April 29, 2025 • 45 mins
One last giant heist is planned in Camden, New Jersey to prove that Hoover will never crush dissent. It's the biggest, boldest plan any raiders have yet dreamed up. It'll require guts, equipment, know-how, and 28 raiders.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Okay, So, just so we're clear on the state of things,
we now have a movement of well meaning and funny
Catholic civilians trading blows with Federal Bureau Director j Edgar
Hoover and basically in open rebellion against the United States government.
His giant trial in Harrisburg that was happening based on
brainstorming ideas the crew had mistakenly put to paper, had
(00:22):
turned the nine month trial prep of the Harrisburg Seven
into a cause celeb The Catholic.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Left had been a pretty small, intimate homespun out that
where everybody knew everybody, and all of a sudden you
have all these big heavyweight lawyers and moneymakers and propaganda people.
All of a sudden you tune around, there's Joan Baez
singing at a fundraiser for you people.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
And money flooded into Central PA, including so called movement
professionals such as Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda, Bill Kunstler,
and many others, the boldfaced names we still read about
in books on the period. Benefit concerts were fundraising parties
in every major city called cocktail conspiracies, attracted all the
(01:05):
left leaning glitterati of a given town, Leonard and Felicia
Bernstein threw a fundraiser in their Park Avenue apartment. The
Harrisburg Defense Committee became so bloated and so hollywood that
many insiders felt it could be the death of the movement,
which was exactly Hoover's plan all along. If Harrisburg succeeded,
(01:26):
shaky informants, grand jury, fishing expeditions, trumped up charges, and
death by due process would be the government's playbook to
crush the Left for generations to come. As Harrisburg lumbered on,
it became clear to the movement rank and file that
the only way to strike back at Hoover to protect
dissent for future generations was to grab the brass ring.
(01:51):
Throughout that spring of nineteen seventy one, Cookie Ridolfi had
been working with some local activists in Camden, New Jersey,
over the river from Philadelphia, as they say, searched for
just the right action.
Speaker 3 (02:01):
You know.
Speaker 4 (02:01):
I used to always say, there was the drama of Catonsville,
there was the tragedy of Harrisburg, which was a totally
bogus bolonnique charges, et cetera. And then there was the
comedy of Camden.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
The Camden Locals had identified the downtown Federal Building to
be the place where they would do something serious. The
only problem was that it was a bit like Fort Knox.
A post office on the first floor, an FBI field
office on the second, courtrooms on the third, Army intelligence
on the fourth, and all the draft records for the
(02:33):
entire city on the fifth. Cookie and John Peter Grady
had shown them how to case and gotten them started,
But the Camden locals had unwittingly chosen the most ambitious
and complex target of any raids to date. The Camden
Locals centered around a parish priest off the boat from
Ireland named Father Michael Doyle. Father Doyle and his crew
(02:56):
began casing the Federal Building in earnest, studying the security
guardar it's patterns from a darkened church portico across the street,
but the building felt too impenetrable. Try as they might
to learn the comings and goings of the place, none
of them could figure out how the hell to get
into it. Then one night, as Father Doyle approached the
(03:16):
dinner meeting of the Canden Locals, he noticed a man
in a suit following him, so he walked past the
door of the house where the meeting was to be held,
pulled out a piece of paper and began ripping it up.
He then tossed the ripped up shreds into a dumpster
and kept walking. When he looked back, the man in
the suit was looking in the dumpster. That night, as
(03:39):
they went out to surveil the building, they were all
followed aggressively and conspicuously by multiple g men. Father Doyle
and the Canden locals were so spooked they decided to
call off the action completely. The FBI was probably onto
them and the building was impenetrable. Their hopes of red
(04:00):
As erecting the movement were dashed. Hoover had won. But
the next day one of the Camden locals went to
hang out with a fellow parishioner of Father Doyle's, a
contractor and handyman named Bob Hardy. He spilled his guts
to Hardy about the abandoned raid, and Hardy consoled him,
(04:21):
betting he could probably figure out a way into the building.
Hardy was an ex marine, although as many ex marines
will tell you, there's no such thing as an ex marine,
and a Catholic convert brought into the church by Father Doyle.
He'd worked as a longshoreman and wept as he unloaded
GI caskets from Vietnam. After hearing about the abandoned raid,
(04:41):
he joined up with the Camden locals on the spot.
Bob Hardy was just what the Camden locals needed. Now
they had a new lease on life. A few days later,
Hardy and another activist paid a visit to the Camden
Federal Building in broad daylight. First, with Bob Hardy taking
(05:02):
the lead, they strode into the draft board on the
fifth floor and they said they were working with a
nearby prison and asked to check about the draft status
of their detainees. That showed them where the one A
files were kept. Next, they went down to the courtroom,
where Hardy saw some workmen and said do you mind
if some taxpayers have a look around. They studied the
(05:23):
fire escape and the window alarms to their hearts content. Finally,
they strode into the alley behind the building where some
mailmen were eating their lunch. Hardy looked up at the
fire escape and just blatantly said, say you've got a
fire alarm on that ladder? Doja? And the mailman unalarmed
said yep, it goes off when you pull it down.
(05:44):
And just like that, they had gathered more intel in
two hours than months of casing had yielded. The group's
spirits were so lifted by Bob Hardy's brio they decided
to do the raid after all. But Hardy told them
if they were really going to do this right, they
were going to need a lot more raiders. So the
(06:08):
call went out up and down the East Coast, come
to Camden. It's going to be the most complicated, the
largest and the greatest possible last stand we could ever
possibly pull against the war and against Hoover. I'm Brendan
(06:31):
Patrick Hughes, and this is Divine Intervention, Chapter eight. What
do we eat? Eagle Meat?
Speaker 4 (06:57):
We did all the preliminary work for months, and then
at some point, as the action got closer, people out
of town would come in, and Tozy was one of
those people.
Speaker 1 (07:05):
Sarah Toci and Paul Cooming arrived in late July. Paul
had just come from covertly making omelets with Sarah's FBI
brother in New Jersey, and.
Speaker 5 (07:14):
There were other people from all over the East Coasters
that come in to.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
Help out, including Bob Williamson who had been an inside
man on the media raid, but of course no one
in Camden knew that.
Speaker 4 (07:25):
Bob Williamson, whose name at the time was weed X.
Speaker 1 (07:28):
We'll call Bob Williamson weed X from now on, partly
because there were so many Bobs in this story, but
mostly because that nickname kicks ass.
Speaker 6 (07:36):
My records if they were still in that Canada draft board,
because that was my draft board.
Speaker 1 (07:40):
Just like Paul Cooming going after his draft file in
Dorchester during the Boston eight. Weed X was well aware
of a piece of paper in that building that held
the key to his fate and he wanted it back.
Speaker 6 (07:52):
So they probably had a file on me and there somewhere.
So I started helping with the casing it for Camden
and just helping to put the action together.
Speaker 7 (08:00):
Waiveson called me up and said we want to go
to a party.
Speaker 1 (08:05):
Weed X then called his media co conspirator, Keith Forsyth,
the one who had picked the lock in the hallway,
and brought him into the Camden fray.
Speaker 7 (08:13):
And I said I might yeah, So he invited me
to meet the Camden twenty eight people.
Speaker 1 (08:20):
Of course, neither would ever speak of their role in
the media burglary. Among themselves or with anyone else.
Speaker 5 (08:25):
John Peter Grady was there and the m mouster had
come down.
Speaker 8 (08:28):
I understood that people chose it because it was such
a poverty ridden community and because there were so many
people being drafted from Camden.
Speaker 1 (08:35):
Camden had boomed with a Campbell soup factory up until
the nineteen fifties, but over the sixties had been hit
severely by layoffs and was now destitute, with blocks of
derelic buildings and poor, young, underemployed men sitting like ducks
for the draft. In July of nineteen seventy one, local
Camden families had just welcomed home the one hundredth soldier's
(08:56):
body from Vietnam. The raiders arrived from up and down
the seaboard. A certain merriness about what they were doing
had taken hold. Bob Hardy's entrance on the scene had
instilled the new confidence, and the FBI tales had all
but vanished.
Speaker 4 (09:11):
There was a lot of singing and continuing to be positive,
regardless of how scary things could get for us, and
there was just a lot of spirit.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
To get to Camden without her. Twenty four to seven
FBI tail following her there and to avoid being subpoenat
as an unindicted co conspirator in the Harrisburg trial, Cookie
had disguised herself in her brother's work uniform and escaped
her mother's house in a heating oil truck. Now she
was staying in Camden full time and had fallen in
(09:38):
love with everyone involved.
Speaker 4 (09:40):
It would like pull you in because of the energy
of the group in Camden. It was like that, and
John Grady had a lot to do with it, because
he was that kind of charismatic band.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
John Peter Grady we've heard his name, was the co
chairman of the Catonsville Nine Defense Committee. He was the
guy who ran Iron Mountain, the resistance book distributor in
them Bronx, where Anne Walsh and many others first got
involved with the raids. By many accounts, he was a
larger than life figure. Men found him gregarious and a
natural born leader. Women, from what I've been told, were
(10:12):
reasonably more wary. After the Barrigins went to jail, he
became the de facto leader of the movement and had
evolved into one hell of a cat burglar. He was
also the FBI's chief suspects, although wrongly so in the
media Pennsylvania Field Office break in. As all the new
raiders arrived, they discovered that this raid had a new
(10:33):
man in charge who seemed to be buying to oust
John Peter Grady. Bob Hardy, the local contractor who got
the raid back on its feet.
Speaker 5 (10:43):
He was a handyman, and he worked with his hands
for a lover.
Speaker 4 (10:46):
He knew a lot about tools.
Speaker 8 (10:48):
He was like a jack of all trades, comperenture with
a wife and children who lived in town, who thought
this was a great idea. His parish priest sort of
drew him in.
Speaker 1 (10:56):
Already started supplying weekly groceries for the raiders who were
in from out of town. When they needed tools, he
would bring them. But he was a bit more of
a civilian than his bohemian counterparts.
Speaker 6 (11:08):
I remember he introduced himself. I remember right away thinking
this guy, I don't know what this guy's doing here.
Speaker 1 (11:16):
Wed X aka Bob Williamson.
Speaker 6 (11:18):
He was older, he was socially awkward. He did not
look anything like any of the people that I had
ever broken into a draft board with.
Speaker 1 (11:27):
But what Bob Hardy lacked in street cred he more
than made up.
Speaker 8 (11:30):
For and know how he was always saying, Oh, you
need ropes, Oh, I have ropes on my troupy. Yeah,
box cut is, you know, whatever, the little tools we
needed for the thing. He was always there at the ready,
and with.
Speaker 1 (11:39):
Bob in the mix, the raiders decided to go big.
Once inside the Federal Building, they would hit the draft board,
the FBI Field Office, and the Office of Military Intelligence,
which George Carlin liked the joke was an oxymorn like
jumbo shrimp.
Speaker 8 (11:55):
The building housed the FBI office, the IM Intelligence office
in the draft it was in the courthouse, Federal Courthouse
and Camden, so it was kind of like a you know, trifecta.
