Backstory of the day I discovered the backstory of my own backstory of yet another person's backstory which tweaked my interest. We're all so famous it seems.
Doesn't Anybody Know How To Be a Fugitive Anymore?
For nearly three decades, his wanted poster described him as ''armed and dangerous.'' But the clean-shaven man in the federal penitentiary here in Florence, Ariz., looks more like an aging Boy Scout. He wears the mud-brown polyester-cotton shirt and pants that are standard-issue prison garb. There is a pair of black reading glasses in his only pocket, and his blue canvas sneakers are the slip-on kind -- no laces allowed. After all those years in Birkenstocks, the closed-toe shoes feel odd on his feet. More disorienting still is his bare wrist. If he'd been wearing a watch when he turned himself in, he would have been allowed to keep it. But there are strict rules about what may be sent into a penitentiary.
Time looms large in prison. The trick, the man says, is not to focus on it, and he is better at that than he was during his first, brief lockup a lifetime ago. But the threads of his world are tangled up in time. Five years: the federal sentence he is serving. Thirty years: the distance between this serene spring morning and the chaotic night of the crime. Twenty-eight years: the gap between the life he fled, in the fall of 1972, and the one that is now unraveling.
Today marks three decades since Richard Nixon expanded the Vietnam War to include Cambodia, and May 4 is the anniversary of the death of four students at Kent State University, shot by National Guardsmen during protests over that war. In the weeks after Kent State, demonstrators burned at least 32 R.O.T.C. buildings, including one at Washington University in St. Louis. Howard Mechanic, a 22-year-old senior, was in the crowd watching those flames, his face all but hidden by a bird's nest of hair and a scruffy beard.
Someone lobbed a cherry bomb toward the clustered firefighters that night. No one was hurt when the firecracker exploded. No damage was done. Howard Mechanic was charged with that crime (he denied it then and still denies it now) and was the first person in the country to be found guilty under a harsh 1968 law designed to quell campus protests. The sentence was five years, and when all his appeals were exhausted he skipped bail and disappeared.
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In February he was caught. He was living where he has been for 28 years, in plain sight, in and around the tony and conservative town of Scottsdale, Ariz. He probably would be there still had he not done something audacious or nave, depending on your point of view. Using his assumed name, Gary Tredway, Howard Mechanic ran for elective office. In a move ripe for Freudian analysis (''Was I secretly hoping to get caught?'' he asks. ''I don't believe that I was''), he became a candidate for the Scottsdale City Council. And when a local reporter came asking questions for a standard candidate profile, he told her his secrets -- and then asked her not to tell them to anyone else.
Why on earth did he run for office? He took the risk, he says, because his past seemed a world away. So far away that he'd forgotten how to spell his given name (when he surrendered, and signed Howard Lawrence Mechanic for the first time since 1972, he could not remember whether his middle name had a ''w'' or a ''u''). So far away that, despite frequent visits by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to his twin brother in California (where agents snapped photos of one brother so they would know what the other looked like), he didn't really believe that anyone would still care.
But we do. When the Chicago Seven defendant Abbie Hoffman surrendered after six years posing as an environmentalist named Barry Freed; when the Black Panther accomplice Katherine Ann Power turned up as a restaurateur named Alice Metzinger; when the Symbionese Liberation Army member Kathleen Soliah was found living as a doctor's wife (and sometime actress) named Sara Jane Olsen; when the former Weatherman Bernardine Dohrn emerged as if from nowhere after a decade underground -- each of those times we were startled by their ability to yank us back into the past. The 60's spill into the Zeroes, and each fugitive who resurfaces from that most turbulent of times forces us to probe the wounds and find that they still have not healed.
They cause us to ask other questions too. What does it take to abandon one life and cloak yourself in another? Can you live without a past, with no connection to a former self, or does the real ''you'' -- in Mechanic's case a pacifist-entrepreneurial-vegetarian environmentalist -- always win out?
