New York at War (53 page)

A half century later, the Weather Underground, the Black Panthers, and other militant groups existed in a strange symbiotic relationship with Hoover’s FBI and Richard Nixon’s Justice Department, which infiltrated radical groups. Undercover federal agents incited militants to violent, self-destructive deeds in order to discredit their movements. Sure enough, bombings and strident manifestos did not win over the hearts and minds of the American masses. An April 1970 Gallup Poll found that a clear majority of Americans wanted stiff prison sentences for bombers and hijackers.
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Perhaps the most damning verdict on terrorist bombings was that New Yorkers, and other Americans, simply forgot. Five years after the 1920 bombing, in an era of financial prosperity and a deflated left, a
Wall Street Journal
reporter found that young stenographers strolling through the fateful intersection of Wall and Broad Streets didn’t know about the blast. “How quickly time effaces the memory of startling events,” the paper commented. In a city bent on the future, new blood arrived, and tragedies faded. And, after all, in a city of 5.6 million, there had been fewer than 300 casualties; a New Yorker had highly favorable odds for surviving an unpredictable attack. The only “plaque” to the Wall Street explosion and its victims is the series of shrapnel pockmarks that still mottles the marble façade of the Morgan and Company edifice at 23 Wall Street. Similarly, rather than fearing another bomb after the West Eleventh Street explosion, a Greenwich Villager focused on the real estate: “In a couple of days they’ll turn it into a parking lot.” New Yorkers’ short memories consigned the terrorists of 1970, like those of 1920, to the dustbin of history. Today, few passersby know why the townhouse rebuilt on the site of 18 West Eleventh Street in 1978 differs architecturally from its stately neighbors.
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Although largely discredited as a form of protest, bombings continued in the post-Vietnam years. Most deadly was the bomb planted in a locker near the TWA baggage claim terminal at LaGuardia Airport on December 29, 1975, which took eleven lives, probably the work of Croatian nationalists seeking their homeland’s independence from Yugoslavia. But the city’s history provided a backdrop for another blast, one that tore through the lunchtime dining room in Fraunces Tavern at Pearl and Broad Streets on January 24, 1975, killing four and injuring fifty-three. Notes left in nearby telephone booths, mimeographed on the letter head of FALN (Fuerzas Armadas de Liberacion Nacional Puertorriquena, or Armed Forces of the Puerto Rican Nation) took credit for the attack.
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The notes denounced “the Yanki government” for resisting Puerto Rican independence and accused the CIA of murdering Puerto Rican activists; they also called for the release of five “political prisoners” held in US penitentiaries. FALN’s stated target was the “reactionary corporate executives” lunching in the tavern, but the group had also picked a target of historical resonance. The original tavern building that stood on the site had hosted George Washington’s farewell to his Continental army officers on December 4, 1783; FALN was declaring that, because the United States was a nation born in revolution, hypocrisy could be the only meaning of its withholding Puerto Rican independence.
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New York had long played a special role, both real and symbolic, for Puerto Ricans. More than any other North American city, New York had developed early trade links with the Spanish Caribbean. By the late nineteenth century, a community of émigré Cuban and Puerto Rican merchants and workers existed in the city. So did a small but active circle of Spanish-speaking revolutionaries. The most important was José Martí, who found work in lower Manhattan as a journalist and as consul for Uruguay, Paraguay, and Argentina after leaving his native Cuba in 1880. Like other revolutionaries—among them Giuseppe Garibaldi (an exile on Staten Island) and Leon Trotsky (a Bronx resident before the Bolshevik Revolution)—Martí embraced New York as a temporary haven. The city, with its Cubans and Puerto Ricans yearning for independence from Spain, was for Martí an incubator for Caribbean liberation. Yet before he returned to Cuba in 1895 to die in an abortive uprising, Martí also expressed his misgivings about America, felt most poignantly in the city he called home for fifteen years. With its banks, corporations, and shipping firms controlling much of the Latin Caribbean’s sugar, coffee, and fruit crops, New York loomed as the leading edge of a North American imperialism that might well succeed Spain’s. “I have lived inside the belly of the monster and know him from within,” he wrote in 1892. New York, in the end, was simultaneously a safe haven and a menace to progress and justice.
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Much as Martí had warned, the Spanish-American War of 1898 gave New York businessmen a new role to play in the former Spanish colonies. New York sugar magnates and others made sure Cuba’s and Puerto Rico’s economies remained captive markets for American manufactures and Wall Street credit; a fundamentally colonial economic relationship dictated low wages and displacement from the land for many islanders. In 1917, Congress granted Puerto Ricans US citizenship but not statehood. Following World War II, thousands took advantage of cheap fares as airlines sought to create a market for passengers between the Caribbean and North America; most settled in New York City. By 1960, New York had more than six hundred thousand Puerto Rican residents and was the cultural capital of the Puerto Rican diaspora.
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As the city’s Puerto Rican population grew, one of the Caribbean island’s most important leaders, Pedro Albizu Campos, lived as a semi-prisoner in a New York hospital. A Harvard-educated lawyer and World War I US Army veteran, the dark-skinned Campos had been enraged by the racism he repeatedly experienced at the hands of Americans, both in Puerto Rico and on the mainland. His Puerto Rican Nationalist Party, founded in 1922, called for independence and resistance to “Yanqui” imperialism. In 1937, he was convicted of “seditious conspiracy to overthrow the U.S. government in Puerto Rico”; released from the Atlanta federal penitentiary in 1943, he spent the final four years of a suspended sentence ill in Columbus Hospital on East Thirty-Fourth Street.
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As some Puerto Rican New Yorkers became radicalized in the years following World War II, they began exporting their resistance beyond the city. In November 1950, two New York followers of Campos, Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola, journeyed to Washington and failed in an attempt to shoot President Truman at Blair House; Torresola was killed by a mortally wounded guard. On March 1, 1954, four other New Yorkers—Lolita Lebron, Irving Flores Rodriguez, Rafael Cancel Mirada, and Andres Figueroa Cordero—opened fire from the US House of Representatives gallery, injuring five Congressmen on the floor below. “The United States of America are betraying the sacred principles of mankind in their continuous subjugation of my country,” read a note found in Lebron’s purse after the shooters were restrained by police. The five revolutionaries captured in these two events—still held in federal prisons in 1975, the year of the Fraunces Tavern explosion—were the “political prisoners” FALN wanted released.
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Formed in the late 1960s, with roots in Puerto Rican nationalism and pro-Cuban Marxism, FALN had planted ten bombs in New York and Newark in late 1974 and early 1975. Prior to Fraunces Tavern, an FALN booby-trap device had exploded in an abandoned East Harlem tenement; a policeman, lured to the site, had been blinded in one eye. (As it happened, the officer, Angel Poggi, was Puerto Rican himself.) Between 1974 and 1982, the group set off at least 110 bombs in Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Newark, as well as New York. Incendiary cigarette packs, designed to ignite after closing hours, were put in the pockets of garments on the racks in eight New York department stores; pipe bombs exploded in or near Lincoln Center, the Defense Department’s Manhattan offices, and several corporate headquarters.
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Identifying and tracking the FALN bombers proved difficult. In July 1978, investigators received a break when an explosion in an Elmhurst apartment led police to the bleeding body of Willie Morales, who had been building a bomb when it accidentally exploded. Morales lost his fingers and part of his face in the blast; his arrest took him out of circulation as an FALN terrorist. Yet dramatic gestures continued. In March 1980, armed FALN members raided the New York offices of George H. W. Bush’s presidential campaign on East Fifty-Ninth Street, bound ten campaign workers, and also threatened to target nuclear reactors with bombs; the masked gunmen then fled after spraying pro–Puerto Rican independence slogans on the walls. (FALN simultaneously carried out a similar raid on Jimmy Carter’s Chicago campaign headquarters.)
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Unlike the Weather Underground, FALN never renounced taking the blood of incidental victims; bringing war to America, in their opinion, required it. On New Year’s Eve 1982, in their last major attack, the group planted five dynamite devices, wired to pocket watches and nine-volt batteries, in Kentucky Fried Chicken boxes outside police headquarters and the Federal Building in lower Manhattan, the Foley Square Federal Courthouse, and the Federal Courthouse in downtown Brooklyn. The Federal Building bomb blew out several floors of windows into the street below. The police headquarters bomb tore the leg off patrolman Rocco Pascarella, who, despite his agony, was able to describe the KFC box he had seen. Trying to defuse two bombs at Foley Square, bomb squad detectives Tony Senft and Richie Pastorella were blown into the air when one of the KFC boxes exploded. Both men were severely injured.
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A series of arrests finally helped to quell the FALN campaign. The group’s terrorism had not brought independence for Puerto Rico, but it had divided New York’s Puerto Rican community against itself. “Because of the horror of what they’ve done, I don’t think these killers are going to get much support from Puerto Ricans,” the head of a police anti-FALN task force commented after Fraunces Tavern. Indeed, dozens of tips were offered by Puerto Rican New Yorkers trying to help the police run down the culprits.
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An old paradox resurfaced: newcomers to the city found in New York a home, but also a political and economic order some blamed for their homeland’s troubles. The largest Puerto Rican metropolis in the world was also a target for the island’s angry nationalists. Nothing indicated to New Yorkers that in the future, religion, not nationalism or Marxism, would elicit declarations of war against their city.