Speaker 1 (12:05):
So now it was time to get down to the
business of mad cap heists for peace, starting with a
new round of intense casing.
Speaker 7 (12:11):
There was a ton of people. I'd never seen that
many people involved in one action.
Speaker 4 (12:16):
Before prep work.
Speaker 8 (12:17):
Let's look at the building. What time do the lights
go on and off?
Speaker 4 (12:20):
What we would do is go out for hours at
a time, and we would go out boy girl right,
so that we would look like the cops came. It
would look like we were just making out. Me and
Coombing would go or me and one of the priests
would go and we would sit there.
Speaker 8 (12:32):
Is there a guard, Where does the guard walk? When's
the pattern of the guard? How could we avoid the guard?
Speaker 4 (12:36):
Basically, what we would do is we would take notes
about what was happening inside the building throughout the night.
What we had to do is to figure out when
would it be safest to go in.
Speaker 6 (12:45):
There was an apartment building that we used to go
up to the roof of and we had a view
of the Federal building.
Speaker 4 (12:51):
So we'd have maybe two cars from two different sides
of the building watching to see when lights went on
and off.
Speaker 1 (12:57):
From Bob Hardy, they learned the guard had a special
key that he would have to put in certain locks
on the walls of the corridors at certain times of
night for fire insurance, to prove there was someone patrolling
the floor.
Speaker 4 (13:09):
And then after several weeks or a month or whatever,
we knew there were patterns. We knew that the guard
was in this part of the building at this time,
at this part of the building in this time, and
from that we chose our times to act.
Speaker 6 (13:19):
From there, we could see the back of the building
where the fire escape was that led up to where
the draft board was we were able to see all
the floors of the building.
Speaker 1 (13:27):
The building was more complicated than any other raid had
ever attempted to penetrate.
Speaker 7 (13:33):
I did a little bit of teaching of people how
to pick locks and some stuff like that.
Speaker 6 (13:37):
And then somebody would make a big sort of poster
board layout of analysis of all of the relevant information,
sort of categorized by things like janitors or security guards.
Speaker 1 (13:48):
But with Hardy's know how, they hatched a plan that
involved getting eight people up a ladder in twenty two seconds,
and not just any ladder.
Speaker 6 (13:55):
Not a step ladder, but an extension ladder. Somebody decided
that we needed to practice climbing this ladder, so the
ladder was stuck up against I think it was maybe
Bob Hardy's garage or something in an alley behind his house.
Speaker 1 (14:08):
Extension ladders will break your arm if you don't know
what you're doing, especially with eight people carrying equipment, only
having about two and three quarters seconds each to scale
fourteen feet.
Speaker 6 (14:17):
And I can't imagine what the neighbors would have thought
of it. But he's standing there with a stopwatch and
timing us, you know, getting up the ladder onto the
roof of his garage or whatever. I just thought it
was hilarious that that was something we needed to practice.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
This was going to be incredibly intense. Cookie had always
played a strategic, behind the scenes role in the action
she planned with Grady, but for Camden, she decided she
was going in. She would lead the raiders up the
fire escape and be the one to cut the glass window.
Speaker 4 (14:49):
Maybe it was while I was processing all this information
and thinking about people across the world personal way think
about Vietnamese families, just imagining what it must be like,
and I started thinking them as my neighbors and people
that I knew. And when I started personalizing it that way,
(15:13):
it became more of an imperative to me to act.
Speaker 1 (15:16):
They began to take on their assignments for the raid.
Speaker 4 (15:18):
By that I was pretty committed to what what had
to do.
Speaker 1 (15:21):
Some would be lookouts, some would be drivers, and some
would be putting their head in the lion's mouth.
Speaker 4 (15:27):
I was excited, but I don't mean like in a
happy way. I was just I was excited.
Speaker 1 (15:33):
A week before the raid, Bob Hardy insisted they do
a dry run of the very complicated plan to penetrate
the building on the night of the rehearsal, there were
eight raiders who would go into the building. There were
four lookouts stationed across the street, and there were eight drivers,
all with synchronized watches, working in a complicated dance.
Speaker 5 (15:52):
Basically, you go with everybody you're going to use that night,
everybody in sync at the exact time of night that
you're going to try to break into the draft board.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
Bob Hardy's van then reversed into the alley behind the building.
Speaker 5 (16:03):
Off We even opened up the back of the thing
and put the ladder up to see how it was
going to fit. We had never actually done it before.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
The eight raiders had to get the ladder against the
metal canopy atop a post office loading dog.
Speaker 5 (16:14):
It was a docking area for trucks to back into
the post office, and this was an awning that went
out over It was a pretty sturdial awning that you
could walk on and walked carefully and quietly.
Speaker 1 (16:24):
Because it made noise fourteen feet up.
Speaker 5 (16:26):
And we knew that we could get up. We had
already practiced growing up and down the ladder, so we
knew we had to practice some more, but we knew
that it was doable.
Speaker 1 (16:35):
On the night of the raid, they would skidter across
the canopy to the fire escape.
Speaker 5 (16:39):
Then you brought a ladder with you and got up
against the fire escape even another little bit. Because the
fire escape was pulled down, an alarm was going to
automatically go off. Bob Hardy had spotted that, told us
about it, made sure that we weren't going to set
off any alarms on the way.
Speaker 1 (16:57):
They would then climb the fire escape to the fifth
floor herapy, where they would bypass the window alarms by
cutting through the glass. On the night of the rehearsal,
everything went according to plan.
Speaker 5 (17:07):
So it's just a drill practice doing all the steps
and it all went pretty well.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
But Bob Hardy didn't like how it went.
Speaker 5 (17:13):
Bob Hardy was very upset afterwards.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
Emotions were starting to flare. What they were trying to
do had never been done before, and Hardy's demand for
precision felt a little unattainable. But despite Bob's hang ups,
the raid was now set for the following Saturday night.
Just a few days before the night of the raid,
(17:37):
during a traffic stop in downtown Camden, two police officers
beat a Puerto Rican resident who would later die from,
according to the autopsy, a blow to the groin. The
following night, Camden's Puerto Rican community entered into open rebellion.
Fires were set throughout downtown, More than fifty injuries were reported,
(18:00):
and additional state troopers were called in to supplement Camden's
police force.
Speaker 8 (18:04):
There were riots happening in Campden the weekend of the action.
Speaker 4 (18:07):
Because about a week before the action, Camden police killed
a Puerto Rican kit motorists.
Speaker 1 (18:12):
From the apartment they used as their headquarters, just two
blocks from the Camden building. The Raiders watched in horror
as the city burned.
Speaker 4 (18:20):
There was looting, and I can remember we were standing
in the window at the window looking across the street
and seeing these kids running in and out of these stores,
breaking windows, running out, running in getting stuff, slathering themselves
with vasoline, which I later learned they did that because
the cops that grabbed them they would slip out. It
(18:42):
was like one of those things ago. This have to
remember this, This is like a dream. Am I really
watching this? And this is in television? And the streets
were just insane, and there were cops everywhere.
Speaker 1 (18:53):
Not only were the cops everywhere, but the mayor had
imposed a curfew.
Speaker 4 (18:57):
Here we are trying to do an action in mild Ale.
Speaker 7 (18:59):
This just a few days from the planned date of
the action. Somebody had to go out and get groceries
because we were you know, twenty eight people eat a
lot of food, and so Bob Hardy volunteered, I'll go.
Speaker 1 (19:11):
Keith Forsyth and Bob Hardy climbed into Bob's van and
headed out to the grocery store. Hardy seemed to be
having second thoughts.
Speaker 7 (19:19):
So Hardy says to me, what do you think you
think this is really I think it's really going to go.
There's an awful lot of police on the streets and stuff.
And I said, yeah, but you know, not so much
in this neighborhood. You know, right where the draft board is.
And he was like, it has to go, no matter what.
Speaker 4 (19:38):
He said.
Speaker 7 (19:39):
You know what about the guard. You know, I'm like,
what about the guard? We know what his routine is.
Just have to be, you know, avoid him and be
quiet inside. And he goes, well, I got something, you know,
in case the guard is a problem, open the glocal apartment.
I opened the glocal apartment. There's a snubnosed revolver in there,
(20:01):
and I'm like, are you out of your fucking mind?
If you think I'm going to carry a gun in
and shoot a minimum wage security guard, there's something wrong
with you. And I told Bob Williamson, I said, you know,
I think this guy Hardy's a cop.
Speaker 1 (20:16):
Bob Williamson aka Weed, ex Keith's fellow media conspirator, assured
him that things were just very tense as a result
of the rioting and they could probably trust Hardy. Besides,
he was a member of Father Doyle's parish and really
good friends with some of the local raiders.
Speaker 7 (20:32):
He says, you know, you always get nervous on the
night of the action.
Speaker 5 (20:35):
You know.
Speaker 7 (20:35):
I'm like, well, you know that's true. I do get nervous,
and I let it go.
Speaker 1 (20:39):
But Bob Hardy gave a lot of people the feeling
of a linebacker reluctantly having to be in Romeo and
Juliet for college credit.
Speaker 4 (20:46):
He was an ex marine, you know, and he shows
up and he's this really big, light hair full of himself.
You know, every word he spoke had importance. Talk to
lie and She'll tell you, you know, we were They're
not crazy about this guy at all.
Speaker 8 (21:01):
He asked us if we thought we should have a
gun at the Camden draft Wood Action. And it was
like a gun and.
Speaker 5 (21:08):
I met the very first night I met Bob Hardy.
Speaker 1 (21:10):
Although Paul the man with the largest heart in the universe,
felt otherwise, and.
Speaker 5 (21:15):
I liked him like that right off the bat. I
really liked him, this great guy.
Speaker 1 (21:20):
Saturday night arrived, they gathered around several tables for a
final dinner, and thirteen men all happened to sit at
one long table. They joked that it was the last
supper and wondered who might be Judas they had a
big decision to make the curfew and the riots had
police and stadies prowling the streets, the Canden Raiders had
(21:40):
a hard look at one another and they decided to
go for it.
Speaker 5 (21:45):
Despite the fact that there was tear gas in the
street and everything. They went right through it.
Speaker 3 (21:50):
Go time.
Speaker 4 (21:51):
We all loaded into Bob Party's van. It was a
big white sort of box van.
Speaker 1 (21:56):
The eight Raiders climbed inside a little Winnebago with their
ladder and two just like they practiced. But I'm sure
you're thinking eight people climbing a ladder in the middle
of downtown Canden would be conspicuous anytime of.
Speaker 4 (22:07):
Day, right, so I have to. I'll show you this
it this way. You can see in this drawing that
this is Cooper Street, Main Drag. The post office is here.
Speaker 1 (22:16):
So Cookie showed me the ingenious way. The raiders made
sure they could remain inconspicuous.
Speaker 4 (22:22):
This was a one way street.
Speaker 1 (22:23):
The Canden Federal Building, known as the post Office and Courthouse,
was at four to Oho one Market Street, on the
north side of the street facing south, with Fourth Street
running down its west side. They drove up Fourth Street
to the loading dock behind the building, and we.
Speaker 4 (22:37):
Had to block traffic from being able to go in
any place where they could see us because we were down.
I'll make this quigly line be the alley.
