Kelly: Trump demands that Cuba return fugitive N.J. cop killer

Mike Kelly | NorthJersey

Show Caption Hide Caption About Joanne Chesimard The story of fugitive cop killer Joanne Chesimard, aka Assata Shakur, goes back more than 40 years.

President Donald Trump, in ordering a significant shift in American policy toward Cuba on Friday, invoked a brutal murder on the New Jersey Turnpike nearly half a century ago.

Listing a series of demands for the improvement of U.S.-Cuban relations in a speech to a largely Cuban-American audience in Miami, Trump called for the return of Joanne Chesimard, the Black Liberation Army operative who escaped from a New Jersey prison after being convicted of murdering a state trooper during a traffic stop on the turnpike in May 1973.

The demand for Chesimard’s extradition — along with some 50 other U.S. fugitives living in Cuba, including a Puerto Rican nationalist bomb maker linked to the murder of a Fair Lawn bank executive — could loom as a major obstacle in recent attempts by the United States to improve business and diplomatic ties with the Communist dictatorship, experts say.

Certainly Trump has thrown down a dramatic diplomatic and legal challenge to Cuba by mentioning Chesimard’s name as part of his litany of demands for improved ties with the Castro regime, which has kept a tight grip on power in Cuba for nearly six decades.

“To the Cuban government, I say put an end to the abuse of dissidence, release the political prisoners, stop jailing innocent people, open yourselves to political and economic freedoms, return the fugitives from American justice, including the return of the cop-killer Joanne Chesimard,” Trump said in his speech.

Chesimard’s fugitive status in Cuba, where she was granted political asylum after breaking out of her cell in the state women’s prison in Clinton in 1979 and making her way to the island nation, has long been a rallying cry for New Jersey police officers and politicians who demanded her return before the United States re-established diplomatic ties with the Communist dictatorship that had been frozen since the 1960s.

Chesimard, who will turn 70 next month, is the only woman on the FBI’s most wanted list of terrorists. Until several years ago, she lived in a two-story home in the Miramar section of Havana. With a $2 million bounty for her return, she is now believed to be living in an undisclosed location near Havana.

President Barack Obama essentially tabled the issue of Chesimard’s return — and the status of the other fugitives — when he renewed ties with Cuba in 2014 by reopening the U.S. Embassy in Havana, loosening restrictions on travel by American tourists and allowing U.S. businesses to invest in Cuba. At the time, the Obama administration said it was negotiating the return of U.S. fugitives with Cuban officials. But no significant headway was ever made after the Cubans said they would never give in to demands to return Chesimard and the other fugitives.

Now Trump has reversed several key elements of Obama's overtures. And by listing Chesimard’s return as a key negotiating point, Trump has opened a new and possibly controversial chapter in the tangled history of U.S. attempts to force Cuba to extradite her and others hiding under the auspices of the Castro regime.

Will Trump’s gambit work? On Friday, a variety of officials and others familiar with the U.S.-Cuban relationship — and Chesimard’s status — offered mixed assessments.

Sen. Bob Menendez, the Paramus Democrat who has long called for Chesimard’s return, said Trump’s reversal of business overtures to Cuba coupled with new demands may just be the most powerful lever to persuade Cuban authorities to extradite her to America.

But Peter Kornbluh, who directs the Cuba Documentation Project at the National Security Archive at George Washington University, downplayed Trump’s speech as posturing.

The president, he said, had “sadly sabotaged” years of efforts to open doors to Cuba. Kornbluh, who had traveled frequently to Cuba for private talks with officials there, said Trump had returned "to an era of imperial demands that for more than 50 years failed to yield any results.”

A behind-the-scenes campaign

Trump's mention of Chesimard in Friday’s speech was the result of an intense behind-the-scenes campaign by a variety of law enforcement officials and a political figures, including Menendez, Gov. Chris Christie and Sen. Marco Rubio, the Florida Republican.

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In the weeks leading up to Trump’s speech, Menendez said he spoke to the president’s national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, about Chesimard and other fugitives. But Menendez did not know his efforts had been successful until he listened to the speech on Friday.