If anyone could have faded away and blended in, it should have been Howard Mechanic. Those who knew him in college describe him as quiet and bookish, the type who might easily get lost in a crowd. ''I wouldn't describe him as a leader,'' says Phillip Koch, now a filmmaker in Chicago, who roomed with Mechanic in their senior year at Washington University. ''There were others on campus who were . . . better at that.''
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In other words, he wasn't a radical or a militant. Not S.D.S. or S.L.A. or Weatherman. He was just a kid shaped by a moment and drawn to a cause. So while it is tempting to lump him with Abbie Hoffman or Kathleen Soliah, his story is more disquieting than theirs. True, he said things back then like, ''The law, courts and pigs protect the propertied interests'' (part of his statement just after his conviction) and ''All you have to do is read a little Marx and you'll figure out how it's all going to turn out'' (a memorable comment to a classmate). And, true, his hair was as godawful as 60's hair could get. But strip the blandishments of the era away and what's left is an earnest, smart, somewhat awkward nerd who got the book thrown at him. A nerd who was caught because, after 28 years of lying, he turned out to be a surprisingly lousy liar.
Which is why, later this week, while others march with candles to commemorate Kent State, Howard Mechanic will be in jail -- a man still caught in a time warp, and wondering about the time.
''Call me Howard,'' he says, taking a molded plastic seat in the stark white visitor's room at the start of our two-and-a-half-hour visit. ''It's my legal name,'' he adds, ''but I'm still getting used to it.'' He was first given his name 52 years ago, on Feb. 21, 1948. His father, Ralph, owned an appliance-repair business; his mother, Rose, was a homemaker. His twin brother, Harvey, says he and Howard were ''nice Jewish boys,'' living in the comfortable Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights. ''We were both National Merit Scholarship finalists,'' Harvey recalls with pride more than three decades after the fact.
In 1966, Howard Mechanic enrolled at Washington University, where one focus of student wrath was the R.O.T.C. training program. In March 1970, the university got a court injunction against any future demonstrations, and Mechanic was one of several students specifically named in that injunction. The court order didn't stop him on the night of May 4, 1970, however. It seemed as if nothing could stop the rage that night. Around the country, thousands of National Guardsmen were deployed on hundreds of campuses as 250 colleges went on strike. At the University of Chicago, students dug trenches to protect themselves against the troops. At Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Ind., one protester set himself on fire. Three students were stabbed in the bedlam at the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque.
And at Washington University, as many as 3,000 protesters gathered to watch the R.O.T.C. building go up in flames, chanting ''Burn, baby, burn'' and ''Kent State, Kent State.'' The blaze, later ruled to be arson, went unchecked after firetrucks were turned back by rock-throwing demonstrators. Mechanic was in the crowd, along with his girlfriend. According to his federal trial testimony, their evening began at about 10 o'clock at a rally in the university quadrangle, where a series of speakers denounced the invasion of Cambodia. At midnight, ''a large portion of that crowd went to the R.O.T.C. building,'' he testified, ''and I went with that crowd.'' He did not cause any property damage that night, he said. Nor did he throw anything. He specifically denied that he had thrown a cherry bomb. ''I can't remember when the last time was that I had a cherry bomb,'' he said. ''I have seen them.''
Mechanic's first conviction was on state charges for contempt of court -- attending the rally in violation of the injunction. The four and a third months he spent in the county jail on that charge (shortened from six months when he was given time off for good behavior) were the foundation for his later decision to flee. The guards, he says, ''were ex-military'' and did not take well to a kid charged with protesting the war. ''I had one guard who would say if he gets a chance he's going to take me out and shoot me.''
The contempt trial was followed by a federal trial, and there Mechanic made history. In 1968 Congress had approved the Civil Obedience Act which prohibits a person from interfering with ''any fireman or law enforcement officer'' who is doing his job ''during the commission of a civil disorder.'' A civil disorder is defined as disruption or damage caused by a group of three or more people.
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Mechanic was the first person ever tried under the act, and a reading of the trial transcript shows the government's case to be anything but airtight. Nineteen prosecution witnesses were called. Only one of them actually testified against Mechanic. Most were firefighters, police officers and news photographers who established that there had been more than three people in the crowd. The one man who claimed to have seen Mechanic with a cherry bomb was a law student named Donald R. Bird. He died in 1983.
