The Boston Courthouse Bombing
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00:47But on this morning, April 22, 1976, there's something different.A bomb scare was called in just a short while ago.A few people out here or inside will know about it.And when, minutes later, that bomb goes down.off, it lays waste to the building's second floor and leaves many victims severely injured andmaimed. But the shockwave of this bomb will be felt far beyond the courthouse for years to come,because this attack is part of a broader campaign, one launched in protest against the Americansystem itself. Hey, and welcome to American History hit. I'm Don Wildman. The mid-1970s were a
01:29turbulent time in the United States. Political scandal, social upheaval,economic uncertainty, all bubbling up like boiled water. And sometimes it spilled over into bloodyviolence. Today, my guest is Kevin Galvin, author of Troubled Times, the Boston CourthouseBombing of 1976, which explores one of these violent episodes, who perpetrated it, how were theycaught, and the impact of the bombing on the people and society it affected.Hello, Kevin. Welcome to American History Hit. Nice to have you. Thanks for having me, John.You know, these historic events that I for one lived through really dates me. But I vividly recall Boston in the 1970s was a raucous and radical place on the news for some pretty ugly reasons.It's true. I mean, it was a difficult time for the country, right? We had just seen a president leave, the end of the Vietnam War. It was bad economic times. Unemployment was on the rise. But in Boston, things were particularly on edge because of a federal court decision trying to be.
02:40to desegregate the Boston public schools that came down in 1974. And tensions only rose from thatpoint. I remember the news on one of those three channels. It was always people screaming in thestreets of Boston about, how dare you? It was really big, big, big stuff. This courthousebombing that your book is about, and congratulations on your book, which has just been released.Set the stage for me. Will you, this bombing happens on Thursday, April 22nd, 1976, shortly after9 a.m. in the morning. What are the circumstances before the bomb goes off? It's another day at thecourthouse. People have been starting to arrive from about 7 o'clock in the morning. The switchboardopens right around 9 a.m. And one of the first callers says there's a bomb that's about to go off.
03:25So it had been warned. The bombers have called in and the cops know about this. Everybody knows about it.Well, there's a big delay between the time the call comes in and the police are informed.Okay.There wasn't really a written protocol.The switchboard operators had received bomb threats in the past,and they all sort of brought the experience they had from having past callsand those jobs or in other places,and they sort of started passing the word leader by leader
03:52and making different calls to different parts of the courthouse.And this, in fact, is part of the reason that it ends somewhat tragically,because the bombers did call.This was their first.action for all intents and purposes. And they didn't really gam it out as closely as they might have.They estimated how long they thought it would take to evacuate the courthouse, and they assumed the people would just promptly evacuate.Wow, interesting. The bomb was placed on the second floor in the probation department of office, which I suppose is a significant detail.Well, it is because the group that was accused or the group that took responsibility for the bombing was known as the Sam Melville Jonathan Jackson unit.
04:35And that bombing, according to the communique that they put out a couple of days later,was to protest conditions at Walpole State Prison, which were very difficult, very bad at the time.At the probation office, interestingly enough, some six, eight months before that,there had been a story in the Boston Globe about an effort to computerize court records.This is the day where everyone's just beginning to try to figure out how to use computers to make things operate more efficiently.And there was pictures of court records spilling out of shoe boxes on top of filing cabinets on the floor.The records were everywhere.So according to one of the people who was involved in early conversations but had split from the group and ended up cooperating with authorities,
05:23the thinking was if we blow up these records, we'd be really messing things up for the court system and the probation system and the prison system.And the idea was not necessarily to kill people or do damage like that.They really wanted to have an impact on the system itself.This is very true.There was no intention, it seems, to cause anybody any physical harm.This was a group that was learning on the job and this very first action.And it was really miraculous.A bomb that size didn't kill people.
05:56Interesting.The bomb itself is, as I understand, six sticks of dynamite, right?The best guess, I think, is 12 sticks of dynamite.Throughout blows a hole, I think it's about 18 inches wide through the concrete floor in the old court building.Yeah.And to be clear, there had been this warning call at 8.53 a.m.And that call said, this is no joke, a bomb will go off in 20 minutes.At that point, employees are aware of this bomb?
