A story of fathers and sons, war and peace, and second chances

BUFFALO — Jeremiah Horrigan’s heart sank when he saw whirling red lights reflected through the arched windows of the Gothic Revival government building where he was trespassing. He had a miniature crowbar for cracking the locks on file cabinets filled with Selective Service System records. And he understood — standing there in his underwear — that his life was over.

Horrigan and his antiwar confederates were burgling Buffalo’s Old Post Office building on a steamy August night in 1971. They’d shed their clothes because it was hot as Hades in the dust-cloaked attic where they’d hidden for hours until nightfall. They’d emerged with their faces streaked in grime, like Lenten ashes, and felt giddy exhilaration as their scheme unfolded precisely as they’d planned — until that moment when they saw those refracted red lights, pulsing like a telltale heart on the stonework.

Now police stormed in, guns drawn, their shouts ricocheting off the cavernous stone walls. A pair of armed FBI agents, who’d been called away from a summer party, arrived in Bermuda shorts and sandals. And the Buffalo Five, as they’d soon be known, were quickly thrown to the terrazzo floor, placed in handcuffs and arrested.

This peculiar tableau of trespassers caught with their pants down and federal agents in tourist attire called to mind a mix of Monty Python and Inspector Clouseau, popular comedic stylings of the era. But this was no joke: Federal charges beckoned. Prison terms loomed. And they hadn’t even gotten to destroy any draft records.

The morning paper trumpeted news of the arrests. Horrigan’s name wasn’t there. He’d given it to the cops as Joe Hill, for a turn-of-the-century labor activist. That would keep the truth from Horrigan’s father for a few more precious hours. Jack Horrigan was a familiar name as the Buffalo Bills’ vice president for public relations and a confidant to their star running back, O.J. Simpson.

The photos that sent O.J. Simpson spiraling

This is a story of fathers and sons, war and peace, firstborns and second chances — and of a formidable federal judge who allowed a band of bohemian dissidents to represent themselves and put the Vietnam War on trial. It all happened at a time not unlike today, when competing ideologies in a fractured, fractious country believed their side owned the moral high ground and a proprietary purchase on patriotism.

The Buffalo Five — three men, two women — are as old as 71 now. John T. Curtin, the U.S. District Court Judge who presided over their trial, is 95. He sent a retirement letter to President Obama last spring, ending a remarkable 48-year tenure that included some of the most important cases in Western New York history, including school desegregation in Buffalo and Love Canal in Niagara Falls. But few cases in Curtin’s career would unfold more unconventionally than the trial of the Buffalo Five.

USA TODAY Sports talked to Curtin and four of the five former defendants, including Horrigan, a retired reporter at a skein of small-town newspapers in New York and author of an unpublished memoir called Fortunate Son: A Dying Father, An Angry Son and the War on the Home Front.

His father died of leukemia in 1973, at age 47. Buffalo Courier-Express sports columnist Phil Ranallo praised his courage and Jack Kemp read the paean into the Congressional Record. A year later the Pro Football Writers of America began giving the Jack Horrigan Award to NFL personnel who are especially helpful to writers. John Elway won it last year. Other winners over the years include coaches such as John Madden, Tom Landry and Don Shula and players such as Archie Manning, Warren Moon — and Simpson.

Jeremiah, eldest of nine, ached inside the night of his arrest, knowing how much this would hurt his father, with whom he had argued so bitterly about the war. Now Horrigan faced up to a dozen years in federal prison. Even if he got just a year or two, he understood it meant his father would die while he was in prison. Lord, how could he have let it end this way?

Horrigan graduated from Canisius High School in 1968, in the same class with Tim Russert, future Washington bureau chief of NBC News, and Anthony Yerkovich, future creator of "Miami Vice." Three weeks before their commencement, antiwar activists in Catonsville, Md., burned draft records with homemade napalm.

Horrigan enrolled at Fordham where he eventually found himself drawn to a subculture of the American antiwar movement known in the newspapers as the Catholic Left. He began to spend time at a church rectory in the Bronx, not far from campus, where war resisters took inspiration from the so-called Catonsville Nine.

The Nine included Catholic clergy, notably brothers Daniel and Philip Berrigan, later styled as “Rebel Priests” on the cover of Time. (Daniel was a Jesuit, Philip a Josephite.) Their trial was national news. So were their convictions. And their brazen act of civil disobedience gave rise to a national escalation of antiwar marches, sit-ins and flaming draft cards.

Peace activist Daniel Berrigan dies at 94

Horrigan dropped out of Fordham after his sophomore year to throw himself into the movement. He returned to Buffalo in the summer of 1971 to participate in a daring draft board raid, thrilled at the notion of destroying the records of men he’d known as boys in hopes this would keep hundreds out of the war. He found a community of like-minded leftists, including Chuck Darst, whose older brother David, a Christian Brother, had been a member of the Catonsville Nine.

The “action” — what the Five called it — would go down the same night as an action in Camden, N.J. The Five wouldn’t find out until later that an FBI informant inside the Camden raiders blew the whistle on the Buffalo action, too.

