For Marxist terrorist Oscar Lopez-Rivera, “chief bombmaker” and “kingpin” of the Chicago-based cell of Armed Forces of National Liberation (FALN), the road to justice started on a spring Friday afternoon in Glenview, Illinois.
In May 1981, Glenview police pulled over his 1977 green Buick for a routine traffic violation. Inside, they found a member of the FBI’s Most Wanted List, a man who had been a fugitive from the law for five years.
Before leaving office last month, President Barack Obama commuted the remainder of the 70-year sentence of Lopez-Rivera, who was convicted for his role in the group's 100-plus bombings.
Oscar Lopez Rivera
| Wikipedia
The FBI missed Lopez-Rivera during a raid of a Milwaukee hideout in April 1980. He was described at the time by the Chicago Tribune as “one of the top three FALN leaders in the country.”
Lopez-Rivera was originally from Humboldt Park on Chicago’s West Side, but he frequented the north suburbs.
A year earlier, 11 of Lopez-Rivera’s FALN cohorts, including his common-law wife, had been arrested in Evanston, where they were plotting the abduction of newly elected Rep. John Porter, an Evanston Republican.
Sources told the Chicago Tribune that they found Porter’s home address scribbled on a scrap of paper in one of the terrorist’s shirt pockets.Police foiled their plan when Porter’s neighbors, near Elliot Park and the corner of Hamilton Street and Sheridan Road, noticed a group of people in jogging clothes acting suspiciously.
The FALN members had planned to pose as joggers as they kidnapped the congressman, driving him by van to a truck they had waiting in the Northwestern University parking lot. The truck had been stolen from Budget Rent-A-Car on Chicago Avenue in Evanston.
Porter, it turned out, got held up in Washington after Congress scheduled an unexpected session. He had planned to be home, where the FALN members would have been waiting for him.
Evanston police noticed one of the joggers was wearing a false mustache. They found 12 handguns, two shotguns and a rifle in their van.
The joggers were also targeting industrialist billionaire Henry Crown, then 84, for kidnapping. He lived in Evanston and took daily walks along the lakefront.
Lopez-Rivera’s FALN group was tied to an April 1980 robbery of a Radio Shack at 176 Skokie Valley Road in Highland Park, in which they tied up a store manager and truck driver before stealing $3,200 worth of portable radios and transmitters.
Another FALN member, Luis Rosado, robbed Highland Park Ford on Park Avenue and Highway 41 in December 1980. He pulled a gun on a Glenview salesman, robbed him and tied him up with rope before stealing a van, resulting in a high-speed chase down the Edens Expressway.
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