'Say Their Names'

Multnomah County DA Mike Schmidt reaches out to the incarcerated

The spirit of Kathy Boudin, Weather Underground revolutionary and killer of cops, hovers over the re-election campaign of Multnomah County District Attorney Mike Schmidt.

Had she not died of cancer last year at age 78, Boudin might have been in the audience at OMSI’s Empirical Theater last week when Schmidt helped kick off the Portland premiere of a film called “Beyond Bars: A Movement, Not a Moment.”

Instead her son, former San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin, was with Schmidt while his mom was up on the screen explaining why prison doesn’t help people.

By this time next year, you likely will have been invited to see this film, which the Oregon Justice Resource Center is promoting to churches, schools and organizations. (The Unitarians are probably salivating at the chance.) Maybe your kids will come home from school telling you how terrible it is when men and women are sent to prison. Their kids suffer, too. It’s not fair.

Ever since Schmidt announced he was running for re-election earlier this year, there has been a consensus that it will be an uphill fight. A prominent billboard downtown blamed him for turning Portland into a “Schmidt show.”

So why is he running, and how will he win? He’s doing it for the kids. The children of the incarcerated.

The film centers on the experience of Chesa, who was raised by family friends (prominent Weather Underground revolutionaries Bernardine Dohrn and David Ayers) while his mother (Kathy Boudin) and father (David Gilbert) were in prison for taking part in the robbery of a Brink’s truck by members of the Black Liberation Army (to finance a Republic of New Afrika, a black nation to be formed in the southern U.S.).

An inconvenient fact barely mentioned in the film: A security guard and two police officers were shot and killed in the Brink’s robbery. All were dads, leaving nine children fatherless. Not mentioned at all was that one of the murdered police officers was black.

The film allows all four of Chesa’s adoptive and biological “parents” to speak about the difficulties of the incarcerated who have children.

The foursome’s notoriety has long since faded from public consciousness. Bernardine Dohrn and Kathy Boudin dominated media coverage of the Weather Underground because they were young, attractive white women.

Check out Dohrn’s FBI mugshot.

Boudin was the daughter of New York civil rights lawyer Leonard Boudin. She had a degree from Bryn Mawr. Her uncle was liberal, muckraking journalist I.F. Stone. In 1969 she joined anti-war militants in the “Days of Rage” window-smashing rampage through Chicago.

How oppressive is a criminal record, even one linked to the murder of police? Three of Chesa’s four parents found homes in academia.

A few highlights not mentioned in the film:

A decade before the Brink’s robbery/murder, Kathy Boudin was taking a shower in a Greenwich Villager townhouse when her fellow Weathermen accidentally detonated a bomb (roofing nails wrapped around dynamite to inflict casualties) that they were preparing, destined for an Army base. The bomb killed three of them (including Ayers’ girlfriend at the time). Boudin ran naked from the wreckage and found refuge at a neighbor’s, then returned to her parents’ home. When her name surfaced in news reports, she went underground.

Dohrn served only seven months in jail for refusing to cooperate with a federal grand jury investigating the Brink’s killings. She later found a career teaching law at Northwestern University.

Ayers served almost no time, “despite cheerfully admitting in his memoir to, among other illegal acts, conspiring to bomb the Pentagon.” He also found a career teaching education at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Gilbert, who never cooperated with authorities, drew the longest sentence — 75 years to life. In 2021, shortly before then-New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo resigned in disgrace, he commuted Gilbert’s sentence to 40 years, allowing him to be paroled.

New York media reported that Gilbert’s son, San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin “tweeted joyfully about the news … even posting a photo of him as a baby holding onto his father’s back: ‘Me and my dad in one of our last precious moment(s) of freedom together.’”

Today Gilbert lives the life of a grandfather, taking care of Chesa’s son.

Three men who never got to experience the joys of being a grandfather and whose families were not interviewed for the film: Brink’s security guard Peter Paige, 49; Sgt. Edward J. O’Grady, 33, and Officer Waverly L. Brown, 45 of the Nyack, N.Y. Police Department.

In the film, Kathy Boudin recalls matter-of-factly the day of the heist.

“One thing revolutionary groups need is funds…,” is how she rationalized the Black Liberation Army’s decision to rob a Brink’s truck.

A white couple driving a U-Haul truck as a getaway vehicle — Gilbert in the driver’s seat, Boudin his passenger — wouldn’t arouse police suspicion since the suspects would be black.

“The day of the robbery was like any other day…,” Boudin says of Oct. 20, 1981. “Drop your baby off at the baby sitter.”

She took 14-month-old Chesa to the baby sitter, crossing paths with Dohrn. By then, she and David Ayers had children of their own. They considered themselves “travelers in the peace movement,” Dohrn says in the film.

The Black Liberation Army’s “expropriation of funds” immediately turned violent.

Viewers of “Beyond Bars” will have to go online to find out what really happened. One of the more detailed accounts is Mark Gado’s  “The Brinks Robbery of 1981.”

Brink’s security guard Peter Paige and his partners, Joseph Trombino and James Kelly were doing their daily rounds when they stopped at a bank in Nanuet, New York. Shortly before 4 p.m., a van pulled up, and three masked men jumped out. In seconds, without saying a word, they grabbed $1.6 million (equal to roughly $5.2 million today) and shot Paige. He died without ever pulling his gun. Trombino’s left arm, was shredded with bullets, leaving him permanently crippled. Kelly, fired several rounds but was outgunned and hit by shrapnel.

The Black Liberation Army fled in the van and met up with one of their getaway vehicles — Boudin and Gilbert, just another white couple, sitting in a U-Haul truck. The killers threw bags of money into the truck, jumped in and took off. A witness saw the transaction and called police.

