With thousands of U.S. soldiers dying in Vietnam, a group of young Catholics in New York embarked on a secret mission to bring the war machine to its knees.

By Stephen Wood

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Paul was the favorite of Betty Good’s ten children. His next-eldest brother, Jim, still remembers his christening in 1947 as a momentous occasion, given that Paul was his maternal grandparents’ fiftieth grandchild. Consider yourself advised, right off the bat, that this is a story about Catholics.

Jim described his brother as “a young man that just loved life.” By his teenage years, Paul was such a notorious pool shark that he had to travel farther and farther from his family’s Western Pennsylvania home in search of marks. “You didn’t wanna play pool against Paul Good,” Jim said. “That was out of the question.”

Shortly after Paul graduated from high school, he was called up to serve in the Army and sent to Vietnam. When Betty put him on the plane, she was proud of what he was doing and convinced that it was right. But just a few weeks later, on June 19, 1967, she awoke with a premonition that something terrible had happened to Paul.

It took a few days, but when the men from the Army arrived outside her house, she knew why they were there. She knew what they were going to say even as she waited for her husband to come and receive the news with her. Paul Good was killed in action outside Saigon on June 19, a few months shy of his twentieth birthday.

Like many people his age, Jim already had serious problems with U.S. foreign policy. Now it had claimed the life of his younger brother. “At that point,” he said, “I just wanted to make the government feel like they’re not as secure as they think they are.” Eventually, he and some friends hatched a plan to do just that—one as outrageous as it was outrageously simple.

Jim is in his eighties now, and he can’t say for certain how many government offices he broke into following his brother’s death. But it all began in Buffalo, New York.

America watched as men in suits picked blue capsules out of a glass container, like some perverse game show, to determine the order in which the most recent crop of draft-eligible boys would be called into service.

Jim started out on a path of righteousness—a spiritual one, that is. He entered seminary at 14 and spent eight years training to be a Catholic priest. It wasn’t spreading the faith that excited him so much as the opportunity to travel; he wanted to be a missionary. But shortly before he was to be ordained and sent overseas, Jim was, in his words, “politely asked to leave” due to his chronic inability to obey orders.

Instead he became something of a secular missionary, traveling to the Dominican Republic as a Peace Corps volunteer. He arrived less than a year after President Lyndon Johnson sent tens of thousands of U.S. troops to the island nation to prop up a strongman friendly to his administration. Most locals gave Jim a chilly reception. “When I got out there, it was like, ‘Hey, hi! My name is Jaime Bueno, Jim Good, and I’m here to help!’ And they said, ‘Screw you.’ ” Jim quickly realized that the troops were there to protect American landowners, not Dominicans, and that the local Catholic clergy “lived very well” while their flocks toiled on plantations. When he began to speak out against the injustice around him, according to Jim, he fell out of favor with the Peace Corps bureaucracy. He ended up leaving his post three months early.

Now known as Jaime Bueno to his friends—James was the most popular name for boys born in the United States every single year between 1940 and 1952, so a distinctive nickname was vital—Jim moved to New York City and fell in with the growing antiwar community. He eventually moved to Buffalo, where he met a number of like-minded people, many of whom had also grown up Catholic.

“I always wanted to be a saint,” said Jeremiah Horrigan, a Buffalonian from a family of ten children, whose father, Jack, was a beloved sportswriter turned executive for the Buffalo Bills. Studious, morally upright, and the son of a local bigwig, Jeremiah was a natural fit at Canisius High School, an elite boys’ school he described as “a training ground for the eventual leaders in Buffalo—at least, the Catholic leaders.”

Mike Hickey, the eldest of ten from a South Buffalo family, attended Canisius on a scholarship. As a kid, Mike always took the Church seriously, but his “scrupulous conscience” alerted him to some major contradictions between doctrine and practice. While studying the catechism in grade school, he was surprised that the illustration accompanying the Fifth Commandment in his book was a photograph of soldiers storming the beaches of Normandy: “It seems pretty straightforward, you know, as a commandment: Thou shalt not kill.”

Ken Mudie referred to the neighborhood where he and Mike grew up as “an Irish-Catholic ghetto.” Ken and his brother stood out. “We had two strikes against us,” he said. “My parents were divorced and we weren’t Irish.” His early life was chaotic, with his mother working multiple jobs and a variety of “transient” relatives cycling through his home. But he had a great time, and he got good grades, which earned him a ticket to Canisius.

Maureen “Meaux” Considine grew up in a suburb of Buffalo, one of “only” five kids. Her parents were “devout,” she said, “but there were things about the Catholic Church that they questioned a little bit.” Had the Church allowed it, her mom would have been a priest. The Considines were the rare suburban white couple who purposefully sent their daughter into the city proper for high school, to Mount St. Joseph Academy. Being in an urban environment exposed Meaux to the effects of racial segregation and grinding poverty. It also put her in proximity to Canisius boys, including Mike, Ken, and Jeremiah.

After the four of them graduated high school, in 1968, they headed to college. Ken and Mike enrolled at Le Moyne College in Syracuse. A Jesuit school, Le Moyne until recently had employed Father Daniel Berrigan, a radical antiwar priest. The Catholics there dressed and talked more like hippies than like the Mass-goers Ken had grown up with, and they weren’t above getting their hands dirty when the spirit moved them.

Le Moyne was where Mike first got picked up by the cops, for leafleting on behalf of farmworkers. He’d been a literal and figurative Boy Scout before college. “ I was always a good boy and never disobeyed any rules,” he said. “But it just seemed like the right thing to do. So we did it.” He and Ken also protested racist hiring practices at a construction site, and they began to recognize the connections between racism in the United States and what was happening in Vietnam. In the early years of U.S. military involvement in the conflict, Black Americans were drafted and killed in disproportionately high numbers.

Ken’s upbringing wasn’t political, beyond his family’s general affinity for John F. Kennedy because he was Catholic. His father was a World War II veteran who had fought in the Battle of the Bulge, and Ken was raised not to question what America did overseas. Jocular and self-effacing, he continued to defend the Vietnam War in conversations with friends and fellow students, until one day, he said, “I just couldn’t argue why we were there.”

Ken, Mike, and Jeremiah all attended Woodstock, the generation-defining music festival in upstate New York, and their accounts of this period are laced with references to countercultural music. One song that’s stuck with Ken is “Sky Pilot,” a catchy but haunting piece of psychedelia released in 1968 by Eric Burdon and the Animals (of “House of the Rising Sun” fame). Over seven and a half minutes, it tells the story of a military priest blessing troops as they head into battle, listening to the firefight, then watching the men return, wounded and traumatized. Burdon’s tone is one of pity mixed with disdain. It’s a song about a man who keeps his head down and stays quiet, allowing great evil to unfold around him.

