An American Radical Page 3

  When the mother of one of our members died, we had a big debate about whether or not she should attend the funeral. We all had seen the movies where the FBI was crouching behind tombstones waiting for a fugitive to show up. Several years earlier when I had been aboveground, I had attended the funeral of a member of the Black Panthers who had been in a terrible gun battle with the NYPD. FBI agents in helicopters surveilling the people followed the funeral procession to the cemetery in attendance. We had worked so hard to create a clandestine space with a network of apartments, cars, and contacts that we were loath to take the risk. But in the end, she went. It was the right decision, it was the humane decision. Her father was very glad that she came. And she was not put in jeopardy. There were no police or FBI at the funeral, no overt or covert surveillance of any kind.

  It was hard to let down the wall that we had constructed between our past and present lives. I missed my parents and wanted to see them. Through an elaborate maze of procedures that included lipstick scrawled on a hotel mirror, indicating that it was safe to go, we contacted my parents and invited them into the underground. They came for a weekend. My mother said that all the precautions were right out of a John Le Carré novel. We shared our world over two days, talking inside an upscale motel. My parents were worried for my safety. They were afraid that someone would get hurt. They vehemently disagreed with the choices that I had made, and they urged me to leave the country. They had been visited by the FBI and threatened with jail themselves if they failed to turn me in. And yet, they risked themselves for their love of me.

  I did not leave the country. Instead, I kept going. On that awful and cold day in November when I was on the New Jersey Turnpike with Tim, there was no immediate, specific plan to use the explosives. We were moving them into storage for an unspecified future time and purpose. We were stockpiling arms for the distant revolution that we all had convinced ourselves would come soon.

  I ended up on that highway because I had been a part of something that had taken hold of my imagination and heart, a world of infinite possibility that would free us all. I believed that there was no other more appealing avenue in life than to be an activist, a revolutionary who worked for justice. I knew from my reading of history that it was only through people actively trying to change the balance of forces, or a war, that made power concede to a demand. Intermixed with what I saw as lofty goals were other psychological factors. I wanted to be loved, to be rewarded, to be an outlaw, and to reject conformity. Was it rebellion or a rejection of authority, or had I fallen in love with the romantic idea that justice was pure and that goodness would not be affected by the means? Was all this intense activism a way to fill the spiritual hole that I felt from being born in America, which I considered to be a morally empty landscape? No matter what, I could not see the long distance I had traveled from my commitment to justice and equality to stockpiling guns and dynamite. Seeing that would take years.

  That night on the New Jersey Turnpike, I still believed with all my heart that what Che Guevara7 had said about revolutionaries being motivated by love was true, and that by being willing to die for the cause we were simply embodying the ideals that we were striving for. I also believed that our government ruled the world by force and that it was necessary to oppose it with force. I felt that we lived in a country that loved violence and that we had to meet it on its own terms. This is why I was moving explosives on the New Jersey Turnpike with Tim Blunk.

  Chapter 2

  Arrested

  AS IT GOT darker and darker that cold and blustery evening, I was filled with a terrible sense of foreboding. It was mad to be moving so many weapons all at once, in bad weather, by ourselves, and especially when I was on the most wanted list. My bad feeling grew worse and worse. Weighing the danger to others and ourselves, Tim and I debated whether to stop at a motel and wait until daylight before moving on. We kept going because we did not want the explosives to sit in the U-Haul any longer than necessary. Leaving the turnpike, we took the back roads, away from people.

  The hours that followed are a blur in my memory. But what happened that evening after Thanksgiving was the end of one lifetime and the beginning of another. My mistake leading to our arrest was simple. It was so simple that I have never been able to get over it. I had rented the storage place with an ID card that I had found in a wallet left mistakenly in a phone booth. Instead of using the name and changing the address, I used the ID itself. When the storage company called the number on the card to confirm the rental, they were told that no one by that name had rented any such space. The company had then notified the police, and when I called again to confirm the arrangements, they insisted on knowing the exact time of our arrival.