Bird's testimony was far from convincing. First he said he saw the cherry bomb in Mechanic's hand. Then he said he saw it only after it left ''the person of Howard Mechanic.'' At one point Bird acknowledged that the cherry bomb ''could have come, perhaps, from someone standing about five or six feet behind.''
Mechanic was sentenced to five years in federal prison for an act that, in a less volatile era, might have resulted in a slap on the wrist. For a year and a half, Mechanic appealed. The federal Court of Appeals agreed that Bird was ''a highly partisan witness who desired to see the defendants convicted,'' but the conviction was allowed to stand. In 1972, the Supreme Court declined to hear the case and Mechanic was ordered to surrender.
He fled instead, later mailing his parents a note that said he would be in touch. He also left one of his professors in a lurch -- an English professor who had put up his home as collateral for Mechanic's $10,000 bail.
''I just didn't think I should serve five years,'' Mechanic says. ''People think, 'Well, this is what you have to do and you don't have a choice.' I did have a choice. So I took the choice.''
When he was 12 years old, Howard Mechanic began collecting stamps -- commemorative envelopes canceled at Cape Canaveral at the time of one or another space flight. He also collected autographs of all the astronauts. He had one postcard signed by Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, and another signed by all seven of the original Mercury astronauts.
While his case was being appealed, he sold the stamps. By the time his final appeal was rejected, he had raised $4,000. With the cash in his pocket, he boarded a bus, expecting to settle in Albuquerque. But when he got there, the weather was too cold, so he got back on the bus and stayed on until Phoenix.
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He liked that the city was not a radical place. ''I was trying to stay away from radical politics,'' he says, and in the land of Barry Goldwater (and later, John McCain) there were fewer temptations. He settled, at first, in the college town of Tempe, where a 24-year-old could easily blend in. Getting used to his new name (he refuses to say where he got his identity or divulge any details that might incriminate others) took about six months. Getting rid of the nightmares -- being hunted, being caught -- took more than 10 years.
The most difficult part, he says, was having to ''minimize my abilities.'' He could show no proof of having graduated from college; nor was there any way to act on his acceptance to Boston University law school, which he believes revoked its acceptance after his conviction. Yet he found it hard to be anything but well educated and outspoken. His first job was as a shelf-stocker in a health-food store, and he apparently didn't do well at keeping his mouth shut. ''My boss thought I was trying to take his job,'' he says. Eventually he went into business on his own, as a local distributor for several national health-food products. He also invented a gadget that allows people to fill empty pill capsules with home remedies.
He had become a strict vegetarian in college and was drawn to an organic-food-buying club in Tempe. During the 70's it grew into the Gentle Strength Co-op, and Tredway became a member of the board. In 1977, he met a college student named Ingrid Gold at the co-op, where she was working parttime as a cashier. While they were dating, they protested the building of the Palo Verde nuclear plant together, Gold remembers, but unlike some other protesters, they were careful not to trespass and risk arrest.
Gold and Tredway were married in 1980, and their son, Ari, was born in 1981. By 1985 they were divorced, because, Gold says, he was a better person than she was willing to be. ''You know about his life,'' she says, referring to her ex-husband's lack of interest in things material, ''and you've seen me.'' We are at a bistro outside Scottsdale when she says this, and she's dressed in a chic pantsuit and tasteful but glittery jewelry, her copper hair stylishly cut. ''Let's just say one of us wanted to move on.''
Which doesn't mean that Tredway was standing still. He had a knack for business. He invested in a line of homeopathic products, then put the profits in an auto-resalvage business -- buying wrecked cars at insurance auctions and fixing them up (with new identities, if you will) for resale.
After a falling out with the partner who did the actual work, he bought the Abode, a modest 12-unit apartment-hotel for Arizona snowbirds, where he installed solar hot-water heaters. In many ways he was a tightwad, buying most of the furnishings for his hotel, including towels, at swap meets. But he prided himself on never turning out a tenant who fell behind -- remembering the professor who stood to lose his home when Howard Mechanic disappeared.
