Donald DeFreeze

Investigator Lake Headley presented additional evidence that Donald DeFreeze was a police informant and an agent provocateur in his book Vegas P.I.: The Life and Times of America's Greatest Detective (1993), co-written with freelance writer William Hoffman. He also concluded that the Black Cultural Association was used by law enforcement to monitor radicals among both Berkeley students and prison inmates. Upon meeting radicals after his prison escape, DeFreeze was known for his eagerness to sell them firearms, explosives, and related items. Some of his contacts were suspicious that he was trying to set up sting operations. His means of acquiring weaponry has remained unexplained.

Paul Schrader's 1988 film Patty Hearst features DeFreeze played by Ving Rhames.

Stephen King said in notes to his book Danse Macabre (1981), that DeFreeze was one of the inspirations for his recurring character Randall Flagg:

DeFreeze and the SLA are referred to in the 1976 film Network. A television show is purportedly created that uses members of a fictional version of the SLA as the stars.

He and several white allies began to make plans for armed action that they believed would arouse the black community and attract more recruits. Three SLA "soldiers" fatally shot Marcus Foster, the Superintendent of Public Schools in Oakland, the first black superintendent of any major public school system, and wounded his deputy. They mistakenly believed he supported a program of student IDs, and, by his assassination, alienated the black community. Two members of the SLA were arrested in January 1974, convicted and sentenced to prison for the crimes.

DeFreeze and co-conspirators next kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst February 1974, seeking a ransom and attention. Police pressure rose. During a shootout with law enforcement in Los Angeles, DeFreeze committed suicide by gunshot when he and five SLA members made a stand in a burning house. A private investigation before this last assault suggested that DeFreeze may have been a police informant and agent provocateur from before the founding days of the SLA. His remains were returned to Cleveland, where the funeral was organized at the family's request by members of the Sunni Orthodox Moslem sect.

In February 1974 they kidnapped newspaper heiress Patty Hearst in Berkeley. They first sought an exchange and release of political prisoners. When that was refused, they told her to ask her father for a ransom enough to feed the poor people.

On April 15, 1974 they robbed the Hibernia Bank in San Francisco of $10,000. Both Hearst and DeFreeze were captured on security videos that showed them brandishing weapons.

When Willie Wolfe's father, Dr. Wolfe, learned of his son's involvement in the SLA, he hired private detective Lake Headley, to provide him with more information. On May 4, 1974, thirteen days before the younger Wolfe's death with DeFreeze and others in a shootout and fire, Headley and freelance writer Donald Freed held a press conference in San Francisco. They presented 400 pages of documentation of their findings, some of which included evidence that, a year before the kidnapping, Patty Hearst had visited DeFreeze in prison.

On May 17, 1974, The New York Times ran the story about Dr. Wolfe's investigation and Headley's report with some of this information. But the major story that day was the LAPD shootout at the SLA house, which was engulfed by an accidental fire. DeFreeze was found to have committed suicide by gunshot; two SLA members were fatally shot by police when they left the house; two others died of smoke and fire.

Building on the work of Headley, some authors have explored theories that the SLA was a fully controlled CIA assassination squad, with the Black Panther Party as its main target. They suggest that the SLA originated within California prisons with active recruitment by authorities. In addition, they claim that the assassination of Oakland Schools Superintendent Marcus Foster was approved by the squad's handlers. They say that the squad was eliminated in the 1974 Los Angeles shootout (see below) because their operation security had been compromised.

On May 17, 1974, the Los Angeles Police Department tracked DeFreeze and five other SLA members to a house at 1466 East 54th Street; they surrounded it and demanded that occupants surrender. An elderly man and a child were allowed out of the house. Following that, police fired a tear gas canister through a window, which the SLA answered with bursts of automatic weapons fire. During the shootout the police were outgunned by the SLA's automatic weapons, and the SLA's gas masks rendered the tear gas ineffective. But the house caught fire during the shootout, possibly from an outdoor-type combusting tear gas canister.

DeFreeze escaped from Soledad Prison on March 5, 1973. He made his way to Oakland, California, where he was hidden by white friends from the Vacaville BCA. He was taken to the house of Patricia "Mizmoon" Soltysik, with whom he lived for several months. Through Soltysik, DeFreeze met Camilla Hall, a white Berkeley artist and former social worker. The two women had an established lesbian relationship, and DeFreeze eventually had relations with each of them. Later he was also sexually involved with SLA member Emily Harris, after she and her husband William decided to have an open marriage.

After acquiring arms, the group perpetrated a number of crimes, the most infamous being the November 1973 murder of Oakland Schools Superintendent Marcus Foster, a black candidate for mayor of the city. DeFreeze is the primary suspect in the murder of Foster and the shooting of his deputy, Assistant Superintendent Robert Blackburn. The SLA provoked outrage in the black community by their assassination of Foster, an admired public figure who was the first black superintendent of any major public school system.

