Levasseur, Raymond Luc

Background on Raymond Luc Levasseur

A Vietnam veteran, human rights activist, revolutionary, writer, and political prisoner, Raymond Luc Levasseur was part of a revolutionary Marxist organization that waged a militant struggle in the 1970s and 1980s against racism and imperialism. Raised in a working-class family, Levasseur was born in the mill town of Sanford, ME on October 10, 1946. His father Paul had emigrated from Quebec with his family when he was just five years old, and like many of his generation, he left high school under the need to earn a living, working as a mechanic in the textile mills. Levasseur’s mother, too, left school early, also to become a mill operative.

Growing up in the shadow of textile mills along the Mousam River, Levasseur was educated in Catholic schools until sixth grade and then in local public schools until 1964, when he graduated from school to a job in the mills, making shoe heels for Eastern Plastics Corp. at $1.54 per hour. Much of his time, he later wrote, was spent in aimless “drinking, gambling, and fighting with a crowd that was pretty much in the same situation I was.” The aimlessness of life in a declining town led him to move to Boston for better opportunities, but a job on the loading dock of the Boston fish pier did little to change his prospects. Even with steady work, he continued his drinking and fighting and was arrested for minor offences.

To shake up his situation, Levasseur decided to enlist in the military in December 1965, and was sent to Vietnam, serving at Long Binh and Xuon Loc with the 11st Armored Cavalry. “The experience in Vietnam,” he wrote in a message to his first daughter, “radically altered my life and left an impression on my heart and mind that is with me to this day.” Beyond the violence and wanton destruction he witnessed, Levasseur was moved by the feeling that he was part of an army of occupation, not liberation, and by what he perceived as the arrogance and racism of the occupation.

“I saw the US government and the corporations who profited from the war as being guilty beyond doubt of murder and other genocidal acts against the Vietnamese people. When children die, when children are born deformed, when the innocent suffer in war, the warmakers are guilty of the crimes.”

Through reading and intensive discussions with a British anarchist serving in his unit, Levasseur began to assemble a political analysis of imperialism, racism, and the war. When he returned to the states late in 1967, receiving his discharge the following September, his radicalization was in full swing. Enrolling at in Austin Peay University, he began to act on his political convictions, joining the Southern Student Organizing Committee — “the first truly revolutionary people I had ever met” — and absorbing a range of new ideas from the student rights and labor movements to the antiwar movement and Black liberation struggle, deepening the radicalization that had begun in Vietnam.

On February 5, 1969, Levasseur’s life took a sharp turn. Arrested for selling marijuana, he was found guilty thanks in part to an overmatched public defender, earning a sentence of five years in the state penitentiary. The bitterness of imprisonment only served to deepen his analysis of class and racial conflict. Serving his time in a county jail, Tennessee State Prison, and the notoriously violent Brush Mountain State Penitentiary, Levasseur faced repeated punitive targeting by prison staff for engaging in political activity with Black prisoners, including a 1970 prisoner strike to protest spoiled food. During his incarceration in Tennessee, he read Marx, Lenin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Che, Fanon, and Bakunin, along with literature and poetry, and emerged with a commitment to revolutionary principle and action.

After parole in 1971, Levasseur returned home to Maine, where he lived with his mother and held jobs as a manual laborer, first making cement blocks and pipes, and then working as a carpenter in Kennebunkport. Fed by the unrelenting political turmoil of the time — particularly the assassination of Soledad Brother George Jackson and the rebellion at Attica Prison — Levasseur returned to political work, beginning with the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. But his experiences in prison, informed by the writings of the Black Panthers and Malcolm X, led him to recognize the centrality of prisoners to any social justice struggles, and by the fall of 1972, he helped form the Portland-based Statewide Correctional Alliance for Reform (SCAR), which organized survival programs for families of the imprisoned designed to “meet the needs of the people who suffer most from class and racist oppression.”

Moving to Munjoy Hill in Portland, Levasseur became part of a close-knit circle that would become the core of the United Freedom Front, including Pat Gros (later his wife), fellow veteran Tom Manning, and Manning’s wife Carol. Convinced that the time for direct action had come, and that violence would be necessary, Levasseur and his associates split from more reluctant members of SCAR and opened Red Star North Bookstore in August 1974, selling radical literature and running a Marxist study group in the evenings, while being subject to intense police surveillance and threats of violence.

