The last radical - dead or alive?

ONE DAY about a year ago, Donald X. Burt was at home in an exurban community west of Philadelphia, when the phone rang. The FBI was calling again, as they had done so many times over the last 40 years.

This time, Burt says, they wanted something new: a sample of his DNA.

Burt, a native of Havertown, and now a truck driver, refused. But he's convinced that the feds were hoping to gather evidence to prove that his notorious brother — Leo Frederick Burt, the last remaining anti-war radical from the 1960s and early 1970s on the FBI's fugitive list — is now dead.

That tip must not have panned out—just like hundreds of other tips that have fizzled over the last four decades. The feds are still seeking the former altar boy from St. Denis in Havertown, Schuylkill rowing jock and 1966 graduate of Monsignor Bonner High School, in Drexel Hill.

Next month, it will be 40 years since Leo Burt dropped out of sight, in his rearview mirror the image of a massive mushroom cloud, the result of a car bomb that tore into a University of Wisconsin campus building.

The bomb was aimed at an Army mathematics center — but, instead, it killed a physics researcher pulling an all-nighter.

That was Aug. 24, 1970. In those first frantic days on the lam, Burt and one of the other bombers narrowly missed being captured a couple of times, but he has not been heard from since a written manifesto attributed to him was published in 1972.

The FBI is still offering a $150,000 reward for information leading to his arrest.

If Burt is still alive, he is 62 years old. The Vietnam War—which played the central role in converting the Wisconsin student from mild-mannered rower into a radical journalist and then a revolutionary—ended in 1975. The three others who bombed UW's Sterling Hall were arrested, served short jail terms and started new lives. Eventually, every notorious left-wing radical who went underground after the tumultuous end of the 1960s was caught or surrendered.

Except for Leo Frederick Burt.

The news last month that one of Burt's three 1970 co-conspirators, Dwight Armstrong, had died from lung cancer only increased the sense among the handful of people still following the case that the mystery of what happened to Burt may never be solved. That would leave so many other questions unanswered.

How does a studious, bespectacled athlete from Philadelphia's middle-class suburbs, who took part in Marine ROTC training, end up behind America's worst car bombing until the World Trade Center attack in 1993?

All these years later, Burt's family and friends still grapple to explain it.

Was the Bonner grad really a campus radical? Or was he something completely different — a counter-revolutionary or even an agent provocateur working undercover for the government?

But one question looms over all the others.

Where's Leo?

It's hard to imagine a more unlikely setting for a radical odyssey to begin than Havertown's St. Denis Lane. About a Richie Allen home run away from the Norristown trolley, it is a row of squat bungalows shrouded in red brick and tan stucco on one side of the block, all looking out onto the neat rows of gravestones and mausoleums of a church cemetery across the street.

It is a quiet place today, not like the kid-swollen Baby Boom years when Leo Burt grew up there. His mother died the same year he was born, 1948, but his father — a mechanical engineer — soon remarried and eventually there were six children in the house.

On Sunday mornings, Burt walked past the tombstones to work the altar at St. Denis as an acolyte. His stepmother was a devout Catholic and he seemed headed in the same direction, joining the Bonner Breakfast Club that served Mass to the priests in the monastery at the Drexel Hill high school.

But Burt's true calling seemed to be rowing. By the time he was a senior at Bonner, he was spending virtually all his free time hitching rides to the Schuylkill, rowing either with the school team or the renowned Penn AC club. If he wasn't there, according to a 1996 op-ed article by classmate Richard de Uriarte, he was running sprints in Bonner's basement to build strength.

Donald Burt admits that he barely remembers his half-brother now, saying that "he spent a lot of time rowing trying to get a scholarship."

It was the waning days of a conservative era for suburban Boomers. Classmate Joe Brennan Sr., one of Burt's best friends, said during senior year that they first heard news of a recent Bonner grad who died in the escalating conflict in Vietnam; eventually about 10 of their Class of '66 mates would be killed in action.

Burt headed west to Wisconsin after graduation — to row.