06:23How much of a broadcast was this through the building?It really wasn't much of a broadcast through the building.The switchboard operators started calling selective leaders throughout the building who then started passing word to judges that the heads of the various courts and different departments.Someone in maintenance had the head of facilities run down to the garage where he would wait for the bomb squad.But it was another 10 or 15 minutes before the operators got around to calling the police.Wow. I wonder how much of that was because of the times.You know, people were hijacking jets back then.I mean, it was a lot of bomb threat stuff going on in the news all the time.
07:02There was a real cynicism about it, wasn't there?I think that's true, but I think that the court officials later would claim that this sort of thing hadn't happened much in Massachusetts.It wasn't something that they thought that they were going to, the threats that they did receive, ordinarily they were cranks.Yeah, exactly.They'd be dumping the building or they'd be trying to think about what are we going to do, and it was just somebody who was calling in a hoax.Yeah.They were unprepared for a real bomb.The broader story of this, of course, is the society in which this happens and what is on the news in general.
07:35I mean, this is a very tense time, as we've already mentioned, Vietnam has just concluded, right?And we'd been there since the 50s.All that story was anybody who was old enough to be thinking in those days knew that that was a big story around.Watergate scandal had damaged public confidence in the federal government.Nixon resigned just a couple of years earlier in 1974.And of course, as we've mentioned, there were gigantic racial tensions, especially in Boston that had been building since 1974 when a federal judge ordered the desegregation of Boston public schools.And that prompted the busing program, which was so controversial and led to such ugliness.So in 1976 itself, I mean, because of those racial tensions, there were violent episodes, weren't there?
08:20There really were. In fact, that month, April had been maybe the height of the violence around busing in Boston. The most graphic image, I think, to come out of the whole period is an image of a group of white youths wielding an American flag on a staff menacing a black attorney as he was walking into City Hall.Lovely. That touched off reprisals in the neighborhoods. And not shortly after that, a white guy was dragged out of his car in Dorchester and beaten near to death in the street. In fact, the morning of the bombing on the front page of the Boston Globe was a story that the mayor basically as a last resort had called for a march for peace. He was going to leave a march the next day through downtown Boston to try to bring together civic leaders and everybody out of the neighborhoods who would renounce violence.That was what was on the front page of the paper the morning the bomb went off.Yeah, it was fraught.This will all involve a group called the Sam Melville Jonathan Jackson Unit.And let's just talk about that in and of itself at this moment.So one interesting thing to sort of note here as we dive into the story is that no one was ever convicted of this bombing.And so no one's ever been convicted of being a member of the SMJJ.
09:41But what we know about them is that the group started out of a prison reform movement in the state of Maine.There was a group up there known as SCAR, statewide correctional alliance for reform, if memory serves.And a couple of the important actors in this story were former Vietnam vets, who had both done prison time in one case related to his anti-war activity after he had been in the service.but the prison reform folks up in Maine, and this is something that comes out of the reaction to Attica,there's a lot of people that are outraged by what they learn about how prisoners are treated in America after the Attica uprising.And so this group is doing some simple things at first.They're taking family members, they're getting in a bus and bringing them up so that they can visit their loved ones in prison.They're sending books to prisoners.
10:38Then they start to get a little more active in the community.They create a bail bond fund.They sort of a la the Black Panther movementbegin offering defense classes to people in the neighborhoodsin the projects.And they are reading a lot of, I mean,they've already sort of accepted a littlesort of the Che Guevara Marxist lens on politics.
11:03Even though they're working entirely within the systemat this point, they are consistently under pressurefrom the authorities.The FBI starts whispering to some donorsand they lose some money.They find they open a bookstore,a leftist bookstore,and they're under police surveillance
11:20almost all the time.To the point where there,people are breaking windowsand leaving notes,and there's an assaulton one of the womenwho works at the bookstore,and these people are convinced
11:34that it was the police who did it.Interesting.I mean, people should understand it.Back in this era,way pre-social media.Organizing of this sorts was done with big names, you know, and you were citing huge causes.I mean, so much of this came out of the Mao, you know, the little red book and this radical left thinking of how to confront capitalist imperialism.All of that was very much in the zeitgeist back then.
