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THE SLA
From "Vegas PI The Life and Times of America's Greatest Detective"
Lake Headley with William Hoffman
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The weather was cold the night of February 4, 1974, in the university town of Berkeley, the cradle of the modern American protest movement.
Nineteen-year-old Patricia Campbell Hearst and her lover Steven Andrew Weed, twenty-six, felt warm and secure in their handsome $250-a-month apartment. They heard a tapping at the duplex window, and Weed rose in response. The Princeton University graduate peered out through the glass at a shabbily dressed young white woman.
“Hi,” the woman said. “Something’s wrong with my car. Can I use your phone?”
“Well, I don’t know, you see..."
Two black men dressed in commando gear materialized out of the darkness, smashed rifle butts through the glass door, drove Weed to the floor. Hearing the noise, a man from next door rushed in: the attackers beat Weed and the neighbor unconscious with a wine bottle.
Weed was knocked out perhaps thirty seconds, then he lurched toward the apartment door while the kidnappers were occupied with their struggling victim, and he ran for help. The commando unit dragged the screaming Ms. Hearst toward a waiting getaway car. The abductors fired bursts of gunfire from their automatic weapons at alarmed neighbors who had crowded to the doors and windows of adjacent apartments.
The neighbors took cover, but most of them saw Patty Hearst stuffed into the trunk of the getaway car.
Ten weeks later Patty’s voice was heard on a taped communiqué sent by her abductors, the terrorist Symbionese Liberation Army: “I have chosen to stay and fight with my comrades. My name is now Tania.”
Accompanying the terrible taped message was the now famous color photograph of Patty-Tania dressed in guerilla costume and holding a Chinese AK-47 automatic weapon.
Behind her hung a banner picturing a seven-headed cobra, the symbol of the SLA. The name “Tania” was associated with the woman who had loved and died with Che Guevera in the jungles of Bolivia.
The kidnapping of Patty Hearst crowded other important stories off the front pages of the nation’s newspapers. Who could resist such a story? It was the first political kidnapping ever engineered inside this country.
Sensation built upon sensation. There were fiery pronunciamentos from SLA Field Marshall Cinque (Donald David DeFreeze), and he quickly proved himself more than just a man of words. He forced Patty’s father, the fabulously wealthy Randolph A. Hearst, to distribute more than a million dollars in food to needy residents of Oakland. Despite then—governor Reagan’s statement ‘The people of Oakland are too proud to accept a handout”—tens of thousands showed up to receive free turkeys.
Then Cinque’s band pulled a daring armed robbery of the Hibernia branch of the Bank of America. Photographed participating in the robbery was Patty Hearst. She became a hero to many on the left.
I didn’t know what to think. Were these revolutionary Robin Hoods stealing from the rich to feed the poor? Then I got a call from the outstanding activist/author Donald Freed (co-author of Executive Action, among many other works), and soon I was up to my ears in a story truly stranger than fiction.
“What do you think of DeFreeze?” Freed asked.
“Cinque? He has a certain panache, I guess.”
“He’s a police agent,” Freed said.
I let that roll around in my head for a while.
“We’d like you to look into this kidnapping,” Freed continued.
“Who’s ‘we’?” It turned out to be a group called the Citizens Research and Investigation Committee; I was impressed by some of the names Freed mentioned and agreed to meet with these people.
One of them, an ex-cop named Danny Stewart, repeated what Freed had said: “This guy Cinque is a police agent. Call him an agent provocateur, if you want. Whatever, he’s no revolutionary, like the cops and press want us to believe.”
The date was May 2, 1974, and though my pay would be zero, I agreed to head the investigation the Citizens Research Committee had begun. I had lots of energy that had carried over from the bracing experiences at Wounded Knee, and maybe there was something here. After recruiting two veter-ans of Wounded Knee, Elizabeth Schmidt, and Jeanne Davies, we went right to work.