With tensions at a high pitch in the fall 1974, Manning introduced Levasseur to his brother-in-law, Cameron Bishop, an SDS organizer from Colorado who had gone underground five years previously after receiving a federal indictment and spot on the FBI’s list of Ten Most Wanted fugitives for the January 1969 bombing of power transmission lines serving a defense plant near Denver, Colorado. Bishop and Levasseur found a common cause in forming a guerrilla unit to “engage in armed attacks on the enemy state and its institutions.” To fund their organization, they sought to “expropriate” money from banks, but their first attempt in March 1975 never fully got off the ground. Arrested while scouting banks in East Greenwich, RI, Bishop was quickly identified by fingerprints and returned to Colorado to face the old sabotage charges, while Levasseur, charged with weapons violations, skipped bail.

Over the next year, Levasseur, Gros (by then his wife), and the Mannings formed the revolutionary, anti-imperialist group the Sam Melville/Jonathan Jackson Unit, named after a white prison activist killed in the Attica uprising and the slain brother of imprisoned Black radical George Jackson. In the early 1980s, the grouip would incorporate new members and rename itself the United Freedom Front. The group attacked symbols of U.S. imperialism, including military buildings and corporate offices, that represented state racism, capitalist exploitation, and other forms of oppression. They would eventually claim responsibility for a series of bombings and expropriations, mostly in the Northeast, that included the Union Carbide building in Needham, Mass.; courthouses; two IBM buildings in Harrison, N.Y.; army and naval reserve centers in the New York City area; and a South African Airways Procurement Office. To avoid casualties, they called in warnings before each attack, although a number of bystanders were injured at the Suffolk County Courthouse after authorities failed to take the alert seriously.

For nearly a decade, the United Freedom Front used thorough planning, false identification papers, and frequent moves from state to state to evade one of the largest FBI manhunts in history. In 1983, the Boston FBI office formed formed Bos-Luc Joint Terrorist Task Force to pursue Levasseur and his comrades. On Nov. 4, 1984, their run came to an end when FBI agents arrested Levasseur and Gros after pulling over the van they were driving with their three daughters near Deerfield, Ohio. Fellow UFF members Barbara Curzi, Jaan Laaman, and Richard Williams were taken in custody shortly thereafter in Cleveland, and the Mannings were captured several months later in Richmond, Virginia.

Shortly after members of the Ohio 7 received federal indictments, Pat Gros’s case was severed from the rest of the group; she eventually received a five-year sentence for harboring a fugitive (Levasseur) and possessing fraudulent ID. In Federal Court in Brooklyn in 1986, the six remaining defendants were convicted and sentenced to terms between 5 and 53 years. Levasseur started his 45-year sentence in the federal control unit prison at Marion, Illinois, notorious as one of the most abusive prisons in the country and as a place used, as one of its administrators wrote, to “control revolutionary attitudes in the prison system and society at large.” In a separate trial, Manning and Williams were also sentenced for a 1981 shoot-out after a traffic stop that resulted in the death of a New Jersey State Trooper. Further politicizing the situation, the federal government chose to compound the long terms meted out to Levasseur and his associates in by making the unprecedented decision to try them on charges of seditious conspiracy, racketeering conspiracy, and racketeering in plotting to overthrow the United States government by force. In the thirteen-month trial that followed, held in Springfield, Massachusetts, Levasseur represented himself, winning acquittal on the sedition charge in 1989 and a hung jury in favor of acquittal on the other two charges.

Imprisonment did little to blunt Levasseur’s commitment to radical political work, and in Marion, Levasseur continued to resist. The only work at Marion came through the Federal Prison Industries, Inc. (UNICOR), who bill themselves as offering “factories with fences,” and which at the time used prison labor to produce military equipment. Levasseur’s principled refusal to work for UNICOR probably resulted in his transfer in 1994 to the Administrative Maximum Federal Correctional Complex at Florence, Colorado (ADX), and five years later he was moved to the Atlanta Federal Prison. He was released on parole in 2004 and returned to Maine.