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The Nyack holdup demonstrates yet another odd departure for the Weather Underground: carelessness. For more than a decade, the group had been an embarrassment to U.S. law enforcement authorities. Boudin, Bernardine Dohrn and others were on the Most Wanted list in the early 1970s, and while the FBI was able to track their occasional comings and goings to Cuba, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the bureau was never able to bring them in. The xenophobic closeness of the organization, so extreme that "they have intermarried like a royal family," according to onetime Radical Jane Alpert, protected them. Yet law enforcement officials say the Nyack job was sloppy. "You always use stolen vehicles for a big stick-up," one observer pointed out. According to Kenneth Walton, head of the FBI's New York office, the bungled holdup enabled law officers to make more progress against the fugitives in a week than they had in years.
Some students of the Underground believe that the urge to merge was inspired by the successful example of radical groups overseas. West Germany's Baader-Meinhof gang, Italy's Red Brigades, Japan's Red Army and other terrorist groups united five years ago, after they concluded that their individual strength was ebbing, a problem the American groups felt acutely. Exactly when and how the Weather Underground got together with the B.L.A., the R.N.A. and the May 19 Coalition, however, remains unknown. But as law enforcement officials continued to examine the evidence last week, they found signs that the organizations may have joined forces to carry out a number of other robberies dating back to early 1980. Gilbert's fingerprint, for instance, was found on a rental agreement for a van used in a Brink's heist in The Bronx last June. Other evidence connects Boudin with two 1980 robberies, one in Inwood. N. Y., and another in The Bronx, in which B.L.A. and R.N.A. members are also suspects. Said Detective Lieut. Shaun Spillane of the Nassau County, N.Y., police: "I'm sure it's the same people involved in all the robberies."
Does that mean that there is a dangerous new fount of terrorism in the U.S.? Or that the Nyack robbery presages a new wave of radical violence? Not very likely. Despite the large amount of money sought by the Nyack robbers, authorities doubt that they represent a large or powerful movement. Said FBI Spokesman Roger Young: "It's possible that we have it all, though it's hard to tell this early." J. Bowyer Bell, head of the Washington-based Interna tional Analysis Center and an expert on political violence, agrees. The total membership of the Weather Underground, he says, would hardly "fill a large living room." The B.L.A. has "a maximum of 20 members, more likely 15." Thus, concludes Bell, the new radical coalition is merely "a desperate residue of 30 to 40 similar people who represent nobody. They are an aberration and we are seeing its death thores.