Ambush: The Brinks Robbery of 1981

"This is a slap in the face of every officer in our state and our nation who put their lives on the line every day to protect the citizens of our country. It is the worst travesty of justice that I have seen in a long time!" Such were the words of Fraternal Order of Police President Frank Ferreyra when he learned of the New York State parole board decision to free 60-year-old Kathy Boudin.

Boudin, a former Weather Underground member, has been in prison for the past 22 years for her role in the notorious Brinks armored car robbery in Nyack in 1981, during which two police officers and a security guard were murdered. On August 20, 2003, the two-member parole board voted to release the 1960s radical as early as it may be feasible.

Boudin said of her early years, "I had an ideology...that said essentially, white people, beause of having privilege, are essentially bad." But the parole commissioners took notice of the good work performed by Boudin during her incarceration, including her assistance to inmates who have AIDS.

Her attorney, Leonard Weinglass, told reporters. "It's only just and fair she be released in accordance with the agreement."

Her son, Chesa Boudin, 23, told the press that her mother wants to apologize personally to the victims' families. "It's very important to her that the families of those three men - know how terribly she feels about what happened," he said.

Chesa's father, David Gilbert, who drove one of the getaway vehicles in the bloody hold-up, is serving a 75-year-to-life sentence in Attica prison and will be eligible for parole himself in 2056. Gilbert has never cooperated with authorities in the investigation of the crime, which netted Boudin and friends $1.6 million in cash.

Chesa was later raised by comrades Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn and recently graduated from college. "If there is anything any of us could do to go back and change history, we would," he said recently to reporters.

The decision to parole Boudin enraged the law enforcement community in New York, especially in Rockland County where the robbery took place. Local groups have consistently opposed the release of Boudin and have worked tirelessly to make their feelings known to the parole board and the governor's office.

The Village of Nyack has erected monuments to the slain officers and holds an annual ceremony in their memory. Officer Waverly Brown, 45, and Sgt. Edward O'Grady Jr., 33, were killed on October 20, 1981 when they stopped a U Haul truck occupied by gang members who had murdered Brinks' guard Peter Paige just minutes before. When the officers tried to open the rear doors of the U Haul, the suspects, who were never all identified, came out shooting. Brown and O'Grady were instantly killed by a barrage of bullets from automatic weapons. Kathy Boudin, a passenger in the front seat of the truck, was apprehended as she ran from the scene of the carnage. She was already on the lam for over ten years as a result of an explosion in a Greenwich village townhouse-bomb factory that unintentionally killed three fellow terrorists.

In a letter published by the New York Post, Diane O'Grady, widow of Sgt. Ed O'Grady and mother to their three children raised without a father, addressed the parole of Boudin. "I do not believe that there is a shred of guilt, shame or remorse felt by inmate Boudin," she wrote. "To see and hear of the celebrating by Boudin and her supporters was hurtful and indecent." Mrs. O'Grady also responded to Boudin's request for a face to face apology. "I want to set the record straight and leave no room for doubt," she wrote, "I will never meet with inmate Boudin or her son. I would never dishonor my husband's memory with such a meeting. Nor do I have any desire to help Boudin ease her conscience or to give her a better public image for her next book."

South Nyack-Grandview Police Chief Alan Colsey, who arrested three of the suspects as they fled from the scene of the murders, described his feelings in a recent interview. "I was shocked beyond words by the unfathomable decision of the parole board to grant Boudin her parole," he said. The record of the violent nature of the crimes, the savage execution of the three officers, the complicity of the defendant in decades of criminal actitivity...This case is about sons and husbands and fathers, killed before their time, and the lifetime of sorrow each family member has been sentenced to endure.."

