My Fugitive - storytelling investigator
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this episode of my fugitive is available everywhere you listen to podcasts, but if you want to binge the whole series right now, all episodes are available exclusively on the new odyssey amp odyssey is your audio home for all the podcasts, music news and sports that matter to you. That's a U. D A C Y. It wasn't uncommon for our phone to ring in the middle of the night or from my family to live under police protection or for the bomb dogs to come at dawn and sniff underneath my father's car. I was assigned to hold happy our family terrier so he didn't attack the police dogs while they did their job. My father was a civil rights attorney, one of the few in ST louis and all of Missouri actually in the 19 sixties and seventies civil rights attorneys didn't get a lot of respect. In the midwest they were considered troublemakers. It was a job for someone who is kind of a terrier himself. Angry and unrelenting. That was my dad. He was very good at what he did. He had a lot of clients. So when our phone rang on the night of May four, I woke up but I wasn't surprised his clients called at all hours of the day and night with all kinds of emergencies. I was 12 years old at the time and I was used to it. We lived in a big house right near Washington University. There was an eight ft fence around the garage in our backyard and that night I heard my father opened it back the car out and close the fence and drive away down Maryland avenue. I went back to sleep. It was so normal for us that I didn't even mention it the next day. Years later though I'd go back and begin to pull at the threads of that night May four, thousands of students rioted on the campus of washoe. They burned a federal building to the ground. Some of them were arrested and one of them became my father's client, Howard mechanic. He was a 22 year old senior at the time, a long haired campus activists with plans to go to law school. Instead he was sentenced to five years in federal prison, five years for protesting. But Howard didn't go to prison. He went on the run and he stayed on the run for nearly 30 years. My father represented hundreds maybe thousands of clients over the course of his career from Traffic Court to the U. S. Supreme Court. But Howard mechanics disappearance haunted him for the rest of his life for years. He'd ask sometimes out of the blue where did Howard go? Whatever became of him? Finally I decided to find out of us three Children. I was the one who inherited my father's preoccupation with Howard. I didn't become a lawyer. Although I did think about it. Instead. I became a historian and a documentary filmmaker. My search for Howard mechanic led me to places I never could have imagined. A Cold war spy ring, a conspiracy to murder a civil rights leader and the U. S. Government's attempts to cover it all up. I know it sounds like the stuff of crazy tin hat conspiracy theories except it's not. I spent almost a decade fighting for the documents to prove it. Ahm Nina guild in C. B. And this is my fugitive. Before we get to the riots at Washington University on May four, I want to go back in time and talk about a string of events that lead up to that night. The first is a speech made three years earlier in the summer of 1967. So I'm gonna say very loudly and say it very explicitly what I mean by a revolution and I mean by revolution is overthrowing the american government. That's devereaux Kennedy, everybody calls him dev he ran in the same circles as Howard mechanic and he was the student body president at Washington University. His speech was delivered at a gathering in santa barbara California, billed as the first ever meeting of student leaders opposed to the war. It's gonna come about by black rebellions in our cities, joined by some white people. People in universities can do a number of things to help, they have access to some money and they can give these people guns which I think they should do. They can engage in acts of terrorism and sabotage outside the ghetto white activists can go outside there and they can blow things up and I think they should. The major thing they can do is while all this is going on completely demoralizing America and castrating America, they can show people what America is capable of if it ends imperialism and if it installs a different kind of system. Deb speech was covered in the local and even in the national press. Years later, Deb told me he had no idea this speech would get that kind of reaction. I remember there was a lot of loose talk about revolution this and revolution that and I said, well to me, revolution means overthrow of the government. But understand I had no idea of how controversial that would be at the time because I wasn't looking up to see all the people who were over above recording this and listening to it, the newspaper people shortly after that speech. Some strange things started to happen in Dev's life. I was dating and in fact living with who its name, I won't mention so a letter was sent to her parents saying, do you know your daughter is living with and sleeping with this guy who's this radical. It was anonymous. We always wonder who wrote the letter and I'm absolutely convinced it was the FBI dev might well have been right about that. Within weeks of that speech, the FBI opened what's known as a main file on Dev and by february of 1968 the ST louis bureau was sending memos about DEV straight to J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI. Almost 30 years later, one of Hoover's trusted lieutenants wrote a book about his time at the bureau and in it, he quoted Debs speech in santa barbara verbatim. DeV was definitely on the FBI's radar, but he wasn't alone. Debs friends back at washoe. They were of interested the feds. Now to the next event I want to tell you about takes place on wash shoes campus. A little more than a year