There are nights when Frank Powell still sees the bomb drop, when he watches it plummet past his feet and through the warm spring air. Sometimes it hits the bunker and explodes; sometimes it lands on the roof. Occasionally it misses the roof entirely and is swept off into oblivion. Some nights it contains two pounds of explosives; other nights there are ten pounds or a hundred. When he wakes up, he realizes that it was just the dream coming back again.
But it was more than a dream. When it was all over, Lieutenant Frank Powell, the acting commander of the police bomb squad, a supervisor who was known for always doing things by the book, would be remembered for this single desperate act. He would be remembered as the man who dropped the bomb.
The scene would be replayed again and again, on television sets in Philadelphia and throughout the world: the helicopter hovering forty-five feet above the tiny row house, the lone figure of Powell leaning out of its open hatch; the bag dropping toward the roof; the long seconds of silence followed by the explosion—a bright orange ball of flame; a hailstorm of lumber and debris; a slowly clearing cloud of dust.
And then wisps of white smoke, wafting silently into the blue afternoon sky.
When the explosion came, Philadelphia Fire Commissioner William Richmond was crouching beside his second-in-command in a doorway half a block east of the bunker. Though it seemed as if half the fire department was out here in west Philadelphia, he really hadn’t had much to do all day. This was a police operation, and his men were taking their orders directly from the cops on the scene. At this very moment he could have been finishing up at the office and preparing to brave the evening rush hour—except for the fact that he had a promise to keep.
When the first rumors of a police operation against MOVE had begun to circulate the week before, the head of the fire fighters’ union had stopped by Richmond’s office. He reminded Richmond of what had happened in 1978, when two fire fighters had been shot during a similar confrontation. A lot of people had felt that fire fighters had been doing police work in 1978, that they never should have been in the line of fire. He wanted to make sure the same thing didn’t happen this time.
Bill Richmond agreed with him a hundred percent. He’d watched his men risk their lives virtually every day. He’d once seen a fireman jump into a tree from a second-story window, clutching a screaming baby under one arm. He’d visited his men lying in hospitals, their lungs ravaged by smoke and heat. And more than once he’d seen the black bunting hanging from fire stations throughout the city, mourning men who’d died on duty.
That was part of a fireman’s job. But it wasn’t part of the job to be ducking bullets. Richmond wasn’t about to have his men risk their lives in a fight that wasn’t their own. And so when the union man came to see him, Richmond made him a promise. As long as there were firemen out at Osage Avenue, he’d be there, too, seeing to their safety.
Now, as he peered through the dust and saw to his utter amazement that the bunker was intact, he knew that he and his men still had a very long day ahead of them. And as if that wasn’t enough, he now heard the deputy commissioner’s voice in his ear, saying, “Chief, it looks like we’ve got a fire up there.”
The time was approximately 5:45 p.m., May 13, 1985.
For nearly twenty-four hours Clifford Bond had been standing with his neighbors at a police barricade three blocks north of Osage Avenue. The night before—the evening of Mother’s Day—policemen in blue fatigues had knocked on his door and herded him and his family down their narrow street and beyond the police barricades. The Bonds had taken literally nothing with them but the clothes on their backs. There wasn’t time, the police had said—and besides, they’d promised, everyone would be back in their homes by late morning.
But morning had come and gone. And as the day wore on and the sounds of explosions and gunfire clattered through the air, the neighbors had instinctively pressed around Bond, asking for news, suggesting that he try to meet with the mayor.
In the months before the confrontation, as the neighbors had tried to get the city to do something about the rotten meat strewn in the alley behind their homes, about the rats and stray dogs that congregated around the MOVE house, Bond had reluctantly emerged as their spokesman and leader. In the last year he’d led a delegation of neighbors to half a dozen meetings in City Hall, only to be told by the mayor that the city had no legal basis on which to take action against MOVE.
It had been his idea in late April to hold a news conference, publicly calling on Governor Dick Thornburgh to help them where the city had not. Before MOVE had invaded his neighborhood, Bond had never known or cared much about politics. But after months of getting nowhere with the city he’d begun to learn, and he figured that the Republican governor wouldn’t pass up the chance to score some public relations points at the expense of Philadelphia’s Democratic mayor.
