Bullets from the Underground

[XXPANTHAXX]

Bullets from the Underground
By Claudia Wallis;James Wilde;Peter Staler Monday, Nov. 02, 1981


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."