What we quickly learned and most of it came from public records painted an unmistakable picture. In 1964, ten years before the Hearst kidnapping, DeFreeze had been a police informant, ratting on friends and associates. This information came from sources I had inside the LAPD, but it wouldn’t have taken even the most dense p.i. long to figure it out. We looked at Cinque’s arrest record:
3/31/65: West Covina, California
836.3 P.C., 211 P.C., 459 P.C., 12020 P.C.
DeFreeze arrested with bomb, knife, and sawed-offshotgun.
Probation: 6/7/65
DeFreeze continued as an occasional informant to the LAPD on the sales of contraband and stolen arms.
6/9/67: Los Angeles, California
211 APC - Robbery, charged 12020 P.C.
Two counts possession of explosives, one count possession of a concealed weapon. Two bombs and a gun.
Probation: to expire on Sept. 14, 1970
#X379-47 1.
DeFreeze, already on probation, now received three more years probation, despite his violation.
On December 2, 1967, DeFreeze was arrested for the fifth time on an arms charge. He had robbed and beaten a prostitute. He was driven to the 77th Street station by arresting officers Toles and Farwell, but he escaped while they were en route. He was recaptured shortly afterward but not charged with anything.
On December 6, 1967, DeFreeze set up his partner, Ron, by telephoning and then leading police to Ron’s apartment.
There a cache of 200 weapons belonging to Ron and DeFreeze was found. These weapons had come from a surplus store, one among several that had been robbed to supply guns to a black cultural nationalist organization.
DeFreeze, evidently a reincarnation of Houdini, escaped once again. When he was recaptured he was given five more years of probation. How could this be possible? Ask any police officer and I used to be one and you’ll be told Cinque was somebody’s snitch. An out-of-control snitch, no doubt, but a snitch nonetheless. Somebody wanted him out on the street; if allowing a prostitute to be beaten and robbed was the price, someone was willing to pay it. Any of the arrests we uncovered, in normal practice, would have remanded DeFreeze to the penitentiary for parole violation.
I came to believe that during this period—December, 1967—Donald David DeFreeze was a certain Los Angeles police detective’s informant on Black Liberation politics. Why did I think this? I called the detective and he implied as much.
Unknown to him, I tape-recorded our conversation (May 2, 1974), which featured the following line: “I am reluctant to say anything because the guy is, he is going to be killed.”
DeFreeze joined a stable of black agents recruited after the Watts uprising, that worked out of the “black desk” of LAPD Intelligence. DeFreeze’s main activity was to report on black militant activity in south-central Los Angeles. This only months after DeFreeze had been discovered to have a supply of 200 guns including automatic weapons. In an event I thought was related, on May 2,1967, California law enforcement was thrown into an official uproar when a delegation from the Black Panther Party legally demonstrated at the Sacramento State House by carrying unloaded guns inside the legislature to protest a piece of pending legislation.
DeFreeze, an ex-con with 200 guns, was given very low bail and, later, probation. In 1968, DeFreeze was arrested, armed, for the sixth time:
4/10/68: Inglewood, California
Burglary: 836.3—459 P.C.
Released no charge.
DeFreeze was being run in the ever-mounting campaign against the fast-growing Southern California Chapter of the Black Panther Party. At the same time DeFreeze was allowed to ply his arms trade for profit.
DeFreeze was arrested again in August, 1968:
8/16/68: Los Angeles
487.3 P.C.: Grand Larceny.
Nine days later DeFreeze’s wife wrote to the authorities reminding them of her husband’s occasional work for them and the protection that the couple had been promised by the police. DeFreeze was released again.
During the early fall of 1968, the LAPD detective and his agents, including DeFreeze, became part of a new subversive super secret unit—the Criminal Conspiracy Section (CCS).
DeFreeze’s job involved moving guns and grenades to be used against the Black Panther Party.