At 12:18 PM on February 26, 1993, a 1,200-pound urea nitrate bomb, planted in a rental van parked in a subbasement garage beneath the World Trade Center’s North Tower, erupted through four floors of reinforced concrete, instantly killing a female office worker, a male hotel worker, and three men lunching nearby. A fifth man, thrown by the blast, died of a heart attack induced by internal injuries. Dozens of cars in the garage burst into flame. People elsewhere in the complex, feeling the floor shudder under them, thought a plane might have hit the building. As police vehicles, ambulances, and fire trucks rushed to the scene, a chaotic evacuation began from the upper floors down the staircases of both towers of the World Trade Center. Fifty thousand people fled the building complex. Over one thousand, many covered in the soot that poured out of wall ducts and up elevator shafts, suffered from smoke inhalation. Dozens spent hours in elevators stuck between floors. Against a backdrop of light snow flurries, gray smoke wafted into the afternoon sky over lower Manhattan.
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Watching from the window of the J & R Music World store two blocks away on Park Row, an Egyptian named Mahmud Abouhalima was disappointed that the visible damage from the blast seemed so minimal. His comrade Ramzi Yousef, who was across the Hudson River on the Jersey City waterfront, was also chagrined; he had anticipated that the explosion would topple the North Tower sideways into the South Tower, with both buildings collapsing to kill a quarter of a million people in crowded downtown Manhattan.
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Police help a woman flee the first terrorist bombing of the World Trade Center, February 26, 1993. PHOTO BY KEN MURRAY / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS ARCHIVE VIA GETTY IMAGES.

It was not long before Americans received an explanation for this latest deadly bombing. “The terrorism that Israel practices (Which is supported by America) must be faced with a similar one,” lectured a letter, signed “the Liberation Army,” that arrived at the
New York Times
several days later. “The dictatorship and terrorism (also supported by America) that some countries are practicing against their own people must also be faced with terrorism.” Americans needed to know that their civilian deaths were no more tragic “than those who are getting killed by the American weapons and support.” The letter demanded discontinuation of all American aid to Israel; otherwise other targets, including nuclear ones, would be attacked.
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