GUERRILLAS IN OUR MIDST

After the New Year’s celebration, cash became a pressing issue. Neither Ed nor John held on to their jobs at Boeing Field, and Bruce was similarly unemployed. Mark had a day job as supervisor of Pivot, the convict-operated upholstery shop he co-founded while incarcerated at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla, and was being offered a position doing prisoners’ rights organizing with the American Friends Service Committee. He was always generous with his income, providing, for example, the funds for the previous fall’s ill-fated gun run to Denver. But his contributions weren’t enough to support the organization’s five full-time members. And, as with Rita and Tammy in respects to gender, Bruce, Ed and John, as three white men, were too proud to rely on Mark, an African-American, for donations.

The collective’s last hundred dollars disappeared into a wallet John claimed to have lost. ‘Is he lying?’ Ed wondered. The thought came as an epiphany: he hadn’t doubted his friend since the painful incident at McNeil Island Penitentiary when John was ejected from their cell after another inmate said he’d given testimony against others to reduce his own sentence. Ed, in observance of John’s new pariah status as a “snitch,” ignored him for months, a painful situation for both men. Ed decided against sharing this concern about John’s honesty with the others.

The Brigade had become a full-time job. The question was: Who was their employer when they acted in the interests of “the people”? ‘Let the rich pay for their own destruction,’ Ed resolved.

“What we need is a big take from a bank,” Ed declared to the others. ‘I’m not gonna be doin’ this every week. We need more than drawers: we need a vault.”

In a quick-entry bank robbery, the felons demanded that one or more of the tellers empty their drawers. These drawers contained just enough to complete the petty tasks performed on a shift, like cashing checks, granting small withdrawals and making change—often less than $1,000. In busy periods, such as on paydays, banks employed a cash cart, which an employee pushed around to refill or empty the tellers’ drawers. Besides this, major currency was kept in the vault, which was difficult to raid: it required more time than the drawers and, often, the creation of a hostage situation.

Flushed from the success of the New Year’s actions, a bank vault didn’t strike anyone in the organization as over-ambitious. Collective members decided to start scouting for a bank with the appropriate qualities: close access to the freeway, light security, and, ideally, a safe distance from the nearest police station. They found one with two out of three of these characteristics. The Pacific National Bank of Washington at 13451 Interurban Avenue was located on a straightaway beside an I-5 onramp. It wasn’t even in a solid building: pending the completion of a permanent structure the branch was housed in a mobile home. The one downside was that a police station was only a couple blocks away.

“We’ll place diversions far away from the station to draw out the pigs. No one’ll even be in the cop shop if the alarm is sounded at the bank,” Ed, the most experienced criminal in the collective, with the exception of Mark, assured.

The collective members dreamt about what they would do with all this cash. The men would take a small amount of money and use it to travel around the country to establish contact with other like-minded individuals in other cities. This would allow them to plug into the national underground and coordinate strategy personally, instead of being isolated in the Pacific Northwest and acting based on reports in publications like the Bay Area’s “urban guerrilla” bulletin Dragon. The majority of the money would be buried by the women, to be employed once the path of the revolution became clearer.

The organization picked Friday, January 23, 1976 to commit the robbery. Collective members would be able to pull together everything they needed by then and, they figured, there would be more cash on a payday.

That Thursday the collective went to the woods north of the city for target practice. Ed stayed behind to rent—using fake ID—the getaway car. He entrusted his Browning .9mm to John with the proviso: “Don’t shoot up all my ammo!”

When the group returned that night Ed discovered that John had shot up all his ammo. The sporting goods supply stores were closed. All he could find open was an Army surplus depot. He purchased shells to fill his own cartridge.

