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And another excerpt of the above

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The FBI alleges that Abiodun was part of a group that came into being in late 1978 and originally called itself simply “the Family.”

According to court records and statements from captured members who became informers, the Family’s ranks consisted of some two dozen people, both blacks and whites, most of whom had cultivated their ideological fervor as members of groups such as the Sixties-era Black Panther Party and its offshoot, the Black Liberation Army; the Republic of New Afrika; and the Weather Underground.

It was a seemingly odd birth date. By 1978 those militant groups, and the cultural tenor that produced them, had long been moribund. For most Sixties survivors, the era was just that: a period they’d survived, learned from, and moved beyond. Indeed those who remained with the Panthers were devoting their energies to political campaigns in the San Francisco Bay area.

By then Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver had returned from Algerian exile to face charges from a 1968 shootout with police, telling the New York Times: “I think a situation now exists in this country where I can have my day in court.... Anyone who hasn’t changed their views since 1968 is in trouble.”

The Black Liberation Army, forged in the very early Seventies by Panthers committed to armed struggle (many had formerly been aligned with Cleaver), also seemed to have faded away. After claiming responsibility for the murders of several police officers, BLA members became targets of a nationwide manhunt. Some were arrested; others were killed in police gunfights.

In the aftermath of the much-publicized capture of Assata Shakur, little more was heard from them. Meanwhile the Republic of New Afrika, a group dedicated to transforming South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana into a separate black nation, also disappeared from the headlines.

By late 1978 several Weather Underground members were getting press coverage, but for leaving their pasts behind and surrendering to authorities in the amnesty climate of the Carter administration.

But not everyone was so sanguine about closing the door on those wrenching and at times apocalyptic days, and it was those remaining faithful who would make up the Family. If their numbers were small, and if conditions for the overthrow of the U.S. government seemed remote at best — well, that just meant they had to be all the more daring.

After all, hadn’t Fidel Castro begun his revolution by heading into the Sierra Maestra mountains with barely twenty men?

“First of all I wouldn’t admit I was doing any of that, even if I was,” Abiodun said, alluding to her own involvement with Family crimes. Not that she would prove unwilling to discuss such matters, or to vigorously defend them.

As for the Family’s attacks on armored cars: “I don’t consider it armed robbery. I consider it expropriation.... If your cause is just, if you’re at war, then it’s the booty of war.”

The two police officers who were killed by Family members during one of those “expropriations”? “They were protecting the state,” she replied testily. “They were upholding the genocidal and oppressive policies of the United States.

They were soldiers who were at war with us. When I say us, I don’t mean just “us’ in the African community; I mean people of color and poor people.” Nor would Abiodun express much sympathy for the fatal shootings of two Brinks guards. “They had a choice,” she explained. “They chose to protect the money of the state.”

Reflecting on her mindset in 1978, she continued, “I had seen the results of mainstream politics and I knew it wasn’t going to work. I had traveled throughout the country, trying to do it the “correct’ way, within the system. It wasn’t going to happen.”

In her eyes “the United States government had waged war against us,” a situation that demanded an equivalent response: to become a soldier and prepare for battle.

Ten years after fleeing the States for Cuba — almost twenty years after first taking up arms — Nehanda Abiodun is still at war.

In 1972 Abiodun graduated from Columbia University and went to work at a New York City methadone maintenance clinic. Trying to help drug addicts might seem far removed from formulating plans for a revolution but to Abiodun that career path was the catalyst that set her on that political road.

“At the time I thought methadone was a viable way to deal with heroin addiction,” she said. “[Soon] I began to understand the politics surrounding drug addiction, racism, and control.” To her methadone was just another toxic drug, one that purposely kept users incapacitated and reporting to the clinic every day.

“It was a way of, once again, capitalism trying to destroy our lives.” She began clashing with the clinic’s managing doctor, who balked at her attempts to detoxify addicts from heroin and also wean them off methadone.

Abiodun soon found kindred spirits working at an experimental detox program at Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx. Under the guidance of Mutulu Shakur, a charismatic Republic of New Afrika member, Lincoln Detox favored acupuncture over methadone, operated as a self-described socialist collective, and viewed the political radicalization of its patients as essential.

For Abiodun, an activist who had been involved with mainstream community groups in Harlem, it was a heady mix:

“There were ex-Panthers, ex-members of the Republic of New Afrika, members of the Young Lords — the Puerto Rican movement. And there were white people who had been involved in SDS [Students for a Democratic Society].”