The Madison campus had one of the nation's top collegiate crew programs under then-Coach Randy Jablonic. Burt — who helped partially pay for college by joining the Marine ROTC program — was highly disciplined and increasingly muscular, bench-pressing twice as much as teammates. But at just under 6-feet he lacked the one thing Jablonic wanted in his rowers: Size.

Friends say that Burt drifted away from crew in his junior year after he failed to make the travel squad. He gravitated more toward the growing anti-war movement at the University of Wisconsin, a hotbed of student unrest; he finally quit the team when his disobeyed Jablonic's edict to get a haircut.

Instead, Burt threw himself into a brand-new calling — journalism, and the Daily Cardinal newspaper, where he covered the anti-war Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS.

"Leo was always a follower," said Bonner classmate Brennan, and was likely looking for something new to latch onto. "He was never a leader."

It was a crazy time on college campuses, which tended to blur the lines between news reporting and activism. Friends say that Burt was radicalized by what he saw while covering the increasingly violent protests, culminating in an incident when UW students protested the May 4, 1970, shootings at Kent State.

The late author Tom Bates, in 1992's Rads: A True Story of the End of the Sixties, wrote that Burt was badly beaten by sheriff's deputies, and when he sat down to write his article, his head was bandaged and his glasses held together by tape.

By then, Burt had also fallen in with some new friends — including a bright young freshman who also hailed from the Delaware Valley, 18-year-old David "Buzzy" Fine, of Wilmington, and campus radical and Madison native Karl Armstrong.

It was Armstrong who'd founded an anti-Vietnam cell called "The New Year's Gang," after a Dec. 31, 1969, plot in which Armstrong, his brother Dwight and a friend took a small airplane and dropped ineffective mayonnaise jars filled with explosives on a Wisconsin munitions plant.

In the angry days following the killing of students at Kent State and Burt's bloody encounter with the law, he got involved with the Armstrongs and Fine in an even more audacious plot: to assemble a car bomb that would destroy Sterling Hall, which housed the U.S. Army Mathematics Research Center.

To this day, friends and writers, like Brennan's son Joe Brennan Jr., who has worked on an unpublished manuscript about the fugitive, speculated that Burt's motivation may have been more of a journalist — getting a little too close to a big story — than of a revolutionary.

"Honestly, I think he was along for the ride," said the younger Brennan. "He was covering it as he was on the inside — much like the battlefield journalists of his time."

When the appointed night of the bombing rolled around, Burt told the other plotters that he felt ill, reportedly saying, "I can't go through with it. I am too sick."

But the Armstrong brothers and Fine needed Burt to carry out the plot; among the four, only the bench-pressing crew jock could lift the 500-pound barrels of ammonium nitrate, or ANFO, into a stolen Ford Econoline van.

At 3:40 a.m., Fine phoned police with a warning, saying, "OK, pigs, now listen and listen good...." It wasn't enough time to clear the building before the explosion, which caused an estimated $2 million in damage — the largest U.S. car bombing before the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center and Oklahoma City in 1995 — but did only minor damage to the Army Math section of the building.

The plotters had timed the attack to avoid hurting anyone, but a 33-year-old physics researcher named Robert Fassnacht was pulling an all-nighter before leaving on a planned family vacation the next day. He was killed instantly, and three others were wounded. Ironically, relatives say that Fassnacht also opposed the Vietnam War.

The four youths were initially thrilled until they learned of the fatality, when — as later recounted by Bates — Burt in the backseat started crying, the former altar boy moaning "Jesus Christ, Jesus ----ing Christ!"

Then he pulled himself together to start a whole new life underground.

To the Brennans, Burt's decision to live out life as a fugitive made sense, because everything he'd dreamed of when he had left Havertown for Madison — making the national rowing team, or becoming a successful journalist — was destroyed by the car bomb that murdered Fassnacht.

The first few days underground were a blur. Burt and Fine first visited Burt's Bonner classmate Paul Bracken — today a professor at Yale — in New York. They didn't tell him of their role in the bombing. They made it to Boston and then over the border to Petersborough, Ontario, which is where they jumped out of a rooming house window to elude the authorities.

That's when they split up — and Burt simply vanished.