The collective fashioned fake bombs by placing bricks in shoe boxes, wrapping them with electrical tape and attaching timers. The next day they divided into groups and, as the time for the robbery approached, planted decoys in the south of the county, as far away from the police station as possible. One was planted in the Double Tree Inn near the airport—which, the collective had agreed, deserved harassment as a bourgeois operation—another in a Tukwila restaurant, the third in a Renton motel. Ed drove to an I-5 overpass, lit a package of smoke flares he had bought from a boating supply store, and chucked it into the freeway. The crew called in false bomb reports, drawing King County, Renton and Tukwila police; the smoke bomb distracted the Washington Highway Patrol.[1]

Mark dropped Bruce, Ed, and John off in front of the bank and parked across the street, listening to a police scanner with a pistol close at hand. Rita and Tammy waited several minutes away in a clean, conventional station wagon, ready to cart the boys away when Mark brought them back after the heist.

At 4:45 pm, Bruce, Ed and John rushed into the bank together and quickly began shouting “No alarms! Hurry!” Ed was wearing faded gray coveralls, a dark blue hat pulled down past his ears, glasses, and black nylon gloves. He carried a white cloth sack in his left hand and a .9 mm semi-automatic pistol in his right. Bruce sported an orange poncho, blue Levis, sunglasses, and a tan ski mask with a red top. John was cloaked in a field jacket, dark knit hat and gray wool ski mask, and clutched a .12 gauge sawed-off shotgun at his side.

Bruce rushed to the manager’s desk and thrust his cocked .38 caliber long-barreled revolver in the manager’s face. Mark Wallbom, who had been speaking on the phone with the bank’s vice president, laid the receiver down on the desk. Bruce gestured for him to get on his feet and pushed him toward the teller cages.

Ed forced a bank teller named Mary Ann Scott to the floor. He then grabbed the manager and directed him to the vault in the back of the trailer. When a second teller came out of the restroom, Ed ordered her to the floor as well. The telephone began ringing continuously.

“She does,” the manager responded, indicating the most recently prone teller, who ventured a glance up.

“Get it!” Ed ordered. The woman scurried to her cash box, unlocked it, retrieved the key, then laid down again.

The manager opened the outer door, then informed Ed, “I’ll need to do the inner vault combination as well.”

“I’m trying! I’ll give you the combination if you want to open it!” the manager snapped back. Bruce went to help John empty the teller cages.

The manager fumbled the combination. Ed perceived that the white shirt wasn’t cooperating. He cocked his pistol, placed the barrel against the manager’s head and informed him: “One last chance.”

“It’s customers!” came the reply. John forced a man onto the floor then ran to the back to check on progress.

“No, it’s alright.” Ed was calm, close to the goal. The manager swung open the inner door of the safe. Ed shoved money into the sack while Bruce and John hovered at the door urging “Come on!” Ed passed the bag to Bruce and the three men ran to the front door with Bruce in the lead.

At the door, through the premature winter darkness, Bruce distinguished the form of a police officer. The Brigade had lost their gamble: one officer, Joe Mathews, was in the bathroom when the call to respond to the diversions came in, and emerged just in time to hear the bank alarm called in by the vice president.

“Pigs!” Bruce cried, and turned to run back into the bank. As he did so, Officer Mathews raised his sidearm and fired. A Tukwila Police Department hollow point bullet entered Bruce’s lower back. “I’m hit!” he yelled. Bruce turned to face his assailant, firing.

Officer Mathews crouched behind his car, only to feel bullets whizzing over him from behind. Mark was firing at the cop from across Interurban. One of these projectiles—a .38 slug—blasted through the flimsy siding of the bank trailer and impacted John’s face, splattering blood and bone. [2]

Officer Matthews instinctively scurried towards the opposite side of the car, until Bruce’s fire reminded him why he had deserted it in the first place. The policeman, uninjured but caught in a crossfire, fired at Mark who, convinced that there was little else he could do for his comrades, drove off. As Mark disappeared other police cars pulled into the bank parking lot and joined in the shoot-out.

