The Phantom Bomb Plot of 1969
http://www.philadelphiaweekly.com/news-and-opinion/The-Liberty-Bell-Bomb-Plot-76-79949692.html
Forty years later, the fallout remains from a notorious case.
By Jonathan Valania
Dec. 22, 2009
In the spring of 1969, four activists from the Philadelphia chapter
of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) were arrested for
plotting to blow up the Liberty Bell after the police found
bomb-making materials in the refrigerator of a West Philly apartment.
According to the police, the planned destruction of the Liberty Bell
was part of a larger plot hatched by a network of student radicals to
destroy national landmarks across the country.
The shocking news spread quickly when footage of the police search of
the apartment surfacedcaptured by a KYW film crew invited in by
police to document the raidand the ensuing arrests made the evening
news. The Daily News trumpeted details of the plot in two separate
cover stories with the blaring headlines "College Rebels Held as
Raiders Find 'Makings of Bomb'" and "Rebel Student Plot to Blow Up
Phila. Historical Shrines Revealed by Police."
A potentially tragic incident of domestic terrorism was narrowly
averted, it seemed, thanks to the aggressive due diligence of the
Philadelphia Police Department and its take-no-bull commissioner
Frank Rizzo. There was just one problem: There was no plot to blow up
the Liberty Bell and no evidence that the four activists had acquired
any bomb-making materials. None of that really mattered, though.
For two long years the case kicked around the courtslong enough to
put the SDS out of business in Philadelphia.
Forty years later, Rizzo and just about everyone on the police and
prosecution side of the case are dead and buried. But all four of the
accused SDS activistsSteve Fraser, Richard Borghmann, Jane "Muffin"
Friedman and Paul Milkmancontinue to insist there never was a plot
to blow up the Liberty Bell, that the Philadelphia SDS was loudly and
proudly nonviolent and that the cops planted the bomb-making
materials to discredit the activists' politics and scare off
potential sympathizers.
The judge overseeing the case seemed inclined to agree, and
eventually threw the case out after two years of pretrial hearings.
But by then it was too late: The Philadelphia SDS, having been
successfully tarred and feathered as a dangerous terrorist
organization, was dead in the water, and so was their ambitious
social-justice agenda for improving schools, housing and job
prospects for the city's downtrodden.
"The backlash happened very quickly; by the time I got out of jail
and went back to the Penn campus, people were scared of me," says
Friedman, one of the four SDS members arrested that day. "When I
tried to organize a rally in support of us, people would back away
from me when they saw me coming like I was some kind of mad bomber."
On the face of it, the plot to blow up the Liberty Bell seems like an
historical curiosity, a lurid footnote from the Age of Aquarius in
the City of Brotherly Love, an incident indicative of then but
irrelevant to now. But in the Age of Terror, with its never-ending
string of shadowy, violent conspiracies in low places, vastly
expanded police powers, diminished transparency and accountability
and prevailing air of "just trust us," the story of the bogus plot to
blow up the Liberty Bell serves as a tragicomic cautionary tale.
To fully understand the significance of the case, it must be placed
in the wider context of the Philadelphia Police Department's war on
per- ceived subversives in the late '60sthe way they systematically
harassed, intimidated and brutalized blacks and white college-boy
troublemakersunder Frank Rizzo's leadership. Rizzo had been known to
routinely invent or exaggerate these threats to scare the public and
amass political power, resulting in two contentious and deeply
divisive terms as mayor in the 1970s.
The bogus Liberty Bell Bomb Plot bust was just the latest in a series
of trumped-up arrests of activists by the police department's Civil
Disobedience Unit, which was created in the early '60s to protect the
constitutional rights of demonstrators while keeping the peace. Upon
the appointment of Rizzo as police commissioner in 1967, the CDU
became a blunt instrument of surveillance, intimidation and
infiltration used to neutralize political dissent.
