[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
plugged a few search words into theChronicle s database:Robert Meyer. BNA.
Then she slapped theENTERkey.
Several matches popped up on the screen right away. We plowed through a lot
of unrelated articles of antiwar and BNA activity in the sixties. Then we
found something.
PROSECUTOR NAMED IN DEADLY BNA RAID CASE.
A series of articles from September 1970.
We scrolled back from there, and bingo!FEDS,POLICE RAID BNA STRONGHOLD.FOUR
DEAD IN SHOOTOUT.
It was in the days of the sixties radicals. Constant protests over the war,
SDS riots on Sproul Plaza in Berkeley. We scrolled through several articles.
The BNA had robbed a few banks and then a Brink s truck. A guard, a hostage,
and two cops were killed in the robbery. Two BNA members were on the FBI s
list of Top Ten Most Wanted Fugitives.
We scrolled through whatever theChronicle had on file. A BNA hideout was
raided the night of December 6, 1969. The Feds had surrounded a house on a
quiet street in Berkeley based on a tip from a CI. They came in, guns blazing.
Five radicals in the house were killed. Among the dead were Fred Whitehouse,
a leader of the group, and two women.
There was one white kid shot dead in the raid, a student at Berkeley. From an
Page 108
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
upper-middle-class background near Sacramento. Family and friends insisted he
didn t even know how to fire a gun. Just an idealistic kid caught up
protesting an immoral war.
No one would say what he was doing in the house.
William Billy Danko was his name.
Chapter86
A GRAND JURY was convened to investigate the shootings at the BNA hideout.
Nasty charges were hurled left and right. The case was given to a rising
prosecutor in the D.A. s office. Robert Meyer. Jill s father.
The jury at the trial found no evidence of any police mis-conduct. Those who
were killed, the police argued, were among the FBI s most wanted, though the
description seemed a stretch for Billy Danko. Federal agents paraded a cache
of guns confiscated in the raid: Uzis, grenade launchers, piles of ammo. A gun
was found in Fred Whitehouse s hand though sympathizers claimed it had been
planted.
Okay, Cindy said wearily, and pushed back from the screen, where do we go
from here?
The database referred to an article from 1971, a year later, in theChronicle
s Sunday news magazine.
You got a morgue downstairs, don t you?
Yes, we do. Downstairs. A morgue.
It was now close to fourA.M. We flicked on a light in the morgue, and there
was nothing but row after row of metal shelves filled with mesh and wire bins.
I frowned, deflated. You know the system, Cindy?
Of course I know the system, she replied. You come in here during normal
working hours and you ask the guy sitting at the desk.
We split up and roamed the dark, crammed corridors. Cindy wasn t exactly sure
if the files went back that far; what we were searching for might only be on
film.
Finally I heard her shout, I found something!
I wound my way through the dark rows, following the sound of her voice. When
I found Cindy, she was hauling down bundled old issues of the magazine
supplement in large plastic bins. They were labeled by year.
We sat on the cold, concrete floor, side by side, barely enough light to read
by.
Still, we quickly found the article the database had referred us to. It was
an exposé titled What Really Happened to the Hope Street Five.
According to the writer, the local police had fabricated the whole crime
scene to get rid of the insurgents. They had been tipped off by an unnamed CI.
It was a massacre, not an arrest. Supposedly the victims were sleeping in
their beds.
Page 109
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
A lot of the article was focused on the white victim in the raid, Billy
Danko. The FBI had claimed he was a Weatherman and tied him to a bombing at a
regional office of Raytheon, a manufacturer of weapons. The article in
theChronicle con-tradicted most of the FBI s facts about Danko, who did seem
to be an innocent victim.
It was four in the morning. I was getting frustrated, angry.
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]