But one thing is sure: Kathy Boudin, now 60 years old, will walk out of Bedford Prison a free woman. Her debt to society for her actions on August 20, 1981 will have been paid. She will start a new life, much to the dismay of some people. There have been published reports that Manhattan's St. Luke's Hospital has already offered her a job to work with AIDS patients. Undoubtedly, her image will appear on television talk shows, media events and the inevitable book deal may soon follow. New York's "Son of Sam" law, which prevents those convicted of crimes to profit from them in movie or book contracts will apply to Kathy Boudin, but other criminals have gotten around the law. It remains to be seen if Boudin has such ambitions.

In the meantime, her family and supporters are ecstatic. "Right now, she's hysterically happy," attorney Weinglass said to reporters recently. "It's a pretty overwhelmingly joyous moment," Chesa Boudin told the Associated Press from his home in Chicago. But in Nyack, where the blood of murdered cops once flowed through village streets, there was a different reaction.

It's nothing to celebrate," Diane O'Grady wrote to the Daily News recently, "Nine children are still without fathers."

I found this interesting related material:
http://texasdarlin.wordpress.com/2008/10/07/1981-new-york-city-just-a-bizarre-coincidence/

1981, New York City: Just a Bizarre Coincidence?
October 7, 2008 by texasdarlin
It’s 1981, New York City. Barack Obama is residing two blocks away from Weather Underground leader William Ayers. We know very little about Obama’s life in NYC during that period; supposedly he transferred from Occidental College and completed undergraduate studies at Columbia University. Obama’s academic records and, in fact, the records of his life from those years in New York are lost. [See references at end.]

At Occidental, Obama belonged to Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a radical socialist organization of which the Weather Underground was an off-shoot. Did Obama continue his SDS membership at Columbia? (I read recently that Columbia was a major SDS center.)

In 1981, former Weather Underground members along with a few former Black Panthers are arrested in association with the robbery of a Brinks armored truck 20 miles north of Manhattan. A guard is killed and the driver is wounded. $1.6 million is recovered.

One of the Weather Underground members arrested for the Brinks crime is Kathy Boudin. She is sentenced to 20 years-to-life. Boudin leaves behind a child, Chesa Boudin, who ends up being raised by Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn while her mother lives in prison.

One of the former Black Panthers arrested in connection with the Brinks robbery is Nathaniel Burns, a member of the Black Liberation Army. Burns is also known as Sekou Odinga. Burns/Odinga is sentenced to 25 years-to-life for attempted murder of a police officer. (ODINGA, sound familiar?)

Obama and Ayers later end up collaborating on several controversial projects in Chicago. They work together to grant funds to Rashid Khalidi, Trinity United Church of Christ, and ACORN, among other “worthy” recipients. Ayers and Dohrn host a soirée at their home to launch young Barack’s political career. (But we’re now to believe that Barack did not know that Ayers and Dohrn created and starred in the Weather Underground, for which they were tried as criminals.)

As we often see in Obama’s history, here again there are a few degrees of separation that cause curious and intelligent people to ask: Is this just another set of odd coincidences?

I believe that Obama knew Ayers in New York City, and that he’s hiding the association with Ayers, among others, in refusing to provide information about his life there.

Obviously Obama’s campaign is lying (and insulting our intelligence) when it audaciously claims that Obama knew nothing of Ayers’ affiliation with the Weather Underground, up until…when?..(I must have missed that part of Axelrod’s explanation. When does he claim that Obama learned about Ayer’s lifelong project, the WU?)

In any event, accepting Axelrod’s explanation would require us to conclude that Obama is stupid. Really stupid, which sort of flies in the face of the magna cum laude thing from Harvard, right?

Everyone knows that the REAL questions are:

When did Obama first learn about Ayers?
When did he first meet Ayers?
What were his “off-campus” activities in New York?
Perhaps if Obama were open about his life, and did not go to such extreme lengths to cover up fundamental facts of his existence, we would not be forced to outline such events as the 1981 Brinks robbery.

Please stop insulting our intelligence, Senator.

h/t miri and rwa

REFERENCES:
Terrorism In America, page 102

Anarchist Black Cross — International Prisoner’s List — 98

WSJ, Obama’s Lost Years

FOX, Barack Obama and Friends: A History of Radicalism

TD Blog, Obama was a Community Organizer in New York?