Speaker 1 (22:45):
They had timed the stoplights at the four intersections surrounding
the building and realized they had at best the length
of one stoplight to set up the ladder twenty two seconds,
but they needed insurance.
Speaker 4 (22:57):
The plan was that there would be cars situated in
various parts around the building, so we had a car
come up stop.
Speaker 1 (23:05):
Here to buy some time. The eight drivers, including Sarah Tosi,
Leanne Mosha, Keith Forsythe and Bob Hardy would simultaneously pretend
to break down in the four surrounding intersections.
Speaker 5 (23:18):
All the cars blocked the streets so that the truck
that's carrying the eight of us that are going to
go inside the building has enough time to back right
up to the platform in the post office.
Speaker 4 (23:26):
And then we had people get out of the car
and lift the hood of the car that act like
they had car trouble, but it blocked the whole street
so no one could go up the street, so no
one could turn into that street like the police. And
we had another car somewhere else doing the same thing.
Speaker 1 (23:41):
This was at a time when cars broke down a lot.
Speaker 5 (23:44):
We got the streets all blocked off and they had.
Speaker 1 (23:45):
A system of lookouts all on walkie talkies.
Speaker 4 (23:48):
There's a house down the street where we had people
with a walkie talkie and.
Speaker 1 (23:51):
A church across the street with an entrance.
Speaker 4 (23:53):
With a little chapel kind of top on. It got
a chapel, I think it called it the parapet or no,
not a parapet. That was the portico, yeah, portico.
Speaker 1 (24:02):
Four lookouts watched the building security guard.
Speaker 4 (24:05):
From the portico, and then we pulled into the back
of the post office and we jumped out of the van.
We had a ladder with us. As a matter of fact,
it was there that we borrowed mail bags. So we
get on the platform. We put the ladder up to
that story. We'd scurry up the ladder. We pulled the
ladder up with us, and then we go up the
fire escape.
Speaker 1 (24:23):
Cookie had learned how to use a glass cutter and
practiced on several windows. They climbed up the fire escape
to the parapet on the roof. She taped up the glass,
cut a hole, hammered it out and opened the window,
just like in Mission Impossible, and they all leapt down
four feet onto the carridor floor.
Speaker 4 (24:41):
We cut the glass and opened the window and we
went in.
Speaker 1 (24:46):
They were in.
Speaker 4 (24:48):
So you're in a large office space. There's files, there's desks,
it's a big open space. We're working. There were in
there at least an hour and a half or two hours.
I don't remember how long.
Speaker 1 (24:58):
They used Bob's industrial grade bolt cutters to get into
the padlocked filing cabinets.
Speaker 4 (25:03):
We had divided up the draft board into one A
files in different categories, but the one I files were
priority files because those were the kids ready to be drafted,
but ready to be sent to war. And we had
to shakecase the room so we knew where the files were,
and we had little pen flashlights because it was we
had to keep the room dark. I had been mine
in my mouth and I was doing my little thing
(25:25):
and pulling out the files and packing the bags.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
It was an incredibly hot and humid night, so some
of the raiders went out onto the roof parapet to work,
but they had to crouch that they wouldn't be spotted
by curfew helicopters.
Speaker 5 (25:38):
I was on walkie talkie and my handle was called little.
Speaker 1 (25:42):
Man Little Big Man. Paul Koming was stationed on the
parapet as a lookout.
Speaker 5 (25:46):
Most of the people were inside of the draft board
filling sacks paper or tearing up flow cards, or making
sure they got everything and putting in the mail sacks.
Speaker 1 (25:57):
Paul's specific job was to make sure the security guard
never came to the fifth floor.
Speaker 5 (26:01):
He never circulated through the building at night. His last
trip was before we ever entered the building. So my
response was trained to be God is coming, I see
your guard's coming. And I also had a rope tied
to me, and I was supposed to pull the rope
in case the walkie talking didn't work, that the person
on the other end of the rope would get yanked
(26:22):
at the waist, and he'd realized that they should sit down.
The idea was that they would sit on the floor
and wait to be arrested by this one guy rather
than try to scamper and get out quick.
Speaker 1 (26:38):
Just after four am, the raiders decided to skip the
FBI office and the Army intelligence since sunrise was imminent.
Speaker 5 (26:45):
Someone on the ground pass how are you proceeding? And
I asked the people in the board and they said
they would be done in a few minutes, so they
were going to need to be picked up and such
a time.
Speaker 1 (26:57):
At four point thirty, the drivers were two blocks away
at the headquarters, getting ready to take their places.
Speaker 8 (27:02):
I was in the command central with a few other people,
including Bob.
Speaker 1 (27:05):
Hardy Leanne Mosha, who said, I think.
Speaker 8 (27:07):
I'm gonna go out and pick up some cheese steaks sandwiches.
He said.
Speaker 1 (27:11):
As Bob Hardy went out for celebratory cheese steaks, the
raiders in the draft board started throwing stuffed mail bags
from the parapet down to a second floor landing.
Speaker 4 (27:20):
So sometime we're there for a while and I hear
we hear footsteps, and then I hear, really faintly, I
hear FBI raid and I look and I think I
think it's Bob Williamson. And I'm like, that is not funny, Bob.
Speaker 5 (27:39):
And just then as that I think I'm over, I
turned around and I looked at him as it wasn't
just the guard, it was four people coming up that
staircase to arrest me.
Speaker 4 (27:50):
But moments later, I start to see the silhouettes of
men coming in the windows. We could just see the
silhouettes of these bodies and they're opening windows in their claes.
I'm in the windows, so I'm.
Speaker 5 (28:01):
Yelling the guard is coming, The guard is coming, into
a walkie talkie as I pull away from the window
and not comprehending that why is there more than one guard?
Speaker 3 (28:12):
You know?
Speaker 1 (28:13):
At that moment at the apartment headquarters, the front and
back doors were kicked in simultaneously and federal agents rushed in.
As Paul's voice continued screaming over the walkie talkie.
Speaker 5 (28:24):
I got saying the guard's coming, The guards coming, The
Guard's coming, because I didn't know what else to say.
Speaker 1 (28:29):
But Paul's contact was dealing with his own shit.
Speaker 5 (28:32):
He was cursing at me on the walkie hockey, saying, Paul,
shut up, we know what we know. The guards here.
Speaker 1 (28:39):
At this time, Sarah, Leanne and Keith were about to
leave to block the intersections.
Speaker 7 (28:43):
I heard all those tires squealing in the parking lot
at three in the morning or whenever.
Speaker 3 (28:47):
It was like.
Speaker 7 (28:49):
Instantly, I said to the other people in the room.
I looked up and said, we're busted.
Speaker 8 (28:52):
FBI agents with the jackets, with FBI in the back, guns,
big guns drawn. Put your hands up, it's the FBI.
It's A it's A. And every window in this little
rectory was lit up by these guys rushing in the doorways,
the windows up against the wall. Spread your legs. It
was terrifying.
Speaker 7 (29:11):
One of them had a shotgun, and I remember the
shotgun very firmly, because they lined us up against the wall.
And I turned around and made some kind of a joke.
I make a lot of smart ass remarks, and the
guy with the shotgun pushed my face back up against
the wall with the business end of the shotting. They
knew who all these people were. I mean there were
(29:31):
twenty eight people. Twenty seven of them were pacifist, half
of them were priests. For God's sake.
Speaker 1 (29:37):
Two blocks away, Paul stood on the parapet of the
Federal building, frozen in fear.
Speaker 5 (29:42):
I turned around and I saw the whole building was
lit up, and I said, no, wonder the guards coming.
They turned the lights on.
Speaker 1 (29:49):
All of a sudden, all of the lights in the
building came on, and the front of the building was
doused in floodlights.
Speaker 5 (29:57):
Every place we had lookouts, they were there, and they
just automatically at the same time, on one signal, arrest
of everybody.
Speaker 1 (30:08):
Eighty wingtipped federal agents started popping up in every place.
A raider had been stationed, the portico, the apartment, the
driver's parking spots, the draft board. The FBI had the
drop on them the whole time, and the jig was
up wearing baseball caps and dark blue windbreakers with FBI
and big white letters across their backs. The agents flooded
(30:30):
into the room through doors and windows.
Speaker 4 (30:32):
It was like an out of body experience. They had
guns drawn on us. Guns. I mean, we were known
for being non violent. They had guns drawn on us.
Were surrounded by agents and they're grabbing hold of us.
Bob good was out on the parapet loading bags and
they threw him into the window. Cooming is dragged into
the room because he'd been grabbed over the other side
(30:54):
of the building. He's dragged into the room and they're
pretty abusive to him.
Speaker 1 (30:59):
Paul Koming was the last one found in his hiding
place out on the parapet.
Speaker 5 (31:02):
And they took me handcuffing behind my back, bent me over,
held me by the handcuffs, and ran me the distance
of that flat roof to the edge of the roof
as if they're going to throw me off, then pulled
me back the last second, just to scare the shit
out of me.
Speaker 1 (31:20):
They brought Paul Coombing into the draft board, smashed him
into the filing cabinets a few times, then threw him
down on his stomach next to Cookie. Then bursting through
the doors came the government's chief prosecutor from the Harrisburg trial,
Guy Goodwin. Goodwin had become the head of Hoover's new
Left squad, whose job it was to take down the
(31:40):
Catholic left.
Speaker 4 (31:41):
And Guy Goodwin has a radio in his hand and
he's talking to someone and he's walked around the room
and he's counting us one, two, three, four, five, sixty seven. Okay,
we got them all. We got them all. And I
kept thinking to myself, this is I cannot believe this
is happening. It's like when you know you're seeing something
that you can't believe you're seeing you in a way
where I wasn't really afraid. All I kept thinking was
(32:04):
I have got to remember this to tell my friends,
because it was so unbelievable. When I was looking at
the whole room and all the people and all the
pushing around.
Speaker 5 (32:14):
They knocked people down and jumped on their backs with
their knees. Fola Doyle was knocked to the ground and
he was handcoffed behind his back, and then the guy
pounced on him.
Speaker 4 (32:26):
And so these two agents grab a hold of me,
and they're grabbing each one of us the same way
like they went to FBI school.
Speaker 6 (32:32):
Right.
Speaker 4 (32:33):
So the idea is you throw the person on the ground,
you put your knee into their lower back, you pull
their hands up, and you handcoff them. So that's happening
all around me. My two guys come, they throw me
on the ground and they're my bands are behind my back,
and one the agent says, give me the cuffs, and
the other one says, I thought you brought them.
Speaker 1 (32:51):
The raiders later described the agents as being right out
of the academy, with baby faces and shaking guns. Television
would have you think the FBI does raids like this
every week. But it makes me wonder if they are
actually pretty rare.
Speaker 4 (33:04):
So the boss comes along, the supervisor. His name is
Agent Snodgrass. I'll never forget. So Snodgrass comes along and
he goes, what's happening over here, and he goes, well,
I thought he had the cops, and he thought he
had the puffs. And they're explaining to their boss, and
he says, tire up with their belt. So they pull
my belt off and I didn't even get handcuffs.
Speaker 5 (33:23):
That first time.