More than five years ago, Tredway placed a personal ad in a local alternative weekly, looking for a ''left-thinking, nonsmoking, vegetarian social activist.'' Janet Grossman answered that ad, and they have considered themselves ''life partners'' ever since. Grossman, who is partial to Guatemalan blouses and embroidered hair bands, works for the Community Housing Partnership, a nonprofit group that rents apartments to low-income tenants. She loved everything about Tredway from the start, she remembers, save for one thing. ''His name,'' she says. ''I called a friend after we first met and said, 'I really don't like the name Gary.'''
During his years with Grossman, Tredway became bolder. Or, put another way, he inched closer to revealing his true self. He regularly wrote letters to the local newspapers protesting things like the use of public tax money to finance arenas for private sports franchises. He worked to help pass the state's Clean Elections Act, a ballot initiative that eliminates corporate donations to political campaigns. (The measure has since been declared unconstitutional and is being appealed.) While spearheading the public campaign to support the act, he allowed himself to pose for a newspaper photograph. He was also interviewed on local cable TV. Each step brought the spotlight closer, and when no one recognized him, it was easier to take the next, larger step.
''I was getting a higher and higher profile,'' he says. ''I felt it was a risk but I was trying to make some positive changes for the city.'' Eventually, fellow activists began urging him to run for City Council, and he found himself agreeing. ''It was like you're on a train,'' he explains. ''The train is going in a certain direction and you can actively get off the train, but people want you to stay on.''
Politics, Grossman believes, is what Howard Mechanic would have done had his life worked out differently. ''He's really a very political person,'' she says, eyes filling with tears. ''I've accused him sometimes of caring more about politics than he does about me. Scottsdale City Council is very small potatoes for what I think he could have done had his life 30 years ago not led him to where he is.''
B ack in 1970, Ben Zaricor was president of the student union at Washington University. He didn't know Howard Mechanic well, but he followed the cherry bomb trial, and he knew that his classmate had fled. In 1973 or '74, Ben Zaricor was attending a National Nutritional Foods Association convention in San Diego. ''I turned a corner and there he was, standing there in sandals,'' says Zaricor, who now owns Good Earth Teas and Restaurant Services, based in Santa Cruz, Calif. ''I recognized him immediately,'' he says, even though the man was now named Gary Tredway.
Over the years, Mechanic says, just 12 people came to know his secret. The only condition of our interview was that he would not name them, for fear that they might be charged with aiding a fugitive. Mechanic did not tell me about Zaricor; I tracked him down myself and found him eager to describe how he decided to protect a friend. ''I went over and introduced myself,'' he says of the health-food convention. ''Howard never asked me, 'Are you going to turn me in?' He knew I wouldn't just by the way I acted.''
For many years after that, the men were in close touch. They spent summers together in California when Mechanic wanted to escape the heat of Arizona. Periodically, Zaricor brought his son to Phoenix to see the Oakland A's at baseball spring training.
For Zaricor, who was himself once suspended from campus for participating in a nonviolent demonstration, the friendship with Mechanic was his chance to right a wrong. ''I felt like we'd both been through a war together at Washington University,'' he says. ''Students were followed, our phones were tapped, we were thrown in jail. Howard was still a prisoner of that war.''
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For Mechanic -- who often had to avoid Hare Krishnas, because his twin had joined the sect and the Krishnas might mistake him for Harvey -- the friendship with Zaricor was a rare chance to be with someone who knew the whole of him. But it also reminded him that discovery could lie around any corner. This secret was not the kind you'd tell a buddy over a beer. The simplest question could lead to a thicket of answers, so he avoided even simple questions. What looked like aloofness was just a man biting his tongue.