Inside the bank, Ed yelled “Tell the pigs we’ve got the manager!” at his damaged co-conspirators. He broke out a window facing the parking lot and began firing. Every second shot failed and he had to manually eject the shells. Ed’s potshots shattered the siren on the closest police car, and pocked its steel doors. (He learned later that the spring on the firing pins of military issue is stronger than that of civilian pieces—the Army surplus goods accounted for his cumbersome dud rate.)

Bruce, fully exposed, got off five shots before taking a hit in the chest from a different police officer, Robert W. Abbott. He collapsed. John crawled over Mary Ann and the manager, to the back where Ed helped him to what they hoped was an exit. It was a toilet. Mary Ann and her boss shimmied through the now unguarded front door out into the parking lot, miraculously dodging bullets.

Ed and John yelled, over and over, “We surrender!” When no reply was forthcoming Ed fired some more. A policeman with a bullhorn boomed: “We will guarantee your safety if you throw your guns down!”

John threw his unfired shotgun out a broken window. Ed’s automatic pistol soon followed; police later said a shot went off as it landed. The two ex-convicts carefully stepped into the open, then outside. Bruce remained inside. His comrades could hear his belabored breathing: it was a chilling gurgle. Bruce was drowning in his own blood.[3]

Mark dropped the getaway car at the pre-designated location, and was rapidly shuffled into the back of women’s station wagon and covered with blankets. The two women, having decided against installing one of their illegal police scanners in the “clean” car, couldn’t follow the unfolding crime, but, once they saw Mark alone, didn’t need to be told that things had gone badly. Back at base Mark filled them in on what he saw; they got the rest of the information they needed by listening to the police scanner, which was humming with excited cross-talk. It was clear that Ed and John were in custody and that Bruce was injured.

Word of the disaster was delivered to Bruce’s closest housemate, Michael Steinloff. Michael called another Michael, Michael Withey, an attorney with the Seattle chapter of the National Lawyers Guild who had recently defended a Weather Underground fugitive who had been caught in Seattle. “I need you to call the Tukwila police and ask if they have a ‘Peter Wilson’ in custody,” Bruce’s housemate told the young attorney.

“I can’t tell you. He’s white, 5’3,” with a stocky build and black hair. He’ll be injured.”

Withey called early the next day. He discovered that “Wilson” had been inducted into Valley General Hospital, where he was declared dead early that morning. Bruce’s housemate, knowing too much, disappeared, aided by a monetary contribution from what was left of the Brigade.

Police came knocking on the door of Bruce’s collective the next day. They were disappointed.[4]

[1] 3 23 78 TNT; Wright “Jury Convicts Mead in Bank Robbery Case” P-I 4 9 76 A (back page)

[2] A ballistics expert testifies in Seidel’s death inquest that the slug removed from Sherman’s jaw—a .38—did not come from a police pistol, indicating that it came from Cook’s across the street (a slug from the same gun is later offered as authentication of the International Women’s Day communiqué). P-I 3 28 76

[3] This account is a composite of Mark Reed Wallbom’s initial police report, taken 1/24/76 by Detective Desmul of the Tukwila Police Department for Case 76-0151, press accounts of testimony at the inquest and state trial (the original transcripts of the inquest, along with those of Mead’s subsequent trial on state charges, were lost by the Court in the early ‘90s), and Mead and Sherman’s “On the Death of Bruce” (1 26 76 Dragon #8 pp 3-5). Press accounts include: “Inquest Jury to Weigh Bank Shoot-out Evidence” PI 2 18 76 A4; W. Wright “Jury Clears Tukwila Policeman in Fatal Shooting” PI 2 20 76 A4; W. Wright “Officers Tell Of Gun Battle” PI 4 7 76 A5; W. Wright “Accounts of Gun Battle Differ Widely” PI 4 8 76 A5; J.A. Wilson “Mead says police fired first” ST 4 8 76

[4] John Arthur Wilson “Dead radical’s roommate sought” ST 4 21 76

Dog Day Afternoon

In which comrades go for a bank vault and are shot and captured