11:59And you'd hear about these groups popping up all over the place from time to time.And they were, you know, some of them were criminally leaning towards crime and others weren't.and it was just this whole sort of level of society or layer of society going on in a very real way back then.So the Sam Melville, Jonathan Jackson unit is referring to two guys, Sam Melville and Jonathan Jackson.Tell me about these two individuals.So Sam Melville has been called the patient zero of American leftist bombers.Really?He was in New York in the 60s and was one of the first people who sort of got to figure out that he could steal some dynamism.
12:38and start planting it in buildings around New York in order to protest, mostly the Vietnam War at the time.And his work was an inspiration to a lot of people in what has been called a forgotten era of political violence in America.Jonathan Jackson is a little more complicated. He is the younger brother of George Jackson.George Jackson was really a lifetime criminal who was serving a long sentence in California prison system.But he was a charismatic figure who also became outspoken in the cause of prison reform and attracted a lot of celebrity support as one of the Soledod brothers from the Soledod prison in California.Writes a very famous book, doesn't he?He does. He writes a very famous book.And his brother becomes involved allegedly with the help of Angela Davis and a plot to try to spring some of his brother, some of George's,
13:37colleagues who are appearing in court for an incident that happened while they were in prison.A judge is killed.Jonathan Jackson is killed.Another court employee is killed.I believe at least one of Jonathan Jackson's accomplices also was killed.But in that incident, he becomes something of a martyr for people that are militant about prison reform.Right.And so this is named in honor of these people.
14:04It's not involving them, obviously.they are the symbols of the radical left and prison resistance, which is key to this whole story, right?Absolutely.So who are the individuals who are involved in this?The key figure who I focus on in this book is a gentleman named Raymond Lavasser.And Ray was, grew up in a mill town in Maine, didn't have much, many prospects, wanted to get out of working in the mill.So he came to Boston, got himself into some trouble in Boston.and the quickest way out of that was to join the army.
14:37He went to Vietnam, and in Vietnam is really where he became radicalized.He saw what he thought was a mistaken adventure in foreign land.He felt like he was part of an imperialist machine.He thought that his fellow GIs treated the local people in a racist manner.And so that really colored his view of things.when he came back and got out, he was discharged in Tennessee. He became active in the anti-warmovement. He also had become a little active in dealing marijuana. So when he was arrested fordealing marijuana, his political activism seems to have really played a big role in getting the
15:22toughest sentence. Five years. Five years, but then also being shift up to maximum security prisonin Tennessee. Oh, interesting. Yeah. Yeah.I mean, he comes from working class background.He's tapping into something.Again, the Vietnam War really brought it into high relief along with Watergate, where you justweren't trusting the elite anymore.And so where do you go with those feelings?You go towards the left and undermining this obviously corrupt system.
15:48That was so much of the force of this kind of thinking.And this guy was very, very articulate about this, wasn't he?He is a very smart guy, isn't he?He is a very smart guy.And one wonders, as I look through his life and spend a lot of time with him, what wouldhave happened if he had not chosen the path he chose? Would he have had more effect if he had stayedengaged as a community leader? But that's not the path he chose. But he would also say that it wasn'treally a choice doing the work that we were talking about. He was coming under tremendous pressure.
16:19We talked a little bit about their surveillance and small things like that. But then it turned,these are headlines in Portland, Maine at the time about a small group of police officers whohad formed a hit squad.Wow.They had a list of local former prisoners who they thought the city would be better offif these guys were dead.And Lavasser and some of his friends were pretty convinced that they were on that list.That's one of the deciding moments for him to say, like, I got to get out.
