Legal Editor
Cuba: Today We Settle All the Family’s Business
We’ve been hearing it for years, but this time looks different in Cuba.
The regime doesn’t have many friends left. The Soviets are long gone. Venezuelan oil, once traded for Cuban doctors and intelligence support, is now effectively under U.S. control. That leaves Mexico. And after Caracas, it’s almost certain President Sheinbaum is not going to test Trump on behalf of Havana. She’ll give humanitarian support, which of course she, and we, should, but she can’t save the regime. There’s no clear path forward for the island. Talks are underway.
And for all the decades Cuba has served as a rock in America’s shoe, it has also been something else, a sanctuary. Not just for ideology. For American fugitives.
Guillermo “William” Morales is one of them. Charles Hill is another.
And as we negotiate and prepare to reset things with Havana, neither name should be an afterthought. Both should be on the list. Non-negotiable.
Morales wasn’t some protester who got swept up in politics. He was the head bombmaker for the FALN, the terrorist group responsible for a wave of bombings across American cities in the 1970s targeting civilians and public places. Devices were built. Devices were planted. And Americans died.
Hill was a member of the Black Liberation Army (BLA), who murdered New Mexico State Police Officer Robert Rosenbloom during a traffic stop in 1971. He was caught, convicted, and sentenced.
The 1960s and ’70s were a period of political violence in America that makes today’s political discourse feel like a school board meeting. A movement of idealized youth armed with familiar utopian notions but endowed with unusual influence by sheer numbers swelled from the post-war baby boom. A significant number of those “revolutionaries” became enamored with outright violence, bombings, assassinations, hijackings, and armed robberies. The Weather Underground. The Symbionese Liberation Army. The Black Liberation Army. The FALN. These groups weren’t theorizing, tweeting, or TikToking. They were bombing and shooting. (See: https://opsdesk.substack.com/p/quiet-please)
Weather Underground leaders Bill Ayers and Bernadette Dohrn helped orchestrate a bombing campaign that hit the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, the State Department, NYPD Headquarters, Harvard University and countless others. They both largely avoided prison and wound up in Chicago as “community organizers” and university professors (along with President Obama). The Symbionese Liberation Army, of Patty Hurst fame, carried out bank robberies and murders before collapsing. And Morales kept building bombs for the FALN.
The FALN ultimately claimed responsibility for more than 100 bombings. The 1975 Fraunces Tavern bombing alone killed four people and wounded dozens more. Innocent Americans, office workers, patrons, passersby, died in an attack most people today barely remember. Their families remember.
Morales was eventually captured after a bomb-making accident nearly killed him. He escaped custody and made his way to Cuba, where he has lived under government protection ever since.
As for BLA member Charles Hill, he too, remarkably, escaped prison. Afterward, he hijacked a commercial jet at gunpoint and fled to Cuba, where he also has lived for decades under protection.
These two are not hiding. They’re protected. And that protection has never been seriously challenged during decades of U.S.–Cuba negotiations. It now must be.
We’ve seen how these situations end if we wait too long.
Hill’s fellow BLA member Joanne Chesimard was another of these 1960s-style maniacs. She was convicted of murdering New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster. She also fled to Cuba in 1979 and lived there openly for decades. Presidents came and went. Negotiations came and went. Nothing changed.
Last year, Chesimard died in Havana. She escaped justice. That cannot be allowed to happen again. Morales and Hill must be brought in.
Congress has pushed this for years. Rubio. Menendez. Last year, Rick Scott and Ted Cruz introduced legislation attempting to formally set U.S. policy regarding these fugitives, specifically naming Morales and Chesimard. That bill has been sitting in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee since last March.
While the proposed bill is well intentioned, it seems unlikely the Trump administration is too concerned with what the Chamber does with it.
If the administration puts this issue squarely on the negotiating table, early and clearly, Havana’s decades-long role as retirement housing for American terrorists ends. And since Secretary of State Rubio was a primary sponsor of a previous Senate resolution calling for U.S. pressure to return fugitives from Cuba, it seems very likely this is indeed already being addressed.
Cuba matters for two main reasons. Geopolitically, ninety miles off Florida’s coast is just too close to have an openly hostile country. And symbolism. Cuba has been the lingering thorn from the Cold War, small but persistent. It seems pretty clear that’s about to end.
We missed Chesimard.
That door is closed forever.
Morales and Hill are still alive.
Those doors are not.
If we’re settling all the family’s business in Havana, then settle it.
ICE Protests at the Olympics
If you tuned in Olympic Women’s Hockey, you might have caught a couple of dominant wins by the American team, who skated circles around Czechia (which is what we are calling the Czeck Republic these days) and Finland. You might also have noticed the violent protestors that threatened the arena and tried to disrupt the international display of goodwill and sportsmanship that is the Olympics.
What kind of cause would be so important as to violate the spirit of peace and friendship that is emblematic of the Olympics? Well, there were a few things.
Anti-ICE protests appear to have moved on from Minnesota and made their way to the shores of warmer Italy. Some ICE personnel were at the games liaising with other agencies regarding human and drug trafficking, gathering intelligence, and providing security. ICE agents are at most Olympics in this capacity, although you wouldn’t know it based on reporting from the media. Protestors used ICE’s presence as an excuse attack Italian cops.
Other protests were against the impact that the Olympic Games has on the environment. Some of these protestors ironically threw smoke bombs and firecrackers (which we heard were bad for the environment) at Italian cops. These protestors presumably walked to the Olympics to avoid the large carbon footprint of taking a plane.
Some protestors were decrying the amount of money that is spent on the Olympics. They feel that governments and corporations would waste money much more efficiently if they just gave it away.
Still more demonstrations were against the high cost of housing, economic unsustainability, social injustice… and we even saw a few Palestinian flags in the crowd.
