Photo by Jerry Engel/New York Post Archives via Getty Images
Throughout much of 1968, Sam Melville, an unemployed 34-year-old with an estranged wife and 5-year-old son, frequently sat at his desk in a squalid apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, contemplating how he could destroy America.
Smoking a pipe, the towering man with long, stringy black hair thinning at the top and two different-colored eyes — one blue, one green — reflected on that turbulent year’s assassinations, the escalating war in Vietnam, and the constant battles between police and protestors. Two years earlier, Melville had left behind a well-paying job as a draftsman, a spacious apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and his family. His father, a former member of the Communist Labor Party, whom Melville once greatly admired, had recently given up the socialist cause, remarried, and opened a hamburger stand in an upscale section of Long Island. Fearing that he might follow his father on a similar path led Melville down an existential rabbit hole. In and around his neighborhood that year, he took part in marches and sit-ins, but by 1969, as his anger toward the government grew, he secretly set off a series of bombs across Manhattan. To many in the counterculture underground, he was their equivalent of a masked avenger. To the local media, he was known as “the Mad Bomber.”
Melville set off bombs in the offices of General Motors, Standard Oil and Chase Bank. He also hit the warehouse of United Fruit, a company that was exploiting its Cuban workers and had even assisted in the Bay of Pigs invasion; the banking institution Marine Midland; the Federal Office Building at Foley Square; an Army induction center on Whitehall Street; and the Manhattan Criminal Court Building. A communiqué delivered to the press stated that the bombings were a protest against “The giant corporations of America [that] have now spread themselves all over the world, forcing entire foreign economies into total dependence on American money and goods.” Members of New York City’s bomb squad were flummoxed by the sophistication of these electrically charged contraptions, which often brimmed over with 20 or more sticks of high-grade dynamite. There was no way some doped-up college kid was making them. When asked by the New York Post who the Mad Bomber could be, according to a book about Melville by Leslie James Pickering, one team member replied, “It looks like the job of a demolition expert.”
The aftermath of the Weather Underground bomb factory explosion in the basement of the West Village townhouse, March 6, 1970. Three people died in the blast. (Photo courtesy New York City Department Of Records And Information Services)
For Melville’s son, Josh, who remembers his father best as a loving, folk-singing vegetarian, the sudden burst of violence still baffles him. “I understand my father’s stated reasons, but I guess I am of the belief that the stated reasons are just the brochure,” he says while relaxing at a cigar bar in Manhattan’s Financial District. “I understand he was against imperialism and was a Marxist, but so what? You can be all those things and still not want to blow up buildings.”
Yet in the flashpoint of just four months, Sam Melville and a small group of followers took the American radical left on a hard turn into armed struggle. In his book Days of Rage, about terrorism in America in the ’60s and ’70s, Bryan Burrough called Melville and his corps “the essential blueprint for almost every radical organization” in the 1970s. Melville was one of the first to turn to this kind of violence, but the country would soon witness the kidnapping of Patty Hearst by the Symbionese Liberation Army, the bombings of the Pentagon and NYPD headquarters by the Weather Underground, and more.
“Between ’68 and ’69, there was this crescendo of an apocalyptic feeling and the circumstances made us crazy,” says Jonathan Lerner, a co-founder of the Weather Underground, the militant offshoot of the socialist group Students for a Democratic Society. “You’re out there marching peacefully to stop the war and the war is getting worse and you’re marching for civil rights and it didn’t stop police harassment of black people or the assassination of Martin Luther King. You begin to think people don’t care, and it makes you feel all that’s left to do are these provocative, attention-grabbing things.”
But the fresh-out-of-college kids of the Weather Underground didn’t have the type of domestic baggage Sam Melville had. Josh Melville recalls something one of his father’s accomplices once told him: “I think your father felt he had to be self-destructive after he left you and your mother. What else would make a person act that way other than knowing they damaged their family?”