The news conference, which the neighbors had held just two weeks ago, had been a success. People learned that armed men were building a fortress in a quiet working-class neighborhood in Philadelphia. One photo appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer and in newspapers around the world. It showed a MOVE member, his muscular body naked to the waist and his face hidden by dreadlocks, using a rope to haul a can of gasoline onto the roof of 6221 Osage Avenue.
The news reports had accomplished what the neighbors’ delegations to City Hall had not. The city had moved with a swiftness that had astonished Bond, as the mayor sought to prove that he was still in charge. Bond had met with the mayor just days before, and yet he’d learned nothing of the city’s plans until the knock had come on his door the night before. Even now he had no idea what was happening on Osage Avenue. But as he saw the smoke begin to rise from the street, he felt the knot in his belly twist even tighter, and he began to wonder—not for the first time—whether the city knew what it was doing.
At nearly the same instant, Police Commissioner Gregore Sambor was moving closer to the sandbags inside 6218 Osage Avenue, keeping his head low. It was an uncharacteristic pose for Sambor; he was the sort of man who always seemed to be standing at attention, even when he was sitting down. But by now his formal manner was gone and his mind was focused entirely on getting a better view of the smoke rising from the house across the street.
Here in his command post, he was just fifty feet from the MOVE house—close enough that he could have carried on a conversation with someone in the bunker. But Commissioner Sambor wasn’t there to talk. He’d made his speech early that morning. It hadn’t been a fancy piece of talking, but then he’d never claimed to be a politician. He was just a cop, and ever since he’d started as a foot patrolman in north Philadelphia thirty-seven years ago that was all he’d been.
Of course, being police commissioner wasn’t just an ordinary job. It put you in the public eye—and in the hot seat from time to time. In just this last year Sambor had already had to deal with a few scandals in the department. First the FBI had uncovered a bribery and shakedown operation involving dozens of cops and sent a top-ranking member of his administration to jail. Then the papers had run a series of articles about K-9 dogs attacking innocent citizens.
Throughout those difficult times, no one had questioned Sambor’s personal reputation for honesty and decency. As a young man he’d studied for the priesthood, and people still called him Father Gregory. Every Sunday he helped give Communion at St. Timothy’s Church, in the blue-collar district of the city called Wissinoming. Though the commissioner’s integrity was never called into question during the scandals, his ability to lead the department was. People said that he wasn’t one to stick his neck out by trying anything new. Others, less charitable, said the problem wasn’t with his neck; it was a little farther up.
Not that he wasn’t book-smart. Over the years he’d passed the advancement exams and risen steadily through the ranks. Along the way he’d gone to night school, earning first a bachelor’s degree, then a master’s. He’d even completed the coursework for a Ph.D. in police administration, though he hadn’t written his dissertation.
Despite the academic credentials, Sambor never seemed to have the street savvy that others would bring to the commissioner’s job. There was a story in the department that in the early 1970s, when Frank Rizzo was still police commissioner, Rizzo had permanently assigned Sambor to night patrol—a graveyard-shift detail with little authority—because he didn’t think Sambor could handle making real decisions. That, some said, was how Sambor managed to get all those degrees—by studying all night while he was working.
But even those who didn’t like Sambor granted him a certain dogged persistence. The oldest of eight children, he’d been orphaned as a child and had managed to keep his brothers and sisters together, working to keep them fed and housed. He’d been a bookkeeper before he joined the force in 1947. Over the next thirty years he’d scored well enough on police examinations to advance through the ranks; by the late 1970s he headed the police academy—an assignment that also put him in charge of the pistol range and the bomb squad. In 1981 the new mayor had named him to succeed departing Police Commissioner Morton Solomon.
Perhaps because of his background in the seminary, Sambor had a love for tradition and authority. The department had an official police commissioner’s uniform—a comical-looking anachronism that resembled the uniform of a Paris traffic cop—but before Sambor became commissioner no one had worn the costume for thirty or forty years, preferring business suits and ties. But Sambor wore it every chance he got—never realizing, apparently, that people would snicker whenever he entered a room.
More than anything else, though, Greg Sambor was a world-class bureaucrat. He’d survived more than three decades of department politics and infighting, and in the end it wasn’t easy to say whether it had been Sambor or the bureaucracy that had emerged the victor. Nobody expected him to shake up the department; they’d figured he would simply let things go along as they always had.