Meaux was studying at St. Mary’s College, just across the street from Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, when in 1969 the U.S. Selective Service began to draft young men by date of birth via a televised lottery. America watched as men in suits picked blue capsules out of a glass container, like some perverse game show, to determine the order in which the most recent crop of draft-eligible boys would be called into service. “It was a terrible night,” Meaux said. “Lots of drunk people. They were drunk because they were happy or because they were sad. There were people who were hysterically crying because their number was really low.”

Ken got lucky—his draft number was high. So high that he quit Le Moyne after two years, giving up the possibility of a student deferment, and started working full-time. “There’d have to be a ground invasion in Iowa before I would ever be drafted,” he said. Mike stayed in school, but his deferment weighed on him as he watched more and more young men get called up.

Jeremiah credits the alternative of a “death sentence” in Vietnam with his decision to go to college. At Fordham University in the Bronx, another Jesuit school, he discovered a scene similar to the one at Le Moyne: Professors assigned books with titles like The Nonviolent Cross. One of those professors was John Peter Grady, a sociologist who appears to have used his teaching position primarily to foment nonviolent resistance to U.S. foreign policy. Gregarious, canny, and hard-drinking, Grady took every opportunity to convert casual war opponents into crusaders against the war machine. And it was an open secret on campus that Grady had been involved in some of the recent high-profile raids on Selective Service offices, better known as the draft boards.

They sent their destroyed cards to the Selective Service, but weren’t arrested. “ I did get a call from the FBI asking me, ‘Did you knowingly and without duress do that?’ ” Chuck recalled, laughing. “And I said, ‘Yeah, you could cast it that way.’ ”

In 1966, determined that neither he nor any of his eleven younger brothers should be drafted, 19-year-old Barry Bondhus emptied a bucket of excrement into the drawer containing his file at a Minneapolis-area draft board. Thankfully, for the sake of public health, this exact method of protest didn’t catch on, but Barry had exposed just how easy it was to destroy the documentation required to draft young men into military service.

In October 1967, four individuals, including Father Philip Berrigan, brother of Daniel, entered a draft board in Baltimore, poured blood—a mixture of animal and their own—over a quantity of files, and were arrested. The following spring, a group now known as the Catonsville Nine, among them both Berrigan brothers, removed files from a suburban Maryland draft board in broad daylight, destroyed them with homemade napalm in the parking lot, and were arrested. “Our apologies, dear friends, for the fracture of good order. For the burning of papers, instead of children,” the Catonsville Nine said in their official statement, which Daniel Berrigan read to reporters over the pyre.

What separated these raids from nearly all other antiwar actions was, to put it bluntly, their potential to be effective. In a world without computers, the physical documents containing the personal information of draft-eligible men might have been the only materials linking them to the Selective Service. “ I often thought, what about the women who worked in those offices?” Jim Good said. “Did they see those files as death certificates?” He and other peace activists came to view the contents of draft boards’ filing cabinets as no different from bombs or bullets: They were just tools that helped the government kill. Crucially, destroying files could be accomplished without any violence, unless you counted the destruction of property, which raiders did not. They believed that some property simply didn’t have a right to exist. 

No central structure existed to plan the raids, but a diffuse network of participants, consisting primarily of working-class Catholics, adopted the moniker of the East Coast Conspiracy to Save Lives. The Berrigan brothers were the most visible members, and they were often assumed to be the movement’s leaders—J. Edgar Hoover even branded Phil a terrorist during a Senate hearing. But neither was personally involved in more than a handful of raids. By 1971, the brothers were in prison for the Maryland actions; Phil went quietly, but Dan led the FBI on a weeks-long chase, during which he occasionally surfaced to deliver guerrilla sermons. Many of their fellow organizers evaded detection, and soon more young people were joining their ranks.

Chuck Darst was one of them. Chuck was a bookish, articulate Catholic kid from Knoxville, Tennessee, whose parents were so apolitical that neither knew how the other voted. He intended to join the ROTC when he enrolled at Notre Dame, then maybe serve in the Air Force. But before long, Chuck was studying just-war theory, reading Gandhi, and plumbing the depths of his own psyche to the tunes of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. He also fell in love with Meaux over at St. Mary’s.

In the summer of 1968, Chuck was selling books in rural Alabama when his older brother, David, was arrested along with the rest of the Catonsville Nine. Back at school, Chuck tore up his draft card beside other young men during a Mass celebrated before the campus mural known as Touchdown Jesus. They sent their destroyed cards to the Selective Service but weren’t arrested. “ I did get a call from the FBI asking me, ‘Did you knowingly and without duress do that?’ ” Chuck recalled, laughing. “And I said, ‘Yeah, you could cast it that way.’ ”

Then his brother died suddenly. A writer and member of the De La Salle Christian Brothers, a community of laymen who take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, David taught religion at a Catholic high school in Nebraska. He’d been convicted for the Catonsville action, but had yet to start his prison sentence, when he was killed in a car accident at age 27.

Chuck took a semester off to focus on compiling a book of his brother’s writings. Maybe some part of him already knew that he wasn’t going back to college. “It just seemed like I was inexorably being drawn to do something more than I had done at Notre Dame,” Chuck said. “The mantle of draft resistance and resistance to the Vietnam War kind of seemed to come to me.”

Meaux also found her studies increasingly meaningless as the fabric of society seemed to fray around her. Buffalo became a favorite port of call for Chuck as he hitchhiked back and forth from South Bend to talk to East Coast publishers about his brother’s book, and when she finally dropped out of St. Mary’s, Meaux ended up back in her hometown, living with Chuck and working for an antiwar congressional candidate.

Chuck’s and Meaux’s fates were sealed when they joined Mike Hickey in a drive across the state to see an off-Broadway play Daniel Berrigan had written about Catonsville. The production incorporated footage of Chuck’s late brother that Chuck had never seen before, and it helped him and his friends come to a monumental decision. “As Meaux and Mike and I made our way back to Buffalo, we were saying, ‘We’ve gotta do an action,’ ” Chuck recalled.

In the summer of 1971, Mike called Ken Mudie and asked if he wanted to attend a meeting about raiding a draft board. Ken agreed to go, in his telling because he happened to have time on his hands. Once they were gathered, the participants introduced themselves with some words about what had brought them there. Everyone shared a story of personal growth and discovery—except Ken.

“I’m Ken Mudie,” he said. “My favorite band is the Kinks, and my favorite color is green.”

He now wonders if he should’ve said something a little less flippant, but his humor had a function. “I think the point I was trying to make was, I’m just new to this, folks,” he said. 