Those who have known him for years (or thought they knew him) now find themselves thinking of conversations they never had. Sherry Bohlen, for instance, worked with Tredway on the liberal newsletter The Current and doesn't once remember ''having a discussion with him outside of the project at hand.'' Bohlen and her husband adopted a Vietnamese orphan in 1975, their own private attempt to right what they saw as a national wrong. When most people learn about her son, she says, it sparks a conversation. Tredway never said a word.
David Winkler, a Phoenix insurance claims supervisor -- and, by coincidence, a 1972 graduate of Washington University -wrote about human rights for The Current. Tredway was his editor. Winkler never recognized his fellow alum, but Tredway, he now knows, recognized him. ''Right before he turned himself in, he called and asked me if I had ever figured it out,'' Winkler says.
The few times Tredway told his secret was when he had no other choice. ''I was forced by circumstances,'' he says. ''Things are discovered, certain things lead to certain other areas, and you try to explain it so it doesn't cause a problem.''
In other words, he would tell when he was about to be found out. His former wife, Ingrid Gold, will not discuss what she knew when, but she was apparently still in the dark when their son was born in 1981. ''I said, 'You have one last name, I have another; which one should we give the baby?''' she says. It was intended as a feminist provocation, but instead Tredway quickly agreed that the boy should take his mother's name. ''I didn't understand then,'' she says, ''that his name meant nothing good to him.''
Janet Grossman also declines to talk about when she learned the truth, but she agrees that she knew by February of this year, when Tredway's secret unraveled. Penny Overton, a fresh-faced but dogged investigative reporter for The Tribune, in Scottsdale, was assigned to write a standard candidate profile, and she was not happy it. She'd been called off the really hot story at the time -- the discovery of a headless torso in a Scottsdale trash bin -- to write pap about a ''very bland man.''
Tredway seemed edgy, Overton remembers. ''Don't worry,'' she told him. ''This is the easy part. We're just going to make sure you are who you say you are.'' That was when Tredway began to sweat, soaking his shirt within minutes.
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Still thinking the problem was first-time-candidate nerves, Overton began with her friendliest questions. ''Tell me about your family,'' she asked. ''Where did you grow up?''
Tredway said he was an orphan, adding that he didn't want to talk about it.
''Tell me three stories, then, about your life, about how you got where you are,'' she says she asked. ''C'mon, everyone has three stories.''
Tredway had only one, Overton says, about a business trip to China in the early 70's.
Overton left that afternoon ''exhausted from having to beg and plead for things that most politicians are trying to palm off on you all the time.'' Tredway paged her several times during the next few days, checking on the status of her investigation and sounding increasingly agitated. When they next met, Grossman was also present, and Overton guessed that Tredway was ''so white bread'' that he was worried that a profile would include the fact that the couple were living together.
''No, I don't think that's why we asked you to come,'' Grossman said.
''I'm not who you think I am,'' Tredway said. ''I'm not Gary Tredway.''
He was a fugitive, he explained, outlining his crime but not telling her his real name or the name of his school. When he decided to run for City Council, Overton says he told her, he and ''a small group of friends'' had faked a resume, choosing as his alma mater Franconia College, in New Hampshire, because it closed in 1978. (He now says he wrote the resume alone.) But once he realized Overton was planning to check, he told her, he panicked.
For the next few hours, sitting by the pool at the Abode, Tredway begged Overton not to tell. At one point, he dug out his tax forms to show that he had been earning about $100,000 a year, paying his full share of taxes and giving 25 percent of his income to charity. ''Now you understand why you can't write about me,'' he said, crying quietly. ''You'll send me to jail. You can either be a good reporter or a good person.''
He told her all this, he now says, because he thought she would protect his secret. After all, no one else he told had turned him in. ''I thought I could get her off the story,'' he says. ''It almost worked.''
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Overton briefed one editor, then spent the weekend hiking in the Ajo Mountains, near Mexico, and agonizing over what to do next. She finally decided that because Tredway was running for office she was obligated to report what she knew. Tredway spent that same weekend on the computer. He reasoned that if he dropped out of the race he would not be a public figure and the paper might leave him be. But he needed a compelling reason for withdrawing, and he surfed medical sites looking for a disease that would serve as his excuse.