Steve Fraser, then 23 years old, was the chief organizer of SDS
activities in Philadelphia. Fraser had been active in the Civil
Rights movement since high school, having gone to Mississippi during
the Freedom Summer of 1964, when white, Northern liberals flooded the
South, registering blacks to vote and ensuring that they got to
exercise that right. He arrived shortly after three activists were
murdered by white racists, events that were portrayed in the film
Mississippi Burning .
Prior to Fraser's arrival as a student at Temple in 1967, the SDS had
struggled to gain a foothold in Philly, but it's a testament to his
charismatic leadership, tenacious organizing and persuasive public
speaking that the ranks of the Philly SDS swelled from a few handfuls
to hundreds during his tenure.
Among these new converts was Richard Borghmann, who prior to meeting
Fraser had little to show for his two semesters at Swarthmore spent
majoring in dope-smoking and birddogging. Fraser opened Borghmann's
eyes to the gross inequities and social injustices of the American
system, and to the power of committed activists to bring about
substantive change.
Another key Philly SDS member was Jane "Muffin" Friedman, a
19-year-old sophomore at Penn who manned the SDS mimeograph machine,
cranking out the leaflets the group used to get their message out and
lure new recruits to the cause of change.
In February of 1969, the Philly SDS spearheaded a sit-in at Penn,
where hundreds of students took over College Hall for six days to
protest the construction of the universities Science Center, in which
it was rumored biological- and chemical-weapon research was to be
conducted. Although nobody realized it at the time, the Penn sit-in
would prove to be the high point of SDS activism in Philadelphia and
the beginning of the end.
The Philly SDS developed an offshoot which attempted to engage
high-school students in the city's poorest precincts. "We were
forming a movement called the Alliance for Jobs, Housing and
Education, which was addressing deprivation that many parts of the
city suffered, not only with job opportunities and housing, but with
the lousy education that the students were getting," says Fraser. "We
would picket and hand out leaflets outside the high schools, and
that's how we forged an alliance with a number of smart, young,
committed black students, and some of them were self-styled Black Panthers."
Such an alliance was anathema to Rizzo, and in March of 1969 he
floated a story in the local media that the SDS was planning to blow
up schools and was distributing leaflets explaining how to make
Molotov cocktails in the ghettos of North and West Philly.
Fraser went on TV and radio and denied any plan to blow up schools or
disseminate bomb-making leaflets. Still, the word was out: the SDS
was dangerous. "This was clearly designed, in hindsight, to provide a
pretext to the arrests that followed," says Fraser.
In late March of 1969, emboldened by their success at Penn, the
Philly SDS members attempted a similar sit-in at Temple, in part to
bring media attention to the deplorable quality of life in the ghetto
that surrounded the university. Roughly 50 protesters took over the
administration building at Temple, assuming that, as with the Penn
sit-in, word would spread and reinforcements would come. But they
never did. "The sit-in failed to attract wide attention and wasn't
heavily supported on the campus," says Fraser. "The consequence was
that it showed us to be vulnerable. And it's right after that, just
days after, that the police did their things with us."
The leader of the Philadelphia Police Department's Civil Disobedience
Unit was Lt. George Fencl, a thick-necked man with slicked-back
salt-and-pepper hair. Fencl was a regular fixture at protests and
demonstrations in the '60s and '70s. It was his job to monitor,
identify, photograph and track dissident groups and their
sympathizers. Fencl, dressed in his trademark black overcoat with a
white armband emblazoned with the word POLICE, and his CDU boys would
show up at demonstrations and photograph everyone in the crowd,
taking down names and license-plate numbers of those participating.
Sometimes Fencl's men would brandish cameras that had no film,
snapping away nonexistent pictures to intimidate and disperse protesters.
On a 1970 episode of NBC news program First Tuesday , Fencl bragged
that the police had a list of over 18,000 names. He also enlisted an
army of informers, some of which were criminals cooperating in
exchange for charges being dropped and others the wives of police
officers encouraged to join activist groups and report back to the
CDU in exchange for "pin money." By 1969, the Philly SDS was
well-acquainted with Fencl and vice versa.