Other newcomers to righteous lawbreaking were there that day: Mike, Meaux, and Chuck, as well as Jeremiah Horrigan. But the two Jims—Jim Martin and Jim Good—were civil-disobedience veterans. That June, they’d gone to the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the Selective Service to carry out a citizen’s arrest of its director, Curtis Tarr. They’d arranged a meeting, invited reporters to join them, and, once in Tarr’s office, announced that they were charging him with war crimes. They asked him to sign an affidavit admitting his guilt. He declined. Martin moved to place handcuffs on him, but Tarr was six feet seven inches tall and a World War II veteran. He brushed Martin aside with enough force to knock him on his ass. The next morning, papers across the country ran a photo of Tarr towering like a victorious boxer over a falling Martin. To the side, Jim Good is holding handcuffs and perhaps starting to wonder if there might be a more effective way to mess with the war machine.

Martin’s girlfriend, Ann Masters, was also at the meeting in Buffalo, along with Barb and Mike Dougherty, a married couple with a newborn baby. The Doughertys were a bit older than the rest of the crew, but they were moved by the spirit of the age, and their guidance was crucial to their younger comrades. “They were the rocks that we built around,” Jeremiah said. Ken described Mike Dougherty as a natural leader and Barb as an “earth mother” who shocked his delicate sensibilities by squirting breast milk across the room at unsuspecting targets. (The Doughertys are now deceased, as is Jim Martin. Ann Masters declined an interview for this story.)

By all available evidence, no member of the Buffalo cell had ever raided a draft board before; among them, however, they had several points of contact with the East Coast Conspiracy to Save Lives and a clear sense of what they wanted to accomplish. Their mark was so obvious, it almost went without saying: The Old Post Office stuck out like a Gothic Revival thumb over downtown Buffalo. The six-story gray square with a glass-covered atrium in the middle—Jim Good described it as both a “stone fortress” and a “square doughnut”—housed all manner of federal offices, including two draft boards. It also contained a branch of U.S. Army Intelligence, which was of great interest to the antiwar crowd. Buffalo was often the last stop on the path to Canada for young men fleeing the draft, just as it had been for people escaping slavery on the Underground Railroad. The local peace community believed that Army Intelligence was trying to track down draft dodgers, and raiding their office seemed like a good way of finding out.

After their first meeting, the Buffalo group went through what some in their circle called a “period of discernment,” a Catholic term that refers to a time of serious contemplation, often undertaken before entering seminary. In this case, it meant weighing the ethics and consequences of breaking into a suite of government offices. Nobody in the group could pinpoint the moment when they decided that they were in; each came to the conclusion over a period of weeks. “It seemed pretty natural,” Mike Hickey recalled. “I was 20, so my left prefrontal cortex was not fully developed. But it was, I would say, a moral decision at that point.” Jim Good said that he came to see planning the raid as “more of a challenge than a risk. It almost became a game. Except it was a serious game.”

As with any break-in, the key to raiding a draft board was casing. The Buffalo crew spent countless hours staring at the Old Post Office, noting mundane details like foot and car traffic at various times of day; the patterns of nearby police patrols; and which lights were left on at night, and how late. They typically cased in twos, for safety and to stave off boredom. Mixed-gender pairings had the option to sit in parked cars. That way if cops took an interest, they could simply pretend they were there to make out.

Jim Good and Jeremiah Horrigan went into the Old Post Office during the day to determine, among other things, if there were any armed guards. Nobody was willing to risk the possibility of guns going off. Luckily, according to Jeremiah, “it was not a difficult building to infiltrate.” There was no camera or alarm system—no security infrastructure beyond the locks on the doors and a single watchman on duty around the clock. Over the course of several summer weeks, the crew did not observe any employees staying late or working weekends.

A simple-enough plan began to form: The raiders would enter the building during a busy workday, and each would quietly make their way to a staircase that led to the top floor. There they would hide in an unused attic until the dead of night, when they’d sneak downstairs. Five members of the group would hit the draft board offices, while Jim Good and Mike Hickey would enter the Army Intelligence office two floors below. They’d all escape in a van waiting outside, disguised to look like a Postal Service vehicle, with Ken at the wheel. Unlike the Berrigan brothers, they weren’t interested in public arrests—they wanted to get away.

Planning took place primarily at the West Street apartment of Cathy McCue, a local college student who was subletting her spare room to Meaux and Chuck. Cathy came from a socially conscious family residing in the New York City suburbs, but was too busy at the time to engage seriously with the plot being hatched in her living room. She claimed that she only learned after the fact just how many meetings had taken place in her apartment while she was at school, at work, or asleep.

Meaux’s “key role” was to get into the rooms where the draft files were kept. “When we cased the building, we saw what kind of locks were in the doors, and then we went out and bought a bunch of those locks, put them in a two-by-four, and just started practicing,” she said. Meaux “fiddled and fiddled and fiddled” with crochet hooks, knitting needles, and fondue forks until she was certain she could efficiently pick the locks that stood between the raiders and the files.

At some point, the group realized that there would be too many files in the offices for them to carry away. They’d have to destroy some of them on-site. “Just ripping them wouldn’t be enough,” Jeremiah explained, because the government could piece the documents back together. “And fire was out of the question.” Destroying papers was one thing, but the group wasn’t ready to risk burning down the Old Post Office. When raiders elsewhere had encountered this problem, they’d soaked draft documents in a substance that made them impossible to read. The activists in Buffalo decided to buy Rit Dye, typically used to color fabric, and a tub they could dump the files in.

Along with her fondue forks and knitting needles, Meaux concealed an uninflated kiddie pool inside her clothes when she entered the Old Post Office on August 20. Mike Hickey was alongside her, in a Goodwill suit several sizes too big, with bottles of dye taped to his body. He also carried two items he wanted with him in the event that he went to jail: a toothbrush and a picture of his girlfriend, Lucy.

Chuck was confident it wouldn’t come to that. He thought their chances of getting away were good. The night before the raid, he drafted a statement on behalf of the group, taking credit for what they were about to do. “Okay,” it began, “the war goes on.” The statement referenced the Gospels and Albert Camus (“I wish I could love my country and still love justice”). It called the war “a violence of extraordinary arrogance and cruelty.”

“In you, good neighbor,” one passage read, “we wish to inspire neither alarm nor disgust by this, our night’s work. We move here against vandals and terrorists especially those of official badge or office in our country.”

The statement was signed: The Buffalo.

Jim Good took a break from the action to put his grubby stockinged feet on an Army officer’s desk, pick up the phone, and call a friend to brag about where he was.

The raiders made it inside the building undetected. “I think my comrades could tell I was a fucking nervous wreck,” Mike said. Jeremiah was excited. “I knew kids that were bound for Vietnam,” he said. “If I was able to make the machine, as I thought of it, stop—or at least throw some sand into the machine—that was the best feeling in the world.” They signed a guest book (Mike checked in as “K. Marx”) and then, one by one, made their way to the top floor.

What followed was more than twenty-four hours of nervous silence in the baking mid-August heat; the friends had decided to wait until Saturday night to emerge from the stuffy, filthy attic. They tiptoed out onto the roof to smoke and pee. Chuck meditated and wrote.