Speaker 1 (33:23):
As things settled down, Guy Goodwin took center stage.
Speaker 4 (33:27):
So meantime, Guy Goodwin is walking around the room and
he's saying things to people to let them know he
knows who they are. So when he got to me,
he said, hey, cookie, how you do it? Is your
brother still playing the drums? My brother played the drums.
Speaker 1 (33:42):
Goodwin knew their nicknames. He knew the names of their families,
and he made it clear that to the government this
was personal, but nowhere near as personal as it would
be for Sarah Toci.
Speaker 4 (33:53):
Her brother was FBI. He arrested some of the people
he was on this arrest. When she was arrested, the
guy said, they're your Toazy's little sister.
Speaker 1 (34:03):
This was supposed to be the raid that would prove
Descent could never be crushed by Hoover's wing tipped goons. Instead,
they all lay dejected on the floor, knees in their backs.
Speaker 4 (34:18):
At some point, I hear a sort of croaky voice
say in it's almost a whisper, what do we eat?
Do you know the story?
Speaker 1 (34:28):
But then weed X did something totally bananas.
Speaker 4 (34:33):
This comes from what we were rehearsing. We were rehearsing
going up and down the ladder and Paul Cooman's High
School when they had games, they had this thing where
some people would say what do we eat? And people
would say, eagle meat, What do we eat? Egle meat?
What do they eat? Shit? So I hear, I hear
somebody in the room say what do we eat? And
I'm like, no, the rest of us are of cough
(34:55):
out eagle meat. And then he says, where a stronger voice, what.
Speaker 5 (35:00):
Do we eat?
Speaker 4 (35:00):
And we say eagle meat, and he says, what do
they eat? We say shit. The bosses in the FBA
agents who are bosses in the room are like, furious,
You can't say that. You'll be quiet, Tom, You're just
trying to yell at us. And then I looked to
the left and the door opens and they're dragging Paul
out of the room. And I felt so bad for Paul.
(35:21):
I didn't know what to say to help him. So
I said, don't worry Paul. We've got him on the run.
Speaker 5 (35:26):
Now.
Speaker 1 (35:30):
They were defeated. Hoover had struck a decisive blow, and
yet they still chanted. They eat shit right in the
FBI's face. After the arrest, the raiders were then hauled downstairs,
separated and interrogated.
Speaker 4 (35:51):
So they take us down into these rooms and they
have each one of us in a separate room and
they start, you know, interrogating us. Looks like how did
a TV show? And I didn't know that the people
outside have been arrested.
Speaker 8 (36:04):
It was an endless time to me, Leanne. They were
frisking us and I was put into a vehicle with
two FBI agents in the front seat. I was in
the backseat, and then we started driving around town and
they were saying, you know, it was stereotypical good cock,
bad cock. One guy was really mean, the other guy
was very nice, and I'm sure they were both Irish,
(36:25):
Catholic FBI agents, and they were saying things like, you know,
your friend John Grady spilled the beans. We've got everybody's
name and address.
Speaker 1 (36:33):
Now, oldest trick in the book. Cookie's interrogation was endless.
Speaker 4 (36:37):
At some point, some agent comes in and says, John
Grady just spilled the beans. Spilled the beans. Really?
Speaker 1 (36:45):
After Cookie's interrogator told her that John Grady had spilled
the beans, she burst out laughing, and then so did
he because they both knew how ridiculous it was.
Speaker 4 (36:54):
All I didn't believe John would have made a statement.
Second of all, spill the beans? What movie? What did
that come from?
Speaker 5 (37:00):
Right?
Speaker 4 (37:00):
It was also nuts.
Speaker 8 (37:02):
I didn't tell them my name. I never answered any
question they asked me. I just kept silent for a
few hours. As we drove around town, and it was
the middle of the night, and then it was sort
of pre dawn, and as we drove in and out
of Camden. I would see another car and realized it
was one of my friends, like in the back seat
of another and I would try and raise my manacle
of hands up the wave. I stopped doing that.
Speaker 4 (37:23):
I look out the window and I see a mob
of people out there, and TV trucks and all this
press and people in the streets, mobs of people. And
I say to the agent, what's going on, because I
think it's related to Riot's going on. So I go,
what happened? What's going on? He says, Oh, they're here
(37:44):
for you.
Speaker 1 (37:46):
It was now Sunday morning, August twenty second, nineteen seventy one,
Jay Edgar Hoover held a joint press conference with AG
John Mitchell in which he announced he had broken the
back of the Catholic left. Eventually, the raiders were all
corraled together in the bowels of the building to await arraignment.
Speaker 4 (38:06):
Eventually they take us all down and put us in
this big room together, the men and women together, and
I remember we started singing the Rising of the Moon,
and they yelled at us.
Speaker 1 (38:16):
And it was there that they realized someone was missing.
Speaker 5 (38:20):
At that time, we realized there was only one person
missing from the arrest scene.
Speaker 8 (38:24):
I don't know at what point it became apparent that
he was the only one who wasn't arrested.
Speaker 6 (38:28):
I think somebody said, where's Hardy.
Speaker 8 (38:30):
And then we're like, ah, okay, it's Bob Hardy.
Speaker 1 (38:33):
Bob Hardy. When the local Camden raider had gone to
Bob Hardy after the initial plans for the action had
fallen apart, Hardy had assured him he could help make
it happen. But then he immediately went to the FBI
field office.
Speaker 8 (38:51):
But immediately he came to one or two meetings and
decided this didn't sit right with him, so he went
immediately to the FBI and they said, great.
Speaker 4 (38:59):
Hang in there.
Speaker 9 (39:00):
And he thought that the Catholic c left was using
Mike Doyle.
Speaker 1 (39:05):
Anne Walsh, who was busy fighting her contempt of court
charge in Harrisburg and therefore wasn't a part of the
Camden crew.
Speaker 9 (39:11):
So he went to the FBI to say the Catholic
cleft was dragging his front and the FBI said, we'll
protect your friend and you if you work with us.
Speaker 1 (39:24):
The FBI agent encouraged him to join the group and
told him they'd reimburse him for any expenses. This was
just the break the FBI needed after the humiliation of
media had enraged one J. Edgar Hoover.
Speaker 9 (39:42):
He was furious, he was out of his mind. Somebody
violated the FBI and he wanted to bring the Catholic
Left to its knees.
Speaker 4 (39:53):
In March, the FBI read happened and allD the FBI
files went out, and they knew it was the Catholic Left.
And when they got the word from Bob Hardy that
he was working with a group, they thought, oh, here
we go, bingo, bingo, We're going to get them all.
That's why it became such a big action. Why was
so highly publicized.
Speaker 1 (40:13):
There was a rumor that the night of the raid,
the FBI men had held a pregame celebration at a
nearby hotel, complete with wives and girlfriends. While the raiders
were setting up their lookouts, the FBI was stationing floodlights
and photographers.
Speaker 4 (40:28):
And there's pictures of us going up the fire escape,
so you must have seen those, right. FBI were taking
pictures of us from across the street.
Speaker 1 (40:33):
Hardy was operating kind of like Haliburton in the Oughts
with a blank check from the federal government.
Speaker 8 (40:38):
So he was always saying, Oh, you need ropes, Oh,
I have ropes in my truck. I mean, the FBI
was supplying equipment, box cut is, you know, whatever, the
little tools we needed for the thing. He was always
there at the ready with stuff which he was getting
from the FBI, and he was being paid.
Speaker 9 (40:52):
So every time they ran into a flaw in the
post office building, the FBI solved that flaw by getting
the saws, the equipment, the ladders and stuff like that,
and nobody suspected. They just thought it was like good luck.
Speaker 1 (41:06):
That's why Bob Hardy, this square nobody but Paul seemed
to like, would keep hanging around with these kids. Why
he'd conveniently left for cheese steaks in the middle of
the biggest heist of the decade. Why he'd seemed pissed
off during the successful dry run of the operation.
Speaker 5 (41:23):
And come to find out, he was upset because he
had been told that we were going to be arrested.
During the dry.
Speaker 1 (41:29):
Run, Hardy had made the FBI promise that his four
friends in the action, including Father Doyle, would not be arrested.
He'd carefully arranged for them to not be at the
dry Run rehearsal, But then the FBI didn't move in and.
Speaker 5 (41:42):
His friends, who were the four people from his parish
in Camden, they wouldn't go to jail, and the FBI
went back on their word they were going to arrest
us at the dry Run, but they didn't.
Speaker 1 (41:56):
And on the night of the raid, the FBI had
let them continue their action for over two hours so
they would keep racking up charges. At the quickie arraignment
that Sunday, which was held in the courtroom literally downstairs
from the draft board they had raided only twelve hours earlier,
(42:19):
Guy Goodwin portrayed the raiders as terrorists to a sympathetic
judge who let the bail climb up to six hundred
and five thousand dollars.
Speaker 5 (42:28):
John Peter had the highest amount on him. Started out
one hundred thousand dollars on his head alone. My bail
is seventy five thousand. This is in seventy one Now
nobody had that kind of money.
Speaker 1 (42:42):
One by one they were brought out of the building
to be transferred to jail.
Speaker 10 (42:46):
The FBI early today caught an anti war group in
the actors. It was trying to steal records from the
draft board in Camden, New Jersey. Twenty persons were arrested,
including two calf the priests and a protestant.
Speaker 1 (42:56):
Minute as they were led out of the building into
squad cars, news reporters filled the.
Speaker 3 (43:01):
Streets, maps, charts, radios, transceivers, mockups of Federal Building windows,
glass cutting tools, and according to the FBI, they were
being taught how to pick locks exactly like the ones
in the Federal Building.
Speaker 1 (43:12):
A crowd of civilians gathered and cheered them on. And
this is one of the most remarkable moments for me
in this whole saga. I've been alive a long time,
and I have never heard of the general public cheering
someone during their perk wlock. And unlike their FBI counterparts,
the Canden twenty eight were all smiles as they came
out of the building, cheering back and flashing handcuffed peace signs.
Speaker 4 (43:36):
They walk me out to the front of the steps
of the building and I walk out and all of
a sudden, people see me and they start screaming sha,
cheering me.
Speaker 1 (43:45):
But the Camden twenty eight caught dead to rights. We're
facing a maximum sentence of forty seven years in prison
on the next intervention.
Speaker 6 (44:01):
We all knew that sooner or later we would get
caught breaking into a draft board. Successfully was only part
of the point. The other part of the point would
be to use the opportunity of our inevitable trial to
try to persuade a jury and hopefully an audience in
the courtroom, that what we did was not a crime.
Speaker 1 (44:32):
Divine Intervention is a production of iHeart Podcasts. It's produced
by Wonder Media Network. It was created and written by me,
your host, Brendan Patrick Hughes. Our fiendishly adept producers our
Carmen Borca Correo, Abby Delk Palomo Moreno, Jimenez, Grace Lynch,
and myself. Our editor is Woman About Town Grace Lynch
(44:54):
for Wonder Media Network. Our executive producers are Emily Rutterer
and Jenny Kaplan for iHeart pod Casts, our executive producer
is Christina Everett. Our theme in end credit music was
composed and performed by actual rock star Tanya Donnelly and
mastered by rock star masterer Ben Aerons. This is Brendan
Patrick Hughes. Thank you for listening to Divine Intervention.