TD Blog, Obama’s Ties to Ayers: Back to High School?

COPYRIGHT REMINDER: Copyright laws protect everything published on this blog. When sharing articles from this blog in whole or in part, you need to credit the source, TD Blog, and provide a link to this site.

Modern Luxury Debuts Manhattan Magazine
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged ayers, Columbia, new york, obama | 20 Comments
20 Responses to “1981, New York City: Just a Bizarre Coincidence?”
on October 7, 2008 at 4:23 pm1 Khan Krum
Another excellent, revealing post. One question: can it be proven that Obama bin Biden was a member of SDS? I have no reason to doubt you based on the multitude of circumstantial evidence, but no one can find a paper trail for this guy. Thanks.

on October 7, 2008 at 4:58 pm2 Mighty Quinn
“Ayers in his 1976 book, Bringing Down America: An FBI Informer with the Weathermen. The park police station bombing in San Francisco was “a success,” Ayers is quoted as saying, “but it’s a shame when someone like Bernardine Dohrn has to make all the plans, make the bomb, and then place it herself. She should have to do only the planning.”

“The ties between Dohrn and Barack and Michelle Obama may run deep. From 1984-1988, Dohrn worked at Sidley & Austin, a law firm, which is also where Obama and his wife Michelle worked and met. “For three years after law school, Michelle worked as an associate in the area of marketing and intellectual property at Chicago law firm Sidley and Austin, where she met Barack Obama,” the official Obama campaign website reports. But it says nothing about meeting or knowing Dohrn.”

http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/4095

on October 7, 2008 at 5:10 pm3 Apocalyptic
There may be more connections between Obama and Ayers than we currently know about. Jack Cashill believes Ayers may have ghost-written Obama’s memoirs “Dreams of My Father.” See the three-part article below:

http://www.cashill.com/natl_general/did_bill_ayers_write_1.htm

http://www.cashill.com/natl_general/did_bill_ayers_write_2.htm

http://www.cashill.com/natl_general/did_bill_ayers_write_3.htm

on October 7, 2008 at 5:11 pm4 miira
Just got this information in my e-mail and it appears to be corroborated online.

Now, we have Obama running for President. Valerie Jarrett, was Michele Obama’s boss. She is now Obama’s chief advisor and he does not make any major decisions without talking to her first. Where was Jarrett born? Ready for this? Shiraz, Iran! Do we see a pattern here? Or am I going crazy?

Here is the corroborating link : Vogue.com Feature Story: Barack’s rock

Senator Obama has one secret weapon in his wife, Michelle. The other is his chief confidante and valued adviser, Chicago businesswoman Valerie Jarrett.

Jarrett’s unlikely, unusual, unsumupable childhood began in Iran, where she was born in 1956. Not unlike Obama’s being “from” Hawaii or “from” Indonesia, that fact in and of itself is more misleading than it is illuminating. Her parents, both of whom are in their 80s and still working and writing and who live a block away from Michelle and Barack, are academics. Her father, James Bowman, a professor emeritus at the University of Chicago and an internationally recognized geneticist and pathologist, is from Washington, D.C.; her mother, Barbara, an expert on early childhood development, has deep roots and a big extended family in Chicago’s Hyde Park. In 1955, the couple moved to Shiraz, Iran, where they stayed for six years as part of a program that sent American doctors to developing nations. When Valerie, their only child, was five, they moved to London for a year and then resettled back in Hyde Park, a neighborhood that has historically been a bit hoity-toity and one to which the Obamas have now brought a whole new level of cachet and bragging rights. Hyde Park is a place that is in many ways defined by its proximity to the University of Chicago, and it is often described as “integrated,” “progressive,” “cerebral,” and “family oriented,” all words that could be used to describe Valerie Jarrett.

