An American Radical:. Susan Rosenberg
between fury and fear.
The FBI did not find the person they were looking for that day. No one was killed or shot or even arrested. Instead, they had kicked in the front door of the clinic carrying blank grand jury subpoenas, filled out the names of the twenty staffers present, and then confiscated all of the clinic’s records. This was one of several raids by the FBI against black-led community institutions that had associations with black revolutionaries.
In September 1982, six months after the FBI raid on the Harlem Institute of Acupuncture, I was in my car listening to WINS radio, when I heard that there had been a new and superseding indictment in the Brink’s robbery. This meant that the grand jury had added new people to the indictment. The announcer read the list. There were over twenty names. I almost missed hearing my own. I drove around the Upper West Side where I lived and finally parked on Riverside Drive and sat in my car. I was certain I could not get a fair trial; I was afraid of going to prison, but also afraid to flee. I had no time in which to think through whether I should flee or go to jail. What about my family? My burgeoning career as an acupuncturist? What about my dog? What about my new car? I was twenty-six years old. I thought, I’ll fight the conspiracy, I’ll turn myself in, and I’ll get a lawyer. I went back and forth in my mind, weighing my options as I sat in the car. I caressed the dashboard and smelled the newness of it. I listened to the recurring WINS report over and over again. I did not cry, but I was terribly sad. I felt I was being forced to abandon my life. Instead of returning home, I drove to my office. After circling the block twice to see if any police were there, I ran in and grabbed all of the money I could find and random bits and pieces of things that I thought would be valuable or that I could sell. Then I fled.
Two and a half years later at MCC with all the other political people in prison, we were now trying to help one another reinforce our identity as political prisoners. One afternoon we were sitting together, eating our government-issue lunch of cheese sandwiches and coffee and reading a news article about the Puerto Rican inde-pendentistas on trial in Hartford, Connecticut. The newest woman prisoner was Lucy Segarra, one of the Macheteros. She had been charged with participating in an action in which toys were distributed to poor children in Hartford on Three Kings Day. What made this illegal was that the money used to purchase the toys came, allegedly, from the $7 million Wells Fargo robbery carried out in 1983 by Los Macheteros in Hartford. Though that robbery was the single largest ever carried out in the United States, no one was injured and the money was never recovered.
When our talk shifted from the trial to the effects of a hurricane on New York, something in the discussion of a violent storm triggered a reaction in Lucy. Her eyes filled up with tears of anger, hatred, shame, and fear. In a soft, halting voice she told us how the Mexican authorities, in conjunction with the FBI, had beaten her (without leaving marks), threatened her by saying they would kill her children, and interrogated her in a locked cell for days while her children were held outside. Finally, they had transported her, placing a hood over her head so that she would not know her whereabouts. They told her that no one knew where she was, that no one would be able to help her, and that as far as the world was concerned she had disappeared. They said that they had killed and broken others in her group, and that still others were giving her up. She went on to describe the men and the place and her deep concern for her children. Always she came back to her children.
As I returned to my own cell, I realized that living in the midst of this prison madness can either take your soul or give it back to you. I resolved to take mine back.
Throughout the months of pre-trial detention and then awaiting sentencing, my parents came to visit. It was the beginning of rebuilding our relationship. My parents attended my trial, despite their profound disagreements with me and my friends. Meeting for the first time since my arrest, my mother was so angry that she could hardly speak. She sat in the visiting room, all dressed up and seething. My father cried. It would be a long rapprochement, but even then my parents met me halfway. They always met me halfway.
Later that same year, John Gotti was arrested. Finally, someone else’s notoriety had eclipsed me and the other political prisoners. I was glad he was in the spotlight. Seeing him in jail, with his swagger, his cigar butt, and the terrible charisma he emitted regardless of his circumstances, I knew it to be true—he was the boss, the man, the Don. During what was described as the Pizza Connection trial, the MCC housed as many Mafia members as political prisoners. Unbelievably, we all mixed in the prison’s attorney-client visiting room, they with their gold crucifixes and we with our revolutionary passions. Although the two groups could not have been more different, we had in common a strong code of principle—we would not snitch, not in our cases, in our lives, or inside the jail itself. In that respect, our honor united us. John Gotti had never witnessed such loyalty before in a group outside the mob. He liked me, and he liked Tim, too.
On my thirtieth birthday I had a visit with my attorney and was off the women’s floor for several hours. When I returned and stood in the saliport, which separated the outside world from the secured area inside, the cop removing my handcuffs gave me a big smile. I responded with the convict glaze, being in no mood to smile. As the steel door popped open and I walked in, everyone on the floor started singing and I saw the banner they had hung across a set of bars: happy birthday, susan.The party—complete with wine and scotch and a sumptuous Italian meal of eggplant, veal, and chicken—had been bought and paid for by John Gotti. It was one of the best birthdays I had ever had. And there wasn’t a cop in sight. (Several months later, thirteen corrections officers were indicted on corruption charges for selling the food contract at the MCC to a Mafia-run company and several administrators were charged with bribery and corruption.)
In October,ten days after my birthday, eleven months after my arrest, I was transferred without warning to Arizona. What had been a year of turmoil, heartbreak, resisting capture, trial and prosecution, changed instantly into “doing time.”
THE TWO-LANE highway was empty except for speeding trucks and an occasional car. It was a cold November. The ice was thick, and the sun glistened on the snow piled high on each embankment. The light, mixed with the freezing air, made the passing scene sharp and clear. We were driving through the Pennsylvania hills early in the morning. In the now-familiar black Mercedes-Benz it was a smooth ride, for sure. The windows were rolled up, the air heavy. Five hours passed in silence, and the tension rose. The driver, part of a new detail, kept watching me in the rearview mirror. The trooper in the front kept checking his revolver. The jangling of my waist chains and a sporadic cackle from the police radio were the only sounds. The phone rang and the driver picked it up. After some murmuring back and forth the driver accelerated. The helicopter overhead flew low and buzzed us. The driver said, “We’re late, but they’ll hold the plane.” When we passed the road sign for Harrisburg, I knew we were approaching our destination. I knew because I had heard that this was the East Coast departure point for the federal prisoner transport.
I never knew until I was in prison that at most major airports, in the back or off to the side, there is a military section. It is for use by all branches of the Department of Defense in case of national emergencies, for private use by those with executive privilege, for civil defense maneuvers, and for the shipping and handling of federal prisoners. We drove to the back of the Harrisburg airport, where we were screened, checked, and waved through the gate. As we passed through the rows of fences and barbed wire I thought, Dual function, to keep us in—and keep the rest out. I was sad and afraid: this was my departure from the past, from the life I had known. I was leaving the East Coast, my family, my friends, my patients, my compatriots, everything that was familiar though now distorted by the extreme circumstances of my arrest and the turmoil of the trial. Going to what? To where? To be with whom? Serving fifty-eight years in prison was impossible to fathom. I wasn’t fazed by the military presence and police intimidation; rather, what I feared was the unknowable future. The slow death that had been imposed on me by vindictive prosecution and over sentencing produced the deepest of aches. And what of the movement? I didn’t know.
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