Days of Rage

ALSO BY BRYAN BURROUGH

The Big Rich: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes

Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933−34

Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco
(with John Helyar)

Dragonfly: NASA and the Crisis Aboard Mir

Vendetta: American Express and the Smearing of Edmond Safra

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First published by Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, 2015

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“The True Import of Present Dialogue, Black vs. Negro (For Peppe, Who Will Ultimately Judge Our Efforts)” from Black Feeling, Black Talk, Black Judgment by Nikki Giovanni. Copyright © 1968, 1970 by Nikki Giovanni. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Photograph credits

ISBN 978-0-698-17007-0

Version_1

For my mother

There’s a group of youngsters cropping up who is getting tired of this brutality against our people. They are going to take some action; it might be misguided; it might be disorganized; it might be unintelligent; but they’re going to get a little action. And there are going to be some whites who are going to join in along with them.

—MALCOLM X, 1964

At the end of the sixties or the beginning of the seventies, it seemed like people were going underground left and right. Every other week I was hearing about somebody disappearing.

—JOANNE CHESIMARD, AKA ASSATA SHAKUR, BLACK LIBERATION ARMY

And there’s some rumors going ’round, someone’s underground . . .

—THE EAGLES, “WITCHY WOMAN,” 1972

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Without a doubt, this book is the single most difficult project I have ever attempted. During more than five years of research, I thought of quitting any number of times. When I began work in 2009, I had no idea of the challenges involved, or the complexities of dealing with veterans of the radical left. If you said I was naïve, well, I couldn’t argue with you.

Eleven years ago I wrote a book called
Public Enemies
, in which I employed a million or so pages of newly released FBI files to tell the story of the Bureau’s pursuit of John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, and a half dozen other Depression-era criminals. In approaching this book, I assumed I would be able to draw on similar resources to document the rise and fall of the 1970s-era underground groups. Big mistake. FBI files, those the Bureau has made publicly available, are almost useless to a historian. Only a fraction of the paperwork these investigations generated has been issued, and almost all of it is dreck, either highly redacted headquarters summaries or page after page of highly redacted, and highly repetitive, “airtels” and telegrams. One could learn far more about the underground from newspapers.

The existing literature was helpful, but contained gaping holes. Of the ten or so books and films dealing with the Weather Underground, few contain much detailed information on what interested me most: how the group actually operated underground. There are two good books about the Symbionese Liberation Army from the 1970s, but none on the Black Liberation Army, the FALN, or the United Freedom Front. John Castellucci’s 1986 book about the Family,
The Big Dance
, is packed with good information but so loosely structured it is often hard to follow.

In the absence of fresh documentation, I was obliged to fall back on the basic skills I learned as a young newspaper reporter many years ago: pounding the pavement, hitting the phones. Veterans of the underground were easy enough to track down. The problem was getting them to talk candidly about decades-old crimes they had rarely if ever spoken of publicly, and which in some cases might still be the subject of law enforcement interest.

During my first year of research, I cold-called any number of aging underground figures. The conversation usually went something like this:

“Hello, my name is Bryan Burrough. You don’t know me from Adam, and I don’t share your politics. Would you be willing to tell me about that building you bombed in 1972?”

Click.

This became somewhat frustrating. A turning point came when, during the course of people’s deflecting my questions, I was directed to their attorneys. The group of radical lawyers who handled underground cases turned out to be surprisingly small; maybe fifteen attorneys, almost all in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, handled just about every major case. A handful worked on dozens of cases spanning multiple underground groups. With the help of several of these attorneys—people motivated simply by a wish to accurately recapture a piece of little-remembered American history—I was able to begin building bridges to their clients, many of whom remain distrustful of anyone associated with the mainstream media. Some interviews took months to negotiate. Even once a veteran of the underground agreed to speak with me, it sometimes took four or five meetings to begin earning something like the trust that is necessary for someone to share secrets with a complete stranger. I am deeply grateful to all those who did.

CONTENTS

ALSO BY BRYAN BURROUGH

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

DEDICATION

EPIGRAPH

AUTHOR’S NOTE

CAST OF CHARACTERS

PROLOGUE

1 “THE REVOLUTION AIN’T TOMORROW. IT’S NOW. YOU DIG?”

Sam Melville and the Birth of the American Underground

2 “NEGROES WITH GUNS”

Black Rage and the Road to Revolution

PART ONE: WEATHERMAN

3 “YOU SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION”

The Movement and the Emergence of Weatherman

4 “AS TO KILLING PEOPLE, WE WERE PREPARED TO DO THAT”

Weatherman, January to March 1970

5 THE TOWNHOUSE

Weatherman, March to June 1970

6 “RESPONSIBLE TERRORISM”

Weatherman, June 1970 to October 1970

7 THE WRONG SIDE OF HISTORY

Weatherman and the FBI, October 1970 to April 1971

PART TWO: THE BLACK LIBERATION ARMY

8 “AN ARMY OF ANGRY NIGGAS”

The Birth of the Black Liberation Army, Spring 1971

9 THE RISE OF THE BLA

The Black Liberation Army, June 1971 to February 1972

10 “WE GOT PRETTY SMALL”

The Weather Underground and the FBI, 1971−72

11 BLOOD IN THE STREETS OF BABYLON

The Black Liberation Army, 1973

PART THREE: THE SECOND WAVE

12 THE DRAGON UNLEASHED

The Rise of the Symbionese Liberation Army, November 1973 to February 1974

13 “PATTY HAS BEEN KIDNAPPED”

The Symbionese Liberation Army, February to May 1974

14 WHAT PATTY HEARST WROUGHT

The Rise of the Post-SLA Underground

15 “THE BELFAST OF NORTH AMERICA”

Patty Hearst, the SLA, and the Mad Bombers of San Francisco

16 HARD TIMES

The Death of the Weather Underground

17 “WELCOME TO FEAR CITY”

The FALN, 1976 to 1978

18 “ARMED REVOLUTIONARY LOVE”

The Odyssey of Ray Levasseur

19 BOMBS AND DIAPERS

Ray Levasseur’s Odyssey, Part II

PART FOUR: OUT WITH A BANG

20 THE FAMILY

The Pan-Radical Alliance, 1977 to 1979

21 JAILBREAKS AND CAPTURES

The Family and the FALN, 1979−80

22 THE SCALES OF JUSTICE

Trials, Surrenders, and the Family, 1980−81

23 THE LAST REVOLUTIONARIES

The United Freedom Front, 1981 to 1984

EPILOGUE

PHOTOGRAPHS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A NOTE ON SOURCES

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

IMAGE CREDITS

CAST OF CHARACTERS

WEATHER UNDERGROUND, AKA WEATHERMAN, 1969 TO 1977

BERNARDINE DOHRN:
beautiful, brainy, first among equals, “la Pasionaria of the Lunatic Left”

JEFF JONES:
California-raised “surfer dude,” co-leader, Dohrn’s onetime lover, principal instigator of 1975–76 “inversion strategy”