Authors: Jonathan Kellerman
The explosion, described by witnesses as a “fire-storm,” occurred at 2:00
A.M.
and totally demolished a former lumber warehouse and several vacant outbuildings a half mile outside Bear Lodge, in addition to setting off fires in surrounding heavily forested areas that took six hours to suppress. Structures within the town of Bear Lodge experienced shattered windows and minor wood and masonry damage. No Bear Lodge residents reported injuries but ten people in the warehouse are believed to have perished.
“The ground just started shaking. It felt like an earthquake,” said Nellie Barthel, owner of the Maybe Drop Inn Tavern and Truck Stop in Bear Lodge, as she swept up broken bottles and glasses. “Or one of those sonic booms, but a lot louder. Then we saw the fire and smoke pouring into the sky from the east and we knew something had happened out there with those people at the old log depository.”
Tax documents obtained in Twin Falls reveal that the titled owner of the warehouse, Mountain Properties, had leased the hundred-year-old clapboard building the previous August for a six-month period to an “M. Bakunin”—believed to be an alias alluding to 19th century Russian anarchist Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin. “Bakunin’s” stated purpose on the lease agreement was “storage of agricultural materials and food.”
Employees and officers of Mountain Properties were not available for comment. However, residents of Bear Lodge (pop. 326) report increased activity in the vicinity of the warehouse during recent weeks, the “outsiders” hauling truckloads of fertilizer, sawdust, sugar and other materials along the quarter-mile service road leading to the four-story storage building.
“They must have bought the stuff somewhere else because they never came into town to shop,” said Dayton Auhagen, a buckskin-clad trapper who sometimes camped in the now-charred forests surrounding the warehouse. Auhagen described the warehouse tenants as “not from anywhere around these parts. But they minded their own business and we minded ours. That’s the way it is out here. We’re all individualists.”
Southern Idaho Regional FBI Agent-in-Charge Morrison Stowe had another view of the blast victims. “They were political radicals suspected of acts of urban terrorism or conspiracy to commit terrorism. The substances they were stockpiling are all potential nitrating agents and thus have a potential role in the manufacture of nitroglycerine-based explosives.”
Although he declined to specify the precise process of bomb manufacture, Stowe did say, “It’s not all that difficult. During the last couple of years there have been several manuals circulating among the subversive underground: bomb cookbooks that make do-it-yourselfing sound easy. What they don’t emphasize sufficiently is that nitroglycerine is an extremely unstable compound no matter how you cook it up. Minute variations in heat or humidity can set it off. We believe that’s what happened here. These individuals were manufacturing bombs, an accidental detonation occurred and they blew themselves up.”
Stowe added that while the force of the blast was so great as to render identification of bodies virt-ually impossible, eyewitness accounts combined with a “careful and longstanding investigation” led the Bureau to believe that at least ten individuals perished in the blast, including two young children, and that no members of the group escaped. He listed the blast victims as:
Thomas Harrison Mader Bruckner, 29, of Darien, Connecticut. A Columbia University graduate, teaching assistant in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and founding member of the violent Weathermen offshoot of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Bruckner was scion of an old Colonial family whose members have included several congressmen and a signer of the Declaration of Independence.
Catherine Blanchard Lockerby, 23, of Philadelphia and Newport, Rhode Island. A former Columbia University psychology student and Weatherman, Lockerby is described as Bruckner’s live-in companion and also the descendant of an affluent, socially prominent family.
Antonio Yselas Rodriguez, 34, of San Juan, Puerto Rico and the Bronx, New York. A convicted forger and burglar, Rodriguez is wanted on an outstanding fugitive warrant for escape from the Rikers Island prison in New York where he was being held for trial on assault charges related to a December 1970 South Bronx bar brawl. He is termed a “major suspect” in several bombings attributed to the Puerto Rican separatist/extremist group, FALN.
Teresa Alicia Santana, 26, of the Bronx, New York, is Rodriguez’s common-law wife and suspected FALN cell leader.
Mark Andrew Grossman, 24, of Brooklyn, New York. Former New York University political science student, Weathermen founder, and self-described “labor activist,” Grossman was wanted for questioning related to attempted sabotage of several Eastern Seaboard power stations.
