In the ten days following the State Street Bank robbery, he has 1) granted an interview with the Cambridge Phoenix claiming the robbery as a conscious political act; 2) sent off letters to the Justice Department, FBI, and a Boston newscaster asking to be treated as a prisoner of war because he is commander-in-chief of the "Revolutionary Action Force- East" ;3) issued a garbled three page statement explaining the revolutionary intent of his action; and 4) begun a book about crime, radicalism, and revolution.
"You're either going to have to keep your mouth shut or I'm out," Bonds attorney Robert M. Mardirosian told him Saturday.
"I thought we agreed that I could talk about the reasons for my political beliefs," Bond retorted.
"Yes, but, my God, you're going all the way," the lawyer answered.
What are the roots of Bond's radicalism? When he came to Brandies in February, students universally agree he was apolitical. When the student strike happened in early May, many strike center people- including Michael Fleshier and Kathy Power- thought he was a police informer. When school ended, he had already slept with Susan Axe and was at the time living with Kathy Power, according to a close friend of both girls.
Although Susan Axe may perhaps have been radicalized to the point of armed revolutionary struggle by the end of the summer, friends uniformly believe Kathy Power was not. It's a strange menage a trois. But how political, how sexual, how coercing was their relationship? And who was politicizing, sexualizing, or coercing who?
Neither Kathy Power nor Susan Axe were particularly attractive girls. Both were under 5'2" and weighed 150 pounds. At a small Brandies party last spring, Bond met Susan Axe for the first time and began chiding her about the political buttons on her sweater supporting the student strike and women's lib. When she began her defense, he interrupted to say she had come to the party to meet a man.
Saxe snapped back at the male chauvinism in his remark, and Bond readily agreed, adding that it was meant to attract her attention and he was confident they would soon become best of friends.
"Stan knew just what he was doing," a party guest told Gordon Hall, a correspondent for the Herald-Traveler. "By telling this dew-cyed impressionable child precisely what she did not want to hear, he was certain to be remembered long after she had forgotten the monotonous cliches everyone else spouts at such parties."
Politically, Bond switched easily from a stance far more radical than those around him (often he would criticize them as "parlor revolutionaries" and their politics as "dry theories from textbooks") to a position of moderation and even reaction (calling on student strikers, for instance, to work within the system and displaying personal prejudices against blacks and Jews).
Psychologically, Bond is perhaps a hardened, less charismatic, but more deceptively sympathetic version of California's Charlie Manson. Bond's ties to the two Brandies women were, like Manson's ties to the women in his family, sexual as well as political. His ties to Gilday and Valerie appear to be distinctly pragmatic.
If anything about the gang becomes more clear with time, it is the fact that Bond swayed back and forth between the poles of his "gang"- the girls on one side and the ex-convicts on the other. He is the only one of the six persons implicated in all of the group's alleged crimes.
His schizoid role left him, with an after the fact choice of being either a political robber or a criminal robber, and he has apparently chosen the former. If his self-characterization as a radical is genuine, there is some question over why he waited until after what police allege was his fourth robbery before declaring his politics. The decision appears pragmatic, designed to elicit the most support and admiration for himself now that his bank robbing days are over.
Sunday, October 4:
Speaking in Boston to the Ford Hall Forum, William Kunstler, lawyer for the defendants in the Chicago conspiracy trial, said he was interested in the case of the six defendants.
"It could be a major political trial. But I don't understand the politics of this case yet," Kunstler said. "I would enter it if 1) somebody wanted me to; 2) it could be a good political case; and 3) if it fit well with my priorities- I've got cases back to back- so it's hard to say there."