  When Tim and I finally pulled in, it was pitch dark and very cold. The storage space was deserted and we could not get the combination to the front entrance to work. I had to get help from the manager to open the lock. It was a large place with rows of sheds. The whole area was isolated from any residential neighborhood and surrounded by a fifteen-foot-high chain-link fence topped by a small row of razor wire. As we were unloading the U-Haul, a lone police car cruised down our aisle. Out came one police officer, who proceeded to walk into the shed.

  The rookie officer who questioned us was as scared as we were. I had left a gun in the car while we were unloading the U-Haul and I knew that if we were going to control the situation I had to go back to the car and get it. I told the officer that I wanted to show him my ID, but I had left it in the car. I nearly begged him to let me get it. Tim stood in the storage space, trying to prevent the policeman from seeing the weapons and explosives. The policeman told me to get my ID. I quickly walked back to the car, opened the passenger door, and reached down under the seat to find the gun exactly where I had put it. My hand grasped the barrel and then the handle. I felt the cold steel. I looked around to analyze our location, to see if there was any place to exit. I left the gun on the floor of the car, turned around, and went back inside. My ID had been in my bag all along.

  I could not bring myself to use the gun. For all of my bravado, I did not want to shoot a police officer, or anyone else. I had never shot or killed or hurt anyone, all I had done was target practice. I did want to run or help create a diversion so that Tim could run, but Tim was trying to pull the sheeting over several boxes on the ground. Surprisingly, the cop did not pull his gun. As he was asking us who we were and what we were doing there, I could see that he was younger than we were. He seemed to be stalling for time, waiting for backup. It all happened so fast. The rookie had made a call, and then other police officers arrived within minutes. The moment they saw the dynamite and the guns, they went crazy. The police kept running between the shed where we had unloaded most of the dynamite to the back end of the U-Haul, which had both doors wide open. They were shouting on their car radios, while some of them drew their guns and ran off to search other aisles in the storage area. The police were yelling at us and at one another. They were afraid of the explosives and the ensuing pandemonium intensified their fear.

  Several officers kicked Tim to the ground, until he lay in a pool of blood and mud. I was handcuffed, slapped, and shoved into the backseat of a police car. Seeing Tim on the ground and scores of police officers running back and forth between the U-Haul, the storage space, and us, hearing their shouts, feeling their fear and hatred, and knowing that in the chaos there was absolutely no escape, I slipped into a mental state in which I was no longer there at all. When a short man, a policeman with black hair and garlicky bad breath jammed his double-barreled pump-action shotgun into my temple and started screaming at me, the woman I was vanished. Suddenly I was surveying the scene above the action, and what I saw was a woman at the very absolute end of her life. I shut my eyes. I did not want to look anymore.

  “Where the fuck is the backup? Where are the others? You cunt,” he shouted hysterically, repeatedly punching me in the temple with the barrel of the gun. My eye was running, and I could not see as I turned that th
e barrel had turned with me and moved to the center of my forehead. I looked straight into his eyes, but he could not meet my stare. He just kept screaming, “You bitch, where’s the backup?” My head was throbbing.

  I felt as if I was emerging from a tunnel when I shocked myself by screaming, “Do it, motherfucker, just do it right now! Kill me and then it will be done!” I thought it, felt it, and meant it. I was calling for death, but my words had an unintended effect—they shocked him, and broke his hysteria. I wanted to die at that point. I felt everything that was happening at that moment was my fault, I wanted him to shoot me rather than be captured.

  He did not pull the trigger, but he resumed hitting me, hard. First he hit me on one side of the head and then the other. Then he slid out of the seat, threw the shotgun on the ground, stuck his head back in the car, and spat on me, his saliva dripping down my cheek.

  A few hours later in the New Jersey State Police barracks, the agents from the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF), the New Jersey state troopers, and the Cherry Hill, New Jersey, police knew that they had made a significant arrest. They knew it because of the guns and dynamite they had captured. We had shotguns and automatic rifles, false identification, and explosives. There had been a three-year hunt for more than twenty different radicals, but they did not know that we were among the most wanted.

