Sam Melville grew up in Tonawanda in the 1930s and 1940s and was killed in the famed 1971 Attica prison uprising. In between, Melville waged an urban guerrilla war in Manhattan against government agencies and corporations driving the Vietnam War effort, inspiring a flood of similar revolutionary activity in the 1970s. The following is an excerpt, the second of four to be published here, from Leslie James Pickering’s new biography of Melville, Mad Bomber Melville.

Leslie James Pickering is a Buffalo native with a master’s degree in history and journalism and a strong background in radical social justice. Pickering’s book will be available in July at www.arissamediagroup.com. Look for it locally at Rust Belt Books and Talking Leaves.

After about a week of pre-trial court proceedings, defense lawyers successfully convinced Judge Milton Pollack to lower bail from half a million dollars each to $20,000 each for Jane and Dave, and $50,000 for Sam. Jane and Dave were bailed out and supporters went to work raising money for legal fees and Sam’s release.

So all week [the staff of RAT Subterranean News] spent our time protesting the innocence of Jane Alpert, Dave Hughey, and Sam Melville. “A classic case of the government entrapping the three by using an agent.” Expediency insists that you carefully lay out the facts of the case to the mass media and to people who might give bail money, but your insides scream at their civilized know-nothingism. You don’t want to talk about innocence in the New York bombings, though you believe it to be true, you want to rip off their ties, hit them in the stomach to get a little emotion flowing…

Eight bombings destroyed corporate property in New York. In the Vietnamese Demilitarized Zone the U.S. Air Force has dropped 500 pounds of bombs for every person…

Reporters question: “Was she the violent type, you know, was there anything in her past which suggests that she might be involved in extremist behavior?” Answer: “She was outgoing and thoughtfully friendly, blah, blah, blah…”

Quiet Paul Meadlo, of Terre Haute, Indiana, tells the nation he has shot old men, women and children with his M-16 while on duty in Vietnam. Townspeople and neighbors insist Paul has always been a nice boy. Not a troublemaker. It’s a shame what happened in Vietnam. One of those things…

When we called people for money for legal defense some moaned about the polarization of the country; they didn’t like it. Getting involved with people charged with bombings was somehow too sticky. You had the feeling that innocence or guilt didn’t so much matter. If the problem would just go away, the people quietly go to jail, everything would be more comfortable for them. They didn’t want anything to disturb the parade for peace in Washington…It was somehow safer to gather in the eclipse and sing along… “All we are saying, is give peace a chance.”

At 3 p.m. on Friday, January 2, 1970, Sam’s support committee went to the bondsman’s office with the money raised to bail him out. In just two hours U.S. Attorney John Doyle responded by requesting Sam’s bail be raised to $150,000, arguing that “the weight of evidence is now overwhelmingly against the defendant.”

The only new evidence was an article printed in RAT Subterranean News encouraging readers to contribute to Sam’s defense fund. An excerpt from the last paragraph drew the attention of the prosecution and the judge: “There is only one position the movement can take in relation to Sam Melville: either he is totally innocent of the charges filed against him and is the victim of a repressive government frame-up, or he is a dedicated and courageous revolutionary brother and must be set free at any cost. In either case, he must go free.”

The judge feared that Sam would jump bail because he had little connection to the people contributing money to his bail fund and that the defense committee wanted nothing more than to see Sam bomb more buildings. Questioning the contributors to Sam’s bail fund in court only reinforced his suspicions. After hearing the prosecution’s argument that Sam’s supporters were urging him to flee and do “whatever this so-called revolution demanded,” the judge raised Sam’s bail to $100,000.

When supporters came back with the additional $50,000, the judge insisted that a wealthy individual put up the entire bail unassisted and take full responsibility for Sam while the trial was still pending. By the time such a person was produced Sam was being taken to the same Criminal Court building that he bombed the day of his arrest, to be indicted on the state charges. The state charges didn’t allow for bail, so Sam wasn’t released.

The prosecutor wouldn’t budge on a thirty-year minimum sentence for Sam until the day before the trial was scheduled to start. Rather than risk the public spectacle of taking the case to trial, the prosecutor offered fifteen years for Sam and five years each for Jane and Dave under the condition that all three entered guilty pleas. Sam got word to Jane and Dave urging them to plea so he could get a release date before he grew to be an old man.

“I don’t have much hope of a so-called political trial,” Sam wrote from prison, “I’m not sure I ever did. Folks are either beyond needing that kind of education or it will never move them anyway. That’s not to imply I’m discouraged. I’m just getting realistic. With repression getting heavier folks have to move beyond the kangaroos [courts]. I find it laughable that we can still have papers printing info on [Molotov] cocktails and other things. Anyway, I hope the home fires keep burning.”

