Kathy Boudin
Kathy Boudin (born
May 19,
1943) is a convicted murderer who has been known for her strong commitment to communist ideals. She was convicted in 1984 of felony murder for her involvement in the
Brinks armoured car robbery, and the accompanying killings of three people. She was controversially granted parole on August 20, 2003 and released from Bedford Hills Correctional Facility on September 17, 2003. The controversy arose, because in her third parole hearing Boudin was granted parole, though there was dispute from the victim's family and others about whether she was truly contrite for her crime or whether she was masking her radical politics in order to gain her freedom.
William Kunstler, a law partner of
Leonard Weinglass, Boudin's attorney, explained Boudin's evolution from political activist to violent revolutionary: "I went to Bedford Hills penitentiary a few weeks ago and talked to Kathy Boudin. Kathy had reached a point where she thought, along with others, that non-violence was ineffective, and that you have to take the next step, into violence." ,
[(October 1995; "Z Magazine," ‘The Life and Times of William Moses Kunstler,' Interview by Dennis Bernstein & Julie Light October 1995).]Kathy Boudin was born in 1943 into a family with a long left-wing history, and was raised in
Greenwich Village New York. Her great-uncle was
Louis Boudonovitch Boudin, a
Marxist theorist who had helped found the
Communist Party USA. Her father, attorney Leonard Boudin, had represented such controversial clients as
Judith Coplon,
Fidel Castro, and
Paul Robeson. A
National Lawyers Guild attorney, Leonard Boudin was the law partner of Victor Rabinowitz, himself counsel to numerous left-wing organizations.
Kathy Boudin attended kindergarten at the
Little Red School House and its high school, the Elisabeth Irwin High School in
Manhattan. Although she went to
Bryn Mawr College to study medicine, her interests quickly turned to politics. Her last year at Bryn Mawr was spent studying in the Soviet Union. In 1965 she studied for a year in the Soviet Union, was paid 75 rubles a month by the Soviet government and, according to her resume, taught on a Soviet collective farm. Kathy Boudin also attended receptions and functions with her parents at the Cuban Mission to the United Nations in New York. During this period it has been reported that the CIA intercepted correspondence between Boudin and her father in which he made arrangements for her to participate in one of the
World Festivals of Youth and Students.
In the
1960s and
1970s, Boudin became heavily involved with the
Weather Underground, who described themselves as a "fifth column" of the
Viet Cong and the
North Vietnamese Army. The Weathermen bombed the
Pentagon, the
US Capitol, the New York Police Benevolent Association, the New York Board of Corrections, as well as the offices of multinational companies. Boudin, along with
Cathy Wilkerson, was a survivor of the 1970 Greenwich Village
'Townhouse Blast' - the premature detonation of a powerful bomb that had been intended for a soldiers' dance at
Fort Dix, New Jersey. Boudin was 27 at the time. Both women were awaiting trial, out on bond for alleged terrorist acts committed in
Chicago several months earlier. Wilkerson had been released on a $20,000 bond and Boudin was out on a $40,000 bond.
A declassified FBI report on foreign contacts of the Weather Underground Organization produced by the FBI's Chicago Field Office reported that, "On February 10, 1976, a source in a position to possess such information advised that Leonard Boudin...had indicated to a friend that Kathie [sic] was presently in Cuba." Kathy Boudin's father had connections directly to Fidel Castro: Leonard Boudin was Castro's lawyer.
In 1981, when Kathy Boudin was 38 years old, she and several members of the Weather Underground and the
Black Liberation Army robbed a
Brinks armored car at the Nanuet Mall, near
Nyack, New York. After Boudin dropped her infant son,
Chesa Boudin, at a baby sitter's she took the wheel of the getaway vehicle, a
U-Haul truck. Kathy Boudin waited in a nearby parking lot as her heavily armed accomplises took another vehicle to a local mall where a Brinks truck was making a delivery. They confronted the guards and firing immediately broke out, severely wounding guard Joe Trombino and killing his co-worker, Peter Paige. The four then took $1.6 million in cash and rendezvoused with Boudin.
An alert high-school student called the police after spotting the heavily armed gang abandoning the getaway vehicle and entering the U-Haul. A police officer spotted and pulled over the U-Haul, but they could only see Boudin in the drivers seat. Boudin then got out of the cab, and raised her hands.
The police officers who caught them testified that Boudin, feigning innocence, pleaded with them to put down their guns and convinced them to drop their guard; Boudin said she remained silent, that the officers relaxed spontaneously. After the police did lower their weapons six of the men in the back of the truck armed with
automatic weapons came out of the back of the truck, surprising the four police officers. A police officer, Waverly Brown, was killed instantly. In fact, Boudin and David Gilbert, a Weatherman radical and the father of Boudin's infant son, deliberately acted as decoys as well as getaway drivers: The Brinks robbers the police were searching for were all from the
Black Liberation Army and drove a red car. Officer Edward O'Grady lived long enough to empty his
revolver, but as he reloaded, he was shot several times with an
M16. Ninety minutes later, he died on a hospital operating table. The other two officers escaped with only minor injuries. The occupants of the U-Haul scattered, some climbing into another getaway car, others
carjacking a nearby motorist while Boudin attempted to flee on foot. An off-duty corrections officer apprehended her shortly after the shoot out. When she was arrested, Boudin gave her name as Barbara Edson.
Three other Black Liberation Army members failed to escape that day. Weatherman
David Gilbert,
Samuel Brown, and
Judith Clark crashed their own car while making a sharp turn, and were arrested by police. Two days later,
Samuel Smith and Nathaniel Burns were spotted in a car in New York. After a gunfight with police that left Smith dead, Burns was captured. Three more participants were arrested several months later.
The majority of the defendants received three consecutive twenty five years to life sentences, making them eligible for
parole in the year
2058. Boudin hired
Leonard Weinglass to defend her. Weinglass, a law partner of Boudin's father, arranged for a
plea bargain and Boudin pled guilty to one count of felony murder and robbery, in exchange for one twenty years to life sentence.
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KathyBoudin.com
