A widening dragnet surrounds the radical underground
It began as a Brink's job, gorier than most, botched but otherwise routine. As police and FBI agents scrutinized the facts, the fingerprints and the getaway-car license plates, however, something larger, more complex, yet weirdly familiar stared back at them. The suspects were specters from a radical past: members of the Weather Underground, soldiers of the Black Liberation Army, onetime Black Panthers. They included half-forgotten radicals, fugitives who had been running so long that no one bothered to chase them any more. More than a week after the $1.6 million armored-car holdup near Nyack, N.Y., in which two policemen and a Brink's guard were killed, investigators were still rounding up ghosts of the old left and exploring how the disparate and perhaps desperate groups had joined together in so ill-conceived a plot. More than ever, they were wondering why.
In fleeing the bloody holdup, the Brink's bandits had literally made tracks. To begin with, there were plenty of witnesses to the blitzkrieg-style heist at Nanuet National Bank, just outside Nyack. There were also witnesses to the police Shootout near by that had led to the capture of Weather Undergrounders Katherine Boudin, 38, David Gilbert, 37, and Judith Clark, 31, as well as Accomplice Samuel Brown, 41, a career criminal. In addition, guns and getaway cars were easily traced to the names of other suspects and to the addresses of their safe houses. The houses, in turn, provided authorities with "boxes and boxes" of further evidence. "It was a gold mine," said one exultant investigator. "When these people are underground, one of them invariably thinks he or she is going to write the new Das Kapital. So they write every damn thing down, and sometimes they tape it all. You'd think they would have learned from Nixon."
By mining the Underground's gold, police were able to move swiftly and surely. First to be snared in the dragnet were Samuel Smith, 37, and Nathaniel Burns, 35, following a gunfight with arresting officers in which Smith was killed. The pair had been spotted in New York City on a Queens highway. They were riding in a car bearing a license plate seen on another car at the Nyack Shootout. Last week their connection with the robbery was confirmed by a souvenir found in Smith's pocket: a spent .38-cal. bullet, which had apparently failed to penetrate the bulletproof vest he was wearing. The slug was traced to the gun of Sergeant Edward O'Grady, one of the two policemen killed in Nyack. "Very strong evidence," said Rockland County District Attorney Kenneth Gribetz. Burns was believed to be a member of the Black Liberation Army (see box). His possible involvement gave investigators their first inkling that the Weather Underground had not acted alone.