When Friday night fell, Jeremiah went downstairs to surveil the building’s lone watchman and came back having discovered a wrinkle. Devoid of people, the building’s atrium was like an echo chamber. The swishing of Jeremiah’s bell-bottom jeans had carried, and he was worried that the noises made by the group would alert the watchman. Father Jim Mang, a local priest, was scheduled to pull up outside and lean on his horn, providing a distraction as they broke into the offices. Still, out of an abundance of caution, everyone agreed to strip down to their underwear.

When the appointed hour came on Saturday night, the seven scantily clad friends descended the building’s stairs, split up, and took their places. Outside, the priest hit the horn, and the raiders got to work picking locks and pulling files from cabinets. Some documents went into mail sacks; others were destined for the kiddie pool. Jim Good took a break from the action to put his grubby stockinged feet on an Army officer’s desk, pick up the phone, and call a friend to brag about where he was.

Chuck’s job was to monitor the watchman, and before long his ears perked up: The elevator shaft in the atrium was active. Someone was coming.

Chuck alerted his friends, but it was too late. When the elevator doors opened, it wasn’t the watchman but two unknown men who stepped out, guns drawn. They were wearing flip-flops and tank tops.

“There they are!” one of the men shouted. They weren’t surprised to see the raiders—they were there to apprehend them. In that instant, Jim Good knew there must have been a snitch.

“FBI!” the agents yelled. 

Jim Good had planned for the worst. While casing the building, he’d taken the bold step of loosening the screws on the lock of a revolving door that offered an alternative exit. Now, from where he stood, with the agents advancing, he saw that he and his friends could scramble over a wrought-iron cage protecting a stairwell, drop down to the main floor of the building, and flee through that door. Jim made his move, and Mike clambered over the cage after him. As Jim began removing the screws from the lock, Mike expedited things: He rammed right through the door.

The FBI had the other five raiders cornered upstairs. Jeremiah started whistling the “Colonel Bogey March.” “You know, how could they shoot someone who was whistling?” he said. He was arrested along with Meaux, Chuck, Anne, and Jim Martin.

When he pulled up in the getaway van, Ken thought he’d stumbled across some crime scene—flashing lights in the middle of downtown—before realizing it was his crime scene. He kept driving, navigating calmly around the traffic circle outside the Old Post Office and heading right back the way he came, wondering what the hell had happened.

As they tasted fresh air, Jim and Mike were wondering the same. “The only thing that took the terror away was the adrenaline of escaping,” Mike recalled. He would have run the entire five miles home to South Buffalo if Jim hadn’t persuaded him to stop and take cover in a parking garage. They were still smeared with grime from the attic and stripped to their underwear; going any farther on foot would attract attention. When they spotted a group of young people hanging out in a nearby alley, they made their way over. The kids burst out laughing when they saw the pair.

“Is the man after you?” one of them asked.

“Yeah,” Jim replied. “Frankly, quite a few of them.”

The kids said they’d give the two raiders a ride in exchange for Jim’s Bulova watch. “You can have it!” Mike said immediately, even though it wasn’t his to give. Jim took off the watch and handed it over.

Soon they were in the backseat of the car, on their way to a safe house where they could shower and put on some clothes. It was around then that Mike remembered the two items he’d left behind in the pocket of his pants, which were still up in the attic of the Old Post Office: his toothbrush and the picture of Lucy. As the sun rose, he hunkered down at his parents’ and devised escape routes for when the FBI came to take him away.

By coincidence, the Buffalo action took place the same night as a raid on a federal building in Camden, New Jersey. One of the people involved in that operation was Bob Good, Jim’s brother. As they were gearing up in Camden, Bob wondered aloud whether the Buffalo raid, which Jim had told him was in the works, might be happening the same night. A minute or so later, another member of the Camden crew, Bob Hardy, excused himself to call his wife.

In fact, Hardy was calling the FBI; he’d been an informant for months. His handlers alerted their colleagues at the FBI’s Buffalo office, the staff of which were enjoying an end-of-summer picnic—hence the casual attire of the agents who busted the Buffalo raiders.

The feds interrogated the five arrested friends. Chuck refused to give so much as his name. As the mustached 21-year-old repeatedly cited his Miranda Rights, one of the FBI agents across from him gave the other a knowing look and said he was stepping out to get some coffee. The remaining agent grabbed Chuck and bundled him over to an open window. “If you don’t tell me your goddamn name right now, you’re going out that window,” Chuck recalled the agent saying. “I’m just gonna tell him you jumped.” Even with his head and torso thrust through the window frame, Chuck didn’t take the threat seriously. So instead of freaking out, he just stared at the agent until he finally relented and hauled Chuck back inside.

Monday morning’s Buffalo Courier-Express carried a photograph of a smiling Chuck, clad in a T-shirt and handcuffs, being led out of the Old Post Office by an FBI agent. In the photo, Ann Masters and another agent walk behind them, and next to Chuck is a suspect identified as “Joseph Hill”—Jeremiah Horrigan had refused to cooperate with the authorities, giving them the name of a deceased Swedish-American folk singer and labor activist in lieu of his own.

When the papers figured out Jeremiah’s identity, they contacted Jack Horrigan for comment. Jack refused to condemn the raid and described his son as “a warm, loving human being.” Being a Bills executive, Jeremiah explained, was “like being the Holy Ghost in Buffalo,” where everyone knew everyone and everyone loved the football team. Even Buffalonians who couldn’t relate to antiwar activists could probably relate to Jack Horrigan.

Next to the article on the Buffalo operation was the headline “20 Nabbed in Camden Draft Raid,” along with a photo of one of the people arrested: John Peter Grady, the Fordham professor. Eventually, eight more people would be arrested for the Camden action. All told, Bob Hardy’s snitching led to the arrest of more than two dozen people in two states.

For the next several weeks, it seemed like the FBI was everywhere. Cathy McCue was on the other side of the state the night of the raid, but as soon as she arrived back in Buffalo, her landlord met her outside and informed her that the feds had been there. Agents also visited professors in her department at the University of Buffalo and questioned the owner of a restaurant where she’d worked. “My whole life was picked apart,” Cathy said.

G-men tried to interview Meaux’s family, but her father kicked the agents out of his house after they suggested that Meaux was too dangerous to be in contact with her siblings. Meaux was out on bail by then; local activists had pooled funds, and priests had appealed to the consciences of well-to-do parishioners until there was enough money to free all five raiders. Ken’s family got a visit, too, even though he hadn’t been arrested. Ken thought he could detect a hint of pride in the way his grandmother talked about his friends “popping off”—her misstating of the colloquialism “ripping off”—a federal agency.

When the FBI showed up at Mike’s house, he hid in the bathroom. His mom told the agents that he wasn’t home, but then, feeling like a coward, Mike revealed himself. He assumed that the agents knew he’d been in the Old Post Office because his girlfriend’s picture was in the pants he’d left behind, but it quickly became clear they didn’t have anything on him. They just thought he might know something.