Despite every indication of his instability, DeFreeze, on December 13, 1968, was given five years probation on the 200-gun charge. The staff opinion from DeFreeze’s psychiatric report was that his constant involvement with “fire arms and explosives” made him “dangerous.” Disregarding every indication of danger, the criminal conspiracy section put De-Freeze back on the streets into an extremely volatile political situation developing in Los Angeles. In December, 1968, the Black Panther Party leaders Jon Huggins and Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter were gunned down on the campus of UCLA with guns that I suspected but could not prove had come from DeFreeze.
4/20/69: Los Angeles
12031 APC
Unlawful possession of a dangerous weapon—”military type semi-automatic M-68 nine MM rifle, which was fully loaded; and attached clip contained 32 bullets. This gun was described as specifically designed for military or police work.”
Thus, DeFreeze was arrested for a seventh time for an armed offense that carried both state and federal charges. But De-Freeze told the judge that he had “registered” the gun with the police under his own name, and that the gun was actually intended for a police-officer friend. DeFreeze was charged with burglary at this same time in April, 1969. Despite consistent and massive violations of his probation, despite demands from New Jersey (where he was also wanted) to hold him, DeFreeze instead was provided medical help by the criminal conspiracy section. During this period, I learned, he threatened CCS with exposure unless they came to his aid. That DeFreeze got released again was unprecedented, according to law-enforcement experts I interviewed.
DeFreeze went to New Jersey:
5/9/69: Newark, New Jersey
DeFreeze and another man, posing as Black Panthers, were accused of assaulting an employee of a Jewish synagogue with a shotgun, demanding $5,000, and information and aid in a scheme to kidnap a well-known Newark Jewish rights leader. Upon completion of the kidnapping, DeFreeze’s plan was to submit a ransom communiqué purporting to be from the Black Panther Party.
DeFreeze escaped authorities in Newark, crossed state lines in violation, once again, of federal law, and in October, 1969, surfaced in Cleveland, Ohio:
10/11/69: Cleveland, Ohio
DeFreeze appeared on the roof of the Cleveland Trust Company Branch Bank with a .38 revolver, .25 caliber
pistol, an eight-inch dagger, a tool kit, and, in violation of federal law, a hand grenade. Cleveland police had, in this period, been on extreme alert because of the Ahmed Evans affair (black militants involved in an ambush and shoot-out with police). Yet DeFreeze was released on very low bail ($5,000), and charges were later dropped. DeFreeze was wanted, at this time, on a capital charge in New Jersey as well as for probation violation in California, but he was not held in Cleveland.
DeFreeze fled back to California, and only days later, while high on pills (his own admission), he robbed a woman at gunpoint of a $1,000 check and, using false identification, tried to cash the check at a Bank of America branch.
11/25/69: Los Angeles
A2525 19: DeFreeze exchanged gunshots with a bank guard and was wounded. The gun used in the shoot-out was a .32-caliber Beretta automatic pistol. [This gun (A63944) was still another gun left over from the earlier 1967 200-gun robbery. DeFreeze had obviously been allowed to keep a number of guns from this cache.]
On December 3, 1969, DeFreeze was ordered imprisoned at the Vacaville, California, medical facility. Over a period of eighteen months he wrote long letters to the sentencing judge in his case detailing his problems and his fanatical Christian religious convictions.
According to DeFreeze, in 1970, at Vacaville, he was recruited by an alleged CIA operative Colston Westbrook to lead a behavior-modification experimental unit entitled the Black Cultural Association. At this time, on orders from Westbrook, DeFreeze publicly espoused a militant anti white cultural nationalist ideology (his private letters, during the same period, were saturated with Christian theology).
The Black Cultural Association, DeFreeze said, attracted outside prison-reform support during this period, and De Freeze began operating as a double agent: (I) for Westbrook and the CIA, and (2) for the California Department of Corrections and the Bureau of Criminal Intelligence and Investigation (CII) responsible to the attorney general of California.
