announcing the ‘Days of Rage’…offer[ing] to provide students with transportation to Chicago….After the [‘Days of Rage’], according to one student, ‘Tommy came up to me and told me how much fun he had kicking ass in Chicago.’”
interviewed in “The Revolutionary Was a Cop,” the idea was dismissed as “absolutely absurd,” so Tommy suggested instead holding the congressman and the audience hostage by chaining the auditorium doors shut. Tommy said he would provide the chains.
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1970
In the spring of , Professor Joseph DiGangi was teaching “Law and Society,” and because it was spring in Geneva, he would occasionally, when the weather cooperated, hold class on the Quad. When he opened course enrollment beyond the class roster, “so we could discuss the constitutionality of the war, 150 students or more showed up,” DiGangi says, recalling the crowd on the steps in front of Coxe Hall. “Everyone was concerned.” “There was tremendous intellectual and political foment,” Wardell says. “Students were questioning the relevance of required professor jOE DIGANGI courses. In addition to the war, there were a number of other issues that blew up with regard to the urgency about the changing world and the possibility that young men would be sent off to die. The war and the draft were absolutely fundamental in getting young people to think about all these things. A blossoming of student questioning and inquiry: How should we live? What’s the best way to get educated? Who are you to tell me how to live?” It was this intellectual, political, and social charge that prompted sit-ins, walkins, debates, and speeches. But to Tommy, that kind of action wasn’t action. David Dellinger, a pacifist anti-war activist and one of the Chicago Seven indicted for rioting during the Democratic Convention, had come to speak on the HWS campus earlier that year. On the walk from Sherrill Hall to Dellinger’s speech, Tommy suggested to Wardell, Davis, and Peter Keenan ’72 that bombing the ROTC office would reproach Dellinger’s pacifism and prove the superiority of a violent revolution. They laughed, brushed him off, and went to hear Dellinger’s speech. When hawkish New York Congressman Samuel Stratton was scheduled to visit campus that January, Tommy had proposed kidnapping him. According to a student
Tommy worked undercover for the FBI, keeping “his eye on radical movements,” until at least the spring of 1970, when he was deputized by the Ontario County Sheriff’s Office, “strictly as an undercover man and what we call a ‘narco’—narcotics officer,” Sheriff Ray O. Morrow said in a story that ran in The Miami News later that year.2 “I asked [Morrow] for a job as a regular deputy on road patrol,” Tommy said in his Grand Jury testimony. “He said he couldn’t fit me in, but he would put me on as an undercover agent.” On March 3, 1970, likely Tommy’s first day of employment with Morrow’s office, he shoe-horned his way into “a student meeting… called to decide if a…‘walk-in’ on a closed faculty meeting would take place. About 400 students…in Albright Auditorium were split as to the appropriate action,” according to the Scranton Commission Report. Because he wasn’t a student, Tommy was denied a vote. But at 4 p.m., he “walked into the faculty meeting with the rest of the students.” DiGangi remembers seeing Tommy in the Student Union around this time: “I was sitting with a student who recognized Tommy a couple tables away, in his suit, very trim, not student-like at all. He said [of Tommy], ‘Look out for this guy. He’s trouble. He’s getting the confidence of the freshmen. I hope they stay away.’” In April, during a three-day sit-in, Tommy appeared at Sherrill Hall with walkie-talkies and a Viet Cong flag, even while “the Hobart Student Association passed a motion to keep all outsiders, with Tongyai’s name mentioned specifically, out of the sit-in and other [HWS] affairs,” according to the Scranton Commission Report. But Tommy, “intent on staying, approached Al Beretta, director of student activities, in request of a press pass.” [Beretta] told Tongyai that Al Learned of the Colleges’ News Bureau was the only person who could issue such a pass. A student accompanied Tongyai when he went to the News Bureau. Learned has reported having a very strange conversation with Tongyai. A conversation which was immediatedly [sic]
2. This earlier statement conflicts slightly with the testimony Morrow later gave to the Grand Jury: “I was interested only in the drug situation,” Morrow said. “And the radical department was [Geneva FBI agent Jerome] O’Hanlon’s department?” lawyer Willard Myers asked. “That’s exactly right,” the sheriff replied.
16 Pulteney Street Survey | Winter 2014
TOMMY WORKED UNDERCOVER FOR THE FBI, KEEPING “HIS EYE ON RADICAL MOVEMENTS,” UNTIL AT LEAST THE SPRING OF 1970, WHEN HE WAS DEPUTIZED BY THE ONTARIO COUNTY SHERIFF’S OFFICE, “STRICTLY AS AN UNDERCOVER MAN AND WHAT WE CALL A ‘NARCO’—NARCOTICS OFFICER.” reported to the FBI and college officials. In any case Tongyai was refused the pass, but he informed students at the sit-in that Beretta had given him permission to stay and that he was a member of the press. “During the meetings I attended, he was asked to leave, since he had no business there,” says Campbell. “Students were frustrated with the war and looking for anything that they could do to make a statement. Many issues were discussed including removing ROTC from campus, but to most students it was a matter of forcing the administration to eliminate the program.” Which was indeed accomplished by the end of the sit-in: students, HWS President Dr. Beverley D. Causey, Jr. and the administration had reached an agreement that would abolish the Hobart ROTC program by July 1971. -------At the April sit-ins, Tommy made the acquaintance of several Hobart freshmen, also discontented with simply sitting in. On Sunday, April 26, Tommy and five students met in a Sherrill dorm room to discuss, as an unnamed student put it in his Grand Jury testimony, more or less non-violent harassment, such as, the continual phoning of ROTC offices on the intercampus phone…tying up their work with the phone constantly ringing. And I remember…Tommy, specifically Tommy mentioning breaking into the ROTC offices and stealing their files…taking them out, burning them, throwing them into the lake or just scattering them in some desolate field and then from there talk turned to possible fire bombing. I have no idea—it just happened. According to Tommy’s testimony regarding the same meeting, he said that