  They did not know who we were and Tim and I would not tell them. We would not say anything. We were not cooperating. The police fingerprinted us, but they had to fly our prints to Washington, D.C., and wait for them to be identified. For some reason it took more than fourteen hours to get the results. While the police waited, we were kept in separate rooms, each of us chained to a chair. The agents from the ATF used the good cop/bad cop routine. They pummeled us with questions for hours at a time, and then offered us water (but no access to a bathroom). It was a very long fourteen hours, perhaps the longest I have ever spent. I replayed bits and pieces of my life. I was thinking about how eventually my parents would find out about my arrest and I wondered what they would do. I remembered my mother pleading with me to leave the country. Getting arrested was my fault, I thought, and I knew that everyone in my group would be angry with me. My wrists hurt from the handcuffs, my head was pounding from the earlier blows.

  When who I thought was an FBI agent finally walked into the interrogation room, he stared at me so intensely that his eyes felt like they were drilling into my skull. His eyes darted back and forth across my face and then locked into mine. Then his lips curled and he said, “This bitch is a kike. Get the fugitive posters and find the kikes.” As soon as he left, other agents brought a poster into the room and held it to my face, trying to find a match. Poster after poster followed, but within minutes they had identified me.

  The FBI agent returned and said, “I can always tell a kike. At least now we know it’s the kikes, the ones with the niggers.”

  As I sat chained, waiting for something else to happen, everything in the physical world receded and slow-moving pictures replaced the dirty, windowless room, the stale air, and the overwhelming ache to urinate. The sweet odor of my fear and anger filtered to my nose. My mind had retreated off again into its own world. I was on an inner journey that the police in the room could not begin to understand or even detect.

  I was catapulted back to a childhood memory of my best friend’s mother handing me a tuna fish sandwich, her housecoat sleeve riding up her arm to expose a tattooed number on her wrist. Eight years old, I questioned her. “What is that? Why is that on your wrist? Why don’t you wash it off?”

  She answered, “I can’t wash it off.”

  I persisted. “Why?”

  “It’s from the concentration camp.”

  “What’s that? Why did you go there?”

  Her answer was short and clipped. “Because we are Jewish.”

  Later my mother explained to me what the camps were and who the Nazis were, the bad people hating us because we were Jewish. “Did we do something bad?” I asked. “Are we bad? Did we kill them first?” No. “Did you know other people in the camps?” Yes, my mom knew other people, and I knew some of them, as well. She explained that many of the people from our family had been exterminated in the camps. Exterminated? Like the termites in the house, like the TV commercial? I wondered. Her answers did not make me fully understand, but learning about genocide when I was eight years old dug into my soul so that, twenty years later, chained to a chair in the New Jersey State Police barracks, my wrists were aching and I recalled that tattoo on my friend’s mother’s arm.

  Next in my mind, the picture of a young black man hanging by the neck appeared. I was remembering an old newspaper photograph on the cover of an album. My aunt was explaining it to me. Billie Holiday’s song “Strange Fruit” about “the lynching of black people in the South and the tattoos and Nazi concentration camps were part of the same thing,” she had said. White people and black people, Nazis and Jews, in my eight-year-old mind it was a strange but simple equation.

  Images started tumbling, each one faster than the other, and memories of being Jewish that I had long forgotten. Upstairs in the synagogue in the back with all the other women. Why did we have to sit behind an ugly curtain? My grandfather swaying back and forth, praying one morning while I hid behind the door and spied on him. Standing on the boardwalk watching hundreds of old people walk to the water to wash away their sins and remember the dead. (Even then I understood that sin was doing bad.) Then lighting the candles for the dead. Hearing a mix of Yiddish and English sounds both foreign and familiar, with my grandmother’s sweet chicken soup spread before us.

