New York lockdown

Cops plan zero tolerance for violent protests at the GOP Convention. Militant groups plan to disrupt the city like never before. Welcome, delegates!

By Michelle Goldberg

Aug. 11, 2004 | If you're a delegate attending the Republican National Convention at Madison Square Garden later this month, Jamie Moran knows where you're staying. He knows where you're eating and what Broadway musical you plan on seeing. For the past nine months, Moran has been living off savings earned as an office manager at a nonprofit and working full-time to disrupt the RNC.

His small anarchist collective, RNCNotWelcome.org, runs a snitch line and an e-mail account where disgruntled employees of New York hotels, the Garden and the Republican Party itself can pass on information about conventioneers. So far, the collective has received dozens of phone calls and hundreds of e-mails with inside dirt on GOP activities. Recently, a woman with a polished, middle-aged sounding voice left a message saying, "For some God-unknown reason I'm on the Republican mailing list, and they sent me what they call a list of their inner-circle events." The events hadn't been publicized elsewhere, she said, and she wanted to fax the list to Moran.

Moran feeds information like this to a cadre of activists desperate to unleash four years' worth of anger at the Bush administration. By dogging the delegates wherever they go, RNC Not Welcome hopes to make the Republicans' lives hell for as long as they're in New York.

"We want to make their stay here as miserable as possible," says Moran, who has sandy hair, a snub nose and a goatee. The son of a retired Queens cop, he's 30 but looks younger. "I'd like to see all the Republican events -- teas, backslapping lunches -- disrupted. I'd like to see people from other states following their delegates, letting them know what they think about Republican policies. I'd like to see impromptu street parties and marches. I'd like to see corporations involved in the Iraq reconstruction get targeted -- anything from occupation to property destruction."

There's a showdown coming to Manhattan. Backed by the most intense security the city has ever seen, the Republicans are about to turn the blue-state bastion of New York City into the backdrop for George Bush's coronation. The RNC chose New York because it was the site of the Sept. 11 terror attacks, which to Bush's opponents and even some ordinary New Yorkers seems a brazen provocation.

On one side are 36,000 cops -- a force that City Councilman Peter Vallone Jr. calls "perhaps the world's tenth-largest standing army." On the other side are at least 250,000 protesters expected to converge on the city from all across the United States and Canada -- a demonstration six times larger than the legendary anti-globalization protests that rocked Seattle in 1999.

They're facing off at a time when police are increasingly adopting military tactics in response to protest, and protesters are responding likewise, conducting their own reconnaissance on Republican plans and plotting actions designed to hit where the cops are weakest. The police have infiltrated the protesters, but the protesters have infiltrated the convention; according to anti-RNC organizers, they have at least two moles working undercover with volunteers the city has recruited to help makes things run smoothly at Madison Square Garden.

Plans to oppose the convention are multiplying, suffusing activists with a giddy, growing tension. Marches and rallies, legal and illegal, are being planned for every day that the Republicans are in New York. There will be street theater, including a Roman-style vomitorium in the East Village a few days before the convention starts, meant to signify Republican gluttony. Cheri Honkala, an organizer from Philadelphia, is mobilizing homeless people, public housing tenants and others for a big, illegal "poor peoples' march" on Aug. 30. Activists are holding weekend workshops where direct-action novices practice street blocking, and DIY medics learn to treat victims of pepper spray and police violence.

No one knows where it's all going -- whether it will look like Chicago '68 or Seattle '99 or something altogether new. But activists see the coming conflict as history-making.

Next page: "A total expression of seething hatred"