Explosives Cache Tied to Radicals Who Lived in L.A.

Fifty pounds of explosives found by the FBI in Santa Fe Springs was linked by the agency Friday to members of a Midwestern radical group believed to have ties with the Puerto Rican revolutionary outfit FALN.

No arrests were announced in connection with the discovery of the cache.

The FBI said six people it had linked with the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee lived in Los Angeles as recently as one year ago, but agents doubt they are still in the area.

The FBI said the explosives found in Santa Fe Springs are similar to explosives found over the past two years at Doylestown, Pa.; Cherry Hill, N.J. and Evesham Township, N.J. All were part of a cache stolen in 1980 from Austin, Texas.

The explosives recovered in Pennsylvania were linked to members of the May 19 Communist Organization, implicated in a 1981 Brinks armored car robbery in Nyack, N.Y., that left a security guard and two policemen dead.

The Los Angeles-area explosives were found Wednesday in an abandoned storage space in Santa Fe Springs by an anti-terrorist task force composed of the FBI and Los Angeles police officers and sheriff’s deputies.

FBI spokesman Jim Neilson said the cache contained about 50 pounds of explosives, blasting caps and detonator cord.

He said the find was linked to a similar June, 1985, seizure in the Los Angeles area, and linked to Claude Daniel Marks, 36, a native of Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Last month, arrest warrants were issued in Chicago for Marks and Donna Jean Willmott, 36, a native of Akron, Ohio, charging them with conspiracy to engineer a breakout for Oscar Lopez, a convicted terrorist in the Federal Correctional Institution in Leavenworth, Kansas.

The prison escape was unsuccessful. Lopez was identified as a member of the National Liberation Army Front, known by its Spanish acronym FALN, a group that espouses Puerto Rican independence and has claimed responsibility for more than 100 bombings in the Chicago and New York areas since 1974.

The FBI also said Marks and Willmott have ties to the radical Weather Underground and a Marxist-Leninist offshoot, the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee.

Marks and Willmott lived in Los Angeles in 1984-1985 and maintained close ties with four other alleged radicals who also lived in the area and are being sought as material witnesses in the case, the FBI said.

All six, who were living under false identities, are believed to have been involved in transporting and storing of explosives for FALN, the FBI said.

The other four are:

- Joan Ann Sokolower, 38, originally of Denver, believed to be a member of the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee and who may be living with Marks and her 13-year-old son.

- Karen Myra Shain, who also uses the last name of Daenzer, 38, originally of Baltimore, believed linked to the Weather Underground and the Prairie Fire group.

- Diana Block, 37, originally of New York City, identified as having a history of involvement with the Prairie Fire group.

- Robert Bruce McBride, 40, linked to the Prairie Fire group.

The FBI said Marks, Sokolower and Willmott lived in a safe house in Van Nuys until abandoning it last year. At that house, authorities said, they found three 9-millimeter pistols, two .223-caliber rifles, two .12-gauge shotguns and one Uzi submachine gun.

Three others being sought lived in a safe house in North Hollywood until June, 1985, and authorities searching that site found a shotgun, one 9-millimeter pistol and two .45-caliber pistols, the FBI said.

The agency did not say which three of the group lived at the house.

There was no accounting for the whereabouts of the sixth person in the Los Angeles area.