on October 7, 2008 at 5:12 pm5 Carlos Echevarria
I don’t believe in coincidences, Barack knew Ayers from Columbia. Also, Barry took a trip to Pakistan for a year and we don’t know what he did there…

Good job, you just keep plugging away and exposing this disgusting charlatan for what he really is…

on October 7, 2008 at 5:32 pm6 xkaydet65
The SDS were not the Young Republicans. They are not and were not a traditional student org.You won’t find a national HQ with membership records,so tying Obama to the SDS is not easy. By 81 the group was in decline. Nam was over and Magnus Ronaldus was POTUS so I don’t know what the attraction would have been for Obama.

The paper trail is another thing. Guys like GWB and Kerry were not proud of their college records, especially Kerry, but they opened them up. People remembered them. How is it possible that NO ONE has come forward to remember Obama at Columbia? If I were to show up on TV on American Idol or as a supected embezzler dozens of people would remember me clearly and I was hardly a BMOC, and my college was in NYC with a similarly sized enrollment as Columbia. Bill Clinton had dozens of Georgetown Hoyas, some of the friends of mine, attest to his college days.

Hypothesis: This guy did not go to Columbia. He hung around NYC, made some contacts, played the 6 degrees of separation game ( which as a sociopath he is inclined to) got his gig as a community organizer which wouldn’t require a check on his grades, made some connections to radicals, and Percy Sutton whom I respect for his service as a Tuskeegee Mustang pilot, was a radical, traded on these connections and goti nto Harvard Law on a pass and the recommendations of members of the radical community.
He is in every sense a FRAUD.

on October 7, 2008 at 5:33 pm7 Update: Ayers, Obama, and the Relationship ties « Just Americans Making Ethical Statements Weblog
[...] http://texasdarlin.wordpress.com/2008/10/07/1981-new-york-city-just-a-bizarre-coincidence/ [...]

on October 7, 2008 at 5:38 pm8 bemused
My experience as a restless young person was that restless young people seek out other people they think are simpatico or are at least friends of a friend. So I’m thinking it isn’t a coincidence at all IF he was in the SDS at Occidental (or the BP) for him to go to New York and Columbia and see the stars of the SDS. That’s what kids do. And nasty plotters like Ayers and the gang look for willing proteges. And the Odinga thing is like the cherry on the sundae. By then, O. might have known about the Odinga branch of the family. Woot! Triple catch, BP-SDS-relatives, or at least the figment of a relation.

on October 7, 2008 at 5:43 pm9 Right on the Left Coast
Nice summary, TD - I don’t think anything with the Jr. Senator from Illinois is a coincidence. In William Ayers book, “A Kind and Just Parent” about juvenile court. Around page 82, he describes his neighborhood of Hyde Park. This is the quote:

“Our neighbors include Muhammad Ali, former mayor Eugene Sawyer, poets Gwendolyn Brooks and Elizebeth Alexander, and writer Barack Obama. Minister Louis Farrakhan lives a block from our home and adds, we think, a unique dimension to the idea of “safe neighborhood watch”: the Fruit of Islam, his security force, has an eye on things twenty-four-hours a day…”

I think it was written in 1997 and published in 1998. “Dreams from my Father” was published in 1995 with a limited issue of 35,000 books (I don’t know how many actually sold). He re-published after his 2004 convention speech, which launched it.

To call out Barack Obama in the same category of fame as Muhammad Ali, Louis Farrakhan, a former mayor and a Pulitzer Prize winning poet is tremendously strange for “just a guy in my neighborhood.” Particularly when Obama’s book was not well known at that time.

Obama was extremely active in southside Chicago organization work at that time, so to mention him as a “writer” is just a bit odd in that context.

There are people who live around me, as I’m sure similar with you, that have written books with limited to moderate distributions, as well as artists that are locally known, but I wouldn’t mention them as part of my neighborhood in a nationally released book for the purpose of describing the “known” people that live near me…unless I knew them really, really, really well.

