store, another pair of armored-car guards, another getaway van driven by Marilyn Buck. The car they used, a Ford Fairmont, was provided by the onetime Weatherman Kathy Boudin, who was working at a rental agency in midtown Manhattan; it was Boudin’s first known work with the group. The robbery went smoothly enough, save for a guard they had to punch and a pistol that misfired, and in a matter of minutes they were safely inside a van Buck was driving toward the safety of Manhattan. The take came to $105,000.

They were ready.

 • • • 

From the beginning this was Sekou Odinga’s job. He and Chesimard were close; he doesn’t deny a suggestion that they had once been lovers. “I loved her, let’s put it that way,” he says quietly. “She was one of our heroes.” The escape idea, he says, came from Chesimard herself, who sent a message through friends. Odinga drove to the prison and, though a wanted man himself, boldly walked in and visited her.

The setting, Odinga could see at a glimpse, was ideal. The Clinton Correctional Facility for Women sprawled across a rise among the green hills of rural western New Jersey, fifteen miles from the Pennsylvania border. The prison might be taken for a forlorn community college; there were no outer walls or fencing. Only one dormitory, the squat, yellow-brick South Hall,
housed maximum-security prisoners, and only seventeen of those. It alone was surrounded by a fifteen-foot chain-link fence, topped by two feet of barbed wire.

“They took their security for granted,” Odinga recalls. “They didn’t even search people. They had metal detectors, but they never turned ’em on or used ’em. I just walked in and signed my [false] name. I saw her and said, ‘Baby sis, so good to see you, when you coming home?’” In whispered conversations they discussed the possibility of an escape attempt. “Marighella used to say a good revolutionary has to be audacious: ‘If you think it can be done, given the right circumstances, you can probably do it,’” Odinga says. “She thought it could be done. I thought so, too, for the simple reason that it was clear [the authorities] weren’t thinking of it at all.”

The autumn sky was a bright and cloudless blue as Odinga stepped out of his car at the front gate the morning of November 2, 1979. The reception area was a trailer at the entrance. Inside, Odinga signed the register. A guard checked his name against a list of visitors Chesimard had approved; he was waved through. There were no metal detectors. No one searched him. No one noticed the .357 Magnum nestled against the small of his back. Standing behind the trailer, Odinga waited a few minutes before a van arrived to ferry him to South Hall. Behind the wheel was thirty-one-year-old Stephen Ravettina. With a nod, Odinga slid into the passenger seat, and Ravettina drove him through the grounds.

At South Hall the only guard on duty, sitting in a glass booth inside the door, was an elderly matron named Helen Anderson. A kindly woman with a heart condition, she was known to inmates as “Mama A.” She buzzed Odinga through a metal door into the visiting room. Inside Odinga hugged Chesimard and slid her the pistol.

After leaving Odinga, Stephen Ravettina climbed back into his van. His radio squawked. “Rav, there’s more visitors at the gate for South Hall,” a guard reported. Ravettina drove back to the trailer, where he saw two young black men standing outside, waiting. He stepped out and talked to one of the guards as the two men slid into the van, one taking the passenger seat, the other a seat behind. After a moment Ravettina hopped behind the wheel and began the return drive to South Hall. As they reached its fence, the man in
the passenger seat, one of Mutulu Shakur’s men, Mtayari Sundiata, produced a pistol and pressed it against Ravettina’s head. When Ravettina glanced at his radio, Sundiata said coolly, “You don’t wanna do that.”

The two groups—Odinga and Chesimard inside, the others outside—approached a bewildered Helen Anderson at about the same time. “She wouldn’t open the door,” Odinga recalls. “I had a .357 Magnum, which would’ve shot right through that glass, or most of it. I had armor-piercing bullets, too. But what I did was just put a stick of dynamite on the window where she was sitting. Then it was just a matter of convincing her it was to her benefit to open these doors and live through the day, which is how I put it. She did, after talking with Assata a moment. Assata told her, ‘We will do nothing to hurt you.’ Once she was convinced, she let us out.”