And so there was an irony in the fact that when the Philadelphia Police Department faced its most difficult crisis, a crisis that could be found in no textbook or manual, Gregore Sambor was the man in charge. Today Sambor was up against something that he’d never encountered before. Three of his men had already been wounded by bullets—none seriously, thank God. The houses on either side of the MOVE compound had been destroyed by explosions and gunfire. There were rumors that MOVE had tunnels running under the streets and into the sewers. Night would fall in another hour or so. And that goddamned bunker still sat on top of the house, commanding the high ground and paralyzing the Philadelphia Police Department.
Now, as the flames burned down through the splintered debris and began to lick at the black tar paper of the MOVE house’s roof, the smoke turned black and thick. In the bedroom of a house on Sixty-second Street, just above the doorway where Commissioner Richmond had been crouching when the bomb exploded, Channel 10 news cameraman Pete Kane was watching the rising flames with disbelief. Unknown to the cops on the street below, he’d been hiding in the house for more than twenty-four hours, filming the confrontation. The night before, he’d captured images of the police quietly moving into rooftop positions. Later he’d filmed the confrontation at dawn—the thick screen of smoke that obscured the street, the first rounds of gunfire, the return bursts of automatic gunfire from the police positions—and all through the long, still afternoon, when the only sound was the steady hum of compressors from the fire engines, he’d filmed the scene intermittently.
Philadelphia had seen none of this footage, for Kane had no way of getting his tapes out of the house without revealing himself to the police. But he had phoned in live reports during the day. Now, as the smoke obscured the setting sun, he picked up the phone and dialed the newsroom of Channel 10. An engineer flipped a switch, and Pete Kane was on the air.
“I see a lot of black smoke,” he reported. “It’s very thick, and there are flames shooting from the roof area of either the neighbor’s house or the MOVE house. It’s spreading, Larry. Several of the houses are on fire right now.”
It was 5:50 p.m.
Across town, in a complex of offices on the second floor of City Hall, Mayor Wilson Goode was watching the Channel 10 news. He was quiet—“pensive,” his press secretary would say later—as he often was when he was away from the glaring television lights and rapid-fire questioning of reporters.
At this moment he’d reached a crossroads in a political career that had seemed charmed. In 1983 he’d defeated former mayor Frank Rizzo in a bitter primary election and then won a three-way race to become Philadelphia’s first black mayor. That triumph, along with the self-assured style he’d shown as he took charge of the city government, made him a man to be watched, not only in Philadelphia but on the national scene as well. The year before, Walter Mondale had even invited him to Washington to talk about being his running mate.
The mayoral primary that had propelled Goode into the political spotlight had been a study in contrasts. His opponent, Frank Rizzo, stood for old-style Philadelphia politics; he was the kind of glad-handing, deal-making, podium-pounding populist that seemed embarrassing in these modern times. His years as mayor from 1971 to 1979 had been tumultuous, seasoned with scandal and charges of police brutality and racism.
Goode’s style was one of cool efficiency. As managing director he’d overseen the city’s day-to-day operations for four quiet years. His campaign for mayor had been flawless, and his support was widespread among whites as well as blacks.
He was born the son of a North Carolina sharecropper. In the 1950s he worked his way through college, earning a degree in business administration. Afterward he came to Philadelphia, a young man looking for “opportunity,” as he liked to tell it.
He found his opportunity in the public housing field, where he made a name for himself as a man who could get the job done. In 1979 Mayor-elect Bill Green had tapped him to serve as the city’s chief operating officer. Once again he’d done his job quietly and well.
First as managing director and then as mayor, Wilson Goode had been running the city of Philadelphia for nearly six years. He’d had to contend with the usual assortment of big-city problems—transit strikes, budget deficits, incompetence and corruption. But now, as the growing flames flickered across his television screen, Goode found himself moving into uncharted territory. What was going on in west Philadelphia was beyond all his experience.
The word that came to his mind was war.
At 6:18 p.m., the twelve-foot by eight-foot bunker, its wooden sides blazing, plunged through the roof and disappeared into the second floor. Now the fire was inside the house, and putting water on the roof would only drive the flames downward through the house, spreading it among the adjoining sun porches all up and down the block. It would be the worst thing the fire fighters could do. Without going inside the house with hoses and axes, there was nothing the fire department could do now to put the fire out.