  As I sat in the barracks under interrogation, waiting to be identified, my own relationship to my Judaism was irrevocably changed. Calling me a kike, this is Jew hating, I thought, and it is the beginning of my captured life. An internal vista opened in my head, and in that instant I owned it. I smiled at those government agents, those hateful, racist, anti-Semitic white men, because with their bigoted selves they had enabled me to shore up a wealth of inner resistance. When the FBI agent sneered, “Rosenberg,” I shot back, “That’s right.”

  I was labeled not just a “kike,” but a “terrorist kike”—a label that was never to change. In the government’s lexicon at the time, the only thing more extreme than a “kingpin narco-trafficker” was a terrorist, particularly a leftist terrorist. When it became known that I was a wanted fugitive in the Brink’s robbery case and was on the FBI’s most wanted list, my fate as far as the criminal justice system was concerned was sealed.

  Chapter 3

  Detention

  AFTER WHAT SEEMED like an eternity, the next morning Tim and I were taken to our arraignment in Camden, New Jersey. The courtroom was filled with more armed agents than I had ever seen in any other courtroom before. We were charged with conspiracy to possess and transport weapons, explosives, and false identification across state lines. We pled not guilty and said we were revolutionaries. At first, bail was set for each of us at five million dollars, but later in that same proceeding bail was revoked and we were held over, pending a formal indictment. Some time after the arraignment was over, Tim and I were bundled into cars and driven at one hundred miles an hour to the New York Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in Manhattan. The building, a large concrete structure amidst many government buildings, including the courts, sits in downtown Manhattan. Bordering it on one side is the Brooklyn Bridge and Chinatown on the other. It had a brutal appearance to me as we drove down the back street to the underground entrance. Helicopters buzzed overhead, and the blaring sirens and flashing lights pierced through the late-night quiet. Our arrival was being announced. We were the prize catch and everyone had to be made aware of it.

  We had not eaten or washed our hands or been alone for two days. Tim and I had not been able to speak to each other. We had only gazed at each other in abject shame, with profound feelings of defeat and an occasional burst of defiance. We had been screamed at continuously a
nd beaten up. We were emotionally and physically exhausted. Earlier someone had lifted me off the ground by my handcuffs, so as we stood at the elevators my arms, cuffed behind my back, were aching. When no one was looking, I slipped out of the cuffs. One hand at a time came out easily. It was my first mental game with capture, and it made me feel alive to give in to the thrilling desire to escape. Up until that moment, for most of the time, I had had the overwhelming desire to be dead.

  Our identification with wanted black revolutionaries had provoked the police and the FBI into a state of frenzy. Their adrenaline production was in overdrive and they wanted to dispose of us so that they could get to work hunting down our associates. After we were booked, photographed, and deposited into detention, they locked us up in the bull pens. It was time for “cold cooking,” a term I did not know then, but a reality that I would come to experience again and again. It meant being left to stew in a cold, isolated, and extremely uncomfortable environment. It could last for two or three days. Here I was shoved into a federal holding cell, empty, dark, and enormous. It had a closed front, the wall only marked by a heavy metal door with a very small window in it. Several marble benches, incongruous amid the dinginess, ran the length of the walls; two more sat in the middle of the room. The architecture was imperial decay, which struck me as funny, particularly when I noticed the steel toilet in a corner caked with urine and filth. There were messages carved wall to wall—tito was here, sam, shit, pete fucks agnes—all with distinct markings. As I examined them, it occurred to me that they were the modern equivalent of hieroglyphics. I understood the need to make a mark, to leave a message, to scream out loud in this disembodied hole, “I was here. Don’t let me disappear.” Then I saw one that read long live black liberation. It relieved me greatly to see this one. I was not the first political person who laid on that bench. It was such a simple thing, yet it gave me much comfort. It was a sign that allowed me to temporarily put aside all the terrible feelings of pain and loss—the agony over the possibility that others would get caught as a result of our mistakes—that I had experienced since my arrest.