16:50I got to go on the ground.So he forms what's called the UFF, the United Freedom Front, between 75 and 84.The UFF goes on after the courthouse.carry out at least 20 bombings and 10 bank robberies. These are folks that go underground.They're in relationships. They build families. They live this whole life. That is this crazyfugitive life that they're doing. But they're doing it, you know, targeting corporate buildings,courthouses, military facilities, all associated with, for their purposes, South Africanapartheid, imperialism, and corporate greed. Is that a fair summation of their activities?
17:26I mean, it really is. And it's one of the striking things, a couple of the striking things about this,I think a lot of people will be surprised when you hear the word terrorist.The word terrorist is thrown around in a way to shut down debate today, right?Or are Native supposed to think about what people who are called terrorists say?Yeah.Well, I think readers would be interested to find that sometimes the people who are called terroristslook an awful lot like your friends and neighbors.I mean, the Lavasars had an idyllic lifestyle up in the Northeast Kingdom in Maine,
17:55sort of growing a lot of their own food, working on the land, raising three daughters,who they really seem to love very much.But they stayed active.They were still engaged in their political fightwith some like-minded families.And this went on for eight years.And the sort of dichotomy between the work they were doingand sort of the beautiful family lives that they were leading
18:19is really pretty remarkable.The other thing I think it's worth pointing outis that after the tragedy of the Suffolk County Courthouse bombing,nobody else ever was seriously injured in one of the actions of this group.The UFF grows out of, it's a sort of a combination with more people, grows out of the Sam Melville, Jonathan Jackson unit.But they are very careful.In fact, after they've been featured by Dan Rather on the CBS Evening News, one of the first communiquees they put out reads like it could be from like the union shop steward to employees everywhere in the New York area.Something like, look, if you get a bomb threat, you should leave.
19:02Here's what you should do.And your employer shouldn't be able to tell you to stay.It was like a generalized warning before what ended up being really their last wave of attacks.Were these guys related to or involved with the weathermen?Was that part of their world?Not directly.They had, they brushed up against them in some ways.They had a common connection in the attorney William Conson.
19:27Oh, yeah. According to one of the conspirators who had split with the group, they had socialized at some times with some of the weathermen. But really, these are working poor, working class folks that are involved in the U.S.S.It's a New England revolution. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And to a certain extent, they have a, they have some little disdain for the weathermen who were college-educated folks who were trying to tell everybody else.what they were supposed to do.Yeah.And I think there's a little bitterness because when this group was really kicking off,they didn't realize it at the time.But the weathermen were coming back, right?The last actual weatherman action was in 1975.
20:13Sure.And when those guys come surface, they don't really pay much of a penalty.They don't end up with a lot.They've got good lawyers.They've got money.They come from somewhat privileged backgrounds.And they don't pay the money.the price that these folks ended up paying.
20:32I'll be back with more American history after this short break.So, Kevin, let's talk about the effect of this bomb.But first, I want to understand this courthouse has chosen specifically.I know we mentioned the probation office.Why else is this such an iconic building for them?Well, it's an iconic building for the city.It's a stone's throw from the site of the Boston Massacre.It's named for John Adams, who represented the British soldiers in the Boston Massacre.
21:03It is a beautiful old government building right on the eastern slope of Beacon Hill.It's also the seat of the state's Supreme Judicial Court, the Suffolk County Courts.It's the center of law enforcement from the prosecution side as well as housing records regarding probation and prisoners.Interesting. It's a beautiful Art Deco building, isn't it? It's really a spectacular structure.Who were the victims in this?We've mentioned 22 people.Sure.There were 22 people who were injured.
21:3719 of them had to be transported to the hospital.They were everybody from witnesses who had shown up that dayto people who had court dates that they needed to appear for,folks who were showing up because they needed a license to carry a gunto get the security job their family was counting on them to get.There was even a woman who would later grow up to be a district judge herself,who was Nancy Gertner, who was a...a well-known jurist here in Boston, was a prosecutor at the time handling a high-profile case.
22:07She was walking into the building when the bomb went off.You focus on one individual named Edmund Narine.Talk to us about him.Yeah.So Ed Narine was the last person a leftist revolutionary would ever have intended to harm.He was an immigrant from Trinidad.He was at the courthouse that day because he needed a piece of paper to let him renew his Hackney licenseso he could keep driving a cab as he went back to Codendid.