Along with Jim, Ken, and the Doughertys, Mike’s thoughts soon turned to revenge. In Washington, Hoover and Attorney General John Mitchell called a press conference to proclaim the end of the East Coast Conspiracy to Save Lives. “That pissed us off,” Mike said. “That’s why we decided, well, we’re gonna keep doing it.”

“I really thought that I would get stigmata because I was so holy,” Sally said. “As a little kid, third, fourth grade, I would look at my hands and go, ‘It’s not there yet, Mom!’ She’d just say, ‘Keep prayin’!’ ”

The five activists arrested in Buffalo never seriously considered a guilty plea. “We talked to one attorney who thought we ought to plead insanity,” Chuck said. Then, in “a real stroke of luck,” they got in touch with attorney Vinny Doyle. He and his partner, Joe Birmingham, agreed to an unorthodox approach. The Buffalo raiders, along with their counterparts in Camden, wanted to represent themselves at trial, put questions directly to witnesses, and make themselves as sympathetic as possible in the eyes of the jury. Doyle, Birmingham, and other legal minds in the antiwar movement would act as a backstop, advising them and handling some of the courtroom technicalities, but it would be the defendants’ show. Doyle “just wanted to help us say what we needed to say,” Chuck said.

The home of University of Buffalo professor Ed Powell became a node for the defense campaign, a place to gather and strategize. A disenchanted former FBI agent and his wife also offered their sizable suburban home as a base of operations; Meaux, Chuck, and some other activists eventually moved in. Before the trial, the activists decided to conduct an extended speaking tour across Buffalo, taking every opportunity to explain their opposition to the war to the people of western New York, in the hope of raising public consciousness and softening up the jury pool. They also compiled a list of potential witnesses that included prominent academics and war veterans, people whose testimony could be argued—fairly—to have nothing to do with the facts of the case. The Buffalo hoped to deliver a history lesson and tell a morality tale. They might not escape jail, but they would go down doing their part to change people’s minds about Vietnam.

While the defendants prepared for trial, Jim, Mike, and Ken cased draft offices throughout New York as possible targets for new raids. They decided to hit three on the same night, in Niagara, right on the U.S.–Canada border; in Batavia, halfway to Rochester; and in Geneseo, a college town south of Rochester. These offices were much smaller than the Old Post Office and seemingly had no night watchmen. The crew knew where to break in and how. But with their co-conspirators awaiting trial, they needed new recruits.  

One of them was Sally Hamlin. Another Buffalo native, Sally was a self-professed religious nerd. “I was enamored, fascinated by all the weird stories of the saints and  martyrs,” she said. When she was seven or eight, Sally still swears, she heard the voice of God calling her to be a priest, a notion her parents dismissed. “I really thought that I would get stigmata because I was so holy,” she said. “As a little kid, third, fourth grade, I would look at my hands and go, ‘It’s not there yet, Mom!’ She’d just say, ‘Keep prayin’!’ ”

The liberalizing reforms that swept Catholicism after the Second Vatican Council—Masses in languages other than Latin, nuns allowed to wear shorter habits—buoyed Sally’s spirits, and by her late teen years she’d embraced the gospel of the Catholic left. “It spoke to me,” she said, “as a person who thought that Jesus had it going on, in the nonviolent, Jesus Christ Superstar kind of way.” She opposed the war on principle and was devastated when it touched her directly. Sally and her best friend, Joanie, both had older brothers. When the boys got drafted, Sally said, “we shaved their hair in our kitchen and drank a lot of beer and sent them off to war.”

Sally got a shock when she picked up the paper on the morning of August 22, 1971, and learned that several of her friends were in federal custody for trying to raid the Old Post Office. She immediately got involved in the volunteer defense committee that had sprung up to aid the defendants. Soon she soon found herself attending weekend retreats where people were laying the groundwork for future raids, and she fell in with the new cell planning to hit three draft boards in one night.

Sally’s widower father couldn’t afford to send her to college. “ I had no money, I had no education,” Sally said, “but I had a body.” She figured she should use it.

Ken called Mike Dougherty to let him know, in code, that the raids had been a success. “Game went well last night!” he said. “I got up three times and had three hits, hit the ball outta the park.”

Sally was working as a nanny, and she made sure to give her employers, the Carlsons, a heads-up prior to burglarizing the Batavia draft board. “I’m gonna get involved with some things that may show up in the newspaper,” she told them. The Carlsons were cool. They didn’t ask questions.

On the afternoon of October 28, 1971, Sally dropped off the Carlson kids at home and hitchhiked to Batavia. She walked right through the door of the draft board building, nonchalantly ascended a flight of stairs, and slid into a broom closet to wait until nightfall. The office was on the town’s main drag, but Batavia didn’t have much in the way of nightlife. Once the coast was clear, Sally let two other activists in through the front door.

The raiders rifled through cabinets, stuffed draft files into sacks, then hauled the sacks downstairs and loaded them into a waiting car driven by another new accomplice named Paul. He and Sally set off for a cabin in the Finger Lakes that was the rendezvous point for everyone involved in the raids that night “We were feeling pretty good that we’d gotten away with it,” Sally said, until she and Paul were about a dozen miles from their destination. “All of a sudden we see flashing lights in the car behind us.”

Paul and Sally pulled over and instinctively sidled up to one another, to pretend they were a couple out for a romantic drive. But that wouldn’t explain the bulging sacks in the back of their car. The policeman approached Paul’s window to ask for his license, and Paul said they were on their way to his family’s cabin for the weekend. The officer told Paul that his taillight was out—that was the reason for the stop. Then he shined his flashlight on the sacks. In a moment of inspiration, Paul told him that they were full of Halloween costumes for the kids at a local Catholic orphanage.

Miraculously, the cop didn’t search the bags, but he offered to follow Paul and Sally to the cabin to make sure they arrived safely. After all, a broken taillight could be a hazard. Thinking it would be suspicious to refuse, Paul and Sally agreed. They set off again, still in possession of several bags of purloined federal property, leading a cop directly to the rendezvous point.

The Niagara break-in was more complicated from the start. Betsy Feltham, a student at Niagara University, was a new raider—she’d been reading Thoreau and Gandhi in school and connected with an “alternative, sort of underground” Catholic community. She couldn’t recall who had asked her to help knock over the Niagara draft board, but she remembered consenting immediately. “It would never occur to me not to,” she said.

The office was adjacent to an outpost of the Social Security Administration, and Betsy cased the building under the pretext that she was doing a school report on the agency. “I set my hair, put on a miniskirt, shaved my legs, and went to interview people,” she said. “That was not the way I normally looked, for sure.” The two government bureaus shared a bathroom, so it was easy enough for Betsy to excuse herself and scope out the target without raising suspicion. Nevertheless, she was so nervous she had to put on her research act “two or three times” to gather the information she needed, which must have made a couple of local Social Security administrators feel very interesting.