But to city officials, the presence of these radicals only aggravated an already offensive situation. In November 1978 New York Assemblyman Charles Schumer bitterly complained to the New York Times that “Lincoln Detox has compiled a well-documented record of millions of dollars in unsubstantiated payroll costs, overbilling for patient care and other egregious management failures.”

Mayor Ed Koch subsequently evicted the Lincoln Detox program from Lincoln Hospital, stripped away its autonomy by placing it under hospital management, and had its Shakur-aligned staffers reassigned. Koch later explained that Shakur and his followers “ran it like Che Guevara was their patron saint, with his pictures all over the wall. It wasn’t a hospital; it was a radical cell.”

But as far as Abiodun was concerned, those two concepts — health care and radical politics — needed some sort of fusion. “It was obvious that alternate methods of healing drug and alcohol addictions were not going to be stood for by the status quo,” she recounted.

In her view the city’s actions against Lincoln Detox dramatized the futility of trying to reform a corrupt system: “That’s when I made a conscious decision that I was going to devote my life in a more disciplined way to try bringing about a change in the United States.”

Abiodun joined other former Lincoln Detox staffers in a new collective headed by Mutulu Shakur: the Black Acupuncture Advisory Association of North America (BAAANA), based out of a Harlem brownstone and dedicated to providing health care free from city control. It also was in 1978 that she stopped using her birth name, Cheri Dalton, and chose the moniker Nehanda Abiodun.

“Nehanda” was an ancient spirit that inhabited the human form in order to lead the Zimbabwean people in their independence struggle against the British, while “Abiodun” was a word used in Nigeria to mean “born at the time of war.”

That name change was symbolic — community health care was only one of BAAANA’s activities. Several of the group’s former Black Liberation Army and Republic of New Afrika members would form the core of the Family, and under the leadership of Mutulu Shakur, they began robbing banks.

By late 1979 the Family had drawn in the remaining handful of Weather Underground members who also clung to armed struggle. The group moved up to hitting armored cars. They also sprung Assata Shakur (no relation to Mutulu) from a New Jersey prison at gunpoint and allegedly spirited her to Cuba.

By the summer of 1980, the Family had netted more than $900,000, funds that would ostensibly be used to finance further revolutionary activities. Details of these actions (and the disposition of the money) are still unclear.

Although captured Family members would later proudly refer to several of the robberies as “expropriations,” at the time the group issued no public communiqués. In fact federal authorities were unaware that all the robberies, as well as the springing from prison of Assata Shakur, were committed by one organization.

The Family’s public debut came on October 20, 1981, during the attempted robbery of a Brinks truck in Nyack, New York. Ten members, divided into teams, allegedly were involved in the operation. One team attacked the truck while it was in a parking lot, killing a guard in the process.

More than a million dollars was transferred into a waiting U-Haul, which was soon stopped at a police roadblock. In the shootout that followed, two officers were killed and a third wounded. The FBI believes Abiodun was driving a getaway car with several Family members, all of whom escaped. Another getaway car crashed and all four of its occupants captured.

The apprehended suspects were questioned, and authorities discovered, to their surprise, that one of them was Kathy Boudin, a member of the Weather Underground wanted by the FBI since March 1970, when she was last seen fleeing naked from a Greenwich Village townhouse rocked by an explosion. (The townhouse was being used by the Weather Underground to assemble anti-personnel bombs, allegedly for use against the Fort Dix military base in northern New Jersey; one such bomb accidentally detonated.)

With the dramatic re-emergence of Boudin, authorities realized they had stumbled across more than a simple gang of robbers. Three days later the police, now on high alert, tracked down two more Family members, Sekou Odinga and Mtayari Sundiata, via a license plate spotted during the Brinks heist. A car chase ensued, ending in a Queens warehouse district. After exchanging gunfire with police, Sundiata was killed and Odinga captured.

The Family began to unravel quickly as police uncovered a network of safe houses and supporters; six other Family members were subsequently captured as well.

By 1986, of the members believed directly involved in the Brinks robbery, only Abiodun and Mutulu Shakur remained at large, crisscrossing the country together. Then in February 1986, on a Los Angeles street corner, federal agents tackled Shakur and threw him to the ground. He was tried, convicted, and sentenced to prison. Abiodun, also thought to be in Los Angeles, managed to elude authorities for four more years.

“Someone said to me, ‘Nehanda, if you get caught, it’s a victory for them. But if you get away, it’s a victory for us,’” she recalled. “That’s what did it.”

