Mr. Joseph Connor, author and advocate, testifying before Congress on December 11, 2024.
Author and advocate Joseph Connor testified before Congress on December 11, 2024 on how the Cuban dictatorship violated his family’s human rights. Hillel Neuer, the executive director of the Geneva based UN Watch provided context in a Tweet he sent out earlier today that said: “Frank Connor was murdered by Cuban-backed terrorists in a New York bombing on Jan. 24, 1975. William “Guillermo” Morales was convicted but escaped from the prison ward of Bellevue Hospital in 1979. He is now being harbored by Cuba. Why is Cuba on the UN Human Rights Council?”
On May 15, 2024, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken “removed Cuba from a short list of countries the United States alleges are ‘not cooperating fully’ in its fight against terrorism and “The department determined that the circumstances for Cuba’s certification as a ‘not fully cooperating country’ have changed from 2022 to 2023.” On the same day Joe Connor sent a letter to Secretary of State Blinken requesting Washington ask the Cuban government for the return of fugitive bomber, William Morales harbored by Havana, who killed his dad.
It was learned later on May 22, 2024 that the reason for the change was not due to improved behavior by Havana, but the newly elected Colombian president, Gustavo Petro [ a former member of the terrorist group M-19] withdrew the extradition request for the Colombian ELN terrorists in Cuba who took credit for the bombing of a police academy in Bogota in 2019.
Seven months later he has still not received a response, but on December 11, 2024 this slight was placed into the Congressional record.
Media reports have focused on the campaign to remove the Cuban dictatorship, but on September 16, 2024 eighteen former heads of state petitioned President Biden to keep Cuba on the state sponsor of terrorism list. The Center earlier this year premiered a short video on the Castro regime’s history of terrorism that is available on Youtube.
Joseph F. Connor
House Committee on Foreign Affairs
December 11, 2024
Connor testimony version
Since the communist revolution, the Cuban Government has been an abuser of Human Rights domestically in Cuba and in the United States. Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognizes that “everyone has the right to life, liberty and the security of person.” Cuba violated the Connor family’s human rights; specifically the right for our father Frank Connor and other Americans to live.
Our father, 33-year-old Frank Connor, and three other innocent men, Alex Berger, Jim Gezork and Harold Sherbourne were murdered, while scores were injured and maimed, on January 24, 1975, (50 years ago next month) when the Marxist, Cuban fueled, Puerto Rican terrorist group Armed Forces for National Liberation (“FALN”) blew up New York’s historic Fraunces Tavern during a crowded lunchtime. The FALN appointed themselves my father’s judge, jury, and executioner, profiling, targeting, and savagely murdering “reactionary corporate executives” as the put in their Communique #3, dated that day. The Connor family had planned to celebrate my 9th and my brother’s 11th birthday that very night.
Fraunces Tavern was targeted by the FALN — who paid lip service to Puerto Rican independence but in reality sought to impose a Cuban-style socialist regime in Puerto Rico — for its proximity to Wall Street and for its storied reputation as the birthplace of American liberty. Alexander Hamilton and the Sons of Liberty met there. General George Washington bade farewell to his officers at Fraunces after the Revolutionary War.
Between 1974 and 1983, the FALN claimed responsibility for over 130 bombings in the U.S. and Puerto Rico including another deadly bombing on August 3, 1977 when Charles Steinberg was murdered at the Mobil Oil building in New York (incredibly an office building I worked in four decades later). That same day in 1977 an FALN bomb threat caused the first evacuation of The World Trade Center.
Though never prosecuted specifically for the Fraunces bombing, the unrepentant terrorists served only 18 years of prison sentences ranging from 35 to 70 years. As Hillary Clinton geared up for her 2000 New York Senate run and was looking to connect with New York’s Hispanic community, Bill Clinton granted clemency to the FALN, a blatant political gesture orchestrated by then–deputy attorney general Eric Holder. One, leader Oscar Lopez Rivera, was so dedicated to his Marxist cause and his comrades that he refused the 1999 Clinton clemency; although in 2017 he accepted an unprecedented second presidential clemency from Obama / Biden.