One has to wonder if all these groups are staying at the same hostel. They are. Because they are the same people. These are the anarcho-communist folks that show up to any protest great or small. Sometimes they are the drivers of a protest, sometimes they just mix in and cause chaos.
Paul and I’s first brush with these types was in 2002 when the World Economic Forum was held in NYC. It was my introduction to their ideology – and its frightening cause. In conversing with the demonstrators, they couldn’t articulate or even imagine an end game for their inane belief system. Nonetheless they want a society with no governments, no private property, no religion, (wait, this is starting to sound like a John Lennon song) and no order. That can only lead to widespread death and destruction.
Unfortunately, these people are becoming more influential in the west. We have been seeing protests in the United States and other countries become larger and more violent. We couldn’t have imagined the riots that occurred in Minneapolis being so intense just a few years ago. Not that all the people protesting in Minneapolis are all, or even mostly, these anarcho-communist types. Some certainly were, but most were not.
But that is how they operate. Infiltrate a cause, incite violence and insurrection, grow chaos, move along to the next cause. In fact, the chaos IS the cause.
We always thought of them as a fringe group that, while troubling, never had any ideas that could catch on. Now there seems to be a change. People are angrier, seemingly less logical, and less informed (all in part thanks to the media). Democrats have turned from the party of the working class to something much further to the left as evidenced by support of people like Bernie Sanders, AOC, and Mamdani (not that they are anarcho-communists, but they are a step in that direction). This ideology is rising to the point that it seems like a legitimate threat to western civilization.
This is unacceptable. Governments around the world must work together to investigate these anarcho-communist groups and the people that support them financially. We have been saying that for years but have seen little evidence that the DOJ is doing much on this front.
The DOJ, Interpol, and the prosecutors in other countries should work together to share intelligence and financial records to make conspiracy cases against these groups whose goal it is to destroy western civilization.
Leaders of this movement must be identified. Crimes committed by individuals with this ideology must be punished to the fullest extent of the law. Civil and criminal enforcement must be taken against entities that provide financial support (we are talking about you, George Soros). Conspiracy cases must be made to stop these people.
Prosecuting an ideology is walking a fine line. All Americans have a right to free speech and the exchange of ideas, but when that turns to violence and revolution, we are well within the bounds of the Constitution to take action.
There is no time to waste. Our very existence depends on it.
What to Watch This Week
I did not grow up a big hockey fan. Sure, I would watch a Rangers game now and then. I always followed the playoffs to a degree. But I did not give it the same attention that I would to baseball.
I have realized the errors of my ways. My family is at a youth hockey game most weekends. What we see at the rink is young men and women who play hard at a sport they truly love.
It is a great sport that embodies a strong work ethic, amazing talent, physicality, and a moral code. Good sportsmanship is admired and rewarded. Laziness is not tolerated. Players often enforce the unwritten rules of the game – you better not lay a finger on our goalie. Ice hockey, at its best, cultivates discipline, resilience, teamwork, respect, and integrity. These virtues extend far beyond the rink and shape the character of the players who commit themselves to the game.
The Olympics will give the world a chance to see this game at its best. The greatest hockey talents in the world will be on the same ice competing against each other. The players will represent themselves, their country, the spirit of the Olympics, and the game they love.
The end of the game will end the same way as every youth hockey game does. With a handshake and an acknowledgement of a game well played. Take the time to check out Olympic Hockey this week. It’s what sports used to be.
Kidnapping - A Rare and Stressful Case
In 2013, I supervised a kidnapping that occurred in Queens, NY. An Ecuadorian immigrant was snatched off the street near Roosevelt Avenue and was held and tortured for 32 days.
It was, without a doubt, the most stressful case I ever worked on.
The victim’s family in Ecuador was receiving ransom demands from a local cell phone number. We sent NYPD detectives to Ecuador to interview the family, work on cell phone records, and to liaise with local cops. We canvassed for cameras, reviewed cell phone data and bank records, conducted days of surveillance, and pursued hundreds of investigative avenues.
Every morning before getting out of bed, I checked my phone for updates. I reviewed the daily report of cases from the Chief of Detectives office to scan for any unidentified DOA’s that had been found overnight, fearing the worst. We didn’t take a day off, and some days didn’t take an hour off. Our families took a backseat to the work at hand. My kids went to Disney Word without their dad.
No doubt the cops and agents in Tucson are making the same types of sacrifices.
Our case had a successful conclusion. We recovered our victim alive from a warehouse just miles from where he was snatched. Arrests were made, both in Queens and in Ecuador. It was a great job by the detectives, but I would never want to go through that again. I felt the stress took years off my life.
Nothing could compare to the horror that Guthrie family is going through. But have some empathy for the cops and agents who are working on this case as well. There is a lot of second-guessing going on from pundits who don’t know a fraction of what is going on.
I undoubtedly made mistakes in that New York City kidnapping that happened years ago. These cops probably made mistakes as well. Sometimes there is no perfect way to handle an extremely rare case like this one.
Take a moment to think of everyone involved, including the cops, and show some empathy. Let’s remember who the good guys are in this.
This is what a serious foreign-policy reset looks like. If Donald Trump is finally closing the Cuba file, it must include ending Havana’s decades-long role as a retirement home for American terrorists. Morales and Hill aren’t symbols—they’re murderers who escaped justice. Bringing them home is non-negotiable. At the same time, the Olympic chaos shows how the same anarchist networks metastasize from city riots to global stages, hiding behind every cause and corrupting it. Order matters. Borders matter. Accountability matters. From Havana to Milan, the through-line is simple: civilizations survive by enforcing law, not by appeasing radicals who confuse chaos with virtue.
Too many talking….and not listening…..you give great insight into all your reporting…..