The Buffalo Five walked into the Old Post Office during business hours and hid in the attic, waiting for the building to close and darkness to come. They taped burglary tools, even filed-down fondue forks, to their bodies. They carried green laundry bags to haul away Army Intelligence files. And they had a pair of inflatable kiddie pools for filling with black fabric dye to obliterate any draft records they couldn’t shred by hand.

The men stripped down to T-shirts and tighty-whiteys, the women to T-shirts and shorts. This was not solely because of the hours they’d spend in an attic sweatbox. They also worried the rustle of pant legs brushing and shoes clacking could echo in the yawning, city-block of a building with its six-story, sky-lit atrium.

Police would find seven pairs of shoes at the scene of the crime because the Five was really Seven. Two men managed to sneak out and dash into the night when those red lights flared. Horrigan, knowing he was caught, forlornly whistled the Colonel Bogey March. It was a way to convey that the raiders were not any sort of threat. His wobbly warble dissolved as cops rushed in.

From his jail cell that night, Horrigan thought about the terrible arguments he’d had with his father over the war. One had come on the night of the first moon landing in 1969, the summer after his freshman year at Fordham. As a fourth grader, he’d told his father that when he grew up he wanted to be the first priest to say Mass on the moon; his father so loved that story. Now, on the night Neil Armstrong took one giant leap for mankind, Horrigan conflated rocket ships with Air Force bombers. Father and son traded bitter words. It would be different two summers later: There was no anger in the air when father paid son’s bail.

“He said, ‘You’re my son and I love you,’ ” Horrigan recalls. “And that’s all I had to hear.”

The Buffalo Five refused to stand when Judge Curtin entered his courtroom on the first day of trial in mid-April, 1972. They explained they saw everyone as equals and did not want to disrespect others by standing only for him. Curtin cleared the court and, when he returned, the Five stood — but only because Curtin had instructed the bailiff to take their chairs.

That set the tone for a remarkable nine days during which the Buffalo Five argued they’d acted to prevent crime, not commit one. The defendants represented themselves, though Curtin assigned Vincent E. Doyle Jr., a top defense attorney, as co-counsel.

The Buffalo Five called themselves The Buffalo. That’s how they’d signed a political manifesto that Assistant U.S. Attorney James W. Grable saw as a confession. He read it in his opening statement. Grable saw this as an open-and-shut case: The Five broke the law. They admitted it. They were guilty as charged.

The defendants argued their nonviolent action was justified in the face of an unjust war. They said a person who broke down the door of a burning house to save those inside is not guilty of breaking in.

Buffalo Five followed judge's orders

Curtin denied their application for a subpoena for President Nixon but allowed them unusual leeway to make their case. Witnesses for the defense included former American soldiers who’d fought in the war, a Vietnamese woman whose village had been destroyed, academics from the fields of history and theology. The defendants, all in their early to mid-20s, waived their rights against self-incrimination and took the stand.

Ann Masters said she felt compelled to act only after war crimes were committed in her name. She’d attended the University at Buffalo and spent time in the Bronx as a volunteer for VISTA, the antipoverty program.

Jim Martin said the government was waging an illegal war and individuals are not powerless to act. He’d studied for the priesthood and joined the Peace Corps in Africa after leaving the seminary.

Darst said children born in Vietnam are no less sacred in the eyes of God than children born in Western New York. He attended Notre Dame, where he met future co-conspirator, and future wife, Maureen Considine.

Considine said all have a responsibility to make government do right. She attended St. Mary’s College, Notre Dame’s sister school, and worked summers for the Christian Appalachian Project. She and Darst married mid-trial; they’d divorce several years later.

Horrigan said the Five’s action was illegal, not immoral — and he believed that distinction made all the difference.

Religion and morality were the trial’s recurring themes. The defendants were raised Catholic. The judge, prosecutor and defense attorney were also Catholic — and all graduates of Canisius College.

David Toolan, a Jesuit who taught religious studies there, testified that a Catholic who believed the war unjust and did nothing would be guilty of a sin of omission. Grable asked if that meant such a Catholic had a right to destroy draft files. Toolan said it did.

Doyle said in his closing argument that the case had been for him a form of baptism. The Five’s action was nonviolent, he said; it targeted paper, not people. “It is for you to decide if these defendants acted with criminal intent,” Doyle told the jurors. “You are not rubber stamps — you are the conscience of the community.”

Grable said in his summation that the action was meticulously planned, not some sudden act of heroism as in the burning-house metaphor. “You have a clear duty to return a verdict of guilty,” Grable told the jurors. “Their motives were sincere. War is horrible. War is hell. But the war is not the issue in this case.”

Next came Curtin’s charge to the jury. The Five, who’d been buoyed by his willingness to let them put the war on trial, soon felt a pang of betrayal. Curtin said the law does not recognize religious or moral convictions or some higher law as a justification for the commission of a crime, no matter the motive.

