Читать книгу An American Radical: - Susan Rosenberg - Страница 14

OUR TRIAL, IN April to May of 1985, was a three-week accelerated collision between the prosecution and us. In the months leading up to the actual court proceeding, we remained housed in New York City. Every time we went to the federal court, in Newark, New Jersey, escorted in a high-security caravan that included helicopters and police of every type, the Holland Tunnel was closed down. If we were not already misunderstood or despised, our impact on thousands of harassed commuters would have been enough to spark an instant mass hatred. The outcome of the trial was a given even before the jury was selected. We did nothing but escalate it.

The security team responsible for us was assembled out of the Joint Terrorist Task Force, which included U.S. marshals, FBI agents, and local New York police. One member of the team was Bernard B. Kerik, who many years later would become New York City’s police commissioner under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, and later still go to jail on charges of tax fraud and perjury. The first time we were due in court for pretrial motions, we were taken to the underground garage of the detention center, where one of the waiting cars was a black Mercedes-Benz. A member of the security team told me to get in. I had over forty pounds of chains wrapped around me, which was standard transport attire. I looked at him and said, “I refuse to get into that Nazi car.” The officers thought that was very funny. One retorted, “This is the car we use for officials; you don’t know how lucky you are.” Then, several of them picked me up and put me headfirst into the backseat. That was the end of the discussion.

Our trial was a venomous and hostile drama. The judge was Frederick B. Lacey. He had been a naval officer, and then the U.S. attorney for the district of New Jersey from 1969–71. He was appointed a U.S. district judge by President Richard Nixon, and his reputation was that he was tough. He was also a member of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. This was the court that heard FBI and CIA applications for international wiretaps in cases pertaining to national security. Judge Lacey was as highly politicized in his way as we were in ours. We tried to present a necessity defense, saying that the government was guilty of war crimes against people in the developing world and at home. We had lawyers who helped us research and prepare our brief. Judith Holmes, an attorney who had experience in defending other political activists, worked with us for weeks as we organized our own defense. We said that we were part of an organized illegal resistance movement and that we were acting out of conscience. We opposed the covert U.S. involvement in Central America, the government’s backing of the Contras in Nicaragua, and the illegal sale of arms to the right-wing paramilitary groups throughout Latin America. We also opposed the racist regime in South Africa and wanted an end to apartheid. We argued that the United States had waged an illegal war via the FBI’s cointelpro(Counter Intelligence Program) against the radical and progressive movements for freedom and liberation among black people, Native People, the people of Puerto Rico, and other oppressed people, forces, and groups. We believed that as a result of cointelpro the civil liberties and human rights of thousands of citizens had been abrogated.

The prosecution, however, asserted that because we were apprehended with hundreds of pounds of explosives, numerous guns, and extensive amounts of false identification, we trafficked in violence (although they did not link any of the materials found to any actual activities) and therefore could not talk about politics. We were simply terrorists. It was their court and their outcome.

Our lawyers, Susan V. Tipograph and Mark Gombiner, both lawyers who were part of the legal community that fought to uphold constitutional rights and defend extremely unpopular defendants, believed that if we put on a necessity defense we would face the wrath of the court, and so we fired them the day our trial began in order to represent ourselves. Still, they sat with us and acted as our legal advisers, and when sentencing came, their hopes took over and they predicted that we would get fifteen years. But Tim and I knew differently—the lawyers had been right in the first place about the anger of the court and we expected stiffer sentences.

We were each convicted of eight counts of conspiracy to possess and transport explosives, guns, and false identification across state lines. We were each sentenced to fifty-eight years in federal prison for possession of weapons and explosives. It was the longest sentence ever given for a possession offense. Judge Lacey compared us to Russian spies during the cold war and instructed us to read The God that Failed, a classic collection of essays by six prominent thinkers who had become disillusioned with communism and through their ideological rebirths became militant anti-Communists.

About a week after our sentencing we were in the visiting room at the MCC. The rumor was that Tim was being shipped out any day. Every visit was charged with intense emotion because we did not know if it would be the last time we would see each other. We felt we had been living in hell since our arrest and it was almost impossible to deal with the idea that we would never meet again. There were several people visiting us that day. Our lawyers, who had heard the rumor, too, had come to say good-bye to Tim. They were joined by paralegals from various groups that had supported us during our trial.

