Underground links likely to resurface for obama

Broadway Baby was not mentioned during the Democratic infighting in Pennsylvania. But Broadway Babyonce a chic children's boutique in Manhattan's is the future, if Barack Obama is the presidential candidate in the fall. This story involves two Chicagoans, former Weather Underground terrorist leaders Bernardine Dohrn and her husband, William Ayers, both Obama supporters who blessed his initial foray into politics. Last week, the unrepentant Ayers became a flash point in Obama's debate with Hillary Clinton. 'And what they [Weather Underground] did was set bombs and in some instances people died,' said Clinton, sweetly playing the white terrorist card. 'I know Sen. Obama is a good man and I respect him greatly, but I think this is an issue that certainly the Republicans will be raising.'' And why shouldn't they? As president, Hillary's husband commuted the prison sentences of two other Weather Underground members and of Puerto Rican terrorists, so her scolding was quite unconvincing. Obama insists such gotcha politics is beneath our dignity. But no association is above question for a candidate, whether , Illinois political fixer Tony Rezko, or Ayers and Dohrn. Clinton and Republican John McCain have suffered scrutiny. The only one treated as an infant in swaddling clothes by the national mediauntil quite recentlyis Sen. Change. So let's wait until Labor Day, when Broadway Baby may become a catchphrase. Here's why According to a 1982 report, Broadway Baby was implicated in an investigation of a series of violent armed robberies in New Yorknetting more than $2 million over a two-year spancommitted by former Black Panthers and Weather Underground members in the early '80s. Their aim? Global revolution, naturally. They needed cash, but the rich white parents weren't in a giving mood. So their privileged offspring grabbed guns, pointed them at the faces of the working man and, sometimes, they pulled the trigger. At Broadway Baby, customers often paid by check and used driver's licenses for identification. On Dec. 28, 1979, information from two customer files was used to apply for two driver's licenses at the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles. The fraudulent licenses were used to rent getaway cars for the gang. Investigators tracked the identities on two licenses for the getaway cars. The names belonged to women who had shopped at Broadway Baby in December 1979. But they weren't robbers. And who was the manager of Broadway Baby during that period of the customer ID theft? Dohrn, the future wife of Ayers, identified by investigators as taking customer information from one, and possibly both, of the women shoppers. Dohrn was never charged in that case. Dohrn and Ayers had been running for some 11 years, fleeing federal charges that they instigated riots in Chicago in 1969. They finally came in out of the cold in 1980, but the New York gang continued its spree, ending in the bloody 1981 robbery in Rockland County that left a Brinks security guard and two police officers dead. The federal charges from the riots were finally dropped because the FBI used illegal wiretaps. But the local charge of aggravated assault stuck to Dohrn. She pleaded guilty to two counts, receiving a $1,500 fine and no jail time In 1982, Dohrn was brought before a federal grand jury investigating radical conspiracies linked to the New York robberies. She refused to cooperate or to provide a signature sought by FBI handwriting analysts. Dohrn was held in contempt of the grand jury and imprisoned for seven months. A few years later, Ayers got his job as a professor at the . And Dohrn was employed at the Children and Family Justice Center affiliated with Northwestern University's School of Law. I've always been fascinated as to how the radical underground stop running and get jobs in academia. Is there a Terrorist Patronage Office for Rich White People? And how did a convicted Dohrn get hired to teach at a law school?'I am afraid I don't know an answer to that,' NU spokesman Alan Cubbage said. 'The person who was the dean at the time is no longer with the law school. And the person who was the president at the time is no longer the president. So I just don't know.'Cubbage did not mention that Ayers' late fatherCommonwealth Edison boss Thomas Ayerswas an NU trustee and former board chairman. UIC spokesman Mark Rosati couldn't help either, but suggested I file a Freedom of Information Act request to find out how terrorists get hired by taxpayers.'It's nothing personal,' Rosati said.How amusing. They don't want to explain how terrorists were hired, so they know nothing. It might work now, but it won't work in the fall, when Broadway Baby opens for a run, in a campaign commercial near you. jskass@tribune.com

Published on Wednesday, April 23, 2008

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