The Burglary (18 page)

Still pushing and pulling, he was thinking, as he was earlier, “Well, if the lock was changed because the FBI knows about the burglary, agents might be standing in the darkened office with guns drawn waiting for me to step inside.” Unlike his humorous musings about what he would say if a resident walked by, he had no musings about what he would say if he encountered agents with drawn guns on the other side of the door. “Hello … Good evening” seemed unlikely. “Finally, I said to myself, ‘There's only one way to find out. I'm paranoid at this moment. I probably exaggerated the sound.' So I say to myself, ‘Let's just go for it. Let's open the door and say, “Surprise!” ' ” His sense of humor may not have been quite that brash at that moment, but he did force himself to push through his fear. “There was a little moment of panic there,” he recalls.

Forsyth has one very pleasant memory from the minutes when he was stretched out on the floor. While he was on his back pushing and shoving the door ever so carefully and repeatedly, he heard the crackling noise of the Ali-Frazier fight broadcast in apartments. At a time when a smile didn't seem possible, he smiled. Ali and Frazier were helping, as the burglars had hoped they would.

Then, finally, success.

The door creaked—the sound he hated to cause but had to—as pressure on the bar pushed the inside cabinet forward ever so slightly while simultaneously causing the wooden door to crack. No resident had come down the stairs to go on an errand and stepped on his face while he was stretched out on the floor. Now he stood and, for several more minutes, very slowly and cautiously pushed the door until it was open just far enough for him to
squeeze inside. In the dark, he determined that no agents, with or without guns, were waiting for him inside the office. After he got in, and felt sure he was alone, he gently closed the now fragile door and slowly inched the tall double-door cabinet far enough away from the door that the inside team would be able to squeeze into the room with their big suitcases. He wore gloves, of course, throughout all these maneuvers.

Inside the dark office, he packed his supplies, hiding the big ones again inside his coat. He carefully eased the damaged door into its frame so that it appeared from the outside, if one did not examine it too carefully, to be closed and locked as usual. He walked to his car, took a few deep breaths, and drove to the motel.

He remembers that from the moment he arrived at the FBI office door the first time until he finished the job and returned to the motel the second time, the time that elapsed was “oh, a lifetime.” What was supposed to take thirty seconds had taken hours. “I screwed up the schedule, I know that. I'll bet they [the burglars waiting at the hotel] were sweating blood. I know I was.”

It would be an understatement to say that everyone was glad to see Forsyth when he arrived at the motel with good news this time—the door was unlocked, the office was ready to be entered. They had feared he would call again and say it was impossible to get in. When they saw his sweating but beaming face, it was clear he had been successful. This time he was greeted like a conquering hero. Forsyth told the inside crew of four—Williamson, Susan Smith, Ron Durst, and Janet Fessenden—that when they arrived at the office they would find an unlocked door that needed to be handled very gingerly. He answered their questions and then, drained from excessive relief, collapsed on one of the twin beds in the room. “It wasn't over, but the worst part was over for me. The chances of me getting busted had just dropped about seven million percent. Sure, I was worried about the other people, but, honestly, it's not as scary as when you're worried about yourself.” He realized there was danger ahead, including when he would be driving a car with suitcases full of stolen FBI files, but he “thought the probabilities of arrest then would be much less. I was a little bit nervous about driving down the road, but I knew I wouldn't speed, and we didn't have drugs in the car or any of that kind of stuff. I knew I looked like a respectable citizen. That was no big deal as far as I was concerned.” His big deal had just ended.

The next big deal was about to begin.

The inside crew members were driven to Media and dropped off near the front of the building. The drivers returned to the motel. During the draft
board raids, drivers of getaway cars sometimes sat in their vehicles near the site of each raid and waited for the raiders to complete the job. The Media group decided they should not risk doing that. They could not be sure how long the inside crew would be in the office. In such a small town, they assumed, people hanging around in cars for a long time late at night might arouse suspicion. They had done enough of that during casing. The cars they were using tonight, as per a plan developed by Davidon, had not been seen in the neighborhood before. Knowing no one was waiting for them outside increased the pressure on the inside crew—what if they needed to escape quickly?—but they all agreed that being dropped off probably was a safer way.