Someone said that we needed to file a notice of appeal. There was a thirty-day deadline for filing from the time of sentencing, and the clock was ticking. Tim, at one end of the table, said no, he did not want to file anything, because there was no expectation of justice. Everyone at the table weighed in on this one way or the other and several people agreed with Tim. I looked around the table and thought, Wow, these people don’t have to do fifty-eight years. We do. I want options. We have to fight this sentence. Our trial had been on many levels a farce, in part because of the drama we had chosen to create. I had begun to realize that the question of how to challenge the criminal justice system has almost as many answers as the number of people who are caught up in it. I said, “I want to file. I want to fight the sentence every way we can, through an appeal, through parole, through political pressure. Even though we said the system would not last as long as our sentence, I am not sure I believe that at all.” Tim said nothing, and the appeal was filed.

Ironically, the charges related to the Brink’s case that had sent me underground in the first place, were dropped by then U.S. Attorney Rudolph Giuliani. The U.S. attorney’s office said they were dropped because I had such a long sentence from my conviction. But I and my lawyers believed that the charges had been dropped because of lack of evidence.

By 1985, there were many other people who had been arrested from various radical political movements. The list included sixteen Puerto Ricans from an armed group called Los Macheteros¹; the Ohio Seven², four men and three women from a clandestine collective against apartheid, racism, and economic injustice charged with the bombing of U.S. military and corporate targets; the New York Eight who included African American revolutionaries, who together had been targeted in the post-Brink’s investigation and subpoenaed to a grand jury but had refused to testify; Joe Doherty, an Irish Republican Army member who had been involved in one of the most spectacular prison escapes in Northern Ireland, who had been caught in New York and was now being held on extradition charges to be returned to Ireland; and Marilyn Buck, a revolutionary who spent all of her adult life supporting the black liberation struggle and who had been in and out of prison as a result, and Linda Evans, a member of SDS, and later the Weathermen, women from the group with which Tim and I were involved. Marilyn was wanted on the Brink’s charges, and Linda had been indicted for harboring Marilyn.

Almost forty political prisoners were being held in the MCC. It was a security nightmare for the authorities to have so many political prisoners together in one facility, but for us it was a moment of incredible solidarity. All the women, housed on the same floor, had daily access to one another.

In September 1985, we were facing our prison terms or future trials, and we all knew that the time we had together in detention was limited. I was twenty-nine years old. Each one of us had a story behind why we were there. We were a diverse group. We were activists and revolutionaries and all of us were motivated to act against the government because we thought it was our responsibility to right the injustices and wrongs as we saw them. I was one of the seventeen people who were wanted stemming from a federal indictment alleging association and conspiracy with the group that carried out the Brink’s New York robbery. In 1981, the Black Liberation Army³, a small outgrowth of the Black Panther Party, had carried out an armed robbery of a Brink’s truck in Nyack, New York. Two police officers, Waverly Brown and Edward O’Grady and a Brink’s guard, Peter Paige, were killed in the shootout that followed the robbery. Four people were arrested near the scene, one of them a good friend of mine. The Joint Terrorist Task Force, a group made up of members of the New York Police Department, the FBI, and other intelligence agencies, began an investigation that led to two major federal conspiracy trials and a New York State trial. Scores of people were imprisoned for refusing to testify and cooperate with grand juries, and anyone identified through political association with those arrested or named by the government investigation was targeted. It was a terrible and dark time and we felt as if we were living in a raging war. I had never experienced this kind of repression, and there was a dangerous escalation of the stakes and consequences, for all involved. It was frightening.