The plan in Niagara was for two people to hide in a closet and let Betsy and Mike Hickey into the draft board late at night. But as he waited at a safe house, Mike was alarmed to receive an early phone call from his comrades inside the office. They had emerged from hiding to find the doors to the building locked from the outside. To let the other raiders in, they’d have to improvise.

From there, Mike said, the operation proceeded “kinda like from a Three Stooges movie.” While casing, the raiders had noticed an exterior door that should have led into the Social Security office, but Betsy saw no sign of it from the inside. The activists realized it had been drywalled over. Now they figured that if they got the door to open from the outside, they could cut through the drywall, enter the Social Security office, and access the draft board via the shared bathroom.

To carry out the new plan, they would need to bypass a construction fence, which meant Mike and Betsy had to scramble up a ladder and onto the office’s roof. They’d made it about twenty yards across the flat rooftop, by Mike’s estimation, when he glanced at the window of an adjacent house. His blood ran cold. “There was a face looking at me out the window, and I completely fucking freaked out,” he said. “Then I slowly looked again and it was a jack-o’-lantern.”

Once they were off the roof, Mike set about carving through the sealed door with a drill and a handsaw. Within minutes they were inside, where their co-conspirators had already begun bagging up files. There were too many to fit in the getaway car, so they dumped the extras in the building’s sinks and turned the faucets on. Betsy still feels bad about leaving the water running.

Finally able to fulfill his destiny as a getaway driver, Ken Mudie picked up the group and drove Betsy back to her dorm. It was a Wednesday night, and she had a midterm to study for. Ken and Mike then got on the highway, heading for the rendezvous point. They were a few exits away from the cabin when, for reasons he still doesn’t understand, the hood of Ken’s Ford Fairlane flew up, obstructing his view. For what felt like forever, but was probably just a few seconds, Ken was driving an accomplice and several thousand stolen government files down the New York State Thruway functionally blind.

Mike stuck his head out the window and guided Ken to the median, then tied down the hood using his belt and some rope. The friends started up the Fairlane again and took the first exit. They’d use surface roads to get to the cabin.

Jim Good was part of the crew that hit the Geneseo office, but the specifics of that raid had blurred together with others in his memory. What’s certain is that, like their comrades in Batavia and Niagara, the Geneseo crew left behind a note, which Jim had written, addressed to Nixon, Hoover, and Mitchell. One of Jim’s accomplices that night was a guy named Harry, whom some of the other raiders had accused of being a government informant. Jim and Harry were waiting at the lake cabin with their batch of stolen files when Sally and Paul came driving up with a police officer tailing them. Harry burst out laughing and climbed a tree. “And you thought I was an informant?” he cried down at Jim.

To their relief, after seeing them to the cabin, the cop bade Sally and Paul good night and left. As the squad car disappeared into the night, most of the group breathed a sigh of relief, but Jim couldn’t relax. For all he knew, the cop might be back any minute with the FBI in tow. Jim decided it would be unwise for everyone to remain, and he told his accomplices to split. When Ken and Mike arrived, fresh off their ordeal with the car hood, Jim took the files they’d confiscated and asked them to leave, too.

Back home, Ken called Mike Dougherty to let him know, in code, that the raids had been a success. “Game went well last night!” he said. “I got up three times and had three hits, hit the ball outta the park.” Ken hung up to find his grandmother at the threshold to the kitchen, having heard every word.

“Did you do another pop-off last night?” she asked.

He told her the truth. She smiled and said, “Well, good for you.” Ken never heard another word about it. “She hated Nixon,” he said, chuckling at the memory.

Jim and Sally still had one more job to do before they could rest. From the cabin, they drove to a nearby shopping center, found a pay phone, and rang up the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle. Without giving his name, Jim read a copy of the letter left behind after each of the raids, then stayed on the line to answer the reporter’s questions. While he spoke, Sally kept watch.

The first sign of trouble was an unmarked car carrying men in trench coats. They looked like FBI agents, and they were circling the lot. Then a police car arrived. Jim might have chatted with the Democrat and Chronicle all day if Sally hadn’t dragged him from the phone booth and forced him to get back on the road. The unmarked car followed them.

Sally assumed that someone at the paper had tipped off the FBI, and that Jim’s conversation with the reporter gave the feds time to trace the call. Now, as men she was sure were law enforcement tailed them on the highway, Sally realized she was carrying an address book that contained contact information for a number of people in the antiwar movement. She tore out the pages one by one, swallowing some and tossing others out the window.

Soon Sally was fed up with the chase. “Let’s just stop and ask them who they are and what they’re doing,” she told Jim. They pulled into a small town and got out of the car. The men tailing them did the same. Jim, who had a camera on him, took photos of the men, who refused to answer the activists’ questions and told them they’d “better leave.” So Sally and Jim started driving again—only for police cars to appear in their mirrors. They were pulled over and arrested.

Yet, after all that, they were only charged with loitering in the small town where they’d briefly stopped. If Sally’s theory about why they’d been followed was right, the authorities had come incredibly close, but in the end they couldn’t link her or Jim to the break-ins. The pair got out on bail, and the loitering charges were eventually dropped. According to Sally, she and Jim returned to the cabin to deal with the stolen draft files. They mailed as many as they could to the young men named in them.

On October 28, the front page of the Buffalo Evening News read, “Three WNY Draft Offices Ransacked.” The accompanying article quoted the raiders’ letter: “You did not break [our] back, as you claimed”—a reference to Hoover and Mitchell’s gloating press conference. FBI special agent Karl Brouse told the paper that the investigation into the newest raids would “be a full-time job.”

As the trial of the five members of the Buffalo neared, the government kept pressure on peace activists and their families, hoping to smoke out other raiders. It was these tactics that finally brought Ken Mudie’s mother around to his political point of view. FBI agents showed up at her house and, in an effort to get her to talk about Ken’s activities, informed her that they had observed him driving over one hundred miles per hour, in gross violation of traffic law. When his mother confronted him, Ken laughed. The vehicle in question was a Ford Pinto. “That car would disintegrate at a hundred,” Ken said. “It’s like driving a roller skate with a door!” His mother, with whom he’d had some “knock-down-drag-outs” about his antiwar stance, was shocked that government agents would come to her house and lie to her. “They lie all the time,” he said.

Betsy Felthem believed that the FBI identified her as a suspect because she’d used the name of a girl who lived down the hall from her when she signed in to the Niagara Social Security office to case the draft board. But they didn’t arrest her for the break-in. That happened when she failed to comply with a subpoena from a grand jury. When federal marshals came for Betsy, Sally sat down in front of their car, earning her a night in jail.