after death, Kennedy's speech. Again, this doesn't involve howard mechanic directly, but this one puts him squarely in the sights of the FBI. It's late in the fall of 1968 and the last nine months had been a volatile time in America martin Luther King Jr was assassinated in april The Apostle of Nonviolence in the civil rights movement has been shot to death. In Memphis Tennessee bobby Kennedy was killed two months later in august student protesters were beaten and gassed outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago campus protests became angrier and more radicalized and the target was often the campus ROTC program, The reserve Officer training Corps. Sometimes it was called Rosie, there were two ROTC buildings on the washoe campus, one for the air force and one for the army On December 3, 1968. At 4:00 AM, a security guard on campus spotted two people near the army ROTC building. They were in the process of placing homemade bombs on a window sill. When the guards saw them, one of them took off, but the security guard caught the other. A 21 year old senior named Michael Siskind. Siskind was arrested and charged but not with attempted arson, with sabotage. A federal crime. The charge was so unusual that it attracted national media attention in ST louis. An anti war protest has resulted in what the Justice Department calls the first conviction under the World War two sabotage act. A 21 year old Washington University Senior Michael Sisk in today pleaded guilty of attempting to destroy an ROTC building with a fire bomb. No one was hurt, no device even went off, But Siskind was sentenced to five years in Federal Penitentiary. The conviction for sabotage and the long sentence. Those were signals ST louis was a place where protesters were going to be punished. J. Edgar Hoover congratulated his agents in ST louis on the system conviction, but whoever was with Michael system that night was still out there and Hoover, wanted him caught that never happened. The FBI never charged anyone else with that crime, but they had their suspicions. I have a memo from the special agent in charge of the ST Louis office of the FBI To J. Edgar Hoover. It has one name on it, a possible accomplice to Michael Siskind, my father's future client. Howard mechanic mm more after the break the draft lottery, a live report on tonight's picking of the birthdates for the draft. On december 1st, 1969. The draft lottery was broadcast on national television. Here's how it worked. 366 little capsules, one for every day of the year plus the leap day were put into a bin, Then drawn out one day at a time. A random selection, a sequence for induction for 1970, september 14 0 september 14th. All men born that day between the ages of 18 and 26 where Uncle Sam's number one pick, there are 366 numbers to select one for each. It went on for hours until every date was chosen. If you've got a low number, you were probably going to Vietnam high number, you were safe in the middle, You cross your fingers and hope they didn't need you. The lottery changed everything. All men had to register for the draft when they turned 18. But before the lottery you could avoid the draft if you were in school or had the right sort of job or even if you were married with Children no more. Now, the random selection process meant that a lot of privileged white kids could no longer be protected. They were at risk of going to war at washoe and on campuses, All over America. The protests grew even more urgent and intense. One of the things that happened on campus was that there were demonstrations, but at night there would be kind of guerilla activity of people out with Waymo slingshots and if you put a ball bearing and you can do serious damage. That's a former member of the students for a democratic society at washoe. The local chapter of the national anti war group S. D. S all these years later, he's still anxious about us using his name in conjunction with the event he's about to describe On February 23, 1970, he and some friends were sitting around an off campus apartment. There were about a dozen or 15 of us talking about what we should do among other things. I said we should do something dramatic and in the course of an hour or so we developed a plan, a plan to burn down a building. All of us had some concept of how you commit arson and none of us were at all stupid. A number of things were thought about. One of the most important was is there anybody in the building? We want to make sure there's nobody in the building. Mhm. And the second thing is that we should get away with a siphon gas from a car into some empty bottles, grab some rags and headed to campus around 11 pm. Certain people went to the dormitory areas to set off fire alarms to distract things. They split up one group took the army ROTC building and the other, the Air Force. We literally were there for less than 10 minutes, broke windows and throwing molotov cocktails and got out of there. We didn't wait around if we're doing this well or not. The Air Force building didn't burn, but a photo of the gutted army ROTC building dominated the front page of the ST louis post dispatch. The next day, the U. S. Attorney convened to federal grand juries that spring to try to identify who was involved. My father represented the students who've been subpoena. He told them all to take the 5th. Don't say a word and they didn't. The code of silence amongst the arsonist stock. No one named names which angered local law enforcement and the FBI. It failed to catch Michael Simkins accomplished when they arrested him back in December of 68. And now the building that had been his target was burned to the ground And No one knew who did it. In fact, when the man you just heard told me this story, it was the first time anyone had ever admitted to the crime. But once again, the FBI had its suspicions. A memo from the ST louis special agent in charge to J. Edgar Hoover names. One