Actually, he jumped bond. Here's a sympathetic obituary of Abbie, really more of a eulogy. Like Leary, he had an angel who kept him afloat and moved him in and out of the country, and both remained improbable fugitives-at-large for a long time. Both had the same nemesis on their trail - G. Gordon Liddy - aside from J. Edgar Hoover, the closest this country has had in modern times to a real political policeman.
http://old.valleyadvocate.com/25th/archives/abbies_road.htmlAbbie's Road 1936-1989
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By Al Giordano
originally published on April 24, 1989
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His road began in Worcester, the Massachusetts city of seven hills and no thrills, on November 30, 1936, at 4:30 p.m., double-trouble in a triple-decker house. The end of the road came on April 12, 1989, when Abbie Hoffman was found lying peacefully in his bed outside of New Hope, Pennsylvania, with a stomach full of barbiturates and a legacy that will be felt for as long as the rest of the human race survives. The fact that the coroner said he committed suicide does not for one moment erase all the good he did while serving his life-sentence on planet earth. Abbie was captain of his own ship. He did everything on his own terms, including die.
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His was a long and winding road that, indeed, led to your door. It took him down dusty brown dirt Mississippi back roads in 1964, past the little shacks and big hearts of the southern civil rights movement. He drove through a cultural explosion of free speech, hallucinogenic drugs, the sexual revolution, and the emergence of a counter-culture. He labored to organize that youth culture into a potent political force against the war in Vietnam and more.
But if his life is to be fairly described as a road, one cannot ignore all the tailgating behind him. Eleven state legislatures once passed laws banning Abbie Hoffman's entry, by name. (Abbie, of course, would hop on the first plane he could into each state to challenge and subsequently overturn the law in court.) The FBI compiled 68,000 pages of files on him, and hired two psychologists to analyze him from afar.
Superspy G. Gordon Liddy was commissioned by the U.S. government to draft a plan to kidnap Hoffman to Mexico. Federal agents repeatedly posed as political allies, followed him around, illegally tapped his phones, broke into his home, and prosecuted him for conspiracy to incite a riot in the case of the Chicago 8 (a.k.a. Chicago 7). The American Civil Liberties Union would later call it the most important political trial of the century.
Abbie made enemies in high places. During the 1971 Mayday demonstrations against the war, President Richard M. Nixon's White House tapes recorded an oval office conversation between the president and his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman:
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In 1973 . . . As part of his research, he was interviewing drug dealers -- on his wiretapped telephone. His natural curiosity for the study of underground commerce, and his legendary willingness to try anything once, led him to be present during a cocaine deal between two sides whom he had helped to bring together. There were undercover agents on both sides. It was the very first night that the tough new Rockefeller drug law took effect. For his role, he faced a mandatory 15-to-life sentence in New York state. He would later write, "I shouldn't have been there."
The tires screeched as Abbie crashed not into a dead end, but into a new life, underground -- in reality many lives, many names, many homes, a constant road due to the need to be a moving target. As a most wanted and famous fugitive, easily recognized across the globe from his photos on the evening news and in morning papers, his only hope was plastic surgery. He went under the knife and emerged with a nose job.
His years underground are perhaps the least well-known in his life's story. . . . And it was there that Abbie met Johanna Lawrenson, his running mate. She kept him alive for 15 years. In his writings from that time, he called her "Angel, who led me into the valley of life." They ran together in a land of brujos and ruined cities of stone, and through Europe and the sad grey American underground. He was madly in love with her until the end.
At times during his seven-year flight, Abbie would surface for guerrilla press conferences. In 1979 he turned up at the John F. Kennedy Memorial Library in Boston for a rendezvous with reporters at a building that President Jimmy Carter had dedicated 10 days earlier. After the death of Judge Julius Hoffman, the nasty little man who had presided over the Chicago conspiracy trial, Abbie appeared in a Groucho Marx nose and glasses, and danced on Julie's grave for a photographer, in fulfillment of a courtroom promise.
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In the late '70s Johanna brought Abbie to her Thousand Islands home on the border of Upstate New York and Canada, where she had spent much of her youth with her mother, author Helen Lawrenson, and her father, maritime union organizer Jack Lawrenson. The road became a rolling river. Cars were replaced by boats. The international border would provide a convenient escape if necessary. Abbie took up fishing, cooking, even relaxing, and settled in under the alias of Barry Freed. For a while it almost seemed as if there would be a happy ending in sight, blissful obscurity.
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Disguised as mild-mannered citizen activist Barry Freed, he was appointed to a federal environmental commission by President Carter -- and awarded a citation from New York Gov. Hugh Carey for his environmental work. After the disguised Hoffman, in a suit and tie, gave calm and reasoned testimony to a U.S. congressional committee, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan leaned into his microphone and reportedly said, "Mr. Freed, after listening to you, now I know that the '60s are finally over."
In 1980 the road surfaced again as Barbara Walters was whisked through a labyrinth of islands by speedboat for the secret blockbuster interview that would mark the second coming of Abbie Hoffman. Working with his lifetime lawyer Gerald Lefcourt, who never once sent him a bill, Abbie made arrangements to turn himself in and face the charges.
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