They Bombed in New York

The two FBI agents, dressed in chinos and sweaters, entered the shabby air-conditioning repair shop and arranged to take it over for the day. Scratching peepholes in the painted-over storefront window, they squinted patiently at the doorway across the East Village street. Pasted next to the peepholes were pictures of the suspects, some snapped surreptitiously at peace rallies by other FBI agents in the guise of press photographers. A crackling radio brought terse reports from about a dozen other teams staked out near by. Finally the agents spotted their prey and set a dragnet into operation.

Health Faddist. The stakeout last week came after four dynamite blasts within two days rocked New York City's Chase Manhattan Bank headquarters, the RCA Building, the new General Motors Corp. offices and the Criminal Courts Building. With New Yorkers on edge and the city's twelve-man bomb squad in a "state of exhaustion," the FBI tailed its suspects to a mid-Manhattan armory where agents witnessed two men place four time bombs in a National Guard truck. Arrested and charged with conspiring to damage Government property were Samuel Melville, 34, a health faddist and sometime plumbing engineer, and George Demmerle, 39, an itinerant diemaker.

The FBI net then closed on two alleged accomplices. One of them was pretty Jane Alpert, 22, whose soft voice and gentle manner reflected her Quaker education at Swarthmore College. Her writings in the underground newspaper Rat were something else. A memher of the radical Women's Liberation movement, she described marriage as a "corrupt institution" and opposed the Pledge of Allegiance in schools. "My old man" is what Jane usually called John D. Hughey III, 22, who shared a Village tenement flat with her and was also accused in the bombings.

The FBI was also seeking 22-year-old Pat Swinton, an advertising manager for Rat and a researcher for a leftist organization called the North American Congress on Latin America. In addition, there were said to be ten other unnamed suspects at large.

The break in the bombings case came last month when the Royal Canadian Mounted Police asked the FBI to put Melville under surveillance. He was suspected of having a part in several Canadian political bombings. Next the FBI infiltrated Melville's New York organization with a "reliable" informant who, said U.S. Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau, "places the defendants at the very heart of the conspiracy."

Since July, when the first blast rocked a United Fruit Co. pier on the Hudson River, there have been eight dynamitings. Before each explosion, the bombers called guards in the targeted buildings, warning them to clear the area, and also informed the news media. Though no deaths resulted, there was one near miss. In August, a blast in a Broadway trust company injured 17 people. Some might have been killed, but all were partially shielded by a two-ton computer, which was moved two feet by the detonation of 24 dynamite sticks.

The final flurry of bombings, coming as they did on the eve of the three-day peace demonstrations, seemed to link the suspects with antiwar groups. Though their targets did at one time include an induction center, the FBI emphatically denied any tie between the group and the antiwar activities. Viet Nam was only one of the group's many grievances. More important in the bombers' thinking was the so-called Establishment in all its guises.

Power Destroys. The group explained their motives in a letter to U.P.I, delivered last week after they had bombed the three corporation headquarters. The letter called the Viet Nam war "only the most obvious evidence of the way this country's power destroys people." The "giant corporations" are the real culprits. "Spiro Agnew may be a household word," they wrote, "but it [the public] has rarely seen men like David Rockefeller of Chase Manhattan, James Roche of General Motors and Michael Haider of Standard Oil, who run the system behind the scenes."

The letter proclaimed that the U.S. "empire" is breaking up because of revolutions abroad and at home, where blacks are now being joined by "white Americans striking blows for liberation." U.S. Attorney Morgenthau summed up: The defendants have "anarchical mentalities" that totally reject "civilized standards of behavior."

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