Six blocks north, on a ninth-floor fire escape landing, the general watched through his field glasses as the bunker collapsed. Leo Brooks had been a civilian for less than eighteen months, and he still had the bearing of an officer. He had retired from the army, where he’d supervised the vast Defense Logistics Agency headquartered in Philadelphia to run the city for Wilson Goode. He brought to the job of managing director some of the same qualities that Goode himself had shown: a low profile and a mechanic’s aptitude for keeping the bloated and unwieldy city bureaucracy in some semblance of working order.
Soft-spoken, with a bit of the lilt of his native Virginia still in his voice, Brooks was a gentleman as well as an officer—an “honorable man” in the mayor’s estimation, and a good man to work for as well. His years in the army had taught him to make a virtue of the need to delegate, and he usually gave his subordinates plenty of elbow room.
But now, as he watched the rooftops in flames below him, as he waited for the water to come on, he grew more and more alarmed. Already he had grabbed a walkie-talkie from his aide to report that he could see flames. Now he used that radio to try to raise Sambor. For long minutes—critical minutes—he and his aide tried again and again to reach Commissioner Sambor. He could not understand why nobody was fighting the fire.
At 6:22 p.m., Pete Kane phoned in another report. “The house is fully involved in flames,” he announced. “The roof just collapsed and several houses are burning right now along with the MOVE house.
“They have not taken a hose into Osage. They are just waiting.”
Fifty-five minutes after the explosion, the flames on the roof were as tall as a man. In the dark cellar three stories below, women and children lay beneath woolen blankets, not knowing whether it was night or day.
They could hear the clatter of combat boots in the kitchen above them, then the trapdoor to the cellar being pulled aside, and finally heavy footsteps coming down the stairs. The men of MOVE were gathering from their posts throughout the house, bringing with them reports of the fire.
And now, in this dark and stifling cellar, not knowing what would happen next, the family known as MOVE put its trust in the wisdom of its leader and teacher, the enigmatic figure of the Coordinator, John Africa. Some among them had followed the teachings of John Africa for more than fifteen years now, from the earliest days of the movement. Some said he was a man; some said he was something greater. He had led his people through the wilderness—through siege and arrest and long, lonely years in jail—and his wisdom had never failed them. He had faced up to the system not once or twice, but time and again, and every time MOVE had emerged stronger. The system could not stop him, because John Africa spoke the truth and the truth is stronger than any lie.
The people who gathered now in the basement were among his most devoted followers. They had come to MOVE from a variety of backgrounds, moving ever closer to the light and warmth of John Africa’s teachings. Most had come tentatively at first, attracted by the teachings but a little afraid of them, too. At first belonging to MOVE had meant changing the way they lived—eating raw foods, giving up jobs and air-conditioning. It meant strained relations with parents and friends and eventually confrontations with a system that hated them and would try to destroy them.
John Africa had told many of them long ago that they would suffer for the truth. He had predicted the confrontations, the beatings, the arrests, and jail terms. He had warned them that some of them would be “cycled”—that they would be recycled back to the earth—in their fight to save the world from man’s corruption.
The Coordinator, in his wisdom, had known that not everyone could make such a sacrifice. Those who could not had been given other assignments. But the people in the house on this evening had known for years that it would come to this and that when the time came they would do what they had to do.
Now that time had come. Already the second floor was ablaze. The fire was moving down through the house, closer and closer to the basement. Soon there would be just one way out—through the two-by-two-foot hatch that led from this room out into the back alley. They knew what they would find out there: the full might of the Philadelphia Police Department, countless cops with automatic rifles, machine guns, and shotguns, all trained on that tiny hatch, all waiting.
Perhaps some of them thought of the long road that had brought them here, of happier times when they had first come to know the gentle teachings of John Africa. Perhaps they recalled those long nights when they would gather together to listen to his words, when they had been like babies discovering the wonders of the world for the first time. Perhaps they thought of the future, the future they were working for, a time when man’s corruption of Mom Nature, as MOVE called her, would finally cease and all people would know that man was meant to be a part of her, not to rule over her.
Perhaps they could see the forests rising again from beneath the asphalt of the cities, the cars rusting and returning to the earth, the skyscrapers crumbling into piles of stone, and the choked and polluted creeks of what was now west Philadelphia running pure and clear under canopies of virgin green. That was the vision that had brought them here. It was not for any personal glory, but for the sake of the world, that they were willing to die. The fire that was burning above them could not destroy MOVE’s truths. Already it had turned on the system, spreading outward and away from MOVE. The fire that had started here tonight would grow until it had consumed the system.
It was happening just as John Africa had told them it would.