Okay, So, just so we're clear on the state of things,
we now have a movement of well meaning and funny
Catholic civilians trading blows with Federal Bureau Director j Edgar
Hoover and basically in open rebellion against the United States government.
His giant trial in Harrisburg that was happening based on
brainstorming ideas the crew had mistakenly put to paper, had
(00:22):
turned the nine month trial prep of the Harrisburg Seven
into a cause celeb The Catholic.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Left had been a pretty small, intimate homespun out that
where everybody knew everybody, and all of a sudden you
have all these big heavyweight lawyers and moneymakers and propaganda people.
All of a sudden you tune around, there's Joan Baez
singing at a fundraiser for you people.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
And money flooded into Central PA, including so called movement
professionals such as Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda, Bill Kunstler,
and many others, the boldfaced names we still read about
in books on the period. Benefit concerts were fundraising parties
in every major city called cocktail conspiracies, attracted all the
(01:05):
left leaning glitterati of a given town, Leonard and Felicia
Bernstein threw a fundraiser in their Park Avenue apartment. The
Harrisburg Defense Committee became so bloated and so hollywood that
many insiders felt it could be the death of the movement,
which was exactly Hoover's plan all along. If Harrisburg succeeded,
(01:26):
shaky informants, grand jury, fishing expeditions, trumped up charges, and
death by due process would be the government's playbook to
crush the Left for generations to come. As Harrisburg lumbered on,
it became clear to the movement rank and file that
the only way to strike back at Hoover to protect
dissent for future generations was to grab the brass ring.
(01:51):
Throughout that spring of nineteen seventy one, Cookie Ridolfi had
been working with some local activists in Camden, New Jersey,
over the river from Philadelphia, as they say, searched for
just the right action.
Speaker 3 (02:01):
You know.
Speaker 4 (02:01):
I used to always say, there was the drama of Catonsville,
there was the tragedy of Harrisburg, which was a totally
bogus bolonnique charges, et cetera. And then there was the
comedy of Camden.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
The Camden Locals had identified the downtown Federal Building to
be the place where they would do something serious. The
only problem was that it was a bit like Fort Knox.
A post office on the first floor, an FBI field
office on the second, courtrooms on the third, Army intelligence
on the fourth, and all the draft records for the
(02:33):
entire city on the fifth. Cookie and John Peter Grady
had shown them how to case and gotten them started,
But the Camden locals had unwittingly chosen the most ambitious
and complex target of any raids to date. The Camden
Locals centered around a parish priest off the boat from
Ireland named Father Michael Doyle. Father Doyle and his crew
(02:56):
began casing the Federal Building in earnest, studying the security
guardar it's patterns from a darkened church portico across the street,
but the building felt too impenetrable. Try as they might
to learn the comings and goings of the place, none
of them could figure out how the hell to get
into it. Then one night, as Father Doyle approached the
(03:16):
dinner meeting of the Canden Locals, he noticed a man
in a suit following him, so he walked past the
door of the house where the meeting was to be held,
pulled out a piece of paper and began ripping it up.
He then tossed the ripped up shreds into a dumpster
and kept walking. When he looked back, the man in
the suit was looking in the dumpster. That night, as
(03:39):
they went out to surveil the building, they were all
followed aggressively and conspicuously by multiple g men. Father Doyle
and the Canden locals were so spooked they decided to
call off the action completely. The FBI was probably onto
them and the building was impenetrable. Their hopes of red
(04:00):
As erecting the movement were dashed. Hoover had won. But
the next day one of the Camden locals went to
hang out with a fellow parishioner of Father Doyle's, a
contractor and handyman named Bob Hardy. He spilled his guts
to Hardy about the abandoned raid, and Hardy consoled him,
(04:21):
betting he could probably figure out a way into the building.
Hardy was an ex marine, although as many ex marines
will tell you, there's no such thing as an ex marine,
and a Catholic convert brought into the church by Father Doyle.
He'd worked as a longshoreman and wept as he unloaded
GI caskets from Vietnam. After hearing about the abandoned raid,
(04:41):
he joined up with the Camden locals on the spot.
Bob Hardy was just what the Camden locals needed. Now
they had a new lease on life. A few days later,
Hardy and another activist paid a visit to the Camden
Federal Building in broad daylight. First, with Bob Hardy taking
(05:02):
the lead, they strode into the draft board on the
fifth floor and they said they were working with a
nearby prison and asked to check about the draft status
of their detainees. That showed them where the one A
files were kept. Next, they went down to the courtroom,
where Hardy saw some workmen and said do you mind
if some taxpayers have a look around. They studied the
(05:23):
fire escape and the window alarms to their hearts content. Finally,
they strode into the alley behind the building where some
mailmen were eating their lunch. Hardy looked up at the
fire escape and just blatantly said, say you've got a
fire alarm on that ladder? Doja? And the mailman unalarmed
said yep, it goes off when you pull it down.
(05:44):
And just like that, they had gathered more intel in
two hours than months of casing had yielded. The group's
spirits were so lifted by Bob Hardy's brio they decided
to do the raid after all. But Hardy told them
if they were really going to do this right, they
were going to need a lot more raiders. So the
(06:08):
call went out up and down the East Coast, come
to Camden. It's going to be the most complicated, the
largest and the greatest possible last stand we could ever
possibly pull against the war and against Hoover. I'm Brendan
(06:31):
Patrick Hughes, and this is Divine Intervention, Chapter eight. What
do we eat? Eagle Meat?
Speaker 4 (06:57):
We did all the preliminary work for months, and then
at some point, as the action got closer, people out
of town would come in, and Tozy was one of
those people.
Speaker 1 (07:05):
Sarah Toci and Paul Cooming arrived in late July. Paul
had just come from covertly making omelets with Sarah's FBI
brother in New Jersey, and.
Speaker 5 (07:14):
There were other people from all over the East Coasters
that come in to.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
Help out, including Bob Williamson who had been an inside
man on the media raid, but of course no one
in Camden knew that.
Speaker 4 (07:25):
Bob Williamson, whose name at the time was weed X.
Speaker 1 (07:28):
We'll call Bob Williamson weed X from now on, partly
because there were so many Bobs in this story, but
mostly because that nickname kicks ass.
Speaker 6 (07:36):
My records if they were still in that Canada draft board,
because that was my draft board.
Speaker 1 (07:40):
Just like Paul Cooming going after his draft file in
Dorchester during the Boston eight. Weed X was well aware
of a piece of paper in that building that held
the key to his fate and he wanted it back.
Speaker 6 (07:52):
So they probably had a file on me and there somewhere.
So I started helping with the casing it for Camden
and just helping to put the action together.
Speaker 7 (08:00):
Waiveson called me up and said we want to go
to a party.
Speaker 1 (08:05):
Weed X then called his media co conspirator, Keith Forsyth,
the one who had picked the lock in the hallway,
and brought him into the Camden fray.
Speaker 7 (08:13):
And I said I might yeah, So he invited me
to meet the Camden twenty eight people.
Speaker 1 (08:20):
Of course, neither would ever speak of their role in
the media burglary. Among themselves or with anyone else.
Speaker 5 (08:25):
John Peter Grady was there and the m mouster had
come down.
Speaker 8 (08:28):
I understood that people chose it because it was such
a poverty ridden community and because there were so many
people being drafted from Camden.
Speaker 1 (08:35):
Camden had boomed with a Campbell soup factory up until
the nineteen fifties, but over the sixties had been hit
severely by layoffs and was now destitute, with blocks of
derelic buildings and poor, young, underemployed men sitting like ducks
for the draft. In July of nineteen seventy one, local
Camden families had just welcomed home the one hundredth soldier's
(08:56):
body from Vietnam. The raiders arrived from up and down
the seaboard. A certain merriness about what they were doing
had taken hold. Bob Hardy's entrance on the scene had
instilled the new confidence, and the FBI tales had all
but vanished.
Speaker 4 (09:11):
There was a lot of singing and continuing to be positive,
regardless of how scary things could get for us, and
there was just a lot of spirit.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
To get to Camden without her. Twenty four to seven
FBI tail following her there and to avoid being subpoenat
as an unindicted co conspirator in the Harrisburg trial, Cookie
had disguised herself in her brother's work uniform and escaped
her mother's house in a heating oil truck. Now she
was staying in Camden full time and had fallen in
(09:38):
love with everyone involved.
Speaker 4 (09:40):
It would like pull you in because of the energy
of the group in Camden. It was like that, and
John Grady had a lot to do with it, because
he was that kind of charismatic band.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
John Peter Grady we've heard his name, was the co
chairman of the Catonsville Nine Defense Committee. He was the
guy who ran Iron Mountain, the resistance book distributor in
them Bronx, where Anne Walsh and many others first got
involved with the raids. By many accounts, he was a
larger than life figure. Men found him gregarious and a
natural born leader. Women, from what I've been told, were
(10:12):
reasonably more wary. After the Barrigins went to jail, he
became the de facto leader of the movement and had
evolved into one hell of a cat burglar. He was
also the FBI's chief suspects, although wrongly so in the
media Pennsylvania Field Office break in. As all the new
raiders arrived, they discovered that this raid had a new
(10:33):
man in charge who seemed to be buying to oust
John Peter Grady. Bob Hardy, the local contractor who got
the raid back on its feet.
Speaker 5 (10:43):
He was a handyman, and he worked with his hands
for a lover.
Speaker 4 (10:46):
He knew a lot about tools.
Speaker 8 (10:48):
He was like a jack of all trades, comperenture with
a wife and children who lived in town, who thought
this was a great idea. His parish priest sort of
drew him in.
Speaker 1 (10:56):
Already started supplying weekly groceries for the raiders who were
in from out of town. When they needed tools, he
would bring them. But he was a bit more of
a civilian than his bohemian counterparts.
Speaker 6 (11:08):
I remember he introduced himself. I remember right away thinking
this guy, I don't know what this guy's doing here.
Speaker 1 (11:16):
Wed X aka Bob Williamson.
Speaker 6 (11:18):
He was older, he was socially awkward. He did not
look anything like any of the people that I had
ever broken into a draft board with.
Speaker 1 (11:27):
But what Bob Hardy lacked in street cred he more
than made up.
Speaker 8 (11:30):
For and know how he was always saying, Oh, you
need ropes, Oh, I have ropes on my troupy. Yeah,
box cut is, you know, whatever, the little tools we
needed for the thing. He was always there at the ready,
and with.
Speaker 1 (11:39):
Bob in the mix, the raiders decided to go big.
Once inside the Federal Building, they would hit the draft board,
the FBI Field Office, and the Office of Military Intelligence,
which George Carlin liked the joke was an oxymorn like
jumbo shrimp.
Speaker 8 (11:55):
The building housed the FBI office, the IM Intelligence office
in the draft it was in the courthouse, Federal Courthouse
and Camden, so it was kind of like a you know, trifecta.
Speaker 1 (12:05):
So now it was time to get down to the
business of mad cap heists for peace, starting with a
new round of intense casing.
Speaker 7 (12:11):
There was a ton of people. I'd never seen that
many people involved in one action.