By May 10, 1974,1 knew enough about Cinque to be pretty sure of what lay in his immediate future. With our committee’s approval, I called a remarkably well attended press conference (the Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle were there, among others) and ran down Cinque’s past. I ended with a prediction that, “He’ll be killed, probably in a shoot-out.”
I never doubted that sooner or later, more likely sooner, Cinque would be murdered. He could not be allowed to live, any more than Lee Harvey Oswald could be allowed to survive and start talking.
I take no satisfaction in ultimately being right. On May 17, 1974, Angelinos, including myself sitting down to enjoy Friday dinner, instead sat transfixed in horror at the “shoot-out” being brought live into our homes via TV.
Six people died in the flaming wreckage of that house at 1466 East 54th Street: Cinque, Angela Atwood, Nancy Ling Perry, Patricia Soltysik, Camilla Hall, and Willie Wolfe.
Elizabeth Schmidt, Jeanne Davies, and I now had to split up the scope of our investigation. Previously we had concentrated on DeFreeze’s bizarre history, but the killings on 54th Street meant we’d have to broaden our focus. We agreed that Elizabeth and Jeanne two attractive white women—would probably be more effective as on-scene investigators, interviewing witnesses and checking out the scene of the slaughter.
I’d resume my research on Cinque.
Using contacts in the California radical community, I was able to interview Vacaville prisoners familiar with DeFreeze and the mysterious Colston Westbrook. These inmates told me that DeFreeze had seemingly broken with Westbrook and the Black Cultural Association over matters of policy, and DeFreeze had then gone to department of corrections authorties to complain about the BCA. Other inmates in the Black Cultural Association had charged that DeFreeze was unacceptable to them because of his extremely provocative and ultra militant positions. Authorities at Vacaville, however, had not found him unacceptable, and had proceeded to set him up with his own outside project. This project, named “Unisight,” was supposedly concerned with problems of the families of black prisoners.
In reality Unisight was an organizing magnet for white radicals in the prison movement. Ultimately, Unisight became the Symbionese Liberation Army.
In December, 1972, DeFreeze had been transferred to the maximum-security prison of Soledad in order to inform and entrap black militants incarcerated in that facility. I located a Soledad inmate who gave the following sworn statement:
While Donald DeFreeze was here, I had a few conversations with him. I have always questioned his departure as being a simple walk-away. I didn’t come in contact with him personally until his last couple of weeks here. There weren’t many who would associate with him. He tried to give the impression of being super-cool, and he came across as cold. When I met him, he was working in the maintenance shop. I asked him if he was happy on his job, because if not, I might be able to find him something else. He replied that within a few days, he was going to be assigned to work in the boiler room at the South Facility.
I questioned that, because he didn’t have enough time here to be given that trust. I know cons that have been turned down for that position. He wouldn’t comment; he only gave me a big smile.
I should explain that no prisoners were kept at the South Facility at that time, because it had no security. No gun towers were in operation, and there were no guards posted.
A few prisoners with proven records of trust were taken from Central Facility to the South Facility to perform certain duties; then they would be returned to Central after their shift. A few days later, DeFreeze did get that job: midnight to eight A.M. shift, in the boiler room at South Facility.
On his first night, he was dropped off at midnight, and given a few instructions. His job was automatic; it only required an overseer. Then he was left to himself, and when an officer returned an hour later to check on him, he was gone.
I learned that the South Facility of Soledad, only for trusted inmates, is a holding section for informers.
DeFreeze “escaped” from Soledad on March 5, 1973, and moved underground in white circles in the Bay area.
Then in November, 1973, he was involved in the assassination of Oakland school superintendent Dr. Marcus Foster.
This killing came just after Dr. Foster had acceded to reform demands made by the Oakland black community and the Black Panther Party. The next time the world heard of DeFreeze, he’d taken the name “Cinque” and kidnapped Patty Hearst.
Maybe his adopted name was appropriate, because the actual Cinque, an African Mendi chief in the 1 830s, had two faces:
the first acquired when he led a rebellion on a slave ship; the second when he himself became a slave trader.
