The Radical Bank Job

At first the holdup in a suburban Boston bank seemed commonplace enough. Early one morning last week, a woman and two men robbed the Brighton branch office of the State Street Bank and Trust Co. of $26,000, spraying the outside of the bank with gunfire as they fled. During the escape, an accomplice who was waiting across the street gunned down Boston Patrolman Walter A. Schroeder, who died 24 hours later. However violent, the incident would probably have attracted little attention outside of Boston if the police had not produced some startling evidence.

From photographs taken by a camera in the bank, police identified one of the robbers as Robert Valeri, an ex-convict. Arrested that evening, Valeri in turn named Susan Saxe, a graduate of Brandeis University, near Boston, and Stanley Bond and William Gilday Jr., both ex-convicts, as other members of the holdup gang. He also implicated Katherine Power, a student activist at Brandeis, as a fifth member of the band. When police searched her apartment, they found evidence that seemed to link her to the fire-bombing and robbery of a National Guard armory in Newburyport, Mass., the previous Sunday.

Boston Police Commissioner Edmund McNamara immediately raised the possibility of a "damned radical, damned revolutionary" plot involving more than the five suspects. Others questioned the greater-conspiracy theory, but suggested that three of the bank robbers were bent on using the loot to finance their radical cause. Though novel in the U.S. today, the idea is not entirely new. Quebec separatist terrorists have long been suspected of robbing Montreal banks in order to support their movement. Some South American revolutionaries have tried similar capers. But if the plot theory is correct, it could represent a basic departure in radical tactics. Fire-bombing banks and other capitalist institutions to tear down the Establishment is one thing; robbing them to finance the cause is something else again. At the very least, the Brighton job seems to have been the work of a strange alliance of underworld and radical academe.

Braless and Barefoot. Kathy Power, 21, was the suspect with the deepest commitment to radical politics. A sociology major with an excellent academic record, she was frequently involved in demonstrations, including S.D.S. rallies. Her passport indicated a recent trip to Cuba. Last spring she emerged as a mainstay of the Brandeis Strike Information Center, which was established in the wake of the Cambodian incursion as a clearinghouse for information about student strikes all over the U.S. While the majority of the students working at the center were moderates, much of the real leadership was composed of radicals.

Kathy insisted that the operation be run as a collective, with no recognized spokesmen or managers. But shouts of "Kathy, Kathy!" were always in the air as students looked to her for guidance. She usually went braless and barefoot, her brown shoulder-length hair falling onto an orange smock. In Kathy's Back Bay apartment, police said, they found a field telephone switchboard, three rifles, a carbine, a pistol and a shotgun, along with an arsenal of ammunition. At least one item, the switchboard, was identified as belonging to the looted armory.

The other suspects in the improbable mob:

SUSAN SAXE, 20. "If someone had asked me which Brandeis student was involved with guns, the last person I would have guessed was Susan," says a friend who has known her since Susan transferred from the University of Syracuse in 1968. It was only within the past year that Susan, a magna cum laude graduate last spring, became involved in such activities as Women's Liberation, the New Haven Panther rally and the Brandeis Strike Information Center.

STANLEY BOND, 25. A Viet Nam veteran with a long history of crime, which was said to include stickups of banks, gas stations and Western Union offices, Bond enrolled at Brandeis last February after completing a special rehabilitation program at Massachusetts' Walpole Prison called Student Tutor Education Program (STEP). Described as being obsessed by his criminal past, Bond searched for clues to his personality in French existentialist literature and in his own writing--he had started a movie script and was planning a novel. Though he apparently had no previous political interests, Bond recently became deeply involved in the student strike center, possibly as a result of dating Kathy Power.

WILLIAM GILDAY JR., 41. Also a participant in STEP and a former inmate at Walpole, where he met Bond, Gilday, from all indications, was more a seasoned small-time crook than a revolutionary. He had spent the past seven years in prison for robbing a variety store, and has a police record dating from 1955. There was some speculation that Gilday was cut in on the bank job not because of his politics but because of his criminal expertise.

ROBERT VALERI, 21. Another Walpole alumnus, Valeri was recently paroled after serving two years for attempted breaking and entering. He, too, was a graduate of STEP and, like Gilday, was scheduled to begin classes at Boston's Northeastern University. Arrested outside his home in Boston, he was charged with first-degree murder and armed robbery.

Remaining Suspects. With only Valeri in custody, Boston police, Massachusetts state troopers and FBI agents combed the Northeast for the remaining suspects. Bond, Saxe and Power are believed to have fled in Susan Saxe's black Volkswagen. Late last week a man identified as Gilday stole a car at gunpoint in New Hampshire and was later spotted by police near Lowell, Mass. After a high-speed chase and gun battle in which one policeman was wounded, he wrecked his car but managed to escape once more.

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