Raymond Luc Levasseur

Raymond Luc Levasseur (born October 10, 1946

Early life

Levausseur was born in southwest Maine, to French-Canadian immigrant parents from Quebec. Growing up, he experienced both poverty and bigotry, being called "frog", "papist", "lazy" and "stupid"—ethnic slurs and stereotypes targeting his French-Canadian background, French language, and Catholic upbringing.

Levausseur, his parents, and grandparents all worked in textile mills:

In an essay written from Marion Prison in 1992 called "My Blood Is Quebecois", Levasseur recalls how, to him, "[my] French and class identity were inseparable," and "the roots of my political vision and militancy extend deep into life as a French Canadian worker."

At 18, Levasseur left Maine for Boston, where he found work as a dockworker.

After returning from Vietnam, Levasseur was honorably discharged, and moved to Tennessee, where he began attending college. Tom Manning later claimed he fired the gun that killed Lamonaco in self defense.

Arrest and trial

In 1983, the Boston FBI office formed the Bos-Luc Joint Terrorist Task Force in pursuit of the members of the UFF. In it, he states: "I freely admit to being part of a revolutionary movement. The government cannot tolerate serious opposition to its own criminal policies, so they do what the prosecution are trying to do here. They want to criminalize my life, my values, and the organizations that they allege I've been part of." The trial ended in an acquittal on most charges and a hung jury on the rest. The facility was "notorious as a ... place used, as one of its administrators wrote, to "control revolutionary attitudes in the prison system and society at large." In 1999 he was transferred to the Atlanta Federal Prison, where he was finally released from solitary confinement. Soon afterwards, he began to publish his writings on the website Letters from Exile. He returned to Maine after his release, where he lives. He continues to speak out in support of political prisoners and against solitary confinement.