Heading for the Last Roundup

By Claudia Wallis

A widening dragnet surrounds the radical underground

It began as a Brink's job, gorier than most, botched but otherwise routine. As police and FBI agents scrutinized the facts, the fingerprints and the getaway-car license plates, however, something larger, more complex, yet weirdly familiar stared back at them. The suspects were specters from a radical past: members of the Weather Underground, soldiers of the Black Liberation Army, onetime Black Panthers. They included half-forgotten radicals, fugitives who had been running so long that no one bothered to chase them any more. More than a week after the $1.6 million armored-car holdup near Nyack, N.Y., in which two policemen and a Brink's guard were killed, investigators were still rounding up ghosts of the old left and exploring how the disparate and perhaps desperate groups had joined together in so ill-conceived a plot. More than ever, they were wondering why.

In fleeing the bloody holdup, the Brink's bandits had literally made tracks. To begin with, there were plenty of witnesses to the blitzkrieg-style heist at Nanuet National Bank, just outside Nyack. There were also witnesses to the police Shootout near by that had led to the capture of Weather Undergrounders Katherine Boudin, 38, David Gilbert, 37, and Judith Clark, 31, as well as Accomplice Samuel Brown, 41, a career criminal. In addition, guns and getaway cars were easily traced to the names of other suspects and to the addresses of their safe houses. The houses, in turn, provided authorities with "boxes and boxes" of further evidence. "It was a gold mine," said one exultant investigator. "When these people are underground, one of them invariably thinks he or she is going to write the new Das Kapital. So they write every damn thing down, and sometimes they tape it all. You'd think they would have learned from Nixon."

By mining the Underground's gold, police were able to move swiftly and surely. First to be snared in the dragnet were Samuel Smith, 37, and Nathaniel Burns, 35, following a gunfight with arresting officers in which Smith was killed. The pair had been spotted in New York City on a Queens highway. They were riding in a car bearing a license plate seen on another car at the Nyack Shootout. Last week their connection with the robbery was confirmed by a souvenir found in Smith's pocket: a spent .38-cal. bullet, which had apparently failed to penetrate the bulletproof vest he was wearing. The slug was traced to the gun of Sergeant Edward O'Grady, one of the two policemen killed in Nyack. "Very strong evidence," said Rockland County District Attorney Kenneth Gribetz. Burns was believed to be a member of the Black Liberation Army (see box). His possible involvement gave investigators their first inkling that the Weather Underground had not acted alone.

Next to be nabbed were two more members of the Weather Underground Organization: Jeffrey Carl Jones, 34, and Eleanor Stein Raskin, 35. Their Bronx address had been found on a piece of paper in one of the safe houses. Jones, like Boudin, was one of the five original members of the Weather Bureau, W.U.O.'s governing council. He and Raskin, who have a four-year-old son, were arraigned in New York last week on a 1979 charge for possession of explosives. Raskin was later released on $ 100,000 bail posted by her brother. The couple have not been linked with the Brink's job.

But Eve Rosahn has. Rosahn, 30, owned a tan Honda and had rented a red Chevrolet van used by the Nyack thieves. Investigators found a rental agreement for another car, signed by Rosahn, in a search of Boudin's apartment. Last week Rosahn was indicted as an accessory in the robbery and three killings in Nyack. District Attorney Gribetz asked that no bail be set for the activist. "She's an individual who would flee the jurisdiction," he said. In fact, Rosahn had been temporarily freed only days earlier on $10,000 bail posted by her radical-minded mother, in connection with an antiapartheid rioting charge. Rosahn's alleged complicity provided a clearer link with a third leftist group, the May 19 Coalition, a Weather Underground offshoot that is believed to include Boudin and Clark.

The richest stash of evidence was found at an apartment building in Mount Vernon, N.Y., where police had spotted one of the getaway cars used in the Brink's job, a tan Ford. Inside the building, investigators found bloodstained clothing, incriminating fingerprints and a very observant superintendent named Dennis Vasquez. Vasquez told police and federal agents that just hours before their arrival, he had seen five people load the contents of an apartment into a tan van and other vehicles. From photographs, he and his wife identified the five: Cynthia Priscilla Boston, 33, and her common-law husband, William Johnson, 33; Samuel Smith; Donald Weems, 35, an escaped convict, former Black Panther and suspected Black Liberation Army member; and Marilyn Jean Buck, 34, chief gunrunner and the only white member of the B.L.A. Buck had already been linked to the case, since two safe houses and one set of getaway-car license plates had been traced to her two known aliases. Boston's involvement implicated yet a fourth revolutionary organization: the black separatist Republic of New Africa.

The trail of the tan van carried federal agents to New Orleans, where Boston and Johnson live, and then on to rural Gallman, Miss., 30 miles south of Jackson. At a local farmhouse they found and arrested Boston. Wisely, she did not resist. Surrounding the house was a small army of 50 G-men, four SWAT teams, two tanks and, overhead, two helicopters. Another 50 agents and two more tanks were stationed near by. Boston, who prefers the name Fulani Sunni-Ali to what she calls her "slave name," is the minister of information for the R.N.A. The farmhouse was apparently used by the group to give paramilitary training to teenagers.