It was one of the administration’s last acts in office. Shortly after his release, on May 18, 2017 Cuban President Raul Castro released a message to Lopez Rivera congratulating the terrorist “…with all the honors and affection you deserve…”
William Morales, chief FALN bomb-maker, was not offered Clinton or Obama clemency. Morales likely built the deadly devices used at Fraunces and the Mobil Oil building. On July 12, 1978, which would have been my dad’s 37th birthday, Morales blew off part of his face and nine of his fingers when a bomb he was crafting exploded in his Queens bomb factory. The apartment contained explosives, incendiary mixtures, tools, FALN communiqués, and even the copy machine used to make the FALN communiqués, including the January 24, 1975 communiqué found after the Fraunces bombing.
Morales was captured, tried, convicted, and sentenced in 1979 to up to 99 years (10 federal, 89 NY State) in prison but escaped from Bellevue prison hospital with the assistance of other radicals who called themselves the Revolutionary Armed Task Force. During the state trial, Morales boasted: “No jail is going to hold me forever. They can put 1,000 of us in jail. They are not going to hold us forever. That’s what I have to say.” Morales was right.
Through a FALN investigation run by the Chicago Terrorist Task Force, Morales was located in Puebla, Mexico, in 1983. When the Mexican police closed in, he and an accomplice killed a Mexican police officer. Morales was arrested, charged with being an accessory to murder, and imprisoned in Mexico.
In 1988, ignoring President Reagan’s extradition demands, the sympathetic Mexican government allowed Morales travel to Cuba, where he remains a guest of the regime along with scores of murderous and felonious fugitives such as Victor Gerena and Black Liberation Army cop killer Joanne Chesimard (aka Assata Shakur).
On May 2, 1973, Chesimard and 2 accomplices opened fire on 2 New Jersey State troopers during a motor vehicle stop. Chesimard and her accomplices wounded 1 State trooper and executed State Trooper Werner Foerster at point-blank range. After a 6-week trial in March 1977, Chesimard was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. On November 2, 1979, Chesimard, aided by armed individuals posing as visitors, like Morales, escaped from what is now the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women and fled to Cuba where she has been given safe haven by the communist regime.
Soon after William Morales’ flight to Cuba, in the early 1990s I began my campaign to have Morales and Chesimard returned to American justice, writing letters to the Justice Department and making contacts with the NYPD, State Department, and Joint Terrorist Task Force. Meeting only frustration, I persisted, expanding with communications to Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, New Jersey Senator Bill Bradley, New York’s Cardinal O’Connor, and Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
During this campaign I quickly realized how closely Cuba and the FALN were connected. For the sake of brevity in my testimony I will provide certain highlights; details of which are in my written testimony. For additional detail, please see retired FBI agent Rick Hahn’s definitive history of the FALN, Terror’s Dawn and my book with Jeff Ingber, Shattered Lives, both previously sent to the committee.
From Shattered Lives:
“…Fidel Castro met with Puerto Rican born, Cuban intelligence officer, Filiberto Ojeda Ríos and encouraged him to form a Puerto Rican armed resistance group, which Cuba would help train. Ojeda Ríos returned to Puerto Rico in 1969 to organize and lead the first of Puerto Rico’s new militant political groups, the Movimiento Independentista Revolutionary Armando, aka “MIRA” After dozens of successful guerilla actions in Puerto Rico and New York City, MIRA was disbanded by police in the early 1970s based on information provided by an informant who had infiltrated the group.”
“In 1974, Ojeda Ríos was arrested in Puerto Rico, but after being granted bond, he fled to New York, where he worked in the Cuban mission to the U.N. While immersed in that supposed peace-promoting environment, Ojeda Ríos established the FALN along with former MIRA members, supported logistically by Cuban intelligence services…To a greater extent than other Puerto Rican independistas, the FALN developed links to domestic terrorist groups, which were facilitated by Cuba. The FALN partnered with and was greatly influenced by the militant, left-wing Weathermen group (also known as the “Weather Underground”), which took its name from a Bob Dylan lyric, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” FALN members were acquainted with the book Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism, written and published covertly in 1974 by Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, and others, which functioned as the Weathermen’s ideological manifesto and vision for the impending world revolution.”
In Rick Hahn’s Terror’s Dawn the various FALN communiques are studied in detail. The last paragraph of the first communique referred to an October 27, 1974 demonstration in support of Puerto Rican independence at Madison Square Garden held the same night as 5 FALN bombs exploded and read,
“Finally, the FALN supports the demonstration at Madison Square Garden on October 27 in support of the independence of Puerto Rico. We view this as a significant step in the formation of an anti-imperialist front in the United States, which will support and fight for the national liberation of Puerto Rico, and educate the American people to the murderous and genocidal policies of the Yanki capitalists throughout the world.”