The last time that society heard from Burt was 38 years ago, when he sent a long manifesto about left-wing politics to a magazine called "Liberation," although author Joe Brennan Jr. is not convinced of its authenticity. Author Bates, who died in 1999, wrote that Burt lived in a major West Coast city for a time in the 1970s, but offers no verification.

Burt's three co-plotters — like most radicals who went underground — didn't make it through the first decade on the lam. Karl Armstrong was busted in Toronto in 1972, the same city where his brother was arrested five years later. David Fine was arrested in San Rafael, Calif., in 1976.

All three received remarkably short sentences, apparently reflecting America's desire in the late 1970s to move past the still-burning wounds of Vietnam. Fine served just three years of a seven-year sentence, for example; he then earned a law degree from the University of Oregon but was denied a law license because of his past.

Today, the Delaware native, a paralegal, still lives in Portland, Ore., with an unlisted number. His Facebook profile says that he's married and keeps up on news from Wilmington Friends, where he graduated in 1969. In the "About Me" section, he writes: "How long do you have?"

The Armstrong brothers returned to Madison. Karl Armstrong once operated a sandwich shop called Radical Rye, with a picture of Che Guevara on the door. He now runs a juice business; Dwight Armstrong was arrested for selling drugs, went back to jail, got out and drove a cab and operated a food cart on the UW campus before succumbing last month to lung cancer at age 58.

The fact that Burt's trail grew so cold so quickly — and that he didn't stop running even while the other three resumed normal lives — gave rise to an alternative theory: that the former Marine ROTC was never truly a revolutionary, but was instead working for the FBI in some capacity.

Friends like Joe Brennan Sr. don't rule out that possibility. He claims that in the early 1970s he told the FBI that Burt was probably in St. Catherines, Ontario, a rowing hotbed, and indeed their friends from crew insisted that they saw him there. "So everybody could find him but the government?" he asked, with an air of disbelief.

But that theory doesn't jibe with the FBI's aggressive efforts to find Burt for the last 40 years, even cooperating several times in recent years with the Fox program "America's Most Wanted."

Donald Burt has faint memories of his half-brother but vivid ones of his many dealings with the feds over the years, beginning with the day in 1970 that agents pulled him out of a Marine training program in Ohio.

"It was like one of those detective shows," he said of his first grilling by FBI agents who were convinced — mistakenly, Donald Burt insists — that the fugitive would contact family. He also says that an FBI agent once started dating his oldest sister in hopes of learning Leo's whereabouts.

Joe Brennan Sr., who lives in North Jersey, also says that he's been questioned multiple times by the FBI, especially when a career move took him to Wilmington and, unwittingly, near David Fine's family.

Brennan's son, who spent several years reseaching the Burt case, discounts the FBI informant theory. Instead, he marvels at Burt's self-discipline when every other wanted Vietnam-era radical who went underground — from Katherine Anne Power to William Ayers to the late Abbie Hoffman — was eventually taken into custody.

Quite simply, in living underground, the failed rower and journalist with inner discipline and a low-key demeanor may have finally found the successful calling he was looking for.

"Leo Burt was self-driven — a highly disciplined individual with superior pain tolerance...physical, emotional, psychological," said Joe Brennan Jr. in explaining why it makes sense that Burt would be the era's last fugitive.

That hasn't prevented nearly dozens of alleged sightings over 40 years. According to Madison journalist Doug Moe, they include a Cleveland movie theatre, a Denver homeless shelter, Algeria and Costa Rica. In the 1990s, Bates wrote that he thought he had seen Burt — tan and curly-haired and 20 pounds thinner — at a Charles Musselwhite show.

In the mid-1990s, there was even a brief uproar over the idea that Burt had become the Unabomber, based on similarities in a police sketch and between manifestos written by Burt and the Unabomber. Then Ted Kaczynski was arrested, and Burt faded from view again.

So much time has passed now. Thereare usually a few chuckles at the Bonner class of '66 reunions when Burt gets listed in the program among the group's "missing persons." Donald Burt was almost speechless when asked what he'd even say to his brother if he showed up.

"I don't think that's going to happen," he finally said. "That only happens in the movies."

Like most people who know Leo Burt, his brother thinks that he's out there, somewhere — eluding the law with the precision of a long-distance rower, staying focused until the final stroke. *