Hmmm, probably nothing, huh?

on October 7, 2008 at 5:50 pm10 Teo Bear
What I found interesting is that Bill Ayers was only two blocks from Obama when he was at Columbia. On his official resume http://billayers.files.wordpress.com/2007/03/9882vita_2006.doc (YES it is his official resume, everything is included except his involvement in the Weathermen underground.)

He lists his address during this period from at least 1981 (possibly as early 1980 I am guessing on how long it takes a fugitive to get a Masters in Arts degree) at Bank Street College of Education. Bank Street is only 2 blocks from Columbia University.

He also lists himself as a teacher at Columbia later on, perhaps he was a adjunct teacher since his profession is education.

I think TD may be on to something.

on October 7, 2008 at 5:55 pm11 an observer
from American Thinker

Tom Hayden wrote this on Barack Obama at the far left Common Dreams website recently:

I didn’t see him coming. When I heard of the young state senator with a background in community organizing who wanted to be president, I was at least sentient enough to be interested. When I read Dreams of My Father, I was taken aback by its depth. This young man apparently gave his first public speech, against South African apartheid, at an Occidental College rally organized by Students for Economic Democracy, the student branch of the Campaign for Economic Democracy [CED] which I chaired in 1979-82. The buds of curiosity quickened. Soon I was receiving emails from David Peck, an organizer of the Occidental rally, who now is coordinating Americans in Spain for Barack Obama.

on October 7, 2008 at 6:02 pm12 jcm
He gave his first public speech at an SDS event at Occidental.
http://www.zimbo.com/Obamamania/articles/622/Repost+Obama+ultra+leftist+backers

on October 7, 2008 at 6:21 pm13 Sandy
Texas Darlin’ you are GOOD. Are you a reporter or just doing the job of the MSM? Even Hannity didn’t put the pieces together so well.

So much of his life still in the dark.. I remember almost every other candidate having that little ‘my life’ video at the convention. Where was that?

on October 7, 2008 at 6:39 pm14 DeppDogg
If Obama was actually a MEMBER of the SDS, we need irrefutable proof because that’s the end of the game. It cannot be said lightly. Let’s nail this down (remember, this is Tom Hayden’s organization, organized at Michigan, where Ayers went, and which spun off the Weathermen, the more violent splinter of the group). IF Barack Obama was a member of SDS at Occidental and then ends up being helped by the leader of an SDS splinter group (the Weathermen), funneling money from a foundation to this guy (Ayers’) radical educational initiatives and those of Ayers’ friends and associates, that’s incredibly damning information.

We need proof. Indisputable.

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on October 7, 2008 at 6:53 pm17 Hilldogluvah
I don’t get it…it’s OK to call him a terrorist but not an Iranian Manchurian candidate?

Nice moderation…

on October 7, 2008 at 7:09 pm18 IndieJones
There’s something big that’s going to break about Obama on noquarter, tonight.
http://noquarterusa.net/blog/

on October 7, 2008 at 7:14 pm19 IndieJones
Yup…it’s big. Obama was a a member of a major socialist
party.
http://noquarterusa.net/blog/

on October 7, 2008 at 7:30 pm20 Papoose
#6 xk,

your hypothesis gives me chills because that is exactly what I have been thinking for months…bet that sucker didn’t even go to school there and Columbia is in collusion…as are many, many other so called pillars of American society participating in this … why?

I’m talking chills…

I cannot believe all that has been uncovered here over the last few days…be sure to revisit each thread that is up for current comments… you’ll be amazed…

An “Odinga” (new and improved changed surname) involved in the Brinks/Robbery/ Weather Underground Murders…really?

TD, we’ll never be able repay you for what you’ve tirelessy and bravely done for us; I look forward to your being honored one day as well as all your wonderful contributors.

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AMBUSH: THE BRINKS ROBBERY OF 1981

The Agony of Parole