Betsy was compelled to testify before the grand jury, and she sensed that the authorities thought she was a soft target. “If I were going to pick who might crack, who might talk,” she said, “I would’ve picked me.” But she stonewalled, giving the grand jury nothing, and the government let her go after a few hours.

The authorities had failed to turn up evidence they could use to prosecute even a single person for the triple raid. It was a clear victory for the antiwar movement. Still, in Buffalo, the feds had five defendants dead to rights.

Chuck and Meaux even decided to get married in the middle of the trial. “We had friends who could come for a wedding and friends who could come for a trial, but not for both,” Meaux said.

There were two federal judges in line to hear the case against the five Buffalo defendants, and one of them was a known right-winger likely to throw the book at them. The other was John Thomas Curtin, a World War II veteran, former U.S. attorney, and Great Society liberal, appointed by President Johnson on the personal recommendation of Robert F. Kennedy. Perhaps most important, Curtin was a Catholic from Buffalo. When they ended up on Curtin’s docket, the Buffalo activists lucked out—he literally knew where they were coming from.  

Nevertheless, the odds weren’t in their favor. The prosecution had an open-and-shut case, not least because the defendants readily admitted what they’d done. If they had any chance of winning and avoiding jail time, they’d need to convince the jury that their actions had been justified. “We have souls,” Meaux said at one point, “and that is what brought us here.”

On the first morning of the trial, in April 1972, the defendants immediately risked Curtin’s goodwill by refusing to stand when he entered the courtroom. As Jeremiah Horrigan explained, “We wanted everybody to be equally treated.” Curtin could have held them in contempt right there. Instead, when the defendants returned from the day’s lunch break, they found that he’d had their seats removed, forcing them to stand. The chairs were eventually returned, and it was agreed that all participants in the trial would stand for each other as they entered.

Prosecutor James W. Grable’s case was simple: These kids had broken the law. He trotted out cops, FBI agents, and draft board officials to testify to the crimes and the damage done. The defendants then played attorney and cross-examined the prosecution’s witnesses. “The agents all have that Nixonian rigidity of body and walk, bereft of laughter, grace, kindness,” professor Ed Powell wrote in his notes from the gallery. “These agents of the Government, the state, Grable, the cops, the FBI people will never know the freedom of expressed conviction; never have freedom really to express that conviction, therefore will never have a conviction, an honest belief, valued as a truth in itself.”

When Grable asked a witness whether the Buffalo had left a statement behind, to which the answer was a simple “yes,” defense attorney Vinny Doyle had the presence of mind to ask if Grable might read the statement. Grable did. How far into the statement did Grable realize his error? Somewhere around “repression of dissent and resistance here at home goes on,” perhaps? When he finished reading, the defendants joined the jam-packed gallery in a round of applause. In his notebook, Powell wrote, “The Judge permitted maximum leeway in discussion of the war.”

Outside the courtroom, the defendants and their allies kept the faith at a local church. “We did a lot of singing, we did a lot of great meals,” Sally said. “We did a lot of having fun together and telling stories and just staying up late and talking about our lives and what in the world was happening.” Chuck and Meaux even decided to get married in the middle of the trial. “We had friends who could come for a wedding and friends who could come for a trial, but not for both,” Meaux said. “It was unusual. It was a great party, though.” Bob Good, himself preparing to go on trial in Camden, made their wedding cake.

Eventually, it came time for the defense to make its case. Curtin had determined that the war was germane to the proceedings, which allowed the Buffalo to call witnesses with no direct connection to the break-in: a Vietnamese refugee, a veteran who had witnessed U.S. troops using prisoners for target practice, experts in the psychological effects of conflict on soldiers and civilians. Grable declined to question these witnesses. Not so with the defendants: The Buffalo were free to speak at length about their justifications for the raid, but each of them was also subject to cross-examination, which meant five chances for Grable to interrogate them about the two extra pairs of pants and shoes left behind in the attic of the Old Post Office.

Each defendant took the stand in turn and was questioned by one of their friends. Ann Masters went first. As part of her testimony, she screened a ten-minute film about Vietnam, which Grable refused to watch. She then put a question to the courtroom: “Can we say we did not know?” One by one the defendants made a moral case for what they’d done. “If a house is on fire and you break down the door to rouse the people inside and get ’em up,” Chuck said, “sure, you broke a door down, but is that breaking and entering in that case? That was the analogy that we used.”

According to Ken Mudie, it was Jim Good’s idea to “do the Spartacus thing.” Already hiding a number of secrets, Ken wasn’t eager to draw attention to himself, but he agreed with Jim that something had to be done, and that Spartacus was a cool movie. On April 25, the day Ann testified, Ken, Jim, and Mike Hickey entered the courtroom prepared to take one more risk.

On cross-examination, Grable got Ann to confirm most of the basic facts of the burglary, but when he asked her point-blank who else had been with them in the attic, she hesitated. Into the breach stepped Jim, Ken, and Mike.

“I was there!”

“I was with them!”

“The shoes are mine!”

None of them could remember who said what. Probably Jim was the first to stand up. “What was really neat about the Spartacus thing was that we told the truth,” Ken said. It was exhilarating, and maybe a bit of a balm to the Catholic conscience, to make such a confession.

Then a remarkable thing happened: Other people stood up. “I hadn’t even seen the movie. I didn’t know what the hell they were doing,” said Cathy McCue, who was in the gallery. But sometimes courage is contagious. “Jim Good was sitting next to me, and he stood up, and I thought, Oh God, I better stand up, too.”

One after the other, people in the gallery rose to take responsibility for the Buffalo’s crimes. Then they did it again, and again, as Grable put the same query about the unidentified accomplices to successive defendants. “The third time the question was asked, before the prosecutor got the question completely out of his mouth, the whole courtroom stood up as one body,” Chuck said. “I thought, I’ll never see a moment more dramatic and life-affirming than that, you know?”

Jeremiah, who had recently learned that his girlfriend was pregnant, wondered if he could still be a good father from a federal penitentiary.

When both sides had rested, Curtin was clear in his instructions to the jury: If you think they did it, you must vote guilty. The facts alone should inform their decision. Only he could take their motivations into account, and that would happen if sentences were issued.

It took seven hours for the jurors to return with a verdict. The Buffalo were convicted of conspiracy to destroy government property and intent to commit third-degree burglary. They were acquitted on the charge of removing files from Army Intelligence, as the government could not prove who exactly had gone in to that office. All five defendants faced the possibility of at least six years behind bars.  

For the three weeks between the verdict and sentencing, the activists could only hope that Curtin would be merciful. “ I went to the hearing with maybe six or eight of my favorite books under my arms, thinking I was gonna be going to prison for a year or two,” Chuck said. Jeremiah, who had recently learned that his girlfriend was pregnant, wondered if he could still be a good father from a federal penitentiary.