Each of the four members of the inside crew carried two large “trip size” suitcases as they walked down the sidewalk and up the three stairs to the front door of the
County Court Apartments building and then up the well-lit central stairwell. In stone silence, they awkwardly squeezed themselves and their suitcases through the FBI office door Forsyth had forced open. One of them shut it after all of them were inside. After their eyes adjusted to the darkness, they explored the rooms. Some cabinets and drawers were locked, others were not. They used screwdrivers to force open the ones that were locked.

Seldom even whispering, they opened every drawer and every cabinet door. They broke locks on some of them. Operating mostly in the dark, they did what they had planned to do: They reached inside the drawers and cabinet shelves and removed every piece of paper, except for a stack of blank personnel forms they left behind in a cabinet. Williamson shined a flashlight on their work as they requested from time to time. He had covered the flashlight with tape so it produced only a narrow, sharply focused beam. He concealed the beam completely with his hands as he moved from one person to another, offering light as needed. It was important that the flashlight beam not be seen from outside the building, especially from the windows that were visible to the courthouse guard across the street. Williamson occasionally turned off the flashlight and walked to the office windows to check whether anything unwanted—such as a police car—was on the streets below.

He remembers the time inside the FBI office as “very scary.” He had said yes immediately to Davidon when he proposed burglarizing an FBI office. But that did not mean Williamson had a casual attitude about the burglary. Far from it. “I was terrified before, during, and after.…Honestly, I think everyone was. We each had our own way of dealing with the fear. Mine was
trying to distract myself and others with humor.” But, given the weight of what they were doing in the FBI office, he gave no thought to telling one of his favorite shaggy-dog stories during the burglary, as he had during some draft board raids. Instead, like the others, he remembers being stoic and determined inside the FBI office, and utterly silent.

The burglars tried to unlock a small safe they found, but they gave up, realizing that a code was needed to open it. When every drawer and shelf was empty, except for a stack of personnel forms, and the suitcases were bulging, one of the burglars used a phone on an agent's desk to call the motel room. Forsyth recalls that the caller “made some cryptic spy remark like, ‘Okay,' and hung up.”

That's what the people at the motel were waiting for: the signal that the job was done, the inside crew was ready to be picked up. It was time to vacate the room at the motel and drive the getaway cars to Media to pick up the inside crew and the stolen files. Everyone in the motel room put on their coats, searched the room for any telltale belongings, and looked at one another knowingly. As the four inside crew members and Forsyth had done at the office, everyone had worn gloves while they were in the motel room. They felt confident there was no sign they had been there—unless, of course, someone checked the name of the person who had rented the room.

When the right number of minutes had elapsed—they had carefully timed how long the drive from the motel to the FBI building would take—the inside crew looked around the dark rooms they had just relieved of files. They left the office as quietly as they could. The suitcases were now quite heavy, and it took more effort to squeeze out through the narrow doorway than it had to squeeze in. The last burglar out set down his suitcases and eased the damaged door against the damaged frame so it looked as normal as possible under the circumstances.

The most important stage of the burglary had just been completed. The four members of the inside crew had in their possession what they had come for—all the files in the Media FBI office. Now they would place the stolen files safely into car trunks and take them to the remote farmhouse that had been loaned to Davidon by a friend who didn't ask and wasn't told why Davidon wanted access to the house for a couple weeks.

Feeling some trepidation, the inside team slowly carried the heavy suitcases down the stairs. They waited briefly in the well-lit space inside the front door. Right on time, the getaway cars arrived. Two of the drivers arrived and parked, as planned, on Veterans Square, just a few yards from the entrance of the FBI building. The inside crew members walked to the
cars, opened the trunks, lifted the heavy suitcases, placed them inside, and then got in the cars themselves.