“I have little to say regarding our last court appearance and it’s possible effect,” Sam continued in a later letter, “I just don’t think folks need further demonstrations of the court’s bankruptcy…Ours is not a political case. We aren’t testing the letter or intent of the law. The law is our enemy. With one’s enemy it is sometimes expedient to make deals. But to be forced to acknowledge their procedure and rhetoric without denying their authority would be treachery.”

“Hanging over all our legal decisions was the fact that Sam faced more than three hundred years in total time,” Jane wrote. “The more political we made the trial, the worse the consequences would have been for Sam…It would have made a splash in the papers perhaps; but Sam did not want to spend his life in prison for the sake of verbal histrionics. He hated the courtroom. When he was not completely ignoring the proceedings he sat with his fists clenched and his mouth tightened in barely suppressed fury.”

On May 8, 1970, Sam, Jane and Dave all pled guilty to a federal conspiracy.

Sam only made one comment during sentencing his last day in court. When the judge emphasized the damage Sam caused by pointing out that one of his bombings destroyed $90,000 in property, Sam stood up and shouted, “That’s about two Viet Cong!” referring to an estimate that it was costing the U.S. government about $35,000 for each Viet Cong guerrilla it killed.

Sam was sentenced to thirteen years for the federal charges and eighteen years for the state charges. The sentences were to run concurrently. With good time, Sam could be out in his mid-fifties.

An article in the RAT Subterranean News titled “All the Low Down on the Blow Down” illustrated the way much of the movement felt about the bombings.

The bombs which have shaken New York City for five months ripped into the steel and concrete guts of Amerika. They exploded in the office buildings and corporate headquarters where the business of the Amerikan empire is carried out.

Each day those buildings suck in human energy and spit it out again in a regular nine-to-five rhythm. Then they stand idle and aloof, empty of humanity, while the rest of Manhattan swells to the point of explosion. During the day, the decisions made and carried out in these anonymous executive suites and administrative offices affect the lives of millions of people. It is important to examine the particulars of their functioning.

The article explained that the Whitehall Induction Center, the Criminal Courthouse and the Federal Building were “understandable enough” as bombing targets. Whitehall, it said, “takes the men who are needed in Amerika’s wars,” the courthouse “flushes away the men and women who are dysfunctional,” and the Federal Building “is the embodiment of the Amerikan government, spreading its bureaucratic pall over the nation.”

It explained that the corporate targets were less clear to most Americans, who “are not meant to understand the workings of Chase Manhattan or General Motors, and ideally they are brought up not to care.”

Those private corporate entities house the men who make the critical decisions about the economic life of the empire. They live in fancy estates like the Rockefeller’s Pocantico in Terrytown, NY; they meet in the plush lounges of clubs like the Links and Knickerbocker, and they make their plans in gatherings of groups like the Council on Foreign Relations. Their news is printed in The Wall Street Journal and Fortune Magazine and they use a language spiked with Monopoly game phrases which is more obscure than the language of any youth culture.

An epilog followed the article, pounding the message home.

You are all bombers—every one of you who stays in his place, who keeps shellinout/sellinout/paying for the Amerikan nightmare, who doesn’t care enough to stop the world bullshit. Did Marine Midland cry out in pain? Does Chase Manhattan mourn the seared and shriveled corpse of its only child? No, no—it wasn’t you this time, it couldn’t have been you Mr. ABM [American Business Man], big fat earlymorning B52 cocksucker, it wasn’t your style. These bombs castrated your property, not your children, and they did something you’ve never done…they gave fair warning.

Dave Hughey spoke on the mixture of fear and excitement that was swelling in the movement during a speech he gave shortly before going to prison:

A lot of people in the movement are really scared because of what’s been happening in the last few months. They’re afraid that the actions of the Weathermen and the things that have been going off around the city will escalate the repression and lead to the destruction of the movement the way it is. The problem with the movement is that it is afraid to let go of itself.

One of the functions of any repressive society is that it makes people hold on to things the way they are. For this fucking system here to survive it’s absolutely necessary that people hold on to their jobs, their private homes, private cars, private bodies; that men hold on to their domination over women, and women to their submission to men; that whites hold on to their white skin privilege. But most important: that people hold on to the definition of life that this system has given them. Namely that life is that 70 or 80 years after which you die a natural death. So that an 80-year-old man who lives 80 years of boredom but dies a natural death is said to have lived a full life. But if an 18-year-old kid dies a violent death, that’s considered tragic.

As long as people hold on to that definition of life obviously no one is going to challenge the existing order. Because challenging the existing order means putting that which they call life on the line and probably losing it in the process.

So for this movement of resistance and protection to join the revolution, it has to start letting go of some of its institutions and the whole way it defines reality. Our little individual consciousnesses whose main concern is to be protected and to stay alive have to start giving way to a broader consciousness, a collective consciousness and a cosmic consciousness where the individual rather than constantly escaping from life and death and trembling at the slightest signs of repression—lets go and flows into life and into death. And in the context of repressive Amerika this flow into life and death amounts to a very deep and strong desire to fight.

Next week: Melville in prison.