Speaker 4 (12:16):
Before prep work.
Speaker 8 (12:17):
Let's look at the building. What time do the lights
go on and off?
Speaker 4 (12:20):
What we would do is go out for hours at
a time, and we would go out boy girl right,
so that we would look like the cops came. It
would look like we were just making out. Me and
Coombing would go or me and one of the priests
would go and we would sit there.
Speaker 8 (12:32):
Is there a guard, Where does the guard walk? When's
the pattern of the guard? How could we avoid the guard?
Speaker 4 (12:36):
Basically, what we would do is we would take notes
about what was happening inside the building throughout the night.
What we had to do is to figure out when
would it be safest to go in.
Speaker 6 (12:45):
There was an apartment building that we used to go
up to the roof of and we had a view
of the Federal building.
Speaker 4 (12:51):
So we'd have maybe two cars from two different sides
of the building watching to see when lights went on
and off.
Speaker 1 (12:57):
From Bob Hardy, they learned the guard had a special
key that he would have to put in certain locks
on the walls of the corridors at certain times of
night for fire insurance, to prove there was someone patrolling
the floor.
Speaker 4 (13:09):
And then after several weeks or a month or whatever,
we knew there were patterns. We knew that the guard
was in this part of the building at this time,
at this part of the building in this time, and
from that we chose our times to act.
Speaker 6 (13:19):
From there, we could see the back of the building
where the fire escape was that led up to where
the draft board was we were able to see all
the floors of the building.
Speaker 1 (13:27):
The building was more complicated than any other raid had
ever attempted to penetrate.
Speaker 7 (13:33):
I did a little bit of teaching of people how
to pick locks and some stuff like that.
Speaker 6 (13:37):
And then somebody would make a big sort of poster
board layout of analysis of all of the relevant information,
sort of categorized by things like janitors or security guards.
Speaker 1 (13:48):
But with Hardy's know how, they hatched a plan that
involved getting eight people up a ladder in twenty two seconds,
and not just any ladder.
Speaker 6 (13:55):
Not a step ladder, but an extension ladder. Somebody decided
that we needed to practice climbing this ladder, so the
ladder was stuck up against I think it was maybe
Bob Hardy's garage or something in an alley behind his house.
Speaker 1 (14:08):
Extension ladders will break your arm if you don't know
what you're doing, especially with eight people carrying equipment, only
having about two and three quarters seconds each to scale
fourteen feet.
Speaker 6 (14:17):
And I can't imagine what the neighbors would have thought
of it. But he's standing there with a stopwatch and
timing us, you know, getting up the ladder onto the
roof of his garage or whatever. I just thought it
was hilarious that that was something we needed to practice.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
This was going to be incredibly intense. Cookie had always
played a strategic, behind the scenes role in the action
she planned with Grady, but for Camden, she decided she
was going in. She would lead the raiders up the
fire escape and be the one to cut the glass window.
Speaker 4 (14:49):
Maybe it was while I was processing all this information
and thinking about people across the world personal way think
about Vietnamese families, just imagining what it must be like,
and I started thinking them as my neighbors and people
that I knew. And when I started personalizing it that way,
(15:13):
it became more of an imperative to me to act.
Speaker 1 (15:16):
They began to take on their assignments for the raid.
Speaker 4 (15:18):
By that I was pretty committed to what what had
to do.
Speaker 1 (15:21):
Some would be lookouts, some would be drivers, and some
would be putting their head in the lion's mouth.
Speaker 4 (15:27):
I was excited, but I don't mean like in a
happy way. I was just I was excited.
Speaker 1 (15:33):
A week before the raid, Bob Hardy insisted they do
a dry run of the very complicated plan to penetrate
the building on the night of the rehearsal, there were
eight raiders who would go into the building. There were
four lookouts stationed across the street, and there were eight drivers,
all with synchronized watches, working in a complicated dance.
Speaker 5 (15:52):
Basically, you go with everybody you're going to use that night,
everybody in sync at the exact time of night that
you're going to try to break into the draft board.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
Bob Hardy's van then reversed into the alley behind the building.
Speaker 5 (16:03):
Off We even opened up the back of the thing
and put the ladder up to see how it was
going to fit. We had never actually done it before.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
The eight raiders had to get the ladder against the
metal canopy atop a post office loading dog.
Speaker 5 (16:14):
It was a docking area for trucks to back into
the post office, and this was an awning that went
out over It was a pretty sturdial awning that you
could walk on and walked carefully and quietly.
Speaker 1 (16:24):
Because it made noise fourteen feet up.
Speaker 5 (16:26):
And we knew that we could get up. We had
already practiced growing up and down the ladder, so we
knew we had to practice some more, but we knew
that it was doable.
Speaker 1 (16:35):
On the night of the raid, they would skidter across
the canopy to the fire escape.
Speaker 5 (16:39):
Then you brought a ladder with you and got up
against the fire escape even another little bit. Because the
fire escape was pulled down, an alarm was going to
automatically go off. Bob Hardy had spotted that, told us
about it, made sure that we weren't going to set
off any alarms on the way.
Speaker 1 (16:57):
They would then climb the fire escape to the fifth
floor herapy, where they would bypass the window alarms by
cutting through the glass. On the night of the rehearsal,
everything went according to plan.
Speaker 5 (17:07):
So it's just a drill practice doing all the steps
and it all went pretty well.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
But Bob Hardy didn't like how it went.
Speaker 5 (17:13):
Bob Hardy was very upset afterwards.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
Emotions were starting to flare. What they were trying to
do had never been done before, and Hardy's demand for
precision felt a little unattainable. But despite Bob's hang ups,
the raid was now set for the following Saturday night.
Just a few days before the night of the raid,
(17:37):
during a traffic stop in downtown Camden, two police officers
beat a Puerto Rican resident who would later die from,
according to the autopsy, a blow to the groin. The
following night, Camden's Puerto Rican community entered into open rebellion.
Fires were set throughout downtown, More than fifty injuries were reported,
(18:00):
and additional state troopers were called in to supplement Camden's
police force.
Speaker 8 (18:04):
There were riots happening in Campden the weekend of the action.
Speaker 4 (18:07):
Because about a week before the action, Camden police killed
a Puerto Rican kit motorists.
Speaker 1 (18:12):
From the apartment they used as their headquarters, just two
blocks from the Camden building. The Raiders watched in horror
as the city burned.
Speaker 4 (18:20):
There was looting, and I can remember we were standing
in the window at the window looking across the street
and seeing these kids running in and out of these stores,
breaking windows, running out, running in getting stuff, slathering themselves
with vasoline, which I later learned they did that because
the cops that grabbed them they would slip out. It
(18:42):
was like one of those things ago. This have to
remember this, This is like a dream. Am I really
watching this? And this is in television? And the streets
were just insane, and there were cops everywhere.
Speaker 1 (18:53):
Not only were the cops everywhere, but the mayor had
imposed a curfew.
Speaker 4 (18:57):
Here we are trying to do an action in mild Ale.
Speaker 7 (18:59):
This just a few days from the planned date of
the action. Somebody had to go out and get groceries
because we were you know, twenty eight people eat a
lot of food, and so Bob Hardy volunteered, I'll go.
Speaker 1 (19:11):
Keith Forsyth and Bob Hardy climbed into Bob's van and
headed out to the grocery store. Hardy seemed to be
having second thoughts.
Speaker 7 (19:19):
So Hardy says to me, what do you think you
think this is really I think it's really going to go.
There's an awful lot of police on the streets and stuff.
And I said, yeah, but you know, not so much
in this neighborhood. You know, right where the draft board is.
And he was like, it has to go, no matter what.
Speaker 4 (19:38):
He said.
Speaker 7 (19:39):
You know what about the guard. You know, I'm like,
what about the guard? We know what his routine is.
Just have to be, you know, avoid him and be
quiet inside. And he goes, well, I got something, you know,
in case the guard is a problem, open the glocal apartment.
I opened the glocal apartment. There's a snubnosed revolver in there,
(20:01):
and I'm like, are you out of your fucking mind?
If you think I'm going to carry a gun in
and shoot a minimum wage security guard, there's something wrong
with you. And I told Bob Williamson, I said, you know,
I think this guy Hardy's a cop.
Speaker 1 (20:16):
Bob Williamson aka Weed, ex Keith's fellow media conspirator, assured
him that things were just very tense as a result
of the rioting and they could probably trust Hardy. Besides,
he was a member of Father Doyle's parish and really
good friends with some of the local raiders.
Speaker 7 (20:32):
He says, you know, you always get nervous on the
night of the action.
Speaker 5 (20:35):
You know.
Speaker 7 (20:35):
I'm like, well, you know that's true. I do get nervous,
and I let it go.
Speaker 1 (20:39):
But Bob Hardy gave a lot of people the feeling
of a linebacker reluctantly having to be in Romeo and
Juliet for college credit.
Speaker 4 (20:46):
He was an ex marine, you know, and he shows
up and he's this really big, light hair full of himself.
You know, every word he spoke had importance. Talk to
lie and She'll tell you, you know, we were They're
not crazy about this guy at all.
Speaker 8 (21:01):
He asked us if we thought we should have a
gun at the Camden draft Wood Action. And it was
like a gun and.
Speaker 5 (21:08):
I met the very first night I met Bob Hardy.
Speaker 1 (21:10):
Although Paul the man with the largest heart in the universe,
felt otherwise, and.
Speaker 5 (21:15):
I liked him like that right off the bat. I
really liked him, this great guy.
Speaker 1 (21:20):
Saturday night arrived, they gathered around several tables for a
final dinner, and thirteen men all happened to sit at
one long table. They joked that it was the last
supper and wondered who might be Judas they had a
big decision to make the curfew and the riots had
police and stadies prowling the streets, the Canden Raiders had
(21:40):
a hard look at one another and they decided to
go for it.
Speaker 5 (21:45):
Despite the fact that there was tear gas in the
street and everything. They went right through it.
Speaker 3 (21:50):
Go time.
Speaker 4 (21:51):
We all loaded into Bob Party's van. It was a
big white sort of box van.
Speaker 1 (21:56):
The eight Raiders climbed inside a little Winnebago with their
ladder and two just like they practiced. But I'm sure
you're thinking eight people climbing a ladder in the middle
of downtown Canden would be conspicuous anytime of.
Speaker 4 (22:07):
Day, right, so I have to. I'll show you this
it this way. You can see in this drawing that
this is Cooper Street, Main Drag. The post office is here.
Speaker 1 (22:16):
So Cookie showed me the ingenious way. The raiders made
sure they could remain inconspicuous.
Speaker 4 (22:22):
This was a one way street.
Speaker 1 (22:23):
The Canden Federal Building, known as the post Office and Courthouse,
was at four to Oho one Market Street, on the
north side of the street facing south, with Fourth Street
running down its west side. They drove up Fourth Street
to the loading dock behind the building, and we.
Speaker 4 (22:37):
Had to block traffic from being able to go in
any place where they could see us because we were down.
I'll make this quigly line be the alley.
Speaker 1 (22:45):
They had timed the stoplights at the four intersections surrounding
the building and realized they had at best the length
of one stoplight to set up the ladder twenty two seconds,
but they needed insurance.