22:31college. He, you know, he was kind of walking on air that morning. He had, everything was goinghis way until he bounded up the front step to the Suffolk County Courthouse and took a seat in theprobation office. Yeah. And at that point, the bomb goes off. He loses his left leg among otherinjuries. Why him? Why did you focus on his, his personality? I think maybe, so to take a stepback, I was a correspondent in Peru during the height of the Shining Path insurgency. And so I,would too frequently find myself walking through scenes of carnage. And it troubled me that,well, these people had gotten up and gone to work that morning. They were never going to seetheir families again. The first draft of history was not going to remember them. We were going
23:16to be writing about the guerrillas. The other thing that bothered me at the time was that theLomanios I knew never paused to think anything except that the Senderro folks were savages and thatthey should be exterminated. It never occurred to them like what was the what poverty, what circumstances,what desperation would lead you to join a group like that and do those sorts of things. And that was a groupthat intended to harm as many people as they could. So I was, you know, three or four years ago,starting the sense, the creeping sense of political violence in American culture. And I was looking for a story that wouldhelp me sort of process how we got here. What is it that drives a person to feel like the onlyrecourse they have is to place a bomb? What happens into whom when it goes off? And as I started
24:14reading around in this, this is the city I consider home, I came across the courthouse story.I also, I was only 10 years old when the bomb went off, but I had almost completely forgotten aboutit. But I didn't want to write a story just about bombers. It wasn't just a true crime story.And one of the things that really struck me about it was this gentleman, Ed Narine.So he survived. It's a miracle that nobody was killed in this blast.But Ed survived. So I could talk to somebody who bore the weight of that day for their life.How does he process it?It's very interesting. So I will answer your question in this way.
24:52So one of the things that I first saw was that there comes a trial where Ray LaVassar is acting as his own attorney.Edna Rine is called to testify.So he is sitting in the witness box face to facewith the man accused of building the bomb that blew off his leg.And to me, that was clearly going to be a dramatic moment of the story.In a traditional narrative,a guy like Edna Rine would could be counted on to be out for vengeance,angry, looking to settle the score.
25:26But he's a very different person.He had not long, he went through a terrible, terrible year or so after he lost his leg.But he got to a point where he told himself, finding the people who did this is not going to get me back my leg.Being angry about this is destroying my life.I won't say he so much forgave as he kind of decided to forget.I'm just not going to think about this.And I'm going to focus on my family.I'm going to focus on my career, and I'm going to focus on getting the most I can out of life.
26:02He carried himself with a tremendous amount of dignity throughout all of this.Exemplary individual.Was anyone ever prosecuted for this?They were prosecuted.Were they found guilty?No.Well, for this particular act, no one has ever been convicted.The group, which had morphed into the United Freedom Front, and then when they were
26:26captured in rural Ohio, became known as the Ohio 7, were tried in federal court in New Yorkfirst on a very targeted case that accused them of conspiracy and several specific bombings thathappened in and around New York City. It was some serious, serious time. Like some people got,you know, 45 to 53 year sentences. Yeah. But the government wasn't satisfied. This is the Reaganerror, the folks who were on the defense side of this story would say that the government haddecided they were going to make an example of them. The lead prosecutor who had been pursuingthem was Robert Mueller. He started to fashion a case for seditious conspiracy. We hear that case a lotsince January 6th, that charge a lot. Before that, it was very rare that the government ever brought
27:20a seditious conspiracy case. But they brought it here against eightpeople. And in this editious conspiracy case, the bombing of the Suffolk County Courthouse was a specificact that was included in the case. By the time they got to trial, and it became the longest and mostexpensive trial in this district. Only three defendants were left, Ray Levasse, his wife, and a comradenamed Richard Williams. Levasseller defended himself in court. And there's an old adage that someone who defendshimself in court has a fool for a client. But everybody from the prosecutor to the judge would tellyou not in this case. He acquitted himself quite ably. They were acquitted of seditious conspiracyat the end of almost a nine months worth of testimony. And then the jury hung on the conspiracy counts.