About this time my son, Lake III, age twenty-two, moved from Las Vegas to Los Angeles and joined the investigation.
From then on, he was with me for parts or all of every case I handled. Plenty was happening on my end of the SLA probe, digging into DeFreeze’s police-agent history; and Elizabeth and Jeanne were unearthing nuggets on their end.
According to the official version of the “shoot-out,” six suicidal fanatics of the Symbionese Liberation Army had attacked the Los Angeles Police Department, thus precipitating the bloody confrontation. In reality, the SLA suspects fired fewer than 50 rounds against some 5,000 incoming, and the police fired first. Millions of taxpayer dollars spent, destruction of property, loss of life, a black community under fire: all this resulted from the decision-making chain headed by policechief Edward Davis. Let’s look at the facts.
By May 10, many people Jeanne and Elizabeth interviewed in the vicinity of what was to become known as the “death house’’ said they were aware that ‘‘important" visitors would soon be arriving. This completely contradicted the official story that the house was rented at random one day before the police raid.
At no time did the FBI or LAPD honor their oft-made and well-publicized promises to alert the families of SLA members to stand by to attempt to talk suspects out of a bloody confrontation. Three of the suspects’ families were less than an hour away at their homes in California. Instead, as the Los Angeles Times reported the next day, “He [a police officer] dropped to one knee almost directly in front of the yellow stucco bungalow at 1466 and fired a tear-gas round through the front window. Then he scrambled to his feet and ran for his life. As soon as he was out of the way scores of policemen and F.B.I. agents started pouring bullets into the house.”
Police claimed 9,000 rounds of bullets were exchanged, 4,000 fired by the SLA. Jeanne and Elizabeth, after the most careful on-site investigation, believe the official report was correct in one respect: the cops fired 5,000 rounds. The SLA, however, fired perhaps 50. No officer was hit, by the way, a virtually impossible result if 4,000 rounds had been fired.
So much was wrong with the official version. Police said communication was difficult between themselves and the terrorists, yet our investigation found that there was a working telephone in the death house. Couldn’t the cops, as per normal procedure, have begun negotiations with the trapped fugitives?
I don’t believe they wanted to negotiate. Donald DeFreeze talking to the press would have unleashed a scandal even the government couldn’t have contained. But let’s stick to the facts. The LAPD said it repeatedly asked the fugitives to come out of the house. To surrender. What the police didn’t reveal was that the SLA tried to comply. Nancy Ling Perry, Angela Atwood, and Camilla Hall all attempted to come out, and were driven back inside by a hail of bullets.
I personally visited coroner Thomas Noguchi after the so-called shoot-out. The model for the TV series “Quincy” (his role was played by Jack Klugman) and one of the world’s most respected pathologists, Dr. Noguchi told me that Nancy Ling Perry had died in the backyard of 1466. She’d been shot in the back as she’d tried to flee from the very people who had urged her to come out. I asked Noguchi if she had beenarmed. He said no.
How much warning had police given the SLA? “Fifteen minutes,” said a LAPD spokesman. But Newsweek magazine reported that “moments” after one warning was issued, the police fired tear gas.
Puzzled police officials talked a good deal about the “mysterious start” of the fire that raged unchecked at 1466. There should have been no mystery at all. The police had used Flite-rite projectiles, and the manufacturer’s own manual, which we obtained, plainly warned of the danger of fire when these weapons are employed.
The police assault began at 5:53 P.M., and Elizabeth and Jeanne estimate that all the SLA members were dead by 6:20.
The house had become an inferno, and no one inside was returning fire. Fire-fighting personnel and equipment had arrived on the scene, but the fire fighters were not allowed to approach the blaze for thirty minutes, despite a clear danger that it could spread. While there was some evidence of ammunition exploding inside the house, the bullets posed no threat to fire fighters, who had the capability to put out the flames from a distance.