Johnson eluded federal authorities and is thus one of several people still being sought by a special FBI-police task force tracing the Nyack leads. There are at least four others: Weems, Buck, Anthony Laborde, 31, a B.L.A. member identified by witnesses as a participant in the robbery, and Joanne Chesimard, 34, the charismatic leader of the B.L.A. who escaped from prison in New Jersey two years ago with the help, police suspect, of Laborde, Burns and Buck. Chesimard is not, however, directly implicated in the Brink's heist.

Boston's arrest, on charges of conspiracy in connection with the robbery, was the seventh directly tied to the case. Late last week she was extradited to New York, where the other six had already been arraigned. At the arraignments, conducted under security so heavy that one official described the courtroom as an "armed fortress," several of the suspects complained that police had abused them. Burns' counsel, well-known liberal Attorney William Kunstler, claimed that his client had been beaten, burned with cigars, choked with chains, half-drowned in a toilet and subjected to a few games of Russian roulette. Deputy Police Commissioner Alice McGillion termed the charges "a classic William Kunstler tactic" designed to divert attention from "three cold-blooded killings." Brown, Gilbert, Clark and Boudin are expected to face indictments for the murders within three weeks. Their lawyers, TIME has learned, plan to argue that the Nyack incident was a Government setup devised to frame longtime radicals.

The involvement of the Weather Underground in the Nyack killings is, in several respects, a strange and unsettling departure for the group. Despite their fire bombs and firebrand rhetoric (an early manifesto: "We will loot and burn and destroy. We are the incubation of your mothers' nightmares"), the W.U.O. usually took pains not to spill blood. Emile de Antonio, who made a 1975 movie about the organization, said he admired "the tender loving care with which their bombings were executed. No one was ever hurt, and they were all directed against the symbols of oppression and authority."

Also new was the involvement of the all-white Weather Underground with black radicals. The two factions had not trusted each other in the 1970s. Black organizations, argued the security-obsessed Weathermen, had been successfully penetrated by the FBI, a fate the W.U.O. wanted to a void." We had what we called gut recognition," a former Weatherman told TIME last week. "We checked each other out all the time to make sure that we didn't have a rat in our midst. We were never penetrated."

The Nyack holdup demonstrates yet another odd departure for the Weather Underground: carelessness. For more than a decade, the group had been an embarrassment to U.S. law enforcement authorities. Boudin, Bernardine Dohrn and others were on the Most Wanted list in the early 1970s, and while the FBI was able to track their occasional comings and goings to Cuba, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the bureau was never able to bring them in. The xenophobic closeness of the organization, so extreme that "they have intermarried like a royal family," according to onetime Radical Jane Alpert, protected them. Yet law enforcement officials say the Nyack job was sloppy. "You always use stolen vehicles for a big stick-up," one observer pointed out. According to Kenneth Walton, head of the FBI's New York office, the bungled holdup enabled law officers to make more progress against the fugitives in a week than they had in years.

Some students of the Underground believe that the urge to merge was inspired by the successful example of radical groups overseas. West Germany's Baader-Meinhof gang, Italy's Red Brigades, Japan's Red Army and other terrorist groups united five years ago, after they concluded that their individual strength was ebbing, a problem the American groups felt acutely. Exactly when and how the Weather Underground got together with the B.L.A., the R.N.A. and the May 19 Coalition, however, remains unknown. But as law enforcement officials continued to examine the evidence last week, they found signs that the organizations may have joined forces to carry out a number of other robberies dating back to early 1980. Gilbert's fingerprint, for instance, was found on a rental agreement for a van used in a Brink's heist in The Bronx last June. Other evidence connects Boudin with two 1980 robberies, one in Inwood. N. Y., and another in The Bronx, in which B.L.A. and R.N.A. members are also suspects. Said Detective Lieut. Shaun Spillane of the Nassau County, N.Y., police: "I'm sure it's the same people involved in all the robberies."

Does that mean that there is a dangerous new fount of terrorism in the U.S.? Or that the Nyack robbery presages a new wave of radical violence? Not very likely. Despite the large amount of money sought by the Nyack robbers, authorities doubt that they represent a large or powerful movement. Said FBI Spokesman Roger Young: "It's possible that we have it all, though it's hard to tell this early." J. Bowyer Bell, head of the Washington-based Interna tional Analysis Center and an expert on political violence, agrees. The total membership of the Weather Underground, he says, would hardly "fill a large living room." The B.L.A. has "a maximum of 20 members, more likely 15." Thus, concludes Bell, the new radical coalition is merely "a desperate residue of 30 to 40 similar people who represent nobody. They are an aberration and we are seeing its death thores.

With reporting by Dean Brelis, David S. Jackson

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