BUFFALO (AP) -- The letters opened with a courteous "Sir," then turned chilling:
"I do not like the way you are doing your job. One day i am going to see you and shoot your brains out. I am going to shoot you dead and i will be coming to your funeral."
The letters arrived in 1985, sent to an eclectic mix of bold faced names: Two U.S. Supreme Court justices, New York Gov. Mario Cuomo, Buffalo Mayor Jimmy "Six Pack" Griffin , U.S. Sen. Alfonse D'Amato, state Comptroller Edward Regan, Attorney General Robert Abrams, and others including an assemblyman who helped restore New York's death penalty for offenders he famously called "animals."
Days after the first letters were postmarked, a 9-mm bullet was shot into the third-floor Virginia apartment of one of the Supreme Court justices, Harry Blackmun, who wrote the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that established a right to abortion. He had already been under near constant guard for four months after a death threat attributed to the Army of God, which federal agents said was an anti-abortion group that claimed responsibility for attacks on abortion clinics nationwide.
The letters, most postmarked in Buffalo and sent in late February, set off a probe by the FBI that kept the private terror largely out of public view, according to recently released documents and interviews. The investigation would touch Toledo, Cleveland, Alexandria, Va., Boston and Albany. But leads kept drawing FBI agents back to Buffalo.
The 1985 FBI case file obtained by The Associated Press under the federal Freedom of Information Act details the weeks in which agents crossed the East Coast seeking patterns in the perplexing array of targets.
It is also a peek at the rarely divulged security needs of public officials, an atmosphere Cuomo described in an earlier diary entry as "stifling."
In 1985, New York was on edge. Within months of the threats, the state's death penalty had been struck down, sparing one of the state most notorious killers, Lemuel Smith; the abortion debate was raging; a recession slammed households, and Bernard H. Goetz split the state among admirers for the subway vigilante and those who felt he was the cold-blooded killer of four young black men. Threats came from many directions, politicians said.
"This one was different," a former aide would say later on the condition of anonymity, because he wasn't authorized to speak of the confidential discussion. The threat came five months after Cuomo's landmark Notre Dame speech supporting rights and the right of Catholic politicians to defend them.
"It was a heady time," the aide said. "This was the first time the feds confronted him with reality."
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"Armed and dangerous," was stamped on the FBI teletype.
March 6, 1985: Orders were cut to process the envelopes and letters for fingerprints, to determine the model of typewriter used and to track down the names used in the return addresses.
"Investigation at Buffalo continues to receive priority attention," stated the telegram-like missive, in all capital letters. "All individuals listed as senders re-interviewed, and all cooperative, claiming no knowledge of the letters. All interviewed cannot think of anybody who would use their name and address in this regard."
The phony return addresses and postmarks focused the probe in Buffalo. On March 7, 1985, a man who had brushes with the law five years before was listed in one return address. He was eventually cleared. Agents then moved on to his girlfriend. She named a guy in the same housing project in Buffalo, who had a girlfriend who led to an instructor at the local business college.
Another dead end.
"Buffalo will intensify its investigation," a terse teletype stated, calling for a polygraph test for one person to lead to the elusive unknown subject, or UNSUB. "In view of threats in letters, UNSUB should be considered armed and dangerous."
March, 14, 1985: Lacking a suspect, the FBI Buffalo office offers "well-founded conjectures," and the anti-abortion angle is questioned. Agents pursue the return addresses, again. Seven were those of black people, four were of whites. Five of them were "taken at random from the phone book." Four were from the same neighborhood.
"It would, therefore, appear the UNSUB has access to these individuals either through personal knowledge or some prior address listing."
And of the targets: "It appears all of addresses are randomly selected public officials that appear in any public ready reference," the teletype concluded.
The whites listed as senders appear to be taken from the telephone book at random and had no knowledge of each other while the blacks were not listed in the phone book, lived in the same neighborhood area and had some knowledge of each other, leading to a theory by Buffalo agents "that the UNSUB is in all probability black and has some affiliation with the black addressors."
But even the new thinking was flawed. A "notable exception" is a black woman, who isn't a public official, who received one of the threatening letters.
The new approach leads two new suspects. One is a black man with "bad blood" with his supervisor at work and a history of unidentified work-related problems.
Another is identified only as a black Muslim, living in the Town Garden Apartments in Buffalo.
"He has been described through neighborhood investigation as a vocal, outspoken critic, not only of both white and black politicians, but of the American system of government in general."
March 14, 1985: Cleveland agents interviewed a man in Toledo whose name was on a return address. They found no connection to him or three others including a "black political activist," who were questioned in Cleveland.
Then, in a Buffalo neighborhood, the trail went cold. No more letters. No more leads. The FBI still won't talk about it. Names of the agents were blacked out in the files obtained by The Associated Press.
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Thousands of threats each year, including those to state and local officials, lead to few arrests. Mostly, there is waiting and watching by agents and targets for a threat to turn lethal. Most are pursued just as the Buffalo-based threat was, quietly with little public display using multiple offices to chase down leads and analyze any evidence of the threat.
Thirteen years after the 1985 threat, agents would again descend on the Buffalo area again after the sniper-style slaying of Dr. Barnett Slepian, an abortion provider who was fatally shot in the kitchen of his suburban home. James Kopp, code name "Atomic Dog," is serving a life sentence for the 1998 killing. At his side during the trial that drew national attention was the Army of God, the same group the FBI said posed a threat to Justice Blackmun in a 1985 letter. The group's manual was in part dedicated to "Atomic Dog."
Looking back, Cuomo remembers his order about such threats in those tense times: Don't tell his wife, Matilda.
"It was very stressful," Cuomo recalled.
The tension rose when he gave the landmark abortion speech in South Bend, Ind. "Even at Notre Dame, when we went there were signs `Mario the baby killer' and for a long time I went to Mass only early in the morning at St. Mary's," he said, referring to a small Catholic church on a back street a block from the Capitol and across from a police station.
The pattern of multiple targets and other factors in 1985 fit a pattern in assassination threats, according to the U.S. Justice Department's guide for state and local law enforcement officials. Its study of cases from 1949-96 shows each year, federal, state and private security investigate thousands of people who show an "inappropriate or unusual interest in a public official or figure," some of whom are "intercepted within lethal range of a target just before they attempt to mount an attack."
Yet there is no accurate profile for assassins, who include men and women of almost any age and varied educational background. The study shows that while 34 percent of targets are presidents and sports and entertainment celebrities, 4 percent are federal judges and 2 percent are state and city officials.
"I had a lot of threats over the years," said Abrams, who weighed in like no New York attorney general before to protect access to abortion clinics by women, including in Buffalo. "It goes with the territory."
There was the time in the early 1970s, when he and then-Mayor John Lindsay committed to riding bicycles on the new concourse into the Bronx. A letter arrived promising to blow their heads off at a specific intersection.
"I must confess when I got to Tremont Avenue I turned my head in all directions," Abrams said. But he said politicians, and law enforcement, abide by a code not to talk about the threats.
"If you do, it encourages people who are on the fringe to perhaps do something similar, or more extreme," he said. "You just keep forging ahead, because there are people who try to intimidate you, and to unnerve you. You can't allow them to succeed."
(Copyright ©2009 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