“THIS RELEASE IS FOR THE UNDERGROUND MEDIA ONLY. THERE WILL BE NO COMMUNICATION WITH THE PIG MEDIA.” Those words were emblazoned across the top of the communiqué that followed the bombing of the Marine Midland Bank Building on August 20, 1969. Composed by his then girlfriend, Jane Alpert, and others who would later be christened by the FBI as “the Melville Collective,” the statement was sent around to local underground weeklies, including the one where Alpert held a staff writer position, Rat Subterranean News. The communiqué explained that the reason behind the massive explosion was the banking institution’s links to the oppression of sugarcane field workers in Latin America. But in Alpert’s 1981 autobiography, Growing Up Underground, in which she chronicles her transformation from Swarthmore honor student to radical fugitive, Alpert claims the action was bereft of any political thought on Melville’s part. The communiqué had to be cooked up afterward to cover up the real excuse for the bombing: his anger over Alpert seeing other men.
When I bring this up to Josh Melville, who’s working on a book of his own about his father, his disdain for how Sam is portrayed in Alpert’s text is clearly visible. “Jane likes to connect my father’s rogue bombings to their spats as a couple, but the more you learn about him, the more you know that’s fucking ridiculous,” Josh says. “This man wouldn’t destroy a building just because the girl he was living with — who he wasn’t even faithful to — slept around. It was the ’60s, and everyone slept with each other. Her story doesn’t add up.” (Alpert’s book is seen by some as an important statement on the sexism in the radical left at the time; Josh Melville who operates SamMelville.org, disputes much of what has been written about his father, by Alpert, Pickering, and others.)
The one thing nobody can debate is the haphazard manner in which Sam Melville went about bombing Marine Midland. Though his intention was to destroy property and not people, he did not take into account the presence of an evening staff in the building when he set the device for a 10 p.m. detonation. When more than a dozen employees were taken to the hospital — all with minor injuries — it forced him to rethink his future plans of attack. To assure nothing like this would happen again, Melville culled a crew of seven, including Alpert and Robin Palmer, a member of the Downtown Manhattan anarchist group “the Crazies,” to help him scope out potential new targets, craft communiqués, and plant the bombs.
After weeks of meticulous planning, Alpert kicked off the group’s revamped campaign by planting a bomb in the Federal Office Building on Friday, September 19, 1969, targeting offices of the U.S. Army and Selective Services inside. The device went off at 2 a.m., destroying files, damaging the building’s electricity infrastructure, and causing flooding. There were no injuries.
Melville and his cell soon learned that damaging federal property could elicit a furious response. The next day, the FBI went to an apartment Melville had moved out of months earlier, and later they tracked him down at the apartment on East 4th Street where he and Alpert were living. He told them his name was David McCurdy — the pseudonym he had used to rent a nearby apartment where he had set up an explosives workshop — and denied knowing who Sam Melville was.
Unfazed by this close call, the collective went to work plotting their most ambitious statement on American tyranny yet: a trio of simultaneous bomb blasts across the city on Veterans Day. Meanwhile, Melville opted for his version of laying low: skipping town and going on a bombing spree of U.S. Army facilities across the Midwest. According to a book by Christopher Hewitt, Political Violence and Terrorism in Modern America, the explosions in Chicago; Madison, Wisconsin; and Milwaukee caused a total of $125,000 in damages — with Melville’s goal of zero injuries. Melville also participated in a guerilla warfare workshop in North Dakota, hosted by the black nationalist H. Rap Brown.
Soon after Melville’s return to New York on the afternoon of November 10, Jane Alpert and two other members of the Melville Collective, Patricia Swinton and John David Hughey III, left their bomb-making factory on East 2nd Street in intervals to disperse one bomb apiece in the offices of Standard Oil, Chase Bank and General Motors. At 1 o’clock the next morning, the concurrent string of explosions did their expected damage to both the offices and the nerves of the already taut city, with the events receiving national news coverage and a new communiqué. Penned by Alpert again, the message ended with the declaration: “The empire is breaking down as people all over the world are rising up to challenge its power. From the inside, black people have been fighting a revolution for years. And finally, white Americans too are striking blows for liberation.”