When Stephen Ravettina stepped inside, two guns at his back, he came face-to-face with Chesimard, brandishing a .357 Magnum, and Odinga behind her. Someone produced a set of handcuffs and cuffed Ravettina and Anderson together. “Come on, move it,” one of the men said, and the little group, now numbering four black militants and their two hostages, walked outside and climbed into the van.

A new face, Winston Patterson, took the wheel. He had been hastily recruited the night before. The hostages later said Patterson was by far the most nervous of the group. As he drove away from South Hall, Patterson took a wrong turn into a dead end beside a prison building, forcing Chesimard to show him the way. The van backed up, then circled through a parking lot and bumped straight onto a grassy knoll, hitting the grass so hard “Mama A” hopped in her seat. When she shot a look at Ravettina, he whispered, “Shut up and be cool.” Driving down the far side of the knoll, the van met a service road.

“Watch out for state police cars,” Ravettina volunteered. “If the state police see this van, they’ll blow it to smithereens.”

Not a soul noticed the hurried escape. A minute later Patterson turned the van into a parking lot for the adjacent Hunterdon State School for the developmentally challenged. Odinga had two cars waiting, a blue compact and a white Lincoln Continental. Marilyn Buck emerged from one car, and the group began furiously opening trunks and changing license plates. As they
did, Mutulu Shakur drove up in a blue van. Ravettina managed to see three digits on one license plate. He stopped looking when one of the black men pointed a gun his way. “Get down,” he said. After a moment everyone leaped into the cars and sped off, leaving “Mama A” and Ravettina cuffed in the van.

“The waiting part was scary enough,” recalls Silvia Baraldini, who was driving the Lincoln. “The thing I remember—like it was a film, like pictures—was the white van approaching. Driving over, they took a wrong turn and had to turn around. Then it all went very quickly. They came, they got out, we opened trunks and changed cars and drove off. It all went very quickly. It had to. What I remember is looking back at the white van and seeing what the FBI later called ‘the two hostages’ poking up their heads and peering out at us as we drove off. I’ll never forget the looks on their faces.”

Chesimard and Odinga curled inside the Lincoln’s trunk. As Baraldini drove east toward Manhattan, she was startled to see state police cruisers screaming past, lights rolling. “I had a gun between my legs, a pistol, an automatic,” she recalls. “I saw police everywhere. I watched one take a U-turn and drive back to the prison. And you know, what I thought was ‘God, give me the strength to shoot if I have to.’ Because I had never shot anybody. But if they stopped us and went for the trunk, I would have to shoot. I said I would. I kept thinking, ‘I have to do this, I have to.’”

Back at the prison, Ravettina and “Mama A” had spread the alarm. Phone calls went out to State Police Headquarters in Trenton. Across the state, troopers stopped what they were doing and sped toward the prison. Within an hour roadblocks began going up. But it was too late. Baraldini says she dropped off Odinga and Chesimard at a parking garage in suburban New Jersey, and by the time the roadblocks went up, Chesimard had been deposited inside a dingy safe-house apartment in East Orange. The three vehicles were last seen speeding east, and by nightfall they had vanished. They had done it: In barely ten minutes, without attracting the notice of a single outside guard, the Family had rescued the most notorious female revolutionary of the decade.

The mood inside the apartment was jubilant. Buck took Chesimard’s photo and dummied up a new driver’s license. They gave her $50,000, half the proceeds of the Paramus Mall robbery, and offered the choice of fleeing to
Libya, China, Angola, or Cuba or remaining in the United States. Two nights later, with the state police canvassing the state in search of them, Chesimard folded herself into a car trunk. Buck and Shakur drove her west into Pennsylvania, where that night they reached an apartment building in the run-down East Liberty section of Pittsburgh. Chesimard would live there for the next nine months, until August 1980, when, according to later court testimony, she boarded a plane that landed in the Bahamas, from where she eventually made her way to the safety of Fidel Castro’s Cuba. Today Odinga denies this. “There were lots of ways to get her out,” he muses. “Mexico was always good.”

The escape was front-page news across the country. Caught unawares, the FBI had no idea who might be involved. Sketches were drawn up of four suspects, a series of apartments were raided in Brooklyn and the Bronx, but the FBI found nothing.

