It is May 19th, so I thought I would revisit the topic of the May 19th Communist Organization (M19CO). It was founded in 1979 by seven radical lesbian women, and two men. It was named after the birthday of Ho Chi Minh, the communist leader of North Vietnam, and Malcolm X (Malcolm Little). M19CO grew out of the “Weather Underground”; its goal was wage war against the United States government and start a new black-controlled nation within the U.S.
M19CO is unique in being the only domestic terror group founded and led by women, and to consist mostly of women. Women set the agenda, chose the targets, and committed most of the violent crimes. The female founders were: Susan Rosenberg, Marylin Buck, Laura Jane Whitehorn, Linda Sue Evans, Judith Alice Clark, Donna Joan Borup, and Silvia Baraldini. The males were Alan Berkman and Timothy Blunk.
Three years ago, I wrote about the May 19th Communist Organization because one of its founders, Susan Rosenberg, was then the Vice-Chairman of the Board of Black Lives Matter’s parent entity, “Thousand Currents.” Rosenberg served 16 years in prison for a five-year terror spree that included multiple bombings and killings.
The crime and terror spree began in 1979, when three M19CO members smuggled pistols into a prison, took two guards hostage, and freed JoAnne Chesimard, a member of the Black Liberation Army who was serving a life sentence plus 26 years for the murder of New Jersey state trooper Werner Foerster. The break-out allowed Chesimard to escape justice for the murder because, in 1984, she was granted asylum in communist Cuba, where she has lived ever since.
The Brink’s Robbery
The most notorious incident M19CO planned and executed was the robbery of a Brink’s armored car at a mall near the town of Nyack, New York. The robbery was carried out by the “Black Liberation Army” as well as by David Gilbert, Judith Alice Clark, Kathy Boudin, and Marilyn Buck of M19CO.
Kathy Boudin left her infant son at the babysitter's before taking the wheel of the getaway vehicle, a U-Haul truck. She waited in a nearby parking lot as her heavily armed accomplices drove a red van to the Nanuet Mall, where an armored Brink’s truck was making a pick-up. As guards Peter Paige and Joseph Trombino emerged from the mall to load the money onto the truck, the robbers stormed out of their van and attacked. One fired two shotgun blasts into the van's bulletproof windshield, while another opened fire with an M16 rifle.
Peter Paige was hit multiple times and killed instantly. Trombino was able to fire a single shot from his handgun, but was struck in the shoulder and arm by several rifle rounds, nearly severing his arm. The truck's driver, James Kelly, fired several rounds at the robbers through a gun port but, coming under heavy fire, took cover underneath the dashboard; he was hit in the head by glass and shrapnel.
The communists grabbed $1.6 million in cash and fled the scene.
The killers then drove to a parking lot where a yellow Honda and the U-Haul truck, manned by members of the M19CO, were waiting. But an alert college student in a house across the street spotted them as they switched vehicles with the money bags; she called the police and identified the vehicles the gang were now using.
Police units converged on the mall, trying to cut off all escape routes. At an entrance ramp to the New York State Thruway, Nyack Police officers Edward O'Grady, Waverly Brown, Brian Lennon, and Artie Keenan spotted and pulled over the U-Haul truck, with Boudin in the front seat. The police were unsure if they had pulled over the right truck; police radio had reported that the robbers were all black but the occupants of this vehicle were white (this confusion was was part of M19CO’s plan).
The officers cautiously approached with guns drawn. Feigning innocence, Kathy Boudin convinced the officers to lower their guard. Then, six men armed with automatic weapons and wearing body armor emerged from the back of the truck and opened fire on the four police officers. Officer Waverly Brown (who was black) was hit repeatedly by rifle fire and fell to the ground. One of the gang then walked over with a pistol and executed him at close range. Officer Edward O'Grady lived long enough to empty his revolver, but as he was reloading he was shot several times with an M16. He died on a hospital operating table.
The $1.6 million that M19CO killed three men in the process of stealing was intended to create a black ethno-state in the American south, to be named, "New Afrika." But most of the perpetrators were caught, and the money was recovered.
The M19CO’s Terror Spree Continues
Although several of the M19CO group were captured after the Brink’s robbery, Rosenberg was not, and her crime spree continued.
On January 28, 1983, M19CO bombed the federal building on Staten Island, N.Y. On April 25, 1983, the group was responsible for a bombing at the National War College at Fort McNair in Washington, D.C. On November 7, 1983, the group triggered a bomb explosion at the US Senate room in the Capitol.
The Capitol bombing caused Susan Rosenberg to wax lyrical:
Tonight We Bombed the U.S. Capitol
. . . our dreams
will be the shell casings
that pierce the enemy
as our love, and resistance
continue.
—Susan Rosenberg, “Compañera” (Fall 1986)
Rosenberg’s reign of terror came to an end on November 3, 1984, when she and fellow M19CO founder Timothy Blunk were arrested at a storage unit in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. Rosenberg had rented the unit with a stolen ID, and the suspicious facility manager called the police. Investigators found 740 pounds of explosives, including 100 blasting caps, nearly 200 sticks of dynamite, more than 100 cartridges of gel explosive, 24 bags of blasting agent, and multiple firearms, including an Uzi submachine gun, an M-14 rifle, a rifle with a telescopic sight, a sawed-off shotgun, and three 9-millimeter pistols.
U.S. Attorney, later New York City mayor, Rudolph Giuliani prosecuted Rosenberg. During her trial she expressed regret—not for her crimes but because she “hadn’t had the courage to shoot it out with police.” In May, 1985, Rosenberg was found guilty of federal explosives and firearms charges and sentenced to 58 years in federal prison, the maximum available sentence.