At Melville’s urging, Robin Palmer was sent to plant a device the very next day at the Criminal Court Building on Centre Street, in response to the trial taking place there of a group of Black Panthers charged with attempts to bomb police stations. Another blast was planned to follow at the Lexington Armory on 26th Street, with Melville delivering the bomb himself with help from George Demmerle, a newer member Melville had befriended on the Lower East Side. Demmerle, an overly rambunctious radical who not only was a member of the Crazies but also held rank as the only Caucasian member of the Black Panthers, greatly impressed Melville.
The only thing stopping Melville from meeting up with Demmerle to execute the bombing, according to Alpert’s book, was the white sedan parked out front of his and Alpert’s apartment — the same one he’d seen there earlier in the week. Could his clumsy blurt of the name David McCurdy to the FBI agents have tipped them off? Had they found his bomb factory? He couldn’t sit and ponder what the answer might be. He had to mobilize. The revolution was in full swing.
Not long after the explosive on Centre Street, Demmerle and Melville made their way uptown, to 26th Street. The plan was to chuck the timed bombs onto the large Army trucks parked in front of the 69th Regiment Armory, knowing they would later be brought inside the building. But as Melville approached, he noticed something different than the numerous times they had cased the building. The trucks were now parked on the opposite side of the street, near people’s homes. His son, Josh, believes he didn’t want to risk hurting any more innocent people. Figuring the action would have to wait for another day, Melville was just about to turn away when he was bombarded from all angles by FBI agents pointing pistols and ordering him to freeze.
Concurrently, Jane Alpert and John David Hughey III were rounded up at the already staked-out apartment on East 4th Street. The feds’ biggest tipoff came from the person assisting Melville with the botched Armory bombing itself: George Demmerle.
Just like Melville, Demmerle was a man who had left his wife and child looking for purpose in life, but instead of becoming a self-appointed revolutionary, he found it as a low-level mole for the government, beginning in 1966. To many on the scene, Demmerle’s attempts to nudge members of the counterculture into outrageous acts like blowing up the Brooklyn Bridge seemed suspicious. But to Melville, Demmerle was just another comrade in the struggle.
Jane Alpert exiting the courthouse with John D. Hughey III, another member of the Weather Underground Collective, after pleading guilty to a conspiracy to bomb federal buildings along with Samuel Melville, January 15, 1970. (Photo by Louis Liotta/New York Post via Getty Images)
Two months into the new decade, Sam Melville stood broken in the Federal Courthouse on Pearl Street. While Alpert and, later, Hughey walked on a $20,000 bond, Melville watched his bail climb higher and higher, and when Judge Milton Pollack raised it to $500,000, an anxious Melville rose to his feet and, according to The New York Times, bellowed, “I don’t have half a million dollars! How the hell am I going to get out of jail, jackass?” Although his remark did not amuse Judge Pollack, it garnered a chuckle from the radicals looking on.
A month after his outburst in court, Melville pulled another act of desperation. He attempted an escape by restraining a marshal in the courthouse with the marshal’s own belt and making a run for it. After racing down two flights of stairs, he was apprehended.
On May 8, 1970, Melville pled guilty to three charges: conspiring to and destroying federal property, and assaulting the marshal. He was sentenced to a consecutive run of 31 years. Hughey ended up serving two years, while Alpert absconded. While harbored by members of the Weather Underground, she circulated the feminist manifesto Mother Right to much praise and criticism from the radical left, before surrendering in 1974.
Mugshots of the Weather Underground members Samuel Melville, George Demmerle, Jane Alpert, and John Hughey circulated by newspapers after being released on bail. (Photo courtesy Joshua Melville)
Melville ended up at the Attica Correctional Facility, in Western New York, in late 1970. There, abusive guards were the norm, as were ludicrously sparse rations such as a single bar of soap every other month and one roll of toilet paper given out only once a month. The lone bright spot for Melville was finding prisoners to connect with from the Black Panthers and a likeminded Puerto Rican civil rights group called the Young Lords. Over the course of the next year, Melville sent out a storm of letters decrying the conditions at Attica to lawyers, outside supporters and the New York Commissioner of Corrections, Russell Oswald, while also publishing a handmade newsletter distributed to prisoners on the sly called The Iced Pig.