man is the chief suspect in the burning of the army Rat C building again. Howard mechanic. Another document describes a conversation between Howard and a confidential informant to the FBI. The informant tells howard has done a good job on the ROTC building. Howard doesn't respond. He doesn't admit to anything but the informant reports, that mechanic grinned when she suggested that he was involved. Mhm Right. See buildings were targets on plenty of campuses across the country. But while she was different, because ST louis was different. Unlike any other city in America, ST louis was built on the foundations of war and that fact mattered in ways the students protesting on wash use campus couldn't possibly have understood. I guess that's an aspect of the history of the city that has been hidden behind the frontier mythology of the gateway arch, walter, johnson is a native Missourian. He teaches history at Harvard and he wrote a book about ST louis called the broken heart of America. The gateway arch is the most famous symbol of the city. It's a huge skyscraper high structure right by the Mississippi river and the banks of that river are full of your full of lead. The military history of ST louis is literally in the soil of the place. Military industry follows lead and so ST louis became very early in the 19th century. A center of lead smelting because of that. The military of the young United States had its western headquarters in ST louis. So what that meant is that most of the indian wars that were fought on the planes before the civil war were either staged out of or supported from ST louis. So ST louis was the nerve center of the wars on the planes. A century later, ST louis was still a center of America's military industrial complex by the Vietnam war. Local industries had moved from lead smelting into something much more sophisticated. Monsanto based in the suburb of Crete core was making the defoliant agent Orange Olin Industries in Clayton was making M1 Rifles. McDonald Douglas was making fighter jets. Mallinckrodt chemical was making napalm and each of those corporations had seats on the board of trustees at Washington University. It's as if those protests were in the middle of a military base and they thought of those protests is being in the middle of their campus where they went to school and instead, from the standpoint of the FBI or the even the administration of Watch you, it looks as if they're there right in the middle of some sort of strategically essential asset. So the university's leadership was not going to look past the burning of an ROTC building. They wanted the protest to stop and they went after the student leaders, they got an injunction barring a handful of them from protesting on campus, including the man named in the FBI reports. Howard mechanic. This brings us to late April 1970 and the next event leading up to the May four riots. Richard Nixon is scheduled to address the nation about America's involvement in Vietnam for a brief moment, There is hope that he'll declare an end to the fighting or at least a winding down. Instead, he announces an escalation. They were already doing it in secret, but now the U. S. Will officially expand the war beyond the boundaries of Vietnam and start bombing cambodia. We take this action not for the purpose of expanding the war into cambodia, but for the purpose of ending the war in Vietnam and winning the just peace We all desire, protests erupted on campuses all across America at Kent State University outside of Akron Ohio Governor James Rhodes called in the Ohio National Guard. They occupied the campus and clashed with students firing round after round of tear gas roads gave a press conference saying they would no longer tolerate the uprising. You can literally hear him banging on the desk in his speech. They only have one thing in mind that is to destroy higher education in Ohio. And when they start taking over communities, this is when we're going to use every part of the law enforcement Asia hard to drive them out of camp. When the clashes continued on May four, the National Guard didn't just fire tear gas. Yeah, National Guardsmen opened fire with semi automatic weapons in just 13 seconds. They shot over 60 rounds into the crowd, four students were killed, two young men, William Schroeder of Lorraine, Ohio and Jeffrey Miller of Plainview new york and two young women, Sandy lee shorter of youngstown, Ohio, nine more were wounded, one was paralyzed. There's a famous photograph from that day of a long haired girl kneeling and screaming over the bleeding body of a young man lying face down on the pavement. After the shooting, one young man dipped a black flag of revolution in the blood and waved it about as a symbol of the students, anger and frustration. The news spread quickly to campuses across the country. At least 114 colleges reported student strikes, some conducted with the sanction of the college administrations, but there were pockets of violence and destruction at the University of California Berkeley students tried to burn the Navy ROTC building. Around 10 30 that night, students began gathering at Washington University. There were thousands of people there from everywhere. We had never had a crowd anything close to that and I did speak, but they didn't want to hear anything that's dev Kennedy who'd given that fateful speech at santa Barbara three years earlier, they didn't want to hear speeches at all that crowd. They wanted to go straight to the ROTC building and burn it down, which they did outside the Air force building. The crowd began chanting and throwing rocks. One person later reported that he heard a little bang mixed in with the chance and the cheers and then some of the protesters broke down the building's doors and smashed the windows. That's when I was frightened for other people. I thought, oh boy, you cannot burn down this building and when the fire trucks came, which they