As Hahn puts it, “Following up on the communiqué’s reference to the Puerto Rican Solidarity Day function, the FBI sought to identify who had rented Madison Square Garden for the rally. The names were familiar to the FBI. The persons who signed the contract were known in the FBI files as persons with links to the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee, a support organization for the Weather Underground who commenced a bombing campaign in the U.S.
They were also among those identified with the Cuban sponsored “Venceremos Brigades”, an operation of the Cuban government which recruited young, idealistic American youth on U. S. campuses to travel to Cuba, ostensibly to assist in harvesting sugar cane and other humanitarian tasks. In fact, the Brigades were thought to be a propaganda and intelligence tool of the Cuban government. The organization was used to create a community sympathetic toward communist Cuba in the U.S. It was also believed to be a recruitment and indoctrination farm for Cuban intelligence, which strove to exploit smart, idealistic, left-leaning American youth.
“The (communiques’) language convinced many that, indeed, the FALN was an operation of Cuban intelligence, designed to disrupt and embarrass the US. The timing of the bombings was also suspicious, for on October 30, 1974, just days after the first bombings, the 16 member United Nations Special Committee on Decolonization, a committee whose function was to encourage self-determination for all countries, was to hear the case of Puerto Rico. The issue of whether Puerto Rico was a US colony and should be declared as such was pressed by Cuba against the desires of the US…All of this made Cuba high on the list of suspects. It was theorized the FALN could be the product of the Cuban Government, utilizing a few Cuban trained Puerto Rican recruits.”
An October 27, 1975 communique left at the site of the FALN’s bombing of the Standard Oil Building in Chicago read,
“The FALN welcomes the support given the Puerto Rican National Liberation struggle at the solidarity conference in Cuba and the meeting of Non-aligned nations in Peru in September. We especially acknowledge the moral support given to our organization by the Cuban people and government in a speech made by Prime Minister Fidel Castro in August in which he said that the Cuban government would do all it could to support the FALN.”
But the history of Cuba supporting Puerto Rican Marxism, through terror goes back decades before the FALN and Weather Underground.
“In September 1979, President Jimmy Carter, as a “significant humanitarian gesture,” commuted the sentences of four imprisoned Puerto Rican Nationalists—Lolita Lebrón, Rafael Cancel Miranda, Ivan Flores, and Oscar Collazo— (who were convicted a 1954 armed assault on the Capitol Building that left five congressmen shot and wounded) to time served. It later was alleged that the clemency was offered as part of a secret agreement with Fidel Castro that secured freedom for CIA agents imprisoned in Cuba.”
“The freed prisoners jointly embarked on a “victory tour.” Appearing at rallies in Chicago, New York, and Puerto Rico, they proclaimed they had no remorse and could not rule out future violence in the name of Puerto Rican independence. Not long after their return to Puerto Rico, the four visited Havana as honored guests of Fidel Castro.”
The 1983 Wells Fargo robbery in Hartford Ct was yet another demonstration of the ongoing links between the Puerto Rican Marxist movement and Cuba. From Shattered Lives:
“Jorge Masetti, a former Cuban diplomat who would defect to the United States, testified that, weeks before the robbery, he delivered $50,000 to the Macheteros (sister group to FALN) on orders from his superiors in Castro’s Department of the Americas, the Cuban agency created to support revolutionary movements. Some of the money went to the purchase of a motor home used for sneaking (FALN terrorist Victor) Gerena into Mexico. Masetti himself waited at the border and helped disguise Gerena, handed him a Cuban passport, and arranged his flight from Mexico City to Havana. Cuba kept about half the stolen money, according to conversations the FBI later intercepted among Los Macheteros members.”
Despite my efforts and Cuba’s sponsoring of terrorists, the Obama administration removed Cuba from the State Sponsor of Terror list. On July 1, 2015, President Obama announced the establishment of formal relations with Cuba before actually visiting the Marxist state in March 2016. As Obama announced his Cuba visit, I immediately began receiving calls, texts, and emails from reporters who knew our family’s long standing fight for justice.
Ironically, I answered those requests from Joint Base Guantanamo, Cuba. You see, I am one of the 9/11 family members fortunate enough to observe the pretrial hearings at GTMO. My cousin, father’s godson Steve Schlag, was murdered on 9/11 as I witnessed the attacks from my downtown office window only minutes after commuting through the World Trade Center and exactly two years after the FALN terrorists walked out of prison.