Although Rosenberg was indicted for planning and driving one of the getaway cars in the Brink’s robbery, Giuliani declined to pursue that indictment. Giuliani felt it was superfluous, given the long sentence Rosenberg had received on the weapons and explosives charges, and he did not want to put the surviving family of Paige, Brown and O’Grady through the trauma of another trial.
In her parole application, which was denied, Rosenberg blamed her terror spree on, “the political ethos of the 1960s and how it had led me and my associates into thinking our activities were acceptable.” But, as anyone with the tiniest bit of historical consciousness knows, the Marxist ethos of the late 1960s was largely fueled by opposition of the Vietnam War, and did not extend into the 1980s, which were a broad return to Americanism; conservative Ronald Reagan was overwhelmingly elected in 1980, shortly after M19CO was founded, and was re-elected four years later in a 49-state landslide the same year Rosenberg’s terror spree was forcibly ended.
On Jan. 20, 2001, his last half-day in office, President Bill Clinton commuted Rosenberg’s 58-year sentence to time served; for a five-year crime spree that involved multiple bombings, prison breaks, and murders, she served 16 years in prison, about one fourth of her sentence.
The Multi-Generational Boudin Saga
Kathy Boudin’s grandparents were Russian-Jewish immigrants to the United States; the name was shortened from Boudienoff. Her great uncle, Louis Boudin, was a Russian-born Marxist theoretician, writer, politician, and lawyer whose works include “The Theoretical System of Karl Marx in Light of Recent Criticism” and “Socialism and War.” Kathy’s father, Leonard Boudin, was a Leftist lawyer who represented a long list of Marxist clients, including communist Cuba.
Kathy Boudin pleaded guilty to one count of felony murder in exchange for a single twenty years-to-life sentence; she was paroled in 2003 after serving 22 years. In 2008, she was hired as an adjunct professor at the Columbia University School of Social Work, where she is now the co-director and co-founder of the “Center for Justice at Columbia University.”
The son she had with David Gilbert and dropped off at the babysitter on the way to commit the pre-meditated, violent Brink’s robbery, was Chesa Boudin, whom she had named “Chesa” after JoAnne Chesimard, the murderer of New Jersey state trooper Werner Foerster who M19CO had broken out of prison and allowed to escape justice.
Although David Gilbert, a “red diaper baby” who studied Marx’s Das Kapital in his spare time, and was in the SDS and the Weather Underground as well as M19CO, was sentenced to 75 years for his role in the Brink’s robbery murders, Governor Andrew Cuomo, on his last day in office (August 23, 2021) commuted Gilbert’s sentence to 40 years, and he was released in November, 2021.
With both his parents serving time for the Brink’s robbery murders, Chesa Boudin was raised by Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, the communist radicals who founded the Weather Underground but left the violent revolutionary struggle to join the gradual (but now complete) Marxist takeover of American academia. They also launched the political career of their protégé, Barack Obama, in their living room.
As a young man, Boudin traveled south to serve the communist revolution in Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela, working as a translator in the Venezuelan Presidential Palace. In a memoir of his Latin American adventures, he discloses that he began signing emails “in the belly of the revolution.” He returned to the U.S. to further the revolution by corrupting the American legal system, attending Yale Law School.
In an episode of supreme irony, Chesa Boudin, whose biological and adoptive parents were most noted for criminality and astonishing contempt for all norms, laws, and human decency, was elected District Attorney for San Francisco, with the responsibility to prosecute crime. During his brief tenure in that office, Boudin declined to prosecute most crime or put most criminals in jail—which is not surprising, given both his nature and nurture—but actually emptied out San Francisco’s jails.
Boudin campaigned on a platform of decarceration—a euphemism for letting criminals go free—and eliminating cash bail—allowing criminals to commit new crimes while awaiting trial on their old ones--establishing a unit to re-evaluate wrongful convictions, and refusing to assist ICE with the arrest of illegal immigrants.
Boudin was a “Soros prosecutor”; his election was aided by a George Soros-funded network of far-Left non-profits that raised more than $600,000 for Boudin’s campaign. Soros also contributed directly to groups opposing Boudin’s recall.
Immediately upon taking office, Boudin fired seven of his office’s top career prosecutors, then halted the prosecution of a man who was video-recorded striking an officer with a liquor bottle. He then announced that his office would no longer seek charges for illegal drugs and weapons discovered during traffic stops, and would not seek sentence enhancements for gang membership or previous criminal convictions.
Also immediately upon taking office, Boudin followed through with his promise to eliminate posting bail as a requirement for pre-trial release, setting up a situation in which a criminal can be arrested in the morning, arraigned and released in the afternoon, and commit another crime that night. In March 2020, on the pretext of Covid (of course), Boudin freed 25% of those in San Francisco’s jails; by the end of Apirl, he had increased that percentage to 40%.
Boudin filed charges against an officer for striking a perp with a baton; he attempted to suppress evidence that the perp was assaulting his girlfriend at the time, which justified the officer’s use of force. A jury of Leftist San Franciscans acquitted the officer. It became known that Boudin prosecuted only 57% of the sexual assault cases referred to his office for prosecution by the San Francisco Police Department.
Finally, the voters of San Francisco, who are 90% Democrat in that most Left-leaning jurisdiction in America, had had enough. A poll in May, 2022, found that 53% of San Franciscans strongly disapproved of Boudin's job performance, 18% somewhat disapproved, 22% somewhat approved and 8% strongly approved. A campaign was launched to recall Chesa Boudin; he left office in July 2022, after only 18 months.
It turns out that there is a limit to the lawlessness, chaos, and degradation that even San Francisco Democrats are willing suffer in order to affirm that they are good communists.
Woe to those who call evil good
and good evil,
who put darkness for light
and light for darkness,
who put bitter for sweet
and sweet for bitter! —Isa. 5:20