 • • • 

After lying fallow for much of the previous year—a bid to avoid inflaming the Willie Morales proceedings, authorities speculated—the FALN sprang back to life that fall of 1979, initiating what proved to be the most harrowing period in its history. Much later authorities would gain the cooperation of one of its newer members, Freddie Mendez, who would provide a unique glimpse into the FALN’s shadowy world during this time. Mendez was a twenty-seven-year-old Chicagoan who had belonged to several aboveground Puerto Rican independence groups. He would eventually enter the federal witness protection program, where retired agents say he remains to this day.

By the time the FALN’s leader, Oscar López, recruited Mendez in 1979, the group’s dozen or so members were scattered through at least six safe houses, including three flats in Chicago. Its East Coast headquarters was apartment 4D in a grim building at 2685 Kennedy Boulevard in Jersey City, New Jersey. There López’s number two man, Carlos Torres, now atop the FBI’s Most Wanted Fugitives list, lived with his wife, Haydee, and their toddler. López himself, along with his companion, Lucy Rodriguez, and the
disfigured Morales, was living in a shambling house in a black neighborhood north of downtown Milwaukee.

The Milwaukee house served as the FALN’s nerve center. López had dozens of ideas for actions, and the arrival of Morales seems to have inspired him to enact them all at once. A Patty Hearst−style kidnapping had long been under consideration; López compiled dossiers on myriad American millionaires and their families, including the oil-rich Hunts of Dallas and the Rockefellers. The 1980 presidential campaign was under way, and he was examining not only raids on various campaign offices but bombings at the Republican National Convention in Detroit that summer and the Democratic convention at Madison Square Garden; Torres had scouted the Garden, drawing maps of where bombs could be placed. López had more prosaic plans as well. There was always a need for money and guns.

The portrait Freddie Mendez later painted of the FALN was of a tightly knit, disciplined guerrilla cell, notably more professional than its 1970s-era peers. Its five fugitive members appeared to live off donations from the militant Chicago Puerto Rican community, plus the odd robbery; the others held jobs. Among themselves they used code names, dead drops, and explosives manuals. During planning sessions everyone wore pillowcases with eye slits, giving the gatherings an eerie, Klanlike feel. In the dirt-floor basement of the Milwaukee house they devised a firing range, hung a chalkboard to diagram actions, and built an elaborate explosives workshop, where Mendez learned to assemble bombs using the same design Ron Fliegelman had pioneered for Weatherman nine years earlier: a screw in the face of an alarm clock, detonated when the minute hand struck the screw at “9.”

Professional methods, however, didn’t ensure success, as Mendez discovered on his first mission, on October 17, 1979. He and onetime Tuley High student Dickie Jimenez were tasked with planting a bomb in the Democratic Party offices at the Bismarck Hotel in downtown Chicago. Carrying the bomb in a leather valise, they entered wearing suits and false mustaches—an FALN trademark. Posing as college students, they asked the receptionist for campaign literature, and Jimenez asked to use the washroom. The receptionist refused, saying it was only for staff, and that was that. They left, declaring the mission a failure.

Their first successful attack that fall came a month later: the bombing of three military offices in Chicago on the night of November 23. Explosions damaged washrooms at two recruiting stations, for the army and the marines, and blew off a metal door at the Illinois Naval Reserve armory. No one was hurt; a caller cited the U.S. Navy’s use of its base on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques as a test-bombing site.

López was just getting warmed up. A month later he engineered a robbery that kept the FALN in funds for months. That morning a twenty-eight-year-old Purolator armored-car driver named Michael Arnold was walking out of the Pick ’n Save Warehouse Foods store on Milwaukee’s Forest Home Avenue, having just retrieved the store’s deposits, when a Hispanic man dressed as a mailman approached him in the lobby and jabbed a gun into his ribs. Arnold was guided into a restroom, where four other men were waiting, then handcuffed to a stall door. The robbers made off with the Pick ’n Save deposits, described only as “in five figures”; afterward police had no sense that the FALN was involved, though an article in the
Milwaukee Journal
described it as “the largest and best-planned robbery of the year.”
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