Bullets from the Underground

A bloody robbery attempt brings a roundup of ’60s fugitives

The armored Brink’s truck pulled up to the Nanuet National Bank near suburban Nyack, N. Y., shortly before 4 p.m. and two guards began loading $1.6 million in cash. Suddenly three armed men in ski masks jumped out of a red van and opened fire. One guard was killed instantly and the other critically wounded. The three bandits and an accomplice dashed off with the loot. “They didn’t even ask them to hand over the money,” declared an incredulous witness. “They just blasted away.”

The robbers changed conveyances at a nearby shopping center and a few minutes later ran smack into a police roadblock. Two Nyack police officers who had stopped the lead vehicle, an orange U-Haul van, were shot dead by figures who leaped from the back of the van. Several of the suspects jumped into a second getaway car, a tan Honda. After it crashed three miles away, four people were arrested and all of the $1.6 million was recovered. A third car, a white Oldsmobile, sped away and was later found abandoned. Authorities began searching with bloodhounds and helicopters for an additional four to eight fugitives.

Except for the murderous fusillades, the botched Brink’s job seemed a routine case. But as police and federal agents began to examine it closely, they found themselves back in the 1960s rummaging through the stale and dusty catacombs of Viet Nam-era radicalism.

When fingerprinted, one of the four in custody turned out to be Katherine Boudin, 38, a leading activist in the violent Weather Underground movement of that period and a fugitive from justice for eleven years. Once on the FBI’s “Most Wanted” list for her participation in the 1969 “Days of Rage” demonstrations in Chicago, Boudin no longer faced federal charges, but was liable for prosecution in Illinois for jumping bail. She had been in hiding since March 6, 1970, when a Greenwich Village town house used as a Weather Underground bomb factory accidentally exploded, killing three group members. Boudin and a comrade, Cathlyn Wilkerson, fled naked from the burning wreckage. Wilkerson turned herself in ten years later and is now serving a three-year sentence for criminally negligent homicide. Most of the other leading Weather radicals had already surrendered, generally to face fines and suspended sentences. Among them: William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, who came in from the cold in Chicago last December.

Two other suspects, both pulled from the Honda, were also Weather Undergrounders: Judith Clark, 31, and David Gilbert, 37. Clark had served 18 months in jail for the Days of Rage. Living in Manhattan for the past ten years, she has recently been associated with the all-female May 19 Coalition, a group that takes its name from the common birthday of Malcolm X and Ho Chi Minh and fancies itself as a support team for clandestine black liberation terrrorist organizations. The fourth suspect, Samuel Brown, 41, who was injured in the crash, is an ex-convict with a 23-year police record.

As authorities began following up on leads in the Nyack crime, they found links to an ever widening circle of radicals and outlaws, perhaps including members of the Black Liberation Army, a recently resurgent ’70s group dedicated to the killing of police officers. The license plate on the abandoned Oldsmobile, for example, led to an apartment in East Orange, N. J. There a six-hour search turned up a cache of weapons and explosives, a manual on making bombs and hand-drawn floor plans of six New York City police stations. In a Bronx apartment, state and federal investigators found a similar arsenal and diagrams, plus a newspaper dated one day after the robbery—indicating that someone had been there since the shootout. Both apartments were vacant when raided, but had been rented in the name of Nina Lewis, an alias police believe is being used by Marilyn Jean Buck, 34, another radical on the lam. Buck is known to have been a gunrunner for the B.L.A. and is believed to be its only white member.

The Honda was traced to another longtime activist. In the Brooklyn flat of Eve Rosahn, 30, detectives found a stack of leftist pamphlets and a poster of fugitive B.L.A. Ringmaster Joanne Chesimard, 34. Rosahn, it happens, was arraigned in Queens criminal court last week for violent demonstrations against a U.S. tour by South Africa’s Springboks rugby team in September.

As the investigation continued, police rounded up more suspects. Two men were spotted in Queens in a car connected with the holdup. They fired at police with guns similar to those used in Nyack. Samuel Smith, 37, was killed in the shootout; Nat Burns, 38, a former Black Panther, was taken into custody. Later, two more arrests were made. Jeffrey Carl Jones, 33, and Eleanor Stein Raskin, also in her 30s, were both fugitive Weather Undergrounders and said to be part of the May 19 Coalition.

Police were also pursuing possible connections between last week’s robbery and earlier crimes. Could the residue of the Weather Underground have been involved in bloody Brink’s ambushes in The Bronx last June and in Brooklyn in December? Could they have had a hand in the killing of a New York City policeman in Queens last April? Or a role in Joanne Chesimard’s 1979 escape from prison?

Just what had Kathy Boudin been doing for the past ten years? Rita Jensen, 38, a reporter for the Stamford (Conn.) Advocate, told her paper that for the past 20 months she had shared a Manhattan apartment with Boudin and the fugitive’s one-year-old son Chesa. Jensen says that she did not know the history of the woman she knew as Lynn Adams, and that she believed her roommate was supporting herself as a waitress. City officials said that Boudin, using the name Adams, had been collecting $355 a month in welfare benefits. William Kunstler, who has represented other radicals, was retained as Boudin’s counsel. Said her father, Leonard Boudin, a prominent New York liberal lawyer: “We will defend her as best we can.”

A large crowd gathered outside Nyack Village Hall last Friday as the four battered-looking suspects, under heavy guard, were brought in for arraignment. A witness charged that it was Brown who had killed the two local policemen, a crime that could carry the death penalty. Kathy Boudin, along with her Weather comrades, remained silent throughout the proceedings—her feelings, motives, the arcane design of her politics still submerged, still underground.—By Claudia Wallis.

Reported by Peter Staler/New York and James Wilde /Nyack