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.