did and throw rocks at the fire trucks. I said, this is gonna be for people who are doing it is going to be serious trouble. At 12:45 the police issued a code 1000 the riot call as the building went up in flames. Dev Kennedy worried that he'd be held responsible and then he spotted something odd. A man in a tuxedo lingering at the edge of the demonstration. It was there looking at all this and I thought there's a very good place for you to be tonight. They go right in front of him and be right with him. So if there's any question about where you were, when this happened, nobody can say anything because who's doing this is certainly going to be caught for it. Around one a.m. the firefighters had the fire under control. The crowd broke up and backed away from the smoking building. All that was left standing was an empty shell. The phone in my home rang a few hours later, my father got up, got dressed and drove off down Maryland avenue the next day. Howard mechanic became his client. My father fought Howard's case and they lost Howard got five years in federal prison. An extraordinary inexplicable sentence. There was almost no evidence that he had done anything except attend to protest on the night that the Kent state students were murdered. So Howard mechanic disappeared and my dad spent the rest of his life haunted by him in 1993 more than 20 years after Howard fled. A reporter from the ST louis post dispatch interviewed my dad at some point in the interview, my father said to him if I wrote a book, it would be called Howard Mechanic by the end of his career. My father was one of the most respected civil rights attorneys in the country. He kept conscientious objectors out of jail. He fought redlining laws in ST louis he argued before the U. S. Supreme Court and the book about his life would be called Howard mechanic. I recently found a tape of the speech my father had given in 1987. He was accepting an award from the national lawyers guild for his civil rights work. And he talked for a while about the two things that shaped his professional life. The first was his choice to represent black defendants at a time when almost all of white ST louis opposed the civil rights movement. And the second, the second thing was I think the student movement which I became involved in the RGC burnings and wash university and throwing a cherry bomb by the way is Howard mechanic in new york. I hasn't been hurt a he was sentenced to five years in the penitentiary and I haven't seen him. Yeah, in the middle of accepting an award for his life's work. There was Howard, my father's strange constant companion when my dad was dying of cancer. He and I talked about Howard a lot. In fact, the last real conversation we ever had was about Howard. We sat on the porch of his house in south ST louis, where he lived since he and my mother had divorced. It was almost winter, but the late afternoon sun was warm and my father seemed to want to talk while he still had the energy. He endured decades of harassment from the government. After Howard went on the run, the FBI believed he was somehow complicit in Howard's flight and he was angry that Howard had fled and left him holding the bag. But there was something else to do. Something about the whole thing just didn't add up. He had the feeling that something had happened that Howard and he couldn't explain later, I would discover just how right he was. I spent nearly a decade trying to answer the question of whatever became of Howard mechanic and every door I opened revealed more doors and more rooms. This show is about that journey from one room to the next and the ghost that occupied all of them. It's a story fueled by paranoia about communists in our midst and about anti war activists trying to bring down the United States and about the threat of black power. All of it forged in the peculiar crucible of my hometown ST louis Yeah. After a couple of hours talking that day on my father's front porch. The sun went down. He was chilly and worn out and I realized at some point in our conversation I did something that was unusual for us. I put my arm around him and we walked inside that way, holding on to one another. We never spoke about Howard again in the last weeks of his life, my father's incredibly sharp mind began to fail. He never did learn what happened to Howard mechanic or why. But I did. Mhm. Next time on my fugitive, Well information King has been shot at the Lorraine. I could hear people say get down, get down. I remember seeing him fall in a way that he wasn't just getting down. I could see the blood was coming from his right side. It took a good number of weeks before the FBI finally figured out that it was James Earl Ray. There were always offers being made on what might be a bounty to collect if somebody was able to kill King. Mhm My fugitive is an original production of pineapple Street Studios and odyssey. You can binge all episodes from this series exclusively on the new odyssey app. Odyssey has all the podcast you crave plus the music news and sports that matter to you. That's a U. D. A. C. Y downloaded for free today from the app store or google play. This show is hosted by me, Nina guild in CB Our producers are Cat erin, a greenish Sasha grey, Justine Down, Jenelle, Anderson and Maria Robin Somerville. With additional production support from Sandra Ellen. The show was edited by Joel level with support from maddie sprung Kaiser research, in fact checking by Charles Richter and Ben Phalen. Our engineers are Noriko, cabe, Hannis Brown and Will Big Would. This episode features original composition by Hannis Brown and music from Blue dot Sessions. Special thanks to our executive producers max Lynskey and Jenna Weiss Berman and thank you to each of our guests for joining us to help tell this story, to see photos, FBI documents and more. Follow us on instagram at my fugitive podcast and visit our website at my fugitive podcast dot com.