Speaker 4 (22:57):
The plan was that there would be cars situated in
various parts around the building, so we had a car
come up stop.
Speaker 1 (23:05):
Here to buy some time. The eight drivers, including Sarah Tosi,
Leanne Mosha, Keith Forsythe and Bob Hardy would simultaneously pretend
to break down in the four surrounding intersections.
Speaker 5 (23:18):
All the cars blocked the streets so that the truck
that's carrying the eight of us that are going to
go inside the building has enough time to back right
up to the platform in the post office.
Speaker 4 (23:26):
And then we had people get out of the car
and lift the hood of the car that act like
they had car trouble, but it blocked the whole street
so no one could go up the street, so no
one could turn into that street like the police. And
we had another car somewhere else doing the same thing.
Speaker 1 (23:41):
This was at a time when cars broke down a lot.
Speaker 5 (23:44):
We got the streets all blocked off and they had.
Speaker 1 (23:45):
A system of lookouts all on walkie talkies.
Speaker 4 (23:48):
There's a house down the street where we had people
with a walkie talkie and.
Speaker 1 (23:51):
A church across the street with an entrance.
Speaker 4 (23:53):
With a little chapel kind of top on. It got
a chapel, I think it called it the parapet or no,
not a parapet. That was the portico, yeah, portico.
Speaker 1 (24:02):
Four lookouts watched the building security guard.
Speaker 4 (24:05):
From the portico, and then we pulled into the back
of the post office and we jumped out of the van.
We had a ladder with us. As a matter of fact,
it was there that we borrowed mail bags. So we
get on the platform. We put the ladder up to
that story. We'd scurry up the ladder. We pulled the
ladder up with us, and then we go up the
fire escape.
Speaker 1 (24:23):
Cookie had learned how to use a glass cutter and
practiced on several windows. They climbed up the fire escape
to the parapet on the roof. She taped up the glass,
cut a hole, hammered it out and opened the window,
just like in Mission Impossible, and they all leapt down
four feet onto the carridor floor.
Speaker 4 (24:41):
We cut the glass and opened the window and we
went in.
Speaker 1 (24:46):
They were in.
Speaker 4 (24:48):
So you're in a large office space. There's files, there's desks,
it's a big open space. We're working. There were in
there at least an hour and a half or two hours.
I don't remember how long.
Speaker 1 (24:58):
They used Bob's industrial grade bolt cutters to get into
the padlocked filing cabinets.
Speaker 4 (25:03):
We had divided up the draft board into one A
files in different categories, but the one I files were
priority files because those were the kids ready to be drafted,
but ready to be sent to war. And we had
to shakecase the room so we knew where the files were,
and we had little pen flashlights because it was we
had to keep the room dark. I had been mine
in my mouth and I was doing my little thing
(25:25):
and pulling out the files and packing the bags.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
It was an incredibly hot and humid night, so some
of the raiders went out onto the roof parapet to work,
but they had to crouch that they wouldn't be spotted
by curfew helicopters.
Speaker 5 (25:38):
I was on walkie talkie and my handle was called little.
Speaker 1 (25:42):
Man Little Big Man. Paul Koming was stationed on the
parapet as a lookout.
Speaker 5 (25:46):
Most of the people were inside of the draft board
filling sacks paper or tearing up flow cards, or making
sure they got everything and putting in the mail sacks.
Speaker 1 (25:57):
Paul's specific job was to make sure the security guard
never came to the fifth floor.
Speaker 5 (26:01):
He never circulated through the building at night. His last
trip was before we ever entered the building. So my
response was trained to be God is coming, I see
your guard's coming. And I also had a rope tied
to me, and I was supposed to pull the rope
in case the walkie talking didn't work, that the person
on the other end of the rope would get yanked
(26:22):
at the waist, and he'd realized that they should sit down.
The idea was that they would sit on the floor
and wait to be arrested by this one guy rather
than try to scamper and get out quick.
Speaker 1 (26:38):
Just after four am, the raiders decided to skip the
FBI office and the Army intelligence since sunrise was imminent.
Speaker 5 (26:45):
Someone on the ground pass how are you proceeding? And
I asked the people in the board and they said
they would be done in a few minutes, so they
were going to need to be picked up and such
a time.
Speaker 1 (26:57):
At four point thirty, the drivers were two blocks away
at the headquarters, getting ready to take their places.
Speaker 8 (27:02):
I was in the command central with a few other people,
including Bob.
Speaker 1 (27:05):
Hardy Leanne Mosha, who said, I think.
Speaker 8 (27:07):
I'm gonna go out and pick up some cheese steaks sandwiches.
He said.
Speaker 1 (27:11):
As Bob Hardy went out for celebratory cheese steaks, the
raiders in the draft board started throwing stuffed mail bags
from the parapet down to a second floor landing.
Speaker 4 (27:20):
So sometime we're there for a while and I hear
we hear footsteps, and then I hear, really faintly, I
hear FBI raid and I look and I think I
think it's Bob Williamson. And I'm like, that is not funny, Bob.
Speaker 5 (27:39):
And just then as that I think I'm over, I
turned around and I looked at him as it wasn't
just the guard, it was four people coming up that
staircase to arrest me.
Speaker 4 (27:50):
But moments later, I start to see the silhouettes of
men coming in the windows. We could just see the
silhouettes of these bodies and they're opening windows in their claes.
I'm in the windows, so I'm.
Speaker 5 (28:01):
Yelling the guard is coming, The guard is coming, into
a walkie talkie as I pull away from the window
and not comprehending that why is there more than one guard?
Speaker 3 (28:12):
You know?
Speaker 1 (28:13):
At that moment at the apartment headquarters, the front and
back doors were kicked in simultaneously and federal agents rushed in.
As Paul's voice continued screaming over the walkie talkie.
Speaker 5 (28:24):
I got saying the guard's coming, The guards coming, The
Guard's coming, because I didn't know what else to say.
Speaker 1 (28:29):
But Paul's contact was dealing with his own shit.
Speaker 5 (28:32):
He was cursing at me on the walkie hockey, saying, Paul,
shut up, we know what we know. The guards here.
Speaker 1 (28:39):
At this time, Sarah, Leanne and Keith were about to
leave to block the intersections.
Speaker 7 (28:43):
I heard all those tires squealing in the parking lot
at three in the morning or whenever.
Speaker 3 (28:47):
It was like.
Speaker 7 (28:49):
Instantly, I said to the other people in the room.
I looked up and said, we're busted.
Speaker 8 (28:52):
FBI agents with the jackets, with FBI in the back, guns,
big guns drawn. Put your hands up, it's the FBI.
It's A it's A. And every window in this little
rectory was lit up by these guys rushing in the doorways,
the windows up against the wall. Spread your legs. It
was terrifying.
Speaker 7 (29:11):
One of them had a shotgun, and I remember the
shotgun very firmly, because they lined us up against the wall.
And I turned around and made some kind of a joke.
I make a lot of smart ass remarks, and the
guy with the shotgun pushed my face back up against
the wall with the business end of the shotting. They
knew who all these people were. I mean there were
(29:31):
twenty eight people. Twenty seven of them were pacifist, half
of them were priests. For God's sake.
Speaker 1 (29:37):
Two blocks away, Paul stood on the parapet of the
Federal building, frozen in fear.
Speaker 5 (29:42):
I turned around and I saw the whole building was
lit up, and I said, no, wonder the guards coming.
They turned the lights on.
Speaker 1 (29:49):
All of a sudden, all of the lights in the
building came on, and the front of the building was
doused in floodlights.
Speaker 5 (29:57):
Every place we had lookouts, they were there, and they
just automatically at the same time, on one signal, arrest
of everybody.
Speaker 1 (30:08):
Eighty wingtipped federal agents started popping up in every place.
A raider had been stationed, the portico, the apartment, the
driver's parking spots, the draft board. The FBI had the
drop on them the whole time, and the jig was
up wearing baseball caps and dark blue windbreakers with FBI
and big white letters across their backs. The agents flooded
(30:30):
into the room through doors and windows.
Speaker 4 (30:32):
It was like an out of body experience. They had
guns drawn on us. Guns. I mean, we were known
for being non violent. They had guns drawn on us.
Were surrounded by agents and they're grabbing hold of us.
Bob good was out on the parapet loading bags and
they threw him into the window. Cooming is dragged into
the room because he'd been grabbed over the other side
(30:54):
of the building. He's dragged into the room and they're
pretty abusive to him.
Speaker 1 (30:59):
Paul Koming was the last one found in his hiding
place out on the parapet.
Speaker 5 (31:02):
And they took me handcuffing behind my back, bent me over,
held me by the handcuffs, and ran me the distance
of that flat roof to the edge of the roof
as if they're going to throw me off, then pulled
me back the last second, just to scare the shit
out of me.
Speaker 1 (31:20):
They brought Paul Coombing into the draft board, smashed him
into the filing cabinets a few times, then threw him
down on his stomach next to Cookie. Then bursting through
the doors came the government's chief prosecutor from the Harrisburg trial,
Guy Goodwin. Goodwin had become the head of Hoover's new
Left squad, whose job it was to take down the
(31:40):
Catholic left.
Speaker 4 (31:41):
And Guy Goodwin has a radio in his hand and
he's talking to someone and he's walked around the room
and he's counting us one, two, three, four, five, sixty seven. Okay,
we got them all. We got them all. And I
kept thinking to myself, this is I cannot believe this
is happening. It's like when you know you're seeing something
that you can't believe you're seeing you in a way
where I wasn't really afraid. All I kept thinking was
(32:04):
I have got to remember this to tell my friends,
because it was so unbelievable. When I was looking at
the whole room and all the people and all the
pushing around.
Speaker 5 (32:14):
They knocked people down and jumped on their backs with
their knees. Fola Doyle was knocked to the ground and
he was handcoffed behind his back, and then the guy
pounced on him.
Speaker 4 (32:26):
And so these two agents grab a hold of me,
and they're grabbing each one of us the same way
like they went to FBI school.
Speaker 6 (32:32):
Right.
Speaker 4 (32:33):
So the idea is you throw the person on the ground,
you put your knee into their lower back, you pull
their hands up, and you handcoff them. So that's happening
all around me. My two guys come, they throw me
on the ground and they're my bands are behind my back,
and one the agent says, give me the cuffs, and
the other one says, I thought you brought them.
Speaker 1 (32:51):
The raiders later described the agents as being right out
of the academy, with baby faces and shaking guns. Television
would have you think the FBI does raids like this
every week. But it makes me wonder if they are
actually pretty rare.
Speaker 4 (33:04):
So the boss comes along, the supervisor. His name is
Agent Snodgrass. I'll never forget. So Snodgrass comes along and
he goes, what's happening over here, and he goes, well,
I thought he had the cops, and he thought he
had the puffs. And they're explaining to their boss, and
he says, tire up with their belt. So they pull
my belt off and I didn't even get handcuffs.
Speaker 5 (33:23):
That first time.
Speaker 1 (33:23):
As things settled down, Guy Goodwin took center stage.