On Monday morning, when Overton returned to the office, she found a statement from Tredway to his supporters, announcing he had leukemia and would not run. What followed was a circus. The City Council was planning a moment of silence for Tredway. The paper's political reporter was planning a column about how the man was ''too pure for politics.''
Tredway's final lie, rather than giving Overton second thoughts, made her more certain. ''He's not dying, he's lying,'' she announced to anyone who would listen, then wrote her story.
Carter Revard is the professor of literature, now retired, who put his house up as collateral for Howard Mechanic's bond. When the young man skipped town, Revard received a letter saying his home would be taken unless he could repay the $10,000. A fund was set up by Revard's colleagues -- Mechanic's father sent a check for $2,000 -- and the professor did not lose his home.
All these years later, Revard is still furious -- but not at Mechanic. ''You tell Howard that I support him completely,'' he told me. ''They gave him five years for a cherry bomb while they were handing out Medals of Honor for dropping napalm on civilians. I think the people who should be in jail are the people who prosecuted him.''
Others are less forgiving. Bob Metcalf was a 27-year-old University City fireman on the night of the R.O.T.C. fire, and he arrived on campus to find ''a riot.'' The pumpers ''could have gotten that fire out when we first got there,'' says Metcalf, who is now the chief of the same fire department, ''but they wouldn't let us do our job.'' To dismiss Mechanic's crime as ''just a cherry bomb,'' he says, is to dismiss the people who were its intended targets. ''He could have killed me,'' he says.
Opinion is divided in Scottsdale too, where Gary Tredway received more than 1,300 votes for City Council, even while Howard Mechanic sat in prison. His supporters argue that the charitable life he led over the past 28 years should mitigate his punishment. The state's chapter of Common Cause has created a Web site where people can log examples of Mechanic's good deeds. ''He seems to have joyfully sentenced himself to a life of community service,'' writes Dennis Burke, the executive director of Arizona Common Cause. ''It will be up to a judge to determine if that has been enough.''
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Mechanic's critics, on the other hand, are far more troubled by his more recent activities than by his original crime. A civic group known as We Love Scottsdale points out that running for office under an assumed name is election fraud, and that the ''small group of friends'' who may have helped him fabricate a resume are guilty of the same offense.
''Our city should aggressively prosecute Gary Tredway for false filings, fraudulently collecting contributions, illegally filing false papers with the city and numerous other criminal offenses,'' says a statement issued by the group. ''But Scottsdale must also actively pursue the others in his group who . . . conspired to rob our citizens of their voting rights.''
Mechanic may well face charges of campaign violations, state officials have said. Already he has been charged with using a false Social Security number to obtain an Arizona driver's license, which carries a penalty of up to 5 years, and making a false statement in the application for a passport, which carries a penalty of up to 10 years.
As for his original five-year prison term, he is in a most unusual legal bind. Other Vietnam-era fugitives fled before they were tried. Later sentences were handed down in a more forgiving time. Katherine Ann Power served six years for helping to rob a bank and kill a police officer. Bernardine Dohrn pleaded guilty to aggravated battery and jumping bail, was fined $1,500 and was placed on three years' probation. Silas Bissell hid for 17 years, then served 1 1/2 years at a federal halfway house for conspiring to bomb an R.O.T.C. building at a different campus. David Fine, who planted a homemade bomb at the University of Wisconsin in 1970, killing a physicist, spent only three years in prison after being caught in 1976. Only Howard Mechanic faces a sentence meted out in another era. He has run out of appeals. His case has already been heard by every court short of the Supreme Court, meaning his best hope -- and it is a long shot -- is a presidential pardon.
Does he wish he served the time in the first place, I asked him, and have been done with all this?
No, he says, because he would not have emerged as the person he is today. Five years, he says, fiddling with the bare spot on his wrist, is much longer to a 22-year-old than it is to a 52-year-old. He is stronger now, more able to weather this storm.
''I'm not going to try to 'what if' my life,'' he says, ''but I think I made the right decision at the time.''