In another car, Bonnie Raines was about to become a decoy. She parked in the center of the street, a few car lengths behind the waiting parked cars and served as a distraction. She got out and lifted the hood, fiddled with the engine, and was prepared to tell any police officer who might stop and question her that her car wouldn't start. She would say she was trying to figure out what was wrong. If necessary, she was prepared to try to engage police officers in conversation about her “problem” long enough to distract them from noticing the people who were placing large suitcases in the trunks of parked cars.

She closed the hood on her “disabled” car. The ruse was not needed. No police car drove up, nor did any other car except the burglars'. That part of their plan had worked perfectly. Smith and she drove to the Swarthmore parking lot.

Forsyth, seated in one of the getaway cars as it was being loaded, remembers watching the courthouse guard as he stood inside the glass front door of the courthouse and looked directly at what was taking place: four people struggling with two suitcases each as they placed them in waiting cars. “He was standing right there,” Forsyth recalls, still amazed years later at the circumstance. “I remember him in his uniform. At the moment these guys were coming out of the building and putting the suitcases in the cars, he was standing there looking out the window, watching it all happen.…We had tried to figure out how we could avoid being seen by him, but there was nothing we could do about it. We decided there was no way to avoid him seeing us. And there he was, seeing it all.”

During questioning by FBI agents the next day and at least two more times over the next two months, the courthouse guard on duty that night told agents he saw nothing unusual take place late the evening of March 8 in front of the building that housed the FBI office. Perhaps he was watching mindlessly, as the burglars had hoped. Or perhaps he had a radio tuned to the Ali-Frazier fight and was distracted. Whatever the case, he claimed he saw nothing.

The burglars drove the loaded getaway cars to waiting parked cars a few miles away in various directions from Media. The suitcases were transferred to those cars. Davidon had added this extra layer of caution. As per his plan, this transfer meant the stolen files would travel to the farmhouse in cars that had never been seen near the FBI office.

Bonnie Raines and Smith arrived at the empty—except for John Raines
in the maroon Raines family station wagon—parking lot at Swarthmore College and parked alongside him. During the hours he spent alone in the dark station wagon waiting for them, the intense, stomach-knotting fear John had felt for several weeks seemed to be more than justified. He imagined terrible scenarios for why Smith and Bonnie had been delayed more than three hours. He was enormously relieved when they arrived. The suitcases were transferred from Smith's car to the Raineses' station wagon.

They set out for the farm.

IN MEDIA
, the verdict was not clear. Having taken enormous risks and pulled off the burglary, the burglars left town with no idea whether their suitcases were stuffed with anything other than heavy piles of uninteresting, unimportant bureaucratic files.

In New York, the verdict was very clear: Frazier won, Ali lost.

As the world watched, Ali did not “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee,” as he had in the past and had predicted he would that night. Frazier's victory happened about the time the burglars were placing FBI files into the getaway cars. After forty-three minutes in the ring, in the fifteenth round, Ali, exhausted, took a hammerlike left hook to his jaw that lifted him off his feet. He crashed to the metal floor, causing a thunderclap that made fans cringe. He was on his feet in three seconds. But the fight was over. He had taken the worst beating of his career. It was a “savage attack,”
New York Times
sports reporter
Dave Anderson wrote. “It lifted Ali off his feet and dumped him on his back, his legs straight up,” wrote
Dave Kindred.

The atmosphere was wild and crazy throughout the fight, Anderson wrote the next day. A man in the audience died of a heart attack in the midst of the excitement.

The hearts of millions of people were broken when Ali lost. His defeat symbolized the defeat many feared for themselves in struggles then taking place for justice, basic rights, and the fight to end the war in Vietnam. Antiwar activists throughout the world felt dejected when they saw their hero lose. But probably no one felt the loss more acutely than young African Americans.
Bryant Gumbel, then a recent college graduate living in a third-floor walk-up in New York and not yet a television journalist, described the impact: “I nearly died that night. I just died because this was a night when it all came together. If Ali lost, it was as though everything I believed in was wrong.…I was devastated. It was awful. I felt as though everything
I stood for had been beaten down and trampled.…It was a terrible night. I'll never forget it as long as I live.”