We have to be qualitatively better guerrillas than we are—especially now that the state can focus on capturing us in their efforts to smash armed resistance. This [has] proved to be very difficult because of failures to adhere to our rules of clandestine procedure, lack of combativity, and accepting low standards of conduct. We are in the midst of a struggle to try to resolve this.
—UNDATED MAY 19TH LETTER, “GREETINGS COMRADES”1
Susan and Tim were loading boxes into a blue Oldsmobile Cutlass sedan and U-Haul trailer that was parked at a self-storage facility in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, not far from Philadelphia. The boxes were heavy, so despite the autumn-night chill and the wind, they were working up a sweat. Tim was wearing an ill-fitting wig that he barely managed to keep on his head. Both of them wore glasses as part of their disguises.
An FBI wanted poster called Susan armed and extremely dangerous, and the Bureau wasn’t wrong. On the front seat of the Olds, purses held semiautomatic pistols: an Interarms Walther PPK .38-caliber and a Browning Hi-Power 9mm.2 They were fully loaded, with chambered rounds. “Hi-Power” wasn’t an exaggeration—the pistol could put a bullet through a wall or a car. The Walther was loaded with Glaser Safety Slugs, so-called frangible rounds filled with tiny metal shot.3 The slugs would mushroom and shred on impact—they were meant for human targets.
A Cherry Hill policeman, Mark DeFrancisco, pulled up at 5:52 p.m.4 The night manager had called. Moving toward Susan and Tim, the policeman demanded to see ID. Tim’s driver’s license said he was William J. Hammond. Susan handed over hers, and DeFrancisco asked her what her birth date was. Her answer didn’t match the date on the license.
Officer DeFrancisco asked her if she had any other identification. Maybe it was just a simple mistake. Susan told him she could go back to the Olds and get another ID. DeFrancisco declined. “Something told me I’d better not let her get to the car,” he recalled later on.5
Officer Craig Martin arrived as backup. Looking inside the trailer and locker, the patrolmen found what the press would call a “terror arsenal”6: an Action Arms 9mm semiautomatic Uzi, complete with replacement barrels; hundreds of rounds of ammo; sawed-off shotguns; rifles; a Sturm Ruger .357 magnum revolver with its serial number filed off.7 And lots of paper: weapons manuals, hundreds of fake FBI, DEA, and state police IDs, a New York Police Department Major Case Squad business card, and 10,250 phony Social Security card blanks.
Before long, Tim and Susan were in handcuffs.
A cop lit up a smoke. “Put out the fucking cigarette,” Susan said.8 The patrolman quickly got the point. Susan and Tim had been trying to move 740 pounds of explosives, including 199 sticks of Hercules Unigel Tamptite dynamite and 110 cartridges of DuPont Tovex 210 water-gel explosives, plus electric blasting caps, detonating cord, and Hercules Slurry Hp-374, a blasting agent. Susan and Tim called it “combat material.”9
The dynamite was in horrible shape. The sticks were meant to be rotated every thirty days to prevent a dangerous buildup of nitroglycerin, but somebody hadn’t been doing his or her job. The dynamite was breaking down. Nitroglycerin was oozing—“weeping”—from the cylinders. That made the contents of the car extremely dangerous: a stray spark could have set off a terrifying blast.
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms agents and cops from the Philadelphia bomb squad were called in to recover the stuff. They piled up the dynamite and materials but realized they would have to divide it up before hauling it over the Benjamin Franklin Bridge to the bomb disposal site in Philadelphia. The explosives were unstable, and if they moved it all together, it could have detonated and dropped the bridge or taken out a city block.
• • •
On the way to the Cherry Hill police station, Susan was in the back seat of the cruiser, cuffed and glowering. DeFrancisco turned to her. “I really appreciate your not blowing me away tonight,” he said. Like a film noir femme fatale, Susan replied, “I guess this is your lucky day.”10
The station house had an “armed camp atmosphere,” Susan said. “Machine guns were constantly aimed at us.” She claimed an FBI agent had looked toward her and said, “I can always tell a kike. At least now we know it’s the kikes, the ones with the niggers.”11
Susan kept up her hardened revolutionary facade. “We’re caught, but we’re not defeated. Long live the armed struggle!” she shouted on the way to her arraignment.