“If you find the defendants committed acts as charged in the indictment,” Curtin told the jurors, “you must find them guilty of those acts.”

The jury deliberated for more than seven hours. Their verdict came at 10:30 p.m.: Guilty of conspiracy to destroy draft records and intent to commit third-degree burglary, not guilty of removing records from a military intelligence office. Sentencing was set for May 19.

Horrigan’s father and mother and his eight brothers and sisters were all in court that day. He remembers wondering if he’d be given time to say goodbye to them or if he’d be taken away immediately. Patty, his girlfriend, had learned in the month since the verdict that she was pregnant. She and Horrigan were the only ones in the courtroom who knew.

Curtin told the Five that their love of country was greater than most citizens because they’d put their moral outrage into action. But he said the jeopardy in which they’d placed themselves and others outweighed any good they’d hoped to achieve. Then he sentenced each to one year in prison.

The math was easy for Horrigan. He’d be in jail when his father died and when his baby was born.

But quickly Curtin said something else. He was suspending the sentences. Each of the Five would be placed on one year’s probation. It took a moment for this to sink in. Shouts of joy rang out in the crowded courtroom.

“Each of you,” Curtin said, “is free to speak your mind, associate with your friends, attend meetings, travel and continue your efforts in a peaceful manner.”

Curtin shares a cozy condo with Jane, his wife of 64 years. Photos of their seven children, 10 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren (one born last week) cover the walls. (Full disclosure: Curtin’s daughter Patricia is married to Sean Brady, this reporter’s cousin.)

What about that day, half a lifetime ago, when Curtin placed the Buffalo Five on probation? A leprechaun’s smile — amused and pleased — washed over Curtin’s Irish features. His health is precarious these days, but the jaunty grin rendered him momentarily young again.

“I always believed there should be a chance for a second chance,” he said, “and the opportunity to have a good life.”

Time affords judges a verdict on their judgments. The Five offer living testimony.

Considine, 66, is a nurse practitioner who has devoted her life to healing. Darst, 67, is a retired bookseller who has lived a life of ideas. Masters, 71, is a travel consultant who spends much of her time in Italy. (She declined comment for this story.) Martin, 70, is a retired geologist who remains active politically. And Horrigan, 66, styles himself “a wild-eyed moderate” these days.

Darst recalls the trial as a theatrical pageant of high drama, low comedy and multiple plot twists. “I wouldn’t have believed it,” he says, “if I hadn’t lived it.”

Martin hosted a Buffalo Five reunion at his northern California home in 2004. Dozens came, including supporters and four of the Five. (Another reunion is in the works for next year, this one in Western New York.) “We all felt we did our little part to end the war,” Martin says. “It was a big-little thing.”

Considine visited Curtin in his chambers in 2008. “He gave me my life,” she says.

Horrigan called Curtin on the phone last April, shortly after the judge retired, to offer thanks for what he’d done all those years ago. Horrigan wrote about it in May for the online site Narratively.

“I tried to tell him how much I owed him the only way I knew how — by describing the barest outlines of a life of the luckiest man I know,” Horrigan wrote, “a life he allowed to happen.”

This month Horrigan offered the same thanks, this time in person. He drove six hours from his home in New Paltz, N.Y., to his hometown of Buffalo at the behest of USA TODAY Sports. When Horrigan walked into Curtin’s condo, the former firebrand and the former judge shared a room for the first time since sentencing.

“You look so old,” Curtin said. “You look older than I do.”

And they laughed like old friends.

Horrigan told Curtin of his son, daughter and four grandsons. He told of his newspaper career. And he told of how he and the girlfriend who stood by him in court that day are an old married couple.

Horrigan retired from the Middletown Times Herald-Record as a general assignment reporter in 2015. He’d followed his father’s footsteps: Jack Horrigan was a Buffalo Evening News sports reporter before going into public relations for the American Football League and then the Bills. (Jeremiah’s brother Joe also followed their father’s footsteps: He is chief communications officer of the Pro Football Hall of Fame.)

The strange case of the Buffalo Five echoes to this day in the Buffalo legal community. Vincent E. Doyle III and James W. Grable Jr. — sons of opposing counsel — are attorneys at a firm co-founded by Lawrence J. Vilardo, the federal judge who was assigned Curtin’s docket when Curtin stepped down.

At a retirement gathering in April, the former Marine pilot charmed his audience by telling them he was coming in for a landing. Curtin’s admirers praise him as a courageous jurist — The New York Times once called his school desegregation decision a model for the nation — while his detractors vilify him as an activist judge.

A local talk-radio voice of the Buffalo Five era loudly lambasted that trial as a circus. Curtin, seated below all those family photos, nodded and grinned when his wife reminded him of this. And then he recalled being booed during a commencement address.

“We must end the war in Vietnam before it ends us,” he said at Trocaire College 10 days after sentencing. “This war has turned all of our best ideals to dust.”

Dust is where the story begins, in the attic of the Old Post Office on that steamy night when those pulsing red lights told Horrigan his life was over. He understands now it was only beginning.