In an interview after the speech, Menendez said he felt that the mention of Chesimard was more than just a symbolic gesture by Trump. Making her return a condition for improved U.S. business investment in Cuba, Menendez said, would “shake the Cubans.”

“When you speak about a name specifically, it sends a chilling effect to the Cubans,” Menendez added. “At the end of the day, it’s consequential. I could never get anyone to mention her by name, which I think is incredibly important.”

Menendez added that he has little doubt that Chesimard will soon be returned. “It’s not a question of if, but when,” he said.

Joseph Connor of Glen Rock, who has long called for Cuba to return the Puerto Rican nationalist who reportedly made the bomb that killed his father four decades ago in New York City, said he was also heartened by Trump’s demands.

Connor’s father, Frank, 33, who lived in Fair Lawn with his wife and two young sons, was an assistant vice president with Morgan Guaranty Trust when he and three others were killed in the bombing of the Fraunces Tavern in Manhattan in 1975. The Armed Forces of National Liberation of Puerto Rico, or FALN, claimed credit for the attack.

The FALN's chief bomb maker, Guillermo “Willie” Morales, fled to Cuba after his conviction on a variety of federal and state charges linked to the bombing and was granted the same political asylum status as Chesimard and lauded as a revolutionary hero.

On Friday, Connor said he hoped that Morales — like Chesimard — would soon be returned.

“The fact that Trump mentioned Chesimard is huge,” Connor said, adding that he was disappointed that the president did not refer to Morales, too. “I don’t think he would mention this without having a real plan to get these guys back. This is what should have been done from the beginning.”

Morales now lives in an apartment in central Havana. When this columnist rang his doorbell there in 2015 and then called, he refused to discuss his case and threatened to summon Cuban police.

Rose Foerster's husband, Werner, a New Jersey State Trooper, was shot to death by Chesimard and another Black Liberation Army operative during a traffic stop near Exit 9 of the turnpike on May 2, 1973.

Reached by phone on Friday, she said she did not watch Trump’s speech on television, but that she hopes the president will be able to persuade Cuba to return Chesimard.

Hiding in Havana

Other notable figures among the more than 50 American fugitives living in Cuba include Charlie Hill, who allegedly killed a police officer in New Mexico in 1971: Victor Manuel Gerena, who is linked to the robbery of $7 million from an armored car in Hartford, Conn., in 1983; and Cheri Dalton, who reportedly helped Chesimard break out of prison in 1979 and later drove a getaway car in the 1981 robbery of a Brinks truck in Nanuet, N.Y., in which two police officers and a Brinks guard were killed.

In an an interview in Havana in 2015, Dalton said she speaks regularly with Chesimard by telephone. Dalton said, however, that Chesimard feared that she might be extradited and had gone into hiding in a new home near Havana, rarely venturing out in public.

In a statement released by his office, Christie praised Trump “for speaking out so strongly and forcefully demanding” Chesimard’s return. Likewise, Col. Rick Fuentes, the superintendent of the New Jersey State Police, also applauded Trump, adding that he was “more hopeful than ever” that Cuban authorities would send her back to the United States.

“We’re committed to bringing her back home to face justice,” said State Police Capt. Michael Rinaldi, who monitors Chesimard’s whereabouts from Newark with the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force. “We’re certainly encouraged that the administration shares our view.”

But the New Jersey prosecutor in Chesimard’s murder trial was not so optimistic.

"I've been disappointed so many times,” said Judson Hamlin, 79, a former Middlesex County prosecutor who led the investigation of Chesimard in 1973. “I was on the turnpike that night. I would hope that Trump’s new demands would work. But I’m a cynic and pessimistic enough to believe it probably will not. I don’t see the Cuban government suddenly giving this lady up.”

Cuban authorities did not comment on Trump’s speech. Chesimard’s American attorney, Lennox Hinds, a former Rutgers University professor, did not respond to a request for comment. But Ron Kuby, the New York City attorney for Morales, said he doubted that Trump’s speech would result in a sudden reversal of Cuban policies to protect the American fugitives.

“Cuba has always maintained a deep sense of national pride and has refused to be bullied by the United States,” Kuby said. “I don’t think Trump’s half step backward is going to change anything.”

Email: kellym@northjersey.com