Posted on 08/27/2004 8:46:09 PM PDT by Royal Guardsman
NYC police on watch for Port courthouse bomber By Andy Smith and Stephanie Akin Staff writers
New York City police are targeting a man who bombed Newburyport Superior Court 28 years ago, saying he poses a threat to next week's Republican National Convention.
But an anti-war activist group has accused police of trying to "smear" their reputation by linking the group with the convicted radical who terrorized New England with a series of bombings in the 1970s.
New York City police say Richard J. Picariello, 55, is among 50 activists whose criminal histories will earn them extra attention next week. In 1977, Picariello was sentenced to 10 to 15 years in federal prison for his role in 13 bombings carried out in the summer of 1976. Picariello and his underground militant group targeted the Newburyport Superior Courthouse on Bartlet Mall, a post office in Seabrook, a prop-jet airliner at Logan Airport and a National Guard Armory truck in Dorchester. No one was killed in the bombings.
Picariello, formerly of Middleton and a graduate of Masconomet High School in Topsfield, was released from federal prison on Dec. 19, 1984.
Picariello has been identified by police as a member of ANSWER (Act Now to Stop the War and End Racism). ANSWER spokesman Bill Hackwell said yesterday he did not know whether Picariello will participate in the group's protests at next week's Republican National Convention in New York City.
Hackwell said Picariello's crimes are over 25 years old, and ANSWER does not "check demonstrators' I.D.'s."
"It's very sleazy that the Bush administration, police and corporate media are taking away the focus from what's happening in this country," he said. "We're outraged at this administration and we plan to demonstrate in a peaceful, organized way. But they're trying to set up a climate of fear and intimidation and project us as violent anarchists."
Since being released from prison, Picariello has tempered his methods of political protest. But brushes with the law have continued, as recently as last March. Suffolk County Superior Court spokesman David Procopio said yesterday Picariello is due in court Sept. 20 for status hearings in two misdemeanor cases.
Procopio said Picariello was arrested in March and charged with repeatedly putting political stickers on a Boston business near the Park Street MBTA stop. Picariello allegedly put at least 30 stickers on the business, replacing them one-by-one as the business owner removed them from his storefront window.
Later that month, Picariello was charged with disorderly conduct while protesting President George W. Bush's fund-raising appearance at the Park Plaza hotel. Procopio said Picariello allegedly became "belligerent and hostile toward police" after repeatedly refusing to step back from barriers for Bush's motorcade.
Picariello's last known address, according to Procopio, is at the New England Shelter for Homeless Veterans on 17 Court St. in Boston.
Established in the wake of 9/11, the international group ANSWER has local affiliations in Boston and Springfield. Hackwell said the group's primary cause is opposition to the Bush administration's military and economic policies, particularly in Iraq, Palestine and Haiti.
Earlier this week, a U.S. District Court upheld the city's denial of a request from ANSWER to stage a rally tomorrow in Central Park. The city claimed an expected crowd of 75,000 would cause too much damage to the lawn.
Hackwell said since demonstrators can't be prevented from going to the park on their own, ANSWER is teaching them what type of signs, noisemakers and displays are allowed on the Great Lawn. Although he expects an orderly demonstration, Hackwell said the city has created a contentious environment for protesters.
"The city has painted people into a corner," he said. "If anything happens, it's the city's fault. We did everything they asked in terms of the permitting process well in advance."
In 1971, Picariello pled guilty in Lawrence Superior Court to holding up and robbing three liquor stores in Lynnfield and Peabody. He received a suspended sentence and was placed on probation. But a bank robbery conviction a year later landed him in Thomaston State Prison in Maine.
There, Picariello met Joseph Aceto and Everett Carlson, both from Portland, Maine. The three became part of a militant prison reform group called SCAR (Statewide Correctional Alliance for Reform). They later collaborated on the string of bombings, assisted by Edward Gullion of Dorchester, a friend of Picariello.
Police said the group's actions were intended as revenge for abuses Picariello and his co-conspirators claimed to have suffered in prison. According to published reports, prison guards beat Picariello with an ax handle in 1974. He and another prisoner were later awarded $1 in damages for suffering cruel and unusual punishment.
The bombings began in May 1976 with a control room at Central Maine Power Co. in Augusta, Maine. Eyewitnesses helped police make a composite sketch that was eventually matched to a picture of Picariello.
On the weekend of the Fourth of July bicentennial, the group executed a three-day bombing spree that claimed a commercial aircraft, a post office and a National Guard truck, and caused $375,000 of damage to the Newburyport Superior Courthouse.
During that summer, a group that would be linked to the foursome also set off bombs at Suffolk County Courthouse in Boston and Middlesex County Superior Courthouse in Lowell.
Plans to bomb the Boston A&P headquarters and kidnap two Polaroid executives were never carried out.
Police suspected the group planned to blow up the Topsfield state police station. That operation was botched when police spotted Aceto dropping off Picariello and another man in front of the building. Aceto sped off at 100 miles per hour and crashed the car into a tree. Police arrested him and found 22 sticks of dynamite in the car.
Picariello led authorities on a three-month manhunt before being arrested in Fall River. One of four men involved in the bombings, he was placed on the FBI's Most Wanted list and was the last suspect to be arrested.
During the group's trial, Aceto testified against the other three men. As a result, he only served two years and eight months in prison. Picariello was sentenced to serve 10 to 15 years; Guillon was sentenced to 8 to 15 years; and Carlson received 7 to 10 years. Members of the group testified that they financed their activities by robbing banks.
Newburyport, Ma is my hometown.
I lived there 12 years. HS grad in 1980.
I knew a few people in your class.