Harold Cleveland “Big Skitch” Dupree, 39, convicted murderer and armed robber, paroled from Rahway, New Jersey, state prison in October of last year. Dupree was an official of the Black Fist prison gang and suspected founder of the Black Revo-lutionary Armed Forces, and was believed to be responsible for a string of armed car robberies in upstate New York.
Norman Samuel Green, 27, of Oakland, California. A former graduate student and teaching assistant in political science at the University of California, Berkeley, a former SDS official and antiwar activist, Green is believed to have been a prime force behind the “People’s Park” riots and other student protests at the Berkeley campus. He is thought to he the “M. Bakunin” to whom the warehouse was leased.
Melba Tamara Johnson-Green, 28, of Oakland, California. Norman Green’s wife and a former law student at the University of California, Berkeley, where she was a member of the Law Review before dropping out one semester short of graduation. An SDS member, an antiwar and women’s liberation activist and a suspected recruiter for the Weathermen on the Berkeley campus.
Malcolm Isaac Green, 2, of Oakland, California, the Greens’ son.
Fidel Frantz Rodriguez-Santana, 8 months, of the Bronx, New York, the son of Rodriguez and Santana.
Asked why members of groups such as the Black Revolutionary Armed Forces and the Weathermen, which had been known to have experienced sig nificant ideological differences in the past, had cooperated in assembling the explosives cache, Agent Stowe said, “Our information is that they were trying a unity-is-strength approach. All the major subversive groups have fallen upon hard times. Successful prosecution and imprisonment of leaders and exposure of their true goals have decimated their ranks, and new recruits are rare. The only ones left tend to be hard-core, violent radicals. This appears to have been a last-ditch effort to establish a radical confederation in order to disrupt society and damage lives and property. Because of their violent tendencies, it’s no surprise they ended up this way. Unfortunately, the two children were innocent victims.”
Facing the clipping was a poem surrounded on all sides by a border of dozens of tiny Jesuses on crosses.
BLACK LIES, WHITE LIES
blood on sawdust
rich and warm sweet with purpose
the splinters pierce martyrflesh
fascist sky ironred firered
uglysound
mycountrytis ofthee
mycountryrightorwrong they say
meanwhile spilling the sacramental blood
of
righteous ones
truth the ultimate victim
in their game the ultimate game
win or lose
battle
not the war
my heart bleeds too
rich and warm
for
joe hill
sacco and vanzetti
che
leon
triangle fire girls
thirdworld saints
piglies black and white
together
just the battle
because of red red
blood
power to the people!!!!
The last page was taken up by a photo, a group portrait of twenty or so people standing and kneeling in two rows in front of an ivy-covered brick building. The handwritten caption said, “Berkeley, Feb. 1969. Great bash. Even revolutionaries have to party.”
Arms around shoulders. Smiling faces. The joy of camaraderie. A few pairs of marijuana eyes.
Several heads had been haloed in black crayon—five men, three women. Handwritten names above each.
Thomas Bruckner and Catherine Lockerby stood together in the center of the front row. He, pear-shaped and stooped in a faded work shirt and jeans, with limp brown shoulder-length hair and a thick drooping mustache that obscured the bottom half of his face. She, big, heavily-built, bare-footed, wearing a batik muumuu, with her blond hair drawn back severely. Thin lips yielded reluctantly to mirth. Piercing eyes, strong jaw. In another place, another time, she might have matured to a horsey society woman.
Next to her stood “Tonio” Rodriguez, medium-sized and clean shaven, surprisingly clean-cut, his dark hair shorter than that of the others, side-parted. Button-down shirt and jeans. Eyes hidden behind mirrored Highway Patrol sunglasses. Teresa Santana had her arm around him. She was very short, very thin, wore a black turtleneck and tight jeans. Her long black hair was parted in the middle, framing an oval face with fashion-model cheekbones, almond eyes, full lips. A miniature Joan Baez, but hardened by a life more brutal than show biz.