I knew and had worked with several people who were under investigation. My longtime teacher and friend Dr. Mutulu Shakur was wanted by the FBI and the New York Police Department, and I was fearful that his life and work would be snuffed out. He had been an organizer in the black community and a revolutionary his entire adult life. He was a health worker in the South Bronx at Lincoln Hospital, and he later became a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine and acupuncture as a way of fighting the terrible heroin epidemic that was ravaging his brothers and sisters in the community. His FBI file was already thousands of pages. Now he was followed and harassed by FBI agents who would walk up to him in the street and open their jackets to reveal their guns and imitating the shape of a gun with their empty hands, pretended to shoot him. People would drive by his mother’s house in Queens and then run into the house and fire their weapons. His mother was blind and lived alone, so she could not identify the perpetrators. But there was nothing secret about the doings of the FBI. As their investigation grew and evolved, I became a target, too.

In 1977, I was working as a drug counselor at Lincoln Hospital. In high school, I had watched one of my best friends become a heroin addict and end up dying from an overdose. By the time I was working in the Bronx, the community had been plagued by a massive heroin addiction, which many people thought was government sponsored, at least in the sense that the police looked the other way and used the presence of drugs as an excuse to criminalize the entire community. I was not sure if that analysis was accurate but I certainly witnessed the devastation that drug use caused and saw that no one was doing anything about it. Wanting to stop the vicious cycle of poverty and drugs, I began to study acupuncture and Chinese medicine with other community-based health workers at the Lincoln Hospital Detox Center. Dr. Shakur was one of them. He had gone to China and seen how with the use of acupuncture millions of opium addicts were effectively treated. In 1980, after a three-year course, we passed our doctoral exams at the Montréal Institute of Chinese Medicine and moved our practice from the South Bronx to Harlem. We were part of the beginning of the New Age holistic health movement. We were led by former revolutionaries and activists from the late 1960s and 1970s, people of color from what had been the Black Panthers, the Young Lords, a U.S.-based Puerto Rican Independence and advocacy organization, and White Lightning, a poor people’s community organizing project. We treated drug addiction, diabetes, asthma, and all the diseases afflicting the poorest of the poor. We called ourselves the “sneaker doctors” after the “barefoot doctors” movement in China, which had been a project that trained a quarter of a million Chinese people to learn acupuncture to detoxify several million opium addicts.

In March 1982, I was on my way to work. I rounded the corner on 147th Street and Eighth Avenue walking toward the Harlem Institute of Acupuncture. As I looked down the block I saw an Army tank coming toward me with a huge gun rolling down the one-way street in the wrong direction. I had never seen a tank except in the movies. It looked obscenely out of place on the quiet deserted residential street. I had no idea what would trigger the men inside to start shooting. I knew that they could not have driven it to this Harlem block for show. Then I looked up and saw flak-jacketed sharpshooters wearing face masks and lying down or crouching on all the rooftops of the buildings next to the clinic. There wasn’t a soul out on the street. No one was standing on the corner. No little children were stepping off their stoops to go to the park or to school. There were no patients standing in front of our office, I realized thankfully. I was the only one, a white person out of place, amid all the cops with guns. I knew that they were there to search the clinic and I hoped they were not specifically looking for me. I did not feel that I merited a tank and certainly not sharpshooters. Not wanting to find out how far down the block I would get before someone either shot me or simply grabbed me, I about-faced and walked as fast as I could short of a breakneck run to the corner, then around it, and down into the subway. I did not start breathing freely again until I was miles away, standing in the subway, alternating between fury and fear.

The FBI did not find the person they were looking for that day. No one was killed or shot or even arrested. Instead, they had kicked in the front door of the clinic carrying blank grand jury subpoenas, filled out the names of the twenty staffers present, and then confiscated all of the clinic’s records. This was one of several raids by the FBI against black-led community institutions that had associations with black revolutionaries.

In September 1982, six months after the FBI raid on the Harlem Institute of Acupuncture, I was in my car listening to WINS radio, when I heard that there had been a new and superseding indictment in the Brink’s robbery. This meant that the grand jury had added new people to the indictment. The announcer read the list. There were over twenty names. I almost missed hearing my own. I drove around the Upper West Side where I lived and finally parked on Riverside Drive and sat in my car. I was certain I could not get a fair trial; I was afraid of going to prison, but also afraid to flee. I had no time in which to think through whether I should flee or go to jail. What about my family? My burgeoning career as an acupuncturist? What about my dog? What about my new car? I was twenty-six years old. I thought, I’ll fight the conspiracy, I’ll turn myself in, and I’ll get a lawyer. I went back and forth in my mind, weighing my options as I sat in the car. I caressed the dashboard and smelled the newness of it. I listened to the recurring WINS report over and over again. I did not cry, but I was terribly sad. I felt I was being forced to abandon my life. Instead of returning home, I drove to my office. After circling the block twice to see if any police were there, I ran in and grabbed all of the money I could find and random bits and pieces of things that I thought would be valuable or that I could sell. Then I fled.