A road block halted the U-Haul truck. True to the Black Liberation Army’s planning, police were thrown off by the appearance of a white couple since the robbers were black. Here’s where the story diverges on a crucial point that could have saved lives.

The police knew the robbers were armed and had already killed a Brink’s guard. According to Kathy Boudin, at the road block she immediately got out with her hands up, and the police voluntarily lowered their weapons.

According to police, she protested that she and Gilbert were innocent while waving her hands in the air and pleading with the cops to lower their guns. They relented.

“Put the shotgun back,” said Sgt. Ed O’Grady. “I don't think it’s them.”

He would later be shot repeatedly after the rear door of the U-Haul flew up, and a half dozen members of the Black Liberation Army came out firing automatic weapons and wearing body armor.

Officer Waverly Brown, the only black officer in the small Nyack Police Department, was shot as he tried to return fire. As he lay prone, one of the gunmen came up and shot him point-blank.

Boudin fled the gunfight on foot.

An off-duty New York City corrections officer was driving by when he noticed  police had stopped a U-Haul truck. As he slowed, he saw a female sprinting away from the cops. His instincts told him to give chase. He jumped out and ran across six lanes of mid-day traffic to catch her, Gado writes.

“He shot him, I didn’t shoot him, he shot him!” she yelled after she was caught. She gave police a false name.

Much has been written — and forgotten — about the Brink’s robbery. The heavily-armed gunmen fanned out in the chaos, carjacking and assaulting motorists in a frenzy to get away.

By comparison, the film “Beyond Bars” is mostly talking heads — and elderly heads at that. Boudin, Gilbert, Dohrn and Ayers all look so harmless now. Even late into middle age, Dohrn was often touted by the media for her glamorous image. The initial shot of her in “Beyond Bars” is a shock. The scaly flesh on her chest is particularly reptilian. She still exudes confidence that she knows what’s right.

At one point, her son Zayd Ayers Dohrn comes on, refers to himself as “Radical Spawn” and explains how he is helping with the campaign to elect Chesa as San Francisco District Attorney.

Mother Kathy Boudin weighs in that Chesa’s “great genius” in running the race was how he put his parents’ incarceration out there publicly. For a long time, she said, he tried to pass off their criminal history as a Robin Hood story.

In the film Boudin and Gilbert recall the hardship of being separated from Chesa as he grew up, and how the injustice later inspired him to run for San Francisco DA.

Included are photos of “trailer” visits where mothers at New York state’s Bedford Hills Correctional Facility can bond with their children. There are photos of Kathy and Chesa baking bread. (Gilbert was housed at Attica.)

Kathy Boudin acknowledged that when her son complained about their separation, she would remind him, “Those families of the dead men don’t get to have trailer visits.”

Boudin with the help of civil rights attorney Leonard Weinglass had cut a plea deal, and she was freed in 2003 at age 60 after 22 years in prison.

By way of explanation for her criminal behavior, she said at the time, “I had an ideology … that said essentially, white people, because of having privilege, are essentially bad.”

The film shows her greeting Chesa for the first time as a free woman holding a Smoothie for him. Boudin’s parole led Diane O'Grady, widow of Sgt. O’Grady to publish a letter in the New York Post.

“To see and hear of the celebrating by Boudin and her supporters was hurtful and indecent,” she wrote.

Boudin had made a public request for a face-to-face apology. O’Grady set her straight: “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. … It’s nothing to celebrate.”

Boudin later earned a doctorate and taught at Columbia University.

The film veers from Chesa Boudin’s successful campaign and election (take note that his campaign staff appears to be all female) to his eventual recall.

Criminals don’t need a weatherman to tell them which way the justice pendulum is swinging. A progressive DA is good news for their line of work. Crime in San Francisco escalated. The recall followed.

At one point during the recall, Portland’s Mike Schmidt offered his services — and campaign contributions — to Chesa. The latter returned the favor and came to the Portland premiere of “Beyond Bars: A Movement Not a Moment.”

While driving into Portland from the airport, Boudin noticed all the tents along the highway. Schmidt told him he was being blamed for the tents.

Chesa was sympathetic. He told the audience at the premiere he had become as unpopular as a used condom in the Tenderloin District. Like three of his parents, he has now found a home in academia. He is the founding executive director of UC Berkeley’s Criminal Law & Justice Center.

Sounding a lot like Schmidt, Chesa told the Portland audience that his state spends too much on prisons, and it’s not making anyone safer.

“We need a new approach.”

There is nothing new about Chesa Boudin or Mike Schmidt’s progressive approach to justice.

Note this quote: “It’s a billion dollar business in our country – and the biggest and greatest in the world – American corrections.”

That could have been Boudin or Schmidt. It’s actually Portland resident Thomas Gaddis, author of “Birdman of Alcatraz” writing in the Sept. 30, 1973 issue of The Oregonian.

Gaddis had been involved with Oregon’s Project NewGate, which welcomed incarcerated prisoners onto college campuses in the 1960s and 70s. Some prisoners made better lives for themselves. Some didn’t. But word got around in the criminal community.  Oregon was open for business.

By 1985, Oregon’s crime rate was starting to hurt. In 1994 voters passed Measure 11, requiring minimum-mandatory sentences for certain violent crimes.

Since then, the media and state legislators have helped chip away at those “harsh” sentences because, well, it isn’t fair.

Why do the media, Hollywood and politicians fall for the Kathy Boudins and her crowd?

Because it’s possible to play God for criminals who have done something terrible but are still alive. You think you can save them. You can’t save the dead.

At the very least, “Beyond Bars: A Movement Not a Moment” could have said these names out loud: “Peter Paige, Sgt. Edward J. O’Grady, Officer Waverly L. Brown.”

The dedication at the end of the film could have gone to them.

Instead, here’s how the film closes: “In Memory of Kathy Boudin, Rest in Power.”