She won’t say exactly how she managed to reach Cuba, only that the journey allowed her to re-establish a relationship with her estranged mother. “The first time I called her [from Cuba], she hung up.

But the second time she accepted the call. After we’d talked for a minute ...” Her voice trailed off, wavering a bit, as if Abiodun had changed her mind about revisiting the memory. Then a broad smile spread over her face, and she related a later story her mother passed along.

“The FBI went to see her and said, ‘Could you tell us where your daughter is?’

“She said, ‘You know where my daughter is. You’ve been listening to everything that goes on in my house.’

“So they asked her, ‘Did she finish her acupuncture studies?’ because when I went underground, I was six months away from getting my acupuncturist license.

“So she said, ‘Nope, she’s got a Ph.D.’

“The [FBI agent] is like, ‘Oh God, this woman’s finally talking to us, giving us information!’ So they ask her: ‘Can you tell us what she has her degree in?’

“’Of course.’

“’Well, well, what’s her degree in?’

“’Fooling you motherf****ers, obviously!’”

(FBI spokesman Jim Margolin said charges against Abiodun are still standing but further investigation has ended. The Cuban government has not commented publicly on her status in that nation. Abiodun says she is officially classified as a “temporary resident.”)

Not all of Abiodun’s underground compatriots are quite so comfortable with their pasts. Alan Berkman was a doctor indicted as an accessory after the fact in the Brinks robbery case, accused of treating one of the Family member’s gunshot wounds. Berkman jumped bail and, according to authorities, was involved in the armed robbery of a Connecticut supermarket, as well as several bombings of government buildings between 1983 and 1985. Caught in 1985, he served time for the robbery and possession of explosives.

In 1994, after his release, he told the New York Times: “We made some really bad decisions, and I don’t want to justify them. And if you remove the context of the times, then we were crazed people.... We were trying to make radical change in a nonradical time. We became desperate and kept going further out on the limb.”

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Also, in the timeframe, in 1988 .. -0 still and forever considered a community organizer .. was ready to go to Harvard. Not knowing the month, it’s hard to pin down the
Miami connection.

However, there were several notable events occurring in
Miami in ‘88.

The NAACP was organizing 3 chapters into one main chapter;
Judge Alcee Hastings was impeached.

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“In 1981, Hastings was charged with accepting a $150,000 bribe in exchange for a lenient sentence and a return of seized assets for 21 counts of racketeering by Frank and Thomas Romano, and of perjury in his testimony about the case. He was acquitted by a jury after his alleged co-conspirator, William Borders, refused to testify in court (resulting in a jail sentence for Borders).

In 1988, the Democratic-controlled U.S. House of Representatives took up the case, and Hastings was impeached for bribery and perjury by a vote of 413-3. He was then convicted in 1989 by the United States Senate, becoming the sixth federal judge in the history of the United States to be removed from office by the Senate.

The vote on the first article was 69 for and 26 opposed, providing two votes more than the two-thirds of those present that were needed to convict. The first article accused the judge of conspiracy. Conviction on any single article was enough to remove the judge from office.

The Senate vote cut across party lines, with U.S. Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont voting to convict his fellow party member, and U.S. Senator Arlen Specter voting to acquit.[1]” (TYPICAL SPECTER!!!)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcee_Hastings

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Also this:

“He is the architect of the “Minority Experience” Management Training Program which was featured in the April 1988 Conference ((in Miami)) of the American Society of Newspaper Editors and “Presstime,” the journal of the American Newspaper Publisher’s Association.

His clients have included: Knight Ridder Institute of Training, USA Today, Newsday, The American Newspaper Publishers Association, The American Society of Newspapers Editors, The Detroit Free Press, The Detroit News, The Charlotte Observer, Press-Telegram (Long Beach, Ca), The Dade County Public Schools, Metro Dade County, Williamson Cadillac Company, and others.

Previously in his former company, Bob Simms Associates, Inc., he served as a contractor with the U.S. Department of Defense Race Relations Institute at Patrick Air Force Base for four years as a designer of their “field experience.”

His three day program, “The Miami Inner City Minority Experience,” explored the values, culture, strengths and mores of Miami-Dade County’s diverse population. His models offered constructive alternatives for understanding and valuing the contribution of each group.”

http://scholar.library.miami.edu/bobsimms/about.html

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It wouldn’t be difficult to imagine that Cheri Dolton, Ayers and -0 could’ve crossed paths in New York.

So hard to know why in Miami. The Kansas address, however, -0 gave to the stranded int’l traveler at Miami Airport, is quite curious.