FALN bomb kills 4 at Fraunces Tavern, where George Washington said farewell to troops
Firefighters work the scene after FALN bombing of historic Fraunces Tavern in lower Manhattan in 1975.
There was a time when American terrorists moved to a Latin beat. Puerto Rican Independence was the song, and it had been pulsing in the background for decades.
On Friday, Jan. 24, 1975, it exploded onto center stage.
The place was Fraunces Tavern, the historic red- and yellow-brick restaurant on Pearl St. where, as any tour book will tell you, that most famous of American freedom fighters, George Washington, said farewell to his officers in 1783.
History would again be made at the tavern on a mild winter day 192 years later.
A lively crowd of Wall Streeters and business executives were having lunch in the Anglers and Tarpon Club, in a second floor dining room adjacent to the main building. Among them were Harold H. Sherburne, 66, whose career on Wall Street spanned four decades, and a young banker, Frank Connor, 33, who had worked his way up over 15 years from clerk to assistant vice president at Morgan Guaranty Trust. Two executives, James Gezork, 32, of Wilmington, Del., and Alejandro Berger, 28, who worked for a Philadelphia-based chemical company, had traveled to New York for business meetings.
It would be their last meal.
At 1:29 p.m., a tremendous explosion rocked the building, sending shivers up to the 60th floor cafeteria of the nearby Chase Manhattan Bank building. Firefighters found a scene of “utter havoc,” with blood- and dust-covered men and women, many in business attire, writhing in agony in the streets, or shrieking under piles of rubble, or wandering about with stunned, blank eyes.
Sherburne, Connor and Berger died on the spot. Gezork lost his fight for life later at the hospital.
Within 15 minutes — even as, the News noted, “dazed and screaming victims, one of them with an arm torn off, were being carried away” — the Associated Press received a phone call. The caller boasted that the bomb was the handiwork of the FALN, the Armed Forces of Puerto Rican National Liberation, radicals devoted to using violence to free the island from the grips of the United States.
In a note police found in a phone booth nearby, the FALN wrote, “we … take full responsibility for the especially detornated (sic) bomb that exploded today at Fraunces Tavern, with reactionary corporate executives inside.”
The note explained that the bomb — roughly 10 pounds of dynamite that had been crammed into an attaché case and slipped into the tavern’s entrance hallway — was retaliation for the “CIA ordered bomb” that killed three and injured 11, one a child, in a restaurant in Puerto Rico.
“You have unleashed a storm from which you comfortable Yankis (sic) cannot escape,” the writers warned.
Few Americans had heard of the group or its gripes before, even though the question of Puerto Rican independence had been long debated. FALN saw violence as the only path to freedom, despite the views of Puerto Rican voters, who consistently favored maintaining U.S. ties.
Witnesses said they saw two Hispanic men running from the scene just before the explosion, but police could not find them, and the investigation stalled.
More bombings followed here, including one in the Mobil Building on 42nd St. that killed an attorney, and in Chicago, Washington, D.C., Newark and Miami. Over the next nine years, FALN would take credit for more than 130 bombings that killed six, and maimed and injured scores of victims.
Each time the terrorists evaded capture.
Investigators had nothing until July 12, 1978, when another explosion uncovered an FALN “bomb factory,” in a two-room apartment in Queens.
William Morales, an FALN explosives expert, had been building a pipe bomb when something went wrong. Three-quarters of his face, six teeth, his right eye, and all but one of his fingers, a thumb, were blown off.
No firm evidence could be found to link Morales to the Fraunces Tavern attack, but his possession of the explosives — including 70 sticks of dynamite — earned him a jail sentence of 89 years.
He did not serve much time. Although he had no fingers and just one eye, Morales somehow managed to escape from Bellevue Hospital’s prison ward by using an ACE bandage to lower himself 40 feet to the ground. He fled to Mexico, and then to Cuba, where he remains, free, to this day.
No one was ever tried for planting the Fraunces Tavern bomb, although in the early 1980s, 16 FALN members, including one of the leaders, Oscar Lopez-Rivera, were arrested and convicted of plotting to overthrow the government, weapons possession, and other charges. In 1999, President Bill Clinton made the highly controversial decision, which was opposed by the FBI and other law-enforcement agencies and Clinton’s own wife, to offer clemency for FALN prisoners. His rationale: The punishments, long prison sentences of 70 or more years, did not fit the crimes.
Lopez-Rivera, who turned down Clinton’s offer, is the last FALN member still behind bars. Attending his January 2011 parole hearing was a small group of victims of FALN terrorists, led by Joseph Connor. He was 9 years old when his father died over lunch at Fraunces Tavern.
Lopez-Rivera’s bid for parole was denied and he will not be eligible again until 2021. “Finally,” Connor said in a presentation at the National Press Club in June, “some justice for our father, Frank Connor, and other victims of the FALN.”