Police continued to pour gunfire into the house throughout the conflagration. Some of them, we later learned, had been whipped into a fury by a superior telling them that Cinque had murdered, a few days earlier, Officer Michael Lee Edwards, whose body had been found in the vicinity. I later learned that this same inflammatory technique was used in the police raid and killings of Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in 1969.
Elizabeth and Jeanne interviewed several fire fighters who said they had wanted to battle the blaze, but had been threatened with arrest when they’d started to try.
Elizabeth and Jeanne talked to virtually every resident in a four-square-block area. The upshot: every person with knowledge of the shoot-out said the cops fired first; so much for the idea floated by authorities that “romantic” SLA members had a “death wish” and wanted “to go out in a blaze of glory.”
I thought the investigation conducted by Jeanne and Elizabeth would show conclusively to any fair-minded individual that the government didn’t want anyone coming out of that house alive. Meanwhile, my own area of specialty, I believed, was producing equally startling conclusions.
In its December/January 1975 76 issue, Argosy magazine writer Dick Russell, after studying our investigation, wrote:
“The history of the SLA begins with a onetime CIA employee named Colston Westbrook, a burly, fast-talking 36-year-old specialist in Black English now teaching at the University of California at Berkeley.
“Early in 1966, Westbrook was hired as a ‘personnel administrator’ by a civilian firm Pacific Architects and Engineers, Incorporated, of Los Angeles which was operating out of South Vietnam. According to Washington intelligence sources, Pacific Architects was a subsidiary of the Pacific Corporation, a multi-national consortium headquartered in Delaware and wholly owned by the Central Intelligence Agency.”
Pacific Architects provided “logistical support for the CIA’s Phoenix program,” whose goal was assassinating “so- called Viet Cong sympathizers.” Colston Westbrook’s returned from Vietnam at the same time the CIA launched a new program called CHAOS. The June 1975 “Report to the President by the Commission on CIA Activities Within the United States” identified one of the goals of CHAOS: “Acquiring Assets in the Peace and Black Power Movements in the United States,” and went on to say, “Individuals without existing dissident affiliation would be recruited and, after recruitment, would acquire the theory and jargon and makeacquaintances in the ‘New Left’ while attending school. . .
The purpose was to spy on antiwar groups. Forget that it was illegal. The CIA’s charter forbade it from participating in domestic operations.
Colston Westbrook came from Vietnam to work as a tutor to the Black Cultural Association at Vacaville. At the prison he met the police snitch Donald DeFreeze. It was Westbrook who introduced the future Cinque to Willie Wolfe. When DeFreeze left the BCA he formed Unisight which became the SLA—and a little more than a year later “escaped” from a low-security section of Soledad, where he’d been transferred.
At Soledad, DeFreeze renewed acquaintance with General Khan (they’d known each other in 1968). Khan was DeFreeze’s right-hand man at Soledad, and when DeFreeze died in that flaming house, Khan took over as the SLA’s new field marshal.
One of our committee’s investigators, Rusty Rhodes, located General Khan.
“Don said he wanted to hit Hearst,” General Khan told Rhodes, “for the recognition that would be involved. He said he wanted to see her beaten and broken to the lowest thing on earth, lower than even himself. We discussed the complete plan of action early in 1973. It was obvious Don was going to split Soledad, that he had a lot of help. He would set up ‘safe houses’ in Berkeley, and once that was done I would get word and lead the second wave’ out. There were eight of us who would escape and make our way to San Francisco, and we’d all meet Don at a flophouse next to the Greyhound bus station. Don and his group would snatch Patty. The second wave, my command, would grab the two younger Hearst girls.
Both commands would then set up in the area, but I’d go to Colorado and find a place.”
So why didn’t it happen that way?
“I caught DeFreeze and [a lieutenant] talking in the custody room,” Khan said. “They were discussing the SLA when [the lieutenant] saw me and ordered me into the recreation yard.