Mark Grossman and “Big Skitch” Dupree stood on the left side of the second row, only their faces visible. Grossman’s was soft, childish, without much chin. He wore a huge blond Afro and fuzzy muttonchops that made him look out of focus. Dupree’s Afro was more modest. He wore black-framed eyeglasses, had a square, asphalt-colored face and a full beard. No smile. Penetentiary wariness.
To the far right side of the second row were the haloed visages of Norman and Melba Green. Next to Melba was an unhaloed face that I recognized.
Roundish, freckled, an unruly mop of dark hair. Pinched features, round tortoise-shell eyeglasses—the kind the British welfare department used to distribute for free. A skimpy mustache and feathery Vandyke that had the pasted-on look of theatrical costumery. But take away the facial hair, add a few years, and it was the same man I’d run into in a classroom, playing a harmonica. Same man I’d seen introducing a rock star.
Even back then, Gordon Latch had worn a politician’s smile. I stared at his picture for a while, creating hypotheses, running with them, hitting brick walls, trying again, finally turning my attention back to the Greens.
Norman Green had been very tall—from the way he towered over the others, at least six three or four. He had coarse dark hair, parted in the middle and held in place with a leather thong. Roman nose, thick dark eyebrows, long handsome face, rendered Lincolnesque by a bushy, mustacheless beard. Something about the face familiar . . .
His wife was of medium height, which brought the top of her head to his bicep. Black and pretty but severe-looking, as if preoccupied. She wore a collarless white blouse, ebony bead necklaces, and huge ebony hoop earrings. Haughty smile. Fluffy Afro above a fine-boned oval face. The carved-mask good looks of an African princess. Her face familiar too.
Black woman, white man.
It made me think of something. I turned back pages, to the newspaper clipping.
Malcolm Isaac Green, 2, of Oakland, California.
Seventeen years ago. Seventeen plus two. The time-frame fit.
Hispanic name on a black kid.
I went into the library, scrounged until I found my Spanish-English dictionary.
Page 146:
novato
m.
novice, beginner.
Flip to the English-Spanish side.
Page 94:
green
adj.
verde; novato, inexperto.
I put the book down and got on the phone.
30
Still unable to reach Milo. Unable to get a bored desk officer at the West Side station to tell me where he was.
Where were the cops when you needed them?
I remembered Judy Baumgartner’s account of her cryptic conversation with lke.
Relax your standards.
If I was interpreting my dictionary correctly, that made sense. I phoned her again at the Holocaust Center. Her secretary informed me she was out of the office and was cagey about saying more. Remembering what Judy had said about death threats, I didn’t push, but finally managed to convince the secretary that I was legitimate. Then she told me Judy had flown back to Chicago, wasn’t expected back for three days. Did I want to leave a message? Thinking about what kind of message I could leave, I declined and thanked her.
As I hung up, I thought of someone else who’d be able to firm up my theory. I looked up the number of the Beth Shalom Synagogue and dialed it. No one answered. The directory yielded three
Sanders, D.,
only one with no address listed and a Venice exchange. I called it. A woman with an accent similar to the rabbi’s answered. Children’s voices filled the background, along with what sounded like recorded music.
“Rabbi Sanders, please.”
“Who may I say is calling?”
“Alex Delaware. I met him at the synagogue the other day. Along with Detective Sturgis.”
“One moment.”
Sanders came on saying, “Yes, Detective Delaware. Any progress on Sophie?”
“Still an ongoing investigation,” I said. Amazing how easy that came . . .
“Yes, of course. What can I do for you?”
“I’ve got a theological question for you, Rabbi. What are Orthodox Judaism’s criteria for determining if someone’s Jewish?”
“Basically, there are two,” he said. “One must either be born to a Jewish mother or undergo a proper conversion. Conversion is predicated upon a course of study.”
“Having a Jewish father wouldn’t be enough?”
“No. Only the Reform Jews have accepted patrilineal descent.”
“Thank you, Babbi.”
“Is that all?”
“Yes. You’ve been very helpful.”
“Have I? Does your question have anything to do with Sophie?”
I hedged, repeated the open investigation line, thanked him for his time, and hung up. Tried Milo again beth at the station and at home. At the former, the desk officer’s boredom had progressed to torpor. Answering machine at the latter. I told it what I’d learned. Then I tried the network again.