For many both inside and outside of prison walls, this new awareness of incarceration conditions came from George Jackson, the San Quentin inmate who authored the best-selling book Soledad Brother. Jackson’s lyrical, vengeful writing style resonated with fellow prisoners, while enticing the romantic radicals of the New Left. When word got out that Jackson had been shot dead during a bungled uprising on August 21, 1971, it set off a brooding fury in Attica. In an act of solidarity, Melville led a multiracial phalanx of prisoners wearing black armbands into the mess hall for a very solemn hunger strike. For months after Melville’s arrival to Attica, an obvious resentment had smoldered between inmates and guards, but the death of George Jackson ignited the spark.
The prisoners’ overtaking of Attica, orchestrated by Herbert X. Blyden, Elliott “L.D.” Barkley and Melville, began two weeks after Jackson’s death, on the morning of September 9, when several portions of the prison were set ablaze. One guard was singled out for a beating so bad he died a few days later. The prisoners drew up a 15-point list of “practical proposals,” including freedom of religion, a healthier diet, improved medical treatment, and educating the correctional officers about the needs of inmates — and asking for “understanding rather than punishment.”
Over the next four days, negotiations were volleyed in and out of the prison walls by journalists, senators and the well-known civil rights lawyer William Kunstler. He came out of the prison saying it resembled a “sloppy boy scout camp,” due to the makeshift tents in the yard and trenches Melville and other inmates had dug for protection. New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller refused to buckle to the inmates’ demands, and on September 13 he sent armed state police in to take back control of the prison by any means necessary. At the end of the sudden and bloody debacle, nine guards and 29 inmates were dead, with Melville reportedly being one of the first to get picked off. Legend says Melville was in mid-throw of a Molotov cocktail when he was gunned down. As much as that would make for a great dramatic ending to this made-for-TV story, evidence brought up in a civil suit during the 1990s revealed this to be a mistruth, as no such item was found near his body.
Coverage of the Attica Prison riot by the Albany Times Union, September 14, 1971. (Photo courtesy New York State Library)
At Melville’s funeral, William Kunstler delivered a riveting eulogy, while various Black Panthers icily stood guard around Melville’s casket. A few days later, the Weather Underground bombed the offices of the Commissioner of Corrections to protest Melville’s slaying.
For an almost 10-year stretch starting in 1975, a group that initially called themselves the Sam Melville Unit carried out a series of bank robberies and bombings across the Eastern Seaboard and the Midwest.
Last year, former New York City Police commissioner Bernard Kerik summoned the name of the Melville-inspired group when arguing that the left-wing protest group Antifa should be considered a domestic terrorist group. “Back in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, we had to deal with the Weather Underground, the Black Panther Party, the Black Liberation Army, the Sam Melville–Jonathan Jackson Unit,” Kerik recalled. “There were a number of these anti-American leftist communist socialist groups … doing exactly what Antifa is doing today, and those groups were doing more, which is what I’m afraid of.”
While Josh Melville may have some differences with the former police commissioner, he doesn’t disagree with this parallel. “The present political climate we are in today is virtually identical to what we were experiencing in the late 1960s, and the amount of millennials percentage-wise in the U.S. population is bigger,” declares Josh Melville. “My father’s story is extremely significant today, and if I did my job correctly with my book, people will say, ‘Holy shit, this is all going to happen again!’”
Arching back in his chair to lend further significance to his statement, he puffs on his cigar and continues. “We have a populist conservative president who is infuriating the left similar to the way Nixon did. … When he won that second term in ’72, it was a symbol to the left that all hope was gone.”
After dispensing of a copious amount of ash, Josh Melville straightens his brow and sternly says, “If Trump wins another term — which I think there’s a strong likelihood he will — who knows how this is going to escalate.”