There were three people in the West Philly apartment Fraser and
Borghmann shared on the night of April 9, 1969: Fraser, Friedman and
Fraser's friend Paul Milkman, an SDS member from New York who worked
as a librarian at Columbia University. Milkman was sweet on Friedman
and had come to Philadelphia with hopes of romance.
As Milkman recalls, all three were about to leave for the movies when
Lt. Fencl and his boys10 cops all toldshowed up around 8 p.m. "The
first thing that struck me as odd was that they were all wearing
these big heavy overcoats and it was unseasonably warm that day, I
remember going in and out of the apartment in shirtsleeves," recalls
Milkman. Fencl instructed Milkman and Friedman to remain seated in
the living room and assigned two officers to watch them. Fraser was
allowed to follow the rest of the cops as they searched the
five-room, two-floor apartment. Shortly thereafter, the doorbell
rang; Fencl stopped Fraser from answering sending one of his officers
instead. It was a camera crew from KYW, which had somehow gotten word
of the raid, and they were invited in despite Fraser's protests.
"The whole thing took about an hour, and the weird thing was that the
kitchen was right in the middle of the apartment, but they made a
point of searching there last," Fraser recalls. "When they finally
got to the kitchen, I remember three or four of them forming a
semicircle around the refrigerator with their backs effectively
walling it off from view, and then they were like, 'Aha! What's
this?' and they pulled out this big tin can of C-4 plastic explosives."
Pulling the refrigerator out from the wall, the cops then produced
three lengths of pipe, some blasting caps and a small quantity of gunpowder.
Fraser believes the bomb-making material must have been planted
earlier in the day, but Milkman disagrees. "I don't see how," he
says. "We were in and out of the refrigerator all day. No, they must
have smuggled it in under those big coats they were wearing."
As the group was being ushered into the paddy wagon, Fraser began
shouting into the cameras that this was a frame-up. At this point,
Borghmann showed up, and shortly afterward joined his friends in the
paddy wagon. Once they got to jail, Friedman was ushered into the
women's wing, where she was issued a prison dress so short it barely
covered her backside. "When I protested that my butt was hanging out,
they made me scrub the floor on my hands and knees," she says.
"I remember I began to get depressed [in jail]," says Milkman. "Not
really for myself, because I knew I had been framed, but for the
others, most of whom were black. One had been arrested for breaking
into his own house because he didn't have a key, and cops were in
such hurry to arrest him they didn't let him provide ID. Another guy
had told a story about how he went to a used-car lot and took a car
out for a test drive and the car died; he was in the middle of the
street waiting for help when the cops arrested him for trying to
steal the car. They told these stories not with outrage but as matter
of fact, that this is what it is like to be a black man in
Philadelphia in the spring of 1969."
The SDS could not have asked for more effective and sympathetic legal
representation than they got from Bernard Segal, a high-profile
defense lawyer who commanded the respect of the city's legal
establishment, and David Rudovsky, a bright young civil-rights lawyer
fresh out of law school. Segal and Rudovsky managed to get the bail
reduced for everyone in the group and, eventually, charges dropped
against Milkman and Friedman, because they were merely visitors on
the premises where the bomb-making materials were found. They also
got a break when Judge Edmund B. Spaeth was assigned the case. "He
was very intelligent and a Quaker, a man of conscience," says
Friedman. "[The lawyers] told us that he was pretty much the only
judge in town we had a chance of convincing."
The prosecution's case stumbled at the start when Fencl acknowledged
in court that he had no proof of Fraser or Borghmann's involvement in
any plot to blow of national landmarks, or that such a plot existed.
Futhermore, under questioning by Segal, he said that the police had
never dusted the bomb-making materials for fingerprints that would
prove Fraser or Borghmann handled them, nor did they take precautions
not to leave their own fingerprints on the materials when they
collected them. Also, the KYW footage of the search mysteriously went
missing from the station's archives when the defense requested copies.