In December 1972 DeFreeze was transferred to Soledad Prison in Soledad, California for good behavior.

In his first brush with the law, DeFreeze was arrested for stealing from parking meters and stealing a car. He was sent to the state reformatory in Elmira, New York. In 1970, DeFreeze wrote of his time there, which he called a prison or a mental institution:

In 1969, DeFreeze and an accomplice were arrested in New Jersey for the kidnapping of a caretaker of a synagogue. His accomplice was tried and acquitted. A memorandum from the prosecutor's office said that they decided to drop charges against DeFreeze since by the time of trial, he was jailed in California.

On October 11, 1969, Cleveland, Ohio, police spotted DeFreeze on the roof of a bank carrying two pistols and an 8-inch dagger. Police said they found a burglar's tool kit and a hand grenade nearby. He paid the $5,000 bond money and then left for Los Angeles.

On November 17, 1969, DeFreeze was injured in a gun battle with police outside a bank in Los Angeles. He was convicted in 1970 of having stolen a $1,000 negotiable cashier's check and was sentenced to 6-to-14 years; he was sent to Vacaville Prison.

While incarcerated at Vacaville Prison, DeFreeze joined the Black Cultural Association (BCA), intended as an educational group to help prepare prisoners for return to general society. He became known as a dynamic member. Started in 1968, the group began to operate at Vacaville in 1969. Colston Westbrook, a grad student and later professor who taught African-American studies at the University of California, Berkeley, became involved in recruiting Berkeley students to visit Vacaville as volunteers to BCA. They helped lead educational and political discussions. People from outside the university also attended BCA events, especially related cultural programs.

On March 10, 1968, DeFreeze was charged with burglary in Inglewood, California. There was no disposition of the charges. On August 16, 1968, he was charged with stealing a motorcycle. There was no disposition. His probation was modified, on December 13, 1968, to forbid possession of firearms or bombs. On March 20, 1969, he was picked up with a loaded 9-millimeter semiautomatic rifle with 32 rounds in the magazine. There was no disposition.

In 1967, the police stopped DeFreeze for running a red light on his bicycle. The police said that when they searched him, they found a homemade bomb in his pocket. The bicycle basket held another bomb and a pistol. DeFreeze said he had found them and was trying to sell them because of his family's needs. He was given three years of probation. The probation officer who interviewed DeFreeze wrote that the youth was "deeply troubled by this case".

According to Headley's research, police records showed that between 1967 and 1969, DeFreeze was given probation despite a series of adverse encounters with the police, which related to charges for illegal possession of weapons and explosives. These included arrest for possession of weapons, a kidnapping charge in New Jersey, an attempted bank robbery in Cleveland, and a gunfight with Los Angeles police and bank guards.

They reconciled. After having some gun charges dropped, in 1965 DeFreeze moved with his family from the Northeast to California, where they settled in Los Angeles. He said that the worries of trying to support the children engulfed him. He wrote, "I just couldn't take it anymore. I was slowly becoming a nothing".

In 1965, having returned to Newark, DeFreeze was arrested for firing a gun in the basement of his home. "I started playing with guns and fireworks," he would later write. "Just anything to get away from life and how unhappy I was". The charges were dropped and DeFreeze took his family to California.

During his period away from his family, in 1964, police stopped DeFreeze while he was hitchhiking on the San Bernardino Freeway near West Covina, California. They found him carrying a tear-gas pencil bomb, a sharpened butter knife, and a sawed-off rifle in his suitcase.

Following his release, DeFreeze moved to the Newark, New Jersey area. In 1963, at the age of 20, he married Gloria Thomas, who had three children from a previous marriage. DeFreeze and Thomas had a total of three children together. In 1964 his wife had him arrested for desertion.

Donald David DeFreeze (November 16, 1943 – May 17, 1974), also known as Cinque Mtume and using the nom de guerre "General Field Marshal Cinque", was known as the "spokesman" of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), a small, American far-left group that formed in Oakland, California in 1973. Some analysts suggested he was a figurehead; others said he was the leader. Born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, he dropped out of high school and was involved from the age of 14 in frequent brushes with the criminal justice system. He received generous probation in the late 1960s, leading some sources to suggest he was serving as a police informant to the Los Angeles Police Department.

DeFreeze and Soltysik co-founded the Symbionese Liberation Army, and soon recruited members for the group. DeFreeze adopted the name General Field Marshal Cinque (which he pronounced "SINK-you", though this is not how the name is historically pronounced). He took the name from Joseph Cinqué, a captive Mandan who reportedly led the slave rebellion that took over the Spanish slave ship Amistad in 1839; the Africans regained their freedom following a United States Supreme Court case. He adopted the surname Mtume from the Swahili word for "prophet".