Picariello has been identified by police as a member of ANSWER
A militant bomber is a member of John Kerry's ANSWER group.
Expect some trouble in NYC. John Kerry's minions are raging.
It has nothing to do with Bush. It's a national security issue, but we'll find out who's right next week, won't we?
I hope they're on this (TERRORIST, not "militant") POS like white on rice, as well as on the rest of those ANSWER freaks.
New York City police say Richard J. Picariello, 55, is among 50 activists whose criminal histories will earn them extra attention next week. In 1977, Picariello was sentenced to 10 to 15 years in federal prison for his role in 13 bombings carried out in the summer of 1976. Picariello and his underground militant group targeted the Newburyport Superior Courthouse on Bartlet Mall, a post office in Seabrook, a prop-jet airliner at Logan Airport and a National Guard Armory truck in Dorchester. No one was killed in the bombings....
...Picariello has been identified by police as a member of ANSWER (Act Now to Stop the War and End Racism). ANSWER spokesman Bill Hackwell said yesterday he did not know whether Picariello will participate in the group's protests at next week's Republican National Convention in New York City. ...(/snip)
Maybe I need to read this again but I didn't catch the name of Picariello's old "militant group." Does anyone see where it is named? ANSWER is new, so what's the old group's name? I did notice his last known address referenced a home for homeless vets. So... makes me wonder, any ties to VVAW?
Its not mentioned in the article. The group he was with at the time of the bombing was allegedly the Weather Underground.
A member of the radical underground Fred Hampton Unit who was on the FBI Most Wanted List, Picariello briefly fled to Canada. When the would-be GOP convention disrupter returned, he bombed a power plant in Maine and robbed a bank before he was apprehended. He has spent nearly half of his life, 25 years, in prison.
(snip) Today's Daily News report trumpeted "police intelligence sources" who claim that 5O of the "country's leading anarchists" are headed this way, including a handful of "hard-core extremists with histories of violent and disruptive tactics." Among them, the paper wrote, are former members of the Black Panthers and even a "one-time member of the Fred Hampton Unit of the People’s Army"—a group that hasn’t operated since the 1970s. (/snip)
Amazingly, this is not the first time Newburyport has had a run-in with some nasty left-wing terrorists. Remember Kathryn Ann Power? She was on the FBI's 10 most wanted list for over 20 years for her involvement with a violent antiwar group that ended up killing a Boston police officer. In September 1970 Kathryn and 4 accomplices broke into and firebombed the Newburyport Armory and made off with some SERIOUS military weaponry. A couple weeks later they attempted a robbery at State Street Bank in Boston, which resulted in a shootout and the death of the officer. The officer killed--William Schroeder--is the namesake of the Boston Police headquarters (Schroeder Place). Pretty amazing for a city of only 17,000 people.
Thanks for the info- whatever became of dear little Kathryn?
She turned herself in to the feds in 1993, confessed, and served a measly 6 years in the slammer before being released. At the time of her arrest, I believe she had been on the most wanted list longer than anyone in history.
Fred Hampton (1948 – December 4, 1969) was a black American activist. He was a rising leader of the Black Panther Party (BPP) when he was shot by the Chicago Police Department (CPD) in a violent raid of his home organized by the FBI.
[SNIP]
At about the same time that Hampton was successfully organizing young African Americans for the NAACP, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (as it was originally called) started rising to national prominence. Hampton was quickly attracted to the Black Panther's approach, which was based on a ten-point program of black self-determination. Hampton joined the Party and relocated to downtown Chicago, and in November of 1968 he joined the Party's nascent Illinois chapter — founded by Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) organizer Bob Brown in late 1967.
Over the next year, Hampton and his associates made a number of significant achievements in Chicago. Perhaps his most important accomplishment was his brokering of a nonaggression pact between Chicago's most powerful street gangs. By emphasizing that racial and ethnic conflict between gangs would only keep its members entrenched in poverty, Hampton strove to forge a class-conscious, multiracial albeit tenuous alliance between the BPP, SDS (a white political action group), the Blackstone Rangers, the Young Lords (a Puerto Rican organization), and the Young Patriots (a white group). In May of 1969, Hampton called a press conference to announce that a truce had been declared among this "rainbow coalition," a phrase coined by Hampton and made popular over the years by Rev. Jesse Jackson.
Due to his organizing skills, oratorical gifts, and personal charisma, he rose quickly in the organization, becoming leader of the Chicago chapter of the party. He organized weekly rallies, worked with a People's Clinic, taught political education classes every morning at 6am, and launched a project for community supervision of the police. Hampton was also instrumental in the BPP's Free Breakfast Program. When Brown left the Party with Stokely Carmichael in the FBI fomented SNCC/Panther split, Hampton assumed chairmanship of the Illinois state BPP, automatically making him a national BPP deputy chairman. As the panther leadership across the country began to be decimated by the impact of the FBI's COINTELPRO, Hampton's prominence in the national hierarchy increased rapidly and dramatically. Hampton was in line to be appointed to the Party's Central Committee's Chief of Staff was it not for his untimely death on the night of December 4, 1969.
[SNIP]
The FBI opened a file on Hampton in 1967 that over the next two years expanded to twelve volumes containing over four-thousand pages. A wire tap was placed on Hampton's mother's phone in February of 1968. By May of that year, the young Panther's name was placed on the "Agitator Index" and he would be designated a "key militant leader for Bureau reporting purposes."
The Panther-SDS alliance mentioned here was characteristic of the SDS faction aligned with the Weathermen that split from a PLP-dominated faction in 1969. The VVAW's Al Hubbard was linked to this faction, though not necessarily to this particular group.
bttt
Thanks for the ping!
Thanks Piasa.
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