Activities
The group was founded in 1975 as the Sam Melville/Jonathan Jackson Unit, setting off a bomb at the Massachusetts State House under that name, but changed its name to the United Freedom Front the same year. The initial members were Raymond Luc Levasseur (the UFF's leader), Tom Manning, and their respective spouses, Patricia Gros and Carole Manning. Levasseur and Tom Manning were both Vietnam War veterans and ex-convicts. The four had worked together in prison reform groups before forming the UFF. Four other members joined the group in the following years: Jaan Laaman and Barbara Curzi (another married couple), Kazi Toure (born Christopher King), and Richard Williams.
The UFF strongly opposed US foreign policy in Central America, as well as South African apartheid.
The UFF's targets included South African Airways, Union Carbide, IBM, Mobil, courthouses, and military facilities. The UFF called in warnings before all of its bombings, attempting to avoid casualties. However, 22 people were injured in one 1976 bombing at the Suffolk County Courthouse in Boston, including a courthouse worker who lost a leg. The group was most active in the early 1980s. The UFF's members lived undercover in middle-class suburbs.
Toure was captured in North Attleboro, Massachusetts in 1982. Two state troopers were wounded in the course of arresting him. On November 4, 1984, police apprehended Levasseur and Gros near Deerfield, Ohio, and Laaman, Curzi, and Williams in Cleveland. The Mannings were captured six months later in Norfolk, Virginia. Gus notes that the UFF was "the most enduring of all New Left terrorist groups of the era," evading capture for almost a decade.
Read more about this topic: United Freedom Front
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—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)
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