DeFreeze told [the lieutenant], ‘No, let him stay. He knows everything, he’s the second man.’ So then [the lieutenant] looked at me and told me I was going to escape. I didn’t trust [him]. I quietly started warning some of my people that the department of corrections knew our plans.”
If I was right, it was more than the department of corrections that knew the plans. I believed the CIA through its CHAOS operation was deeply involved.
Why? The CIA doesn’t tell me why it does things, like hire my old pal John Roselli to kill Fidel Castro, but I could guess it had something to do with discrediting the left in the eyes of a middle class becoming increasingly disenchanted with the Vietnam war.
At the least, the CIA had lost control of the monster it had created—illegally.
And, yes, Cinque was a monster. A rapist (he raped Patty Hearst). A murderer (he helped kill Marcus Foster). Snitch, bank robber, gunrunner, dope peddler, mugger—you name it, that was Cinque. In his rantings he even called for the murders of Angela Davis and Huey Newton. He wanted the entire movement to follow him.
The whole scenario Khan had talked about soon resurfaced in our investigation. It came about when the enterprising Rusty Rhodes interviewed inmate Robert Hyde, a jail-house lawyer who actually had practiced law in California courts.
“The California Department of Correction,” Hyde told Rhodes, “approached me about a deal to recruit ‘snitches’” in 1971. “They wanted me to enlarge my legal assistance efforts to include all races and organizations inside the prison, so I could bring them ‘tips.’ At first I refused, but their ‘goon squad’ beat me and threw me into isolation. I stayed there for seven months. I knew I couldn’t get out alive unless I made a deal, so I agreed. . . . In late 1971, (I was ordered to begin recruiting inmates for a new organization called the Symbionese Liberation Army. I was very successful. I recruited one hundred or more SLA members. When I became suspicious of all this recruitment, I got word to . . . the FBI in San Francisco. [It] didn’t respond, but in early 1972 a Secret Service agent named Miller came in to see me and I gave him all the information I had.”
Hyde couldn’t explain why the Secret Service had come.
No, he wasn’t mistaken. Miller said he was Secret Service.
In late 1973, with Cinque now “head” of the SLA, Hyde again contacted the FBI, and two men came to question him.
In a letter to his San Jose attorney, Elliott Daum, the convict described what happened: “The day after I talked to [FBI] agents . . . I was taken to segregation (0-wing, the hole) it has been decided I know too much and must be silenced.”
Congressman Ron Dellums was notified of Hyde’s plight, and his intervention may have helped get Hyde out of segregation.
Perhaps the most fascinating of all the witnesses we found was Wayne Lewis, a former FBI undercover agent. He contacted me through his attorney, and when we met he produced letters from both FBI director Clarence Kelley and assistant director William A. Sullivan confirming that he’d been a bureau employee. I obtained a statement from Wayne Lewis that he was prepared to testify in court to the following:
• He had been in contact with Cinque several times after the Patty Hearst kidnapping, in the role of informant operating under orders from the FBI’s Los Angeles office.
• He said he was told that DeFreeze was an FBI informant who had gotten out of hand and needed to be “removed.”
• He said he was asked to take Cinque’s place after he’d been “eliminated.”
Early on in our investigation we were retained by Dr. Peter Wolfe, the father of Willie, or “Cujo” as he was known to the media. Dr. Wolfe wanted to know what had happened to his idealistic son. He knew for sure the authorities weren’t being straightforward. I felt a good deal of compassion for this decent man, who assured me he only wanted the truth, and I did my best to give it to him.
With Dr. Wolfe’s blessing, our committee spent many months trying to bring our findings to the public’s attention.
We held numerous press conferences, spoke at dozens of universities, held teach-ins and seminars. What we asked for, pleaded for, was a genuine official investigation that would root out the truth.
We got an investigation, all right. The government investigated us. Elizabeth, Lake III, and I were followed twenty-four hours a day. Our phone was tapped, our mail tampered with.
A helicopter hovered over our home.
There were times I felt like stepping outside and shooting it down.