Our family has continued to fight through endless injustices directed at us and Frank Connor. Along with fighting the reprehensible clemencies, ending Oscar Lopez Rivera’s 2011 parole bid by facing him at the Federal Prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, we also successfully forced City University of New York to, in 2013, close down the disgusting Guillermo Morales / Assata Shakur (Joanne Chesimard) Student Center on campus. CUNY had a student center named for two convicted terrorists, one of whom was complicit in my father’s murder…and my father attended City College out of high school.
Incredibly but not surprisingly in November 2017, only ten months after his second presidential clemency, Lopez Rivera was received as an honored guest in Havana where he paid tribute to the late Commander in Chief Fidel Castro and Che Guevara and was decorated with the Order of Solidarity.
Our family has fought for Morales’s extradition to the U.S. for decades; to hold Cuba responsible for their role in our father’s death and in protecting members of the terrorist group who murdered him. In 2024, following lobbying by our family, the Frank Connor / Trooper Werner Foerster Justice Act, was introduced by Senator Marco Rubio, co-sponsored by Senator Rick Scott. The Walter Patterson and Werner Foerster Justice and Extradition Act was introduced in the House of Representatives in 2023. We currently have a documentary film, Shattered Lives on the subject set for release.
As I testified at the 1999 Senate hearing on Clinton Clemencies, the FALN and their Cuban patrons took away my father’s life; never allowing him to see his sons play sports in high school, never allowing him the pride of being a part of his boys’ college graduations; to be at their weddings, meet his daughters-in-law. They took from him the joy of being father and a grandfather. They took from my mother the promise of growing old with her first love.
They stole from his mother, Irish born, Margaret Maloney “Grandma” Connor, her only child; the pride and joy of her life who working in facilities at the old Morgan Guaranty Trust Company, got her son Frank a safe job out of high school at the bank, unlike his friends who worked in the subway or became New York City cops or firemen.
The Connor and Patterson Acts, both call out Cuba for stomping on Americans’ human rights, for supporting and sponsoring terrorists. They demand the return of Morales, Chesimard, Gerena and others to face justice and to keep Cuba, the human rights violator, on the State Sponsor of Terror List.
We call for President Biden and President Elect Trump to secure the return of Morales and the other terrorists and guarantee Cuba ends its systemic human rights violations so Frank Connor’s life will be remembered for Justice.
Thank you,
Written testimony: https://www.congress.gov/118/meeting/house/117755/witnesses/HHRG-118-FA06-Wstate-ConnorJ-20241211-SD001.pdf
Joseph Connor, Biography December 11, 2024
Joe Connor has testified before the Senate Subcommittee on Foreign Relations regarding President Clinton’s 1999 clemency grant to the Cuban fueled Marxist terrorists of the Armed Forces of National Liberation, (FALN) who murdered his father Frank Connor in the 1975 bombing of historic Fraunces Tavern in New York City.
Mr. Connor went on to introduce The Pardon Attorney Reform and Integrity Act to Congress in 2000 in response to the Clinton FALN clemencies and testify at the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2009 during Eric Holder’s AG senate confirmation hearing.
Joe co-authored The New Founders, What would George Washington think of the United States of America if he were alive today, and Shattered Lives. Joe is executive producer of a documentary film of the same name which chronicles the FALN’s decade-long reign of murder and destruction and Joe’s quest for justice for his father.
Having commuted through the World Trade Center on 9/11/01, Connor eye-witnessed the attacks from his nearby office, losing his cousin, father’s god son Steven Schlag, among the thousands murdered. In 2016, Mr. Connor faced Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other detainees during pretrial hearings at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and in 2011 faced FALN terrorist Oscar Lopez Rivera at his federal parole hearing in Terre Haute, Indiana (Lopez refused Clinton’s 1999 clemency). Lopez’s parole was denied but he subsequently accepted a second clemency in 2017 from Obama / Biden on their last day in office.
In the early 1990s Joe began his quest to return convicted FALN terrorist fugitive William Morales from Cuba to complete his prison sentences in letters to then President Clinton, the Department of Justice, Secretary of State Warren Christopher and NY Mayor Giuliani.
Joe’s articles have been published in outlets including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Times. He currently writes on WeWinAmerica.com and contributes to Townhall.com. Mr. Connor has appeared on MSNBC, FOX, Newsmax and various other TV, on line news, local and syndicated radio programs.
A 1988 graduate of Villanova University, Joe is married with 2 grown children and lives in the New York metropolitan area.