Weather Underground terrorist Kathy Boudin born to privilege

Kathy Boudin was born to a left-wing family steeped in the traditions of jurisprudence, but she black-sheeped her way around terror gangs.

Kathy Boudin, a former member of the radical Weather Underground, in a 1981 mug shot. Picture: Getty Images

Kathy Boudin Terrorist.
Born New York, May 19, 1943; died New York, May 1, aged 78.

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On March 6, 1970, bombs urban terrorists were making in New York’s Greenwich Village accidentally went off, demolishing a four-storey townhouse and killing three misguided Marxists but not, unfortunately, Kathy Boudin, who escaped and went on the run.

On October 20, 1981, after dropping off her infant son to a babysitter, she was getaway driver in a robbery of a Brinks van that netted more than $2m the gang planned to fund its war against America. They shot dead one guard – a father of two – and put so many bullets into another’s shoulder he needed his arm reattached (still working as a guard, that man was killed beneath the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001).

Boudin drove the killers away but was stopped by police. She got out of the hired truck, said she had done nothing wrong and that she was frightened by their weapons, and asked that they holster them. When they did, Boudin’s accomplices jumped from the back, one with a rapid-fire M16 military rifle, and shot four of them. Waverly Brown, the first black officer in the New York town of Nanuet and a father of three, lay bleeding. One of Boudin’s crew walked over and shot him dead with a 9mm pistol. Sergeant Edward O’Grady, a Vietnam veteran also with three children, was shot and died in hospital.

Boudin and David Gilbert, the father of her son Chesa, were given long jail sentences for their various crimes, including murder, even though neither was armed that day. Both became model prisoners – the only way to secure parole one day. Which they both did.

Boudin was born to a family of left-wing lawyers. Her Ukrainian-born great-uncle migrated to the US as a teenager, studied law and became a member of the fledgling Socialist Labor Party of America (never that popular, at last count it had 77 members).

Clients of her lawyer father, Leonard, included the Central Bank of Iran (during the US hostage crisis), the Cuban government, singer Paul Robeson, controversial author Dr Benjamin Spock and criminal unionist Jimmy Hoffa. President George H. Bush appointed her brother Mich­ael to the federal Court of Appeals from which he retired just last December.

Boudin topped her university graduating class in 1965. She was drawn to that era’s civil rights and anti-war movements but soon took a radical path, joining a group first known as the Weathermen (adapted from Bob Dylan’s 1965 hit Subterranean Homesick Blues – “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows”).

Rebadged the Weather Underground, this delusional band of would-be revolutionaries first gained attention by smuggling psychiatrist and LSD pioneer Timothy Leary – then a counterculture hero – out of jail, bombing a statue commemorating fallen police officers, and organising the violent Days of Rage protests to mark the start of the Chicago 7 trials of the men arrested outside the notorious 1968 Democratic national convention. Thereafter they decided to arm themselves for guerrilla warfare and kill police. The FBI believed it had perhaps 400 members at that time, but the turn to murderous violence saw many walk away. The FBI created a special Ten Most Wanted list of 16 names to include the organisers.

The gang planted and exploded a bomb in the Senate rooms of the US Capitol on March 3, 1971. On May 19, 1972 – the birthdate of North Vietnam leader Ho Chi Minh – they set off a bomb inside the Pentagon. Both events were praised by extremist groups across the world. In 1977, with the Vietnam War over, the remains of the group planned to bomb the office of California senator John Briggs, but they had been infiltrated by FBI officers and the scheme was revealed and five members arrested. The group splintered and Boudin sided with a communist breakaway gang that joined with the Black Liberation Army, itself a splinter of the Black Panthers, already blamed for the murders of 13 US police officers. Together they robbed the Brinks van.

Boudin pleaded guilty to murder and was sentenced for 20 years to life but was paroled in 2003. Gilbert was sentenced to 75 years but disgraced New York governor Andrew Cuomo granted him clemency and he was released last November.

Boudin did a master’s degree in jail, returned to study and became an adjunct professor at Columbia University. Her son Chesa is San Francisco’s District Attorney. Chesa said: “She always ended phone calls with a laugh … she wanted to leave every person she spoke with, especially me, with joy and hope.” Perhaps that’s also the last sound heard by officers Brown and O’Grady.