Speaker 4 (33:27):
So meantime, Guy Goodwin is walking around the room and
he's saying things to people to let them know he
knows who they are. So when he got to me,
he said, hey, cookie, how you do it? Is your
brother still playing the drums? My brother played the drums.
Speaker 1 (33:42):
Goodwin knew their nicknames. He knew the names of their families,
and he made it clear that to the government this
was personal, but nowhere near as personal as it would
be for Sarah Toci.
Speaker 4 (33:53):
Her brother was FBI. He arrested some of the people
he was on this arrest. When she was arrested, the
guy said, they're your Toazy's little sister.
Speaker 1 (34:03):
This was supposed to be the raid that would prove
Descent could never be crushed by Hoover's wing tipped goons. Instead,
they all lay dejected on the floor, knees in their backs.
Speaker 4 (34:18):
At some point, I hear a sort of croaky voice
say in it's almost a whisper, what do we eat?
Do you know the story?
Speaker 1 (34:28):
But then weed X did something totally bananas.
Speaker 4 (34:33):
This comes from what we were rehearsing. We were rehearsing
going up and down the ladder and Paul Cooman's High
School when they had games, they had this thing where
some people would say what do we eat? And people
would say, eagle meat, What do we eat? Egle meat?
What do they eat? Shit? So I hear, I hear
somebody in the room say what do we eat? And
I'm like, no, the rest of us are of cough
(34:55):
out eagle meat. And then he says, where a stronger voice, what.
Speaker 5 (35:00):
Do we eat?
Speaker 4 (35:00):
And we say eagle meat, and he says, what do
they eat? We say shit. The bosses in the FBA
agents who are bosses in the room are like, furious,
You can't say that. You'll be quiet, Tom, You're just
trying to yell at us. And then I looked to
the left and the door opens and they're dragging Paul
out of the room. And I felt so bad for Paul.
(35:21):
I didn't know what to say to help him. So
I said, don't worry Paul. We've got him on the run.
Speaker 5 (35:26):
Now.
Speaker 1 (35:30):
They were defeated. Hoover had struck a decisive blow, and
yet they still chanted. They eat shit right in the
FBI's face. After the arrest, the raiders were then hauled downstairs,
separated and interrogated.
Speaker 4 (35:51):
So they take us down into these rooms and they
have each one of us in a separate room and
they start, you know, interrogating us. Looks like how did
a TV show? And I didn't know that the people
outside have been arrested.
Speaker 8 (36:04):
It was an endless time to me, Leanne. They were
frisking us and I was put into a vehicle with
two FBI agents in the front seat. I was in
the backseat, and then we started driving around town and
they were saying, you know, it was stereotypical good cock,
bad cock. One guy was really mean, the other guy
was very nice, and I'm sure they were both Irish,
(36:25):
Catholic FBI agents, and they were saying things like, you know,
your friend John Grady spilled the beans. We've got everybody's
name and address.
Speaker 1 (36:33):
Now, oldest trick in the book. Cookie's interrogation was endless.
Speaker 4 (36:37):
At some point, some agent comes in and says, John
Grady just spilled the beans. Spilled the beans. Really?
Speaker 1 (36:45):
After Cookie's interrogator told her that John Grady had spilled
the beans, she burst out laughing, and then so did
he because they both knew how ridiculous it was.
Speaker 4 (36:54):
All I didn't believe John would have made a statement.
Second of all, spill the beans? What movie? What did
that come from?
Speaker 5 (37:00):
Right?
Speaker 4 (37:00):
It was also nuts.
Speaker 8 (37:02):
I didn't tell them my name. I never answered any
question they asked me. I just kept silent for a
few hours. As we drove around town, and it was
the middle of the night, and then it was sort
of pre dawn, and as we drove in and out
of Camden. I would see another car and realized it
was one of my friends, like in the back seat
of another and I would try and raise my manacle
of hands up the wave. I stopped doing that.
Speaker 4 (37:23):
I look out the window and I see a mob
of people out there, and TV trucks and all this
press and people in the streets, mobs of people. And
I say to the agent, what's going on, because I
think it's related to Riot's going on. So I go,
what happened? What's going on? He says, Oh, they're here
(37:44):
for you.
Speaker 1 (37:46):
It was now Sunday morning, August twenty second, nineteen seventy one,
Jay Edgar Hoover held a joint press conference with AG
John Mitchell in which he announced he had broken the
back of the Catholic left. Eventually, the raiders were all
corraled together in the bowels of the building to await arraignment.
Speaker 4 (38:06):
Eventually they take us all down and put us in
this big room together, the men and women together, and
I remember we started singing the Rising of the Moon,
and they yelled at us.
Speaker 1 (38:16):
And it was there that they realized someone was missing.
Speaker 5 (38:20):
At that time, we realized there was only one person
missing from the arrest scene.
Speaker 8 (38:24):
I don't know at what point it became apparent that
he was the only one who wasn't arrested.
Speaker 6 (38:28):
I think somebody said, where's Hardy.
Speaker 8 (38:30):
And then we're like, ah, okay, it's Bob Hardy.
Speaker 1 (38:33):
Bob Hardy. When the local Camden raider had gone to
Bob Hardy after the initial plans for the action had
fallen apart, Hardy had assured him he could help make
it happen. But then he immediately went to the FBI
field office.
Speaker 8 (38:51):
But immediately he came to one or two meetings and
decided this didn't sit right with him, so he went
immediately to the FBI and they said, great.
Speaker 4 (38:59):
Hang in there.
Speaker 9 (39:00):
And he thought that the Catholic c left was using
Mike Doyle.
Speaker 1 (39:05):
Anne Walsh, who was busy fighting her contempt of court
charge in Harrisburg and therefore wasn't a part of the
Camden crew.
Speaker 9 (39:11):
So he went to the FBI to say the Catholic
cleft was dragging his front and the FBI said, we'll
protect your friend and you if you work with us.
Speaker 1 (39:24):
The FBI agent encouraged him to join the group and
told him they'd reimburse him for any expenses. This was
just the break the FBI needed after the humiliation of
media had enraged one J. Edgar Hoover.
Speaker 9 (39:42):
He was furious, he was out of his mind. Somebody
violated the FBI and he wanted to bring the Catholic
Left to its knees.
Speaker 4 (39:53):
In March, the FBI read happened and allD the FBI
files went out, and they knew it was the Catholic Left.
And when they got the word from Bob Hardy that
he was working with a group, they thought, oh, here
we go, bingo, bingo, We're going to get them all.
That's why it became such a big action. Why was
so highly publicized.
Speaker 1 (40:13):
There was a rumor that the night of the raid,
the FBI men had held a pregame celebration at a
nearby hotel, complete with wives and girlfriends. While the raiders
were setting up their lookouts, the FBI was stationing floodlights
and photographers.
Speaker 4 (40:28):
And there's pictures of us going up the fire escape,
so you must have seen those, right. FBI were taking
pictures of us from across the street.
Speaker 1 (40:33):
Hardy was operating kind of like Haliburton in the Oughts
with a blank check from the federal government.
Speaker 8 (40:38):
So he was always saying, Oh, you need ropes, Oh,
I have ropes in my truck. I mean, the FBI
was supplying equipment, box cut is, you know, whatever, the
little tools we needed for the thing. He was always
there at the ready with stuff which he was getting
from the FBI, and he was being paid.
Speaker 9 (40:52):
So every time they ran into a flaw in the
post office building, the FBI solved that flaw by getting
the saws, the equipment, the ladders and stuff like that,
and nobody suspected. They just thought it was like good luck.
Speaker 1 (41:06):
That's why Bob Hardy, this square nobody but Paul seemed
to like, would keep hanging around with these kids. Why
he'd conveniently left for cheese steaks in the middle of
the biggest heist of the decade. Why he'd seemed pissed
off during the successful dry run of the operation.
Speaker 5 (41:23):
And come to find out, he was upset because he
had been told that we were going to be arrested.
During the dry.
Speaker 1 (41:29):
Run, Hardy had made the FBI promise that his four
friends in the action, including Father Doyle, would not be arrested.
He'd carefully arranged for them to not be at the
dry Run rehearsal, But then the FBI didn't move in and.
Speaker 5 (41:42):
His friends, who were the four people from his parish
in Camden, they wouldn't go to jail, and the FBI
went back on their word they were going to arrest
us at the dry Run, but they didn't.
Speaker 1 (41:56):
And on the night of the raid, the FBI had
let them continue their action for over two hours so
they would keep racking up charges. At the quickie arraignment
that Sunday, which was held in the courtroom literally downstairs
from the draft board they had raided only twelve hours earlier,
(42:19):
Guy Goodwin portrayed the raiders as terrorists to a sympathetic
judge who let the bail climb up to six hundred
and five thousand dollars.
Speaker 5 (42:28):
John Peter had the highest amount on him. Started out
one hundred thousand dollars on his head alone. My bail
is seventy five thousand. This is in seventy one Now
nobody had that kind of money.
Speaker 1 (42:42):
One by one they were brought out of the building
to be transferred to jail.
Speaker 10 (42:46):
The FBI early today caught an anti war group in
the actors. It was trying to steal records from the
draft board in Camden, New Jersey. Twenty persons were arrested,
including two calf the priests and a protestant.
Speaker 1 (42:56):
Minute as they were led out of the building into
squad cars, news reporters filled the.
Speaker 3 (43:01):
Streets, maps, charts, radios, transceivers, mockups of Federal Building windows,
glass cutting tools, and according to the FBI, they were
being taught how to pick locks exactly like the ones
in the Federal Building.
Speaker 1 (43:12):
A crowd of civilians gathered and cheered them on. And
this is one of the most remarkable moments for me
in this whole saga. I've been alive a long time,
and I have never heard of the general public cheering
someone during their perk wlock. And unlike their FBI counterparts,
the Canden twenty eight were all smiles as they came
out of the building, cheering back and flashing handcuffed peace signs.
Speaker 4 (43:36):
They walk me out to the front of the steps
of the building and I walk out and all of
a sudden, people see me and they start screaming sha,
cheering me.
Speaker 1 (43:45):
But the Camden twenty eight caught dead to rights. We're
facing a maximum sentence of forty seven years in prison
on the next intervention.
Speaker 6 (44:01):
We all knew that sooner or later we would get
caught breaking into a draft board. Successfully was only part
of the point. The other part of the point would
be to use the opportunity of our inevitable trial to
try to persuade a jury and hopefully an audience in
the courtroom, that what we did was not a crime.
Speaker 1 (44:32):
Divine Intervention is a production of iHeart Podcasts. It's produced
by Wonder Media Network. It was created and written by me,
your host, Brendan Patrick Hughes. Our fiendishly adept producers our
Carmen Borca Correo, Abby Delk Palomo Moreno, Jimenez, Grace Lynch,
and myself. Our editor is Woman About Town Grace Lynch
(44:54):
for Wonder Media Network. Our executive producers are Emily Rutterer
and Jenny Kaplan for iHeart pod Casts, our executive producer
is Christina Everett. Our theme in end credit music was
composed and performed by actual rock star Tanya Donnelly and
mastered by rock star masterer Ben Aerons. This is Brendan
Patrick Hughes. Thank you for listening to Divine Intervention.
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