Shortly after his arrest, Fraser flew out to San Francisco to meet
with The Black Panther Party in hopes of forging an SDS/Panther
alliance. "They were so paranoid, I remember they picked us up and
blindfolded us so we wouldn't know where their hideout was," says
Fraser. "In the end, they just didn't trust us."
Although a unified front with the Panthers was not to be, the meeting
would, in a roundabout way, provide the foundation for their defense.
Fencl let it slip at a City Hall rally in support of Fraser and
Borghmann that he knew all about Fraser's trip to meet the Panthers,
and it became apparent that authorities had wiretaps in place,
something they were loath to admit.
Segal and Rudovsky argued that their clients had a right to know if
Philadelphia Police or the FBI had tapped their phones (if the
wiretaps had violated the Fourth Amendment, all evidence gathered as
a result would be inadmissible in court) and that the defense had a
right to know the identity of any moles or informers employed by the
authorities, as they would prove to be crucial witnesses for the defense.
Judge Spaeth agreed, but prosecutors dragged their heels on both
motions during the nearly two years of pre-trial hearings until
Spaeth finally issued an ultimatum: Either provide the details of any
wiretapping and provide the names of any informers or he was throwing
out the charges. Which is exactly what happened in April of 1971.
The decison not to disclose on the wiretaps and informants went all
the way up to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and then-Attorney General
John Mitchell, who discussed the case on several occasions, as Fraser
would later learn when he secured his voluminous FBI file with a
Freedom of Information Act request. Curiously, the prosecution never
appealed Judge Spaeth's ruling or re-filed charges despite its
prerogative to do so.
Forty years later, the four SDS members look back on the experience
with a mixture of resignation and disillusionment. They agree that,
while the SDS might have won the court battle, the authorities won
the war. "You know, you see a guy on the front page of the newspaper
in handcuffs accused of planning to bomb the Liberty Bell and it
mortally wounds your cause," says Fraser. "That's the whole point of
these kind of frame-ups, is to do political damage. Whether we went
to jail or not was ultimately beside the point. They accomplished
what they set out to do."
Fraser went on to become a respected author and academic. He is
currently a visiting professor at Columbia University in New York
City, where he resides. Last year he was a senior lecturer at Penn,
where he occupied an office in the same building he helped take over
four decades earlier.
Milkman went on to become a high-school English teacher in New York
City, where he also currently resides.
Friedman remained in the area and went on to marry David Rudovsky
(they divorced in 1991) and is associate director of A Better Starta
preventive-health-care program which teaches nutrition to low-income
residents for Albert Einstein HealthCare Network.
Richard Borghmann abandoned politics and went off the grid, working
as a rancher in Colorado. Last year Borghmann voted for the first
time since his arrest, casting his vote for Obama on behalf of his
sister, a big-time Obama supporter who died shortly before the election.
Bernard Segal currently teaches law at Golden Gate University in San
Francisco. David Rudovsky went on to become a highly respected
civil-rights lawyer and was recently awarded the ACLU's Keystone of
Civil Liberties Award.
Lieutenant Fencl was eventually promoted to inspector and led the
first raid on MOVE. The much-coveted Fencl Award"bestowed on a
police officer who brings a unique blend of courage, integrity and
determination to the job," according to the Daily News , which
co-sponsors the awardwas named in his honor after his death 24 years ago.
Fraser rolls his eyes when told of the Fencl Award. "He was a guy of
bottomless unscrupulousness, and constantly involved in the
harassment and intimidation of groups fighting for social justice,"
says Fraser. "I think Fencl was very cynical about all this. Although
he was not the smartest guy in the world, I am sure he knew, because
everybody knew ... that the SDS Labor Committee was avowedly
anti-violent and in some corners of the SDS we were criticized,
severely, for condemning Weatherman-like behavior, because it was
destined to isolate the organization, it was immoral and it was
politically suicidal. We said all these things publicly and he knew that."
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