The courtroom was overflowing on Friday, May 19. Curtin began the proceedings with a lecture about the importance of acting within the law. “Concerning the action that you took, it was fortunate no one was injured,” he said to the convicted five. He advised them to get involved in electoral campaigns instead of illegal activities. He chastised them for unilaterally deciding that some property shouldn’t exist, pointing out that the same logic could be deployed to defend torching abortion clinics.

“And then,” Chuck said, “he turned a corner.”

Curtin told them he wished more people had their courage. He complimented them on how they had conducted themselves in court and said that he admired their commitment to peace. “I don’t speak for myself here,” he said. “I speak for all of the people in the community.” Curtin sentenced them each to a year in prison—then suspended the sentences. The Buffalo were free.

“The room just erupted,” Jeremiah recalled. “And we walked away.” The crowd applauded Curtin as he exited his courtroom. Once they were outside, people started singing “Here Comes the Sun.” For the first time in months, Jeremiah imagined a future outside of prison. “There was a whole new page,” he said. “I had to do something with my life.”

In the wake of the trial, Curtin publicly criticized the Vietnam War. At a commencement ceremony less than a month after letting the Buffalo go free, he implored a graduating class, “We must end the war in Vietnam before it ends us. This war has turned all our best ideals to dust.” The following summer, Curtin took a class on civil disobedience taught by Father Jim Mang, the priest who’d blared his horn outside the Old Post Office during the raid. Five years later, Curtin tried one of the most significant cases in Buffalo history, issuing a ruling that at long last desegregated the city’s public schools.

The raiders, meanwhile, took his words to heart and resolved to pursue their goals through legal means. For the most part.           

After the trial, Chuck and Meaux moved to a tiny town in Washington State. They divorced within a few years. Meaux worked as a nurse, remarried, had kids, got divorced again, and came out as lesbian. Before Curtin’s passing in 2017, Meaux visited the judge three times. She also took his advice. “No more actions,” she said. “I wasn’t gonna show up in the courtroom again.” She channeled her politics into an international youth-exchange program, where she’s worked for the better part of the past three decades. “I think everyone should be thinking about peace,” she said. “Everyone.”

Like Meaux, “one raid was enough” for Chuck. He opened a bookstore, remarried, and had kids. But he never had regrets about Buffalo. “I’m more proud of those two felonies than I would be of a degree from Notre Dame,” he said.

Jim Martin made his living as a geologist and a farmer; he passed away in 2024. Ann Masters became a fleet maintenance supervisor for the New York City Department of Sanitation. Jeremiah Horrigan drove a cab, worked at the Buffalo Zoo, and eventually settled into a career as a journalist. He and his girlfriend, Patty, got married and named their son, born less than a year after the trial, after John Peter Grady. Jeremiah and Patty now live in the Hudson Valley.

Ken Mudie had a successful career in the insurance business, retired to Cape Cod, and is now the town moderator, a nonpartisan elected official who oversees democratic decision-making, in Yarmouth Port. He claims to have abided by the law since the early 1970s, notwithstanding a few traffic offenses perhaps, but says the draft raids changed him for the better. “What it did is embedded in my mind that passiveness is not a good offense,” he said.

Mike Hickey became a chiropractor, married, and had a daughter. In 2024, he ran into Lucy, the girlfriend whose photograph he’d left behind at the scene of the crime in August 1971. Only then, more than fifty years after the fact, did Mike learn that the FBI had indeed found her photo, identified Lucy, and questioned her and her father. Lucy dumped Mike as a result, but she didn’t give him up to the authorities.

“ I did not avoid the draft,” Mike told me. “I ran head-first into the draft. I attacked my draft board.” Now living in the San Francisco Bay Area, Mike continues to participate in antiwar protests, including recent actions against arms shipments to Israel.

Around the time of the Buffalo trial, Sally Hamlin and Betsy Feltham moved to a Catholic Worker house in Niagara Falls. Feeding, clothing, and housing the poor were their top priorities, but within weeks of the five raiders being set free by Judge Curtin, Sally said, “a few of us drove to Chicago.” Jim Good went, too. The crew decided to hit draft boards in Evanston and Cicero.

The raids went off without a hitch, except that a getaway driver had backed out at the last minute. The replacement driver allowed Jim to use her typewriter to draft the statement of responsibility, which her paranoid boss discovered when he went through her trash and found the discarded typewriter tape. After successfully avoiding arrest for the Batavia raid, Sally served ninety days in jail for the Evanston action. Her arrest and conviction put her at odds with her family. “ My dad said, ‘You were a thorn in my side.’ He told me he didn’t wanna see me anymore,” she said. But it didn’t last: “In the end, he told me, ‘You kids were right.’ ”

Sally stayed in countercultural circles for several years before moving with her husband to Vancouver, British Columbia, and becoming a nurse and a mother. When the last of her kids was out of the house, the girl who heard God’s voice in grade school quit her job, sold everything she owned, and used the money to pay for seminary. She became a Unitarian Universalist minister at the age of 51 and has served several congregations in western New York.

In addition to being a chief organizer of multiple raids in western New York and the Chicago area, Jim Good pulled off at least one more draft board action, which ended with a sack of files floating down the Cuyahoga River in Ohio. “It wasn’t like we were gonna close the war down just by destroying a few draft records,” Jim said, but it felt important “to let the government know that there are people who are seriously opposed to this war and are willing to take the risk to demonstrate that.” Jim eventually became a carpenter and now lives on the Big Island of Hawaii with his husband. (His brother Bob and the rest of the Camden raiders also went free following a sensational 1973 trial.)

Today there’s no comprehensive list of all the draft board actions that took place across the country, but there were at least several dozen, and possibly more than one hundred. They took place in Providence, Rhode Island; Pasadena, California; and many places in between. Their impact is hard to quantify, but it’s possible that hundreds of thousands of files were liberated or destroyed. Even disrupted raids like the Old Post Office break-in hamstrung individual draft boards and drew public attention to the antiwar cause.

When the draft ended in early 1973, it was a victory for the peace movement, but it also provided political cover for Nixon and Henry Kissinger to intensify bombing in Southeast Asia, particularly Cambodia. Some people believe that the antiwar movement died with the draft; the American public could more easily tune out what the government was doing overseas, particularly as new technologies allowed the U.S. to wage war with fewer boots on the ground. Meanwhile, the proliferation of surveillance technologies made resistance actions like the draft board raids much harder to pull off.

Still, if there’s one thing the Buffalo activists know, it’s that peace is a lifelong cause. You have to keep fighting for it, however you can.

After retiring from draft board raids, Jim Good helped some friends open a drop-in center for peace organizing in an abandoned storefront in downtown Buffalo. Over the next five decades, he mellowed a bit, but his commitment to civil disobedience remained ironclad. “People should be willing to call out our government, our military, our businesses, when they’re out of line,” Jim said. “And they are, most of the time.”

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