28:17Yeah, mistrial declared November 1989. The defendants had already been, were already servingsubstantial federal sentences for other crimes, right? They had been caught up in other situations.This is true. And Ray LaVasher ultimately spent 20 years in federal prison, most of that in solitaryconfinement. Yeah, right. Not because of things that happened while he was behind bars,but he was identified as someone who could be political trouble and therefore was treatedrather harshly. And that's in Maxim's security prison out in Colorado, right?Absolutely. The bad one.It was the crown jewel of the government's prison system at the time.
28:57He would go day. He was in the prison at the same time with Timothy McVeigh and the blindcheek from the New York terrorism cases. And the isolation was so intense.And the unabomber was there. He would never even see those people.And that word sedition now gets tossed around a lot. But you're right. Back then it was like,that's the worst to be called that. This guy, I mean, like others here, he's a fascinating individual.I mean, you really get into quite a portrait of him.Tell me why.Well, here's another thing about Edna Rine that really drew me to him.
29:30After Ray Lavaser has served his time, a group of faculty at UMass wants to have him come speak on the anniversary of the sedition trial, which was a massive event in central Massachusetts.The governor speaks out against it.The head of the UMass system speaks out against it.Law enforcement groups across the region are outraged.The university cancels that event, but a little pocket of faculty members come up with an alternative event.And that just creates a whole new round of criticism.The one voice speaking out from freedom of speech, the one guy who says, this man should be allowed to come speak, is Edna Ryan.Wow.
30:12The guy who lost his leg is the only person who's willing to take a stand for democracy here.And so did he speak?No.At the last minute, the police associations managed to convince him.his parole officer to refuse a travel permit. So he couldn't leave Maine to get to UMass. His ex-wife,Pat Lavasser, spoke on his behalf, along with a couple of the attorneys, and interestingly,a couple of the jurors who were involved in the trial. Wow. He's still alive, Levasse,isn't he? He is. He's just now turned to 80. Yeah. It's a good Wikipedia to read. I just read up on it.
30:45Fascinating. Do you think that we live in a time where, you know, so much of this stuff is happening still,you know, wealth disparity and American imperialism. Is that stuff coming back or are we just not hearingabout it? I think it's starting to come back. I went to a talk with a sociologist from BostonCollege last night who had pointed out that I don't know what survey he was referring to, but that50% of Americans now say capitalism is an unfair system. That we are of losing faith in it and thatis making their lives worse. I think that matters. I don't see sort of the articulation ofa cause in the same way, the way you were referring to how things were sort of thawed out andlaid out, sometimes in extreme and over-the-top language. But they had put a lot of analysis
31:38into what they decided the problem was and how they were going to try to deal with it.Yeah. The political violence that I see the most of around us today seems to be the loner who pops off. You know, somebody who's, and it's very easy in theinternet age to sort of latch on to somebody else's ideology and be motivated to go out and dosomething, even though you haven't really thought through what it is you're doing or what theconsequences might be for you or for anybody else.Yeah. Well, I think it's a really important theme that people should probably read up on,and a good place to start with be your book. Kevin Galvin is the man we've been speaking with
32:15today, is a Boston-based journalist who wrote this book.Troubled Times, the Boston Courthouse Bombing of 1976, which has only just been released.I recommend that you get it.It's a fantastic way into this world, and to understand it through this particular episode is fascinating.Thank you so much, Kevin.Really nice to meet you.Thanks, Don.Thanks for the opportunity to speak to you.
32:36Hey, thanks for listening to American History Hit.You know, every week we release new episodes, two new episodes dropping Mondays and Thursdays,all kinds of content from mysterious missing colonies to powerful political movements.some of the biggest battles across the centuries. Don't miss an episode. By hitting like and follow,you help us out, which is great, but you'll also be reminded when our shows are on. And while you'reat it, share it with a friend. American History Hit with me, Don Wildman. So grateful for your support.
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