Tim couldn’t get over how easily he had allowed himself to be arrested. In a document titled “Self-criticism,” he pummeled himself. Face-to-face with the Cherry Hill police, he had “given up, punked out, refused to fight.” The cop “was fairly low key, [he] hadn’t drawn his gun, & didn’t seem to be onto who we were. This was our chance. I just froze. I wasn’t confident I could take out the cop unarmed.”12
Later in the document he sounded like an “enemy of the people” confessing to the Red Guard during the Chinese Cultural Revolution: “I completely understand that my membership is profoundly in question. I have shown none of the character required of a guerrilla.”13
But Susan was also to blame for the Cherry Hill shambles. She’d rented the storage space on November 3, 1984, under the name “Barbara Grodin,” written down a Social Security number, listed ABC News as her most recent employer, and given a home address. Then there was some kind of paperwork problem, and the facility’s manager needed to get in contact with Ms. Grodin. He called ABC in New York. Nobody had ever heard of her.
But he was persistent and wrote a letter, asking her to get in touch. The real Barbara Grodin called him and asked what was going on. She’d never been in Cherry Hill, much less rented a self-storage space, but somebody had stolen her wallet while she had been in New Jersey a year earlier.
Daniel phoned the Cherry Hill cops. The police told him to call if anyone using the name Barbara Grodin showed up on the premises. He asked his staff to be on the lookout.
It was that string that led the manager to call the police when Susan arrived at the front gate on the night of the twenty-ninth.
The FBI made quite a haul in Cherry Hill: weapons, explosives, fake IDs. They got Tim; however, the Bureau concluded that he wasn’t any kind of terrorist mastermind but “just a gofer,” said retired FBI Special Agent Donald R. Wofford.14 Susan, a Brinks fugitive and Chesimard breakout suspect, was the bigger catch.
There was more. The Bureau found Alan’s prints on one of the manuals and Linda’s on a phony ID card. It also learned that two of the recovered weapons, a Ruger Mini-14 rifle and a Hi-Power pistol, had been bought in Norco, Louisiana, by “Louise Robinett.” They knew that was Linda’s gun-buying nom de guerre.15
The Olds towing the U-Haul was registered to somebody in Orange, Connecticut, named Louise Harmon.16 On suspicion that it could be one of Marilyn Buck’s aliases, special agents from nearby New Haven were dispatched to check it out. The address on the registration was phony, but they kept at it. Special agents showed mug shots to area mechanics and got a match to Marilyn’s from a guy who fixed cars at the Exxon station at 284 Whalley Avenue in New Haven. He said she had called herself Ms. Harmon.
Up until that point the FBI’s focus on May 19th had been Chesimard and NYROB related. After Cherry Hill, the FBI began widening its investigative aperture and started to get a clear picture of how much destruction the organization was responsible for.
Meanwhile, behind bars, Susan penned a lengthy letter. “Dear Friends,” she wrote. “The pigs seized on all the Fed ID & were going to pursue it with a vengeance. Also they were going to comb all storage places. . . . We hope you can vacate both CT and Ph[iladelphia] ASAP.”17
• • •
Donald Corrigan read the front-page story in the Hartford Courant about terrorists on the loose in Connecticut: bombings, armed robberies, rifles. He looked at the people in the accompanying photos and immediately recognized a woman from the photo: Marilyn Buck looked like the woman who had raised the check-cashing ruckus at the Stop & Shop in August. And a man named in the piece as Alan Berkman was definitely one of the two who had robbed him in September. At 2:30 a.m., Corrigan called the Cromwell Police Department with the tip.
The local cops called the FBI. The robbers had worn black latex gloves when they had pulled the cash from the safe. But one of the thieves had been barehanded in the manager’s office, and there was a set of prints all over the phony warrant. The FBI’s crime lab identified them as Alan Berkman’s: federal fugitive, bail jumper, accessory to murder, and now armed robber.
• • •
On March 17, 1985, a federal jury found Susan and Tim guilty on eight counts involving explosives, weapons, and fake IDs. At their sentencing, Judge Frederick B. Lacey compared the explosive potential of their storage locker load to the October 1983 truck bomb in Beirut that had flattened a four-story military barracks, killing 220 U.S. marines. Boisterous supporters of Susan and Tim were in the courtroom—“New York weirdos came out of the woodwork for the event,” Officer DeFrancisco remembered.18
But arrest and prosecution hadn’t cooled their revolutionary ardor. Tim insisted that he and Susan were “captured combatants” who had worked to become “the best guerrillas we could be” in their struggle against a “diseased and terroristic system.” They told the court that they’d been trying to live up to Cuban comandante Che Guevara’s injunction to revolutionaries to combine “perfect love and perfect hate.”19
“It’s not a crime to build revolutionary resistance against the single greatest enemy of the people of the world,” Susan told the judge.20
Judge Lacey wasn’t persuaded. He gave each of them fifty-eight years in prison. One of Susan’s appeals would be heard by a federal judge in Philadelphia, Maryanne Trump Barry, an older sister of Donald Trump. During the 2016 Republican presidential primaries, Senator Ted Cruz described Barry as a “Bill Clinton–appointed federal appellate judge who is a radical pro-abortion extremist.”21