I was involved in the aboveground support group of the Zapata Unit. Greg Adornetto led myself and several others to believe we were joining a cell of the Weather Underground, which had a new surge of life when it published Prairie Fire. I knew nothing about a hit list or your being on one, and can't imagine why you would have been. When we were arrested, FBI agent provocateur Adornetto immediately turned against the rest of us and provided evidence to the Government. We were basically caught with stolen explosives.

Another advised:

You shouldn't have believed the boys in the black shiny shoes [FBI] about being on a Zapata hit list. They just found some addresses and Bates and his running partner Hearst wanted to build up some sensationalism to take the heat off of Patty's trial. They had over 75 people (politicians and corporate execs) under protection, thinking all of us didn't get arrested.

Jacques Rogiers, aboveground courier for the underground New World Liberation Front, told me that the reason I was on the hit list was because I had written that Donald DeFreeze was a police informer.

"But that was true," I said. "It's a matter of record. Doesn't that make any difference?"

It didn't.

"If the NWLF asked me to kill you," Rogiers admitted, "I would."

"Jacques," I replied, "I think this puts a slight damper on our relationship."

After Patty Hearst was arrested, she had a jailhouse conversation with her best friend since childhood, Trish Tobin--whose family, incidentally, controlled the Hibernia Bank that Patty had helped rob. Several times throughout the trial, prosecutor James Browning attempted to have the tape of that dialogue played for the jury, but Judge Carter kept refusing--until the end of the trial, when the impact of its giddiness would be especially astonishing.

Trish: "I had a lot of fights at Stanford."
Patty>: "Oh, yeah? About what?"
Trish: "You."
Patty: "Oh--what were they saying? I can just imagine --"
Trish: "Oh, well, 'that fucking little rich bitch'--you know, on and on--and they said, 'She planned her own kidnapping,' and I said, 'Fuck you, you don't know what the fuck you're talking about, I don't even care if she plans her kidnapping and everyone's in the world, so you know something, I don't wanna hear shit out of you!" (Laughter)

The gossip was that Patty had arranged her own kidnapping in order to get out of her engagement to Steven Weed in as adventurous a way as possible--"I guess I was having second thoughts," she admitted, "I wasn't sure he was somebody I could stay married to"--but that she was then double-crossed and manipulated into becoming an informer.

In any event, Patty's jailhouse tape appeared to reveal a change in her outlook: "I'm not making any statements until I know that I can get out on bail, and then if I find out that I can't for sure, then I'll issue a statement, but I'd just as soon give it myself, in person, and then it'll be a revolutionary feminist perspective totally. I mean I never got really . . . I guess I'll just tell you, like, my politics are real different from, uh--way back when (laughter)-obviously! And so this creates all kinds of problems for me in terms of a defense."

An accurate forecast. So Patty testified that she was influenced to say that because captured SLA member Emily Harris was in the visiting room at the time Patty was talking to Trish Tobin.

Bailey asked, "Was she a party to your conversation?"

"Not by any intention of ours, no."

On cross-examination, Patty continued: "Emily was also on a phone." Prisoners and visitors had to converse over telephones while they looked at each other through a thick bulletproof-glass window. Patty said she knew that Emily could hear her talking simply because "I could've heard her if I'd stopped and listened." But jail records showed that Emily was not in the visiting room then.

While psychiatrist Harry Kozol was testifying in court, Patty was writing notes to Albert Johnson on a yellow legal pad. And while I diverted the head marshal's attention by acting suspiciously during recess, reporter Steve Rubinstein copied those notes, but he wasn't allowed to include them in his story for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, a Hearst paper.

In one of the notes, Patty described life in Berkeley with Weed: "I paid the rent, bought the furniture, bought the groceries, cooked all the meals (even while working eight hours a day and carrying a full course load), and if I wasn't there to cook, Steve didn't eat."

In another note, she clearly and concisely described where her mindset really was at in the San Mateo County Jail when she couldn't blame Emily Harris' eavesdropping as her motivation: "Dr. Kozol kept trying to equate the women's movement with violence. I repeatedly told him: 1. Violence has no place in the women's movement. 2. I didn't feel it was possible to make lasting changes in our society unless the issue of women's rights was resolved. Kozol kept trying to say things like, 'Isn't it more important to solve the poverty problem?' Any reform measures taken by the Government will only be temporary."

Although news items about the trial were clipped out of the daily papers by US marshals, the sequestered jurors were not immune to media influence. During the trial, they all went out to see a few films, which they voted on.

They saw One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which, Ken Kesey complained, made Big Nurse the target and omitted the central theme of his book, that people go crazy in this country precisely because they can't handle the gap between the American Dream and the American Nightmare as orchestrated by the same combination that Patty was forced to experience, where organized crime and organized crime-fighting are merely different sides of the same corporate coin.

The jury also saw Swept Away . . ., reinforcing the theme that one does not transcend one's class unless one is already heading in that direction before circumstances temporarily shatter all those arbitrary rules that distinguish the classes.

And the jury saw Taxi Driver--once again perpetuating the myth of the lone-nut assassin, played by Robert DeNiro, who, in this case, attempts to kill a political candidate, not because he has been hired by an intelligence agency, but rather because Cybil Shepherd won't stay and hold his hand at a porno movie.

Bill and Emily Harris let it be known that, if called to testify, they would take the Fifth Amendment, but Emily testified, in effect, through the media. After Patty told the jury that Willie Wolfe had raped her, Emily was quoted in New Times: "Once Willie gave her a stone relic in the shape of a monkey face [and] Patty wore it all the time around her neck. After the shootout, she stopped wearing it and carried it in her purse instead, but she always had it with her."

Prosecutor James Browning read this in the magazine and he had an Aha! experience, remembering that "rock" in Patty's purse from the inventory list when she was originally captured. He presented it as his final piece of evidence in the trial, slowly swinging the necklace back and forth in front of the jurors, as if to hypnotize them.