Two and a half years later at MCC with all the other political people in prison, we were now trying to help one another reinforce our identity as political prisoners. One afternoon we were sitting together, eating our government-issue lunch of cheese sandwiches and coffee and reading a news article about the Puerto Rican inde-pendentistas on trial in Hartford, Connecticut. The newest woman prisoner was Lucy Segarra, one of the Macheteros. She had been charged with participating in an action in which toys were distributed to poor children in Hartford on Three Kings Day. What made this illegal was that the money used to purchase the toys came, allegedly, from the $7 million Wells Fargo robbery carried out in 1983 by Los Macheteros in Hartford. Though that robbery was the single largest ever carried out in the United States, no one was injured and the money was never recovered.

When our talk shifted from the trial to the effects of a hurricane on New York, something in the discussion of a violent storm triggered a reaction in Lucy. Her eyes filled up with tears of anger, hatred, shame, and fear. In a soft, halting voice she told us how the Mexican authorities, in conjunction with the FBI, had beaten her (without leaving marks), threatened her by saying they would kill her children, and interrogated her in a locked cell for days while her children were held outside. Finally, they had transported her, placing a hood over her head so that she would not know her whereabouts. They told her that no one knew where she was, that no one would be able to help her, and that as far as the world was concerned she had disappeared. They said that they had killed and broken others in her group, and that still others were giving her up. She went on to describe the men and the place and her deep concern for her children. Always she came back to her children.

As I returned to my own cell, I realized that living in the midst of this prison madness can either take your soul or give it back to you. I resolved to take mine back.

Throughout the months of pre-trial detention and then awaiting sentencing, my parents came to visit. It was the beginning of rebuilding our relationship. My parents attended my trial, despite their profound disagreements with me and my friends. Meeting for the first time since my arrest, my mother was so angry that she could hardly speak. She sat in the visiting room, all dressed up and seething. My father cried. It would be a long rapprochement, but even then my parents met me halfway. They always met me halfway.

Later that same year, John Gotti was arrested. Finally, someone else’s notoriety had eclipsed me and the other political prisoners. I was glad he was in the spotlight. Seeing him in jail, with his swagger, his cigar butt, and the terrible charisma he emitted regardless of his circumstances, I knew it to be true—he was the boss, the man, the Don. During what was described as the Pizza Connection trial, the MCC housed as many Mafia members as political prisoners. Unbelievably, we all mixed in the prison’s attorney-client visiting room, they with their gold crucifixes and we with our revolutionary passions. Although the two groups could not have been more different, we had in common a strong code of principle—we would not snitch, not in our cases, in our lives, or inside the jail itself. In that respect, our honor united us. John Gotti had never witnessed such loyalty before in a group outside the mob. He liked me, and he liked Tim, too.

On my thirtieth birthday I had a visit with my attorney and was off the women’s floor for several hours. When I returned and stood in the saliport, which separated the outside world from the secured area inside, the cop removing my handcuffs gave me a big smile. I responded with the convict glaze, being in no mood to smile. As the steel door popped open and I walked in, everyone on the floor started singing and I saw the banner they had hung across a set of bars: happy birthday, susan.The party—complete with wine and scotch and a sumptuous Italian meal of eggplant, veal, and chicken—had been bought and paid for by John Gotti. It was one of the best birthdays I had ever had. And there wasn’t a cop in sight. (Several months later, thirteen corrections officers were indicted on corruption charges for selling the food contract at the MCC to a Mafia-run company and several administrators were charged with bribery and corruption.)

In October,ten days after my birthday, eleven months after my arrest, I was transferred without warning to Arizona. What had been a year of turmoil, heartbreak, resisting capture, trial and prosecution, changed instantly into “doing time.”