Biography
White anti-imperialist activist arrested in November 1977 in Los Angeles as one of the PFOC/LA 5 on conspiracy and explosives charges; booked under the alias Grace Fortmer. Continued solidarity work after release. Documented in PFOC Breakthrough magazine.
The Torch’s “Free the Prairie Fire Five” article individually names these defendants as arrested in the prosecution concerning an alleged plan to bomb California Senator John V. Briggs’s Fullerton office. It reports a February 1, 1978 grand-jury indictment for conspiracy involving a destructive device and disputes the prosecution’s account. February 1 is the indictment date, not an independently established arrest date. The Torch, March 15–April 14, 1978, vol. 5 no. 3, original PDF page 6. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/torch-us/v5n3.pdf#page=6
The Lesbian Tide, March/April 1979, page 19, reported that a Los Angeles judge had freed Judith Bissell, Leslie Mullin and Marc Perry in the John Briggs office conspiracy prosecution after crediting time already served. The brief supplies no exact physical-release date. Its printed figure of 645 days conflicts with the November 1977 arrest chronology and the issue date; that figure is not adopted as a custody counter. The fourth named defendant is printed as Thomas Justesen, which is not silently substituted for the existing Michael Justesen identity.
In a Spring 1978 first-person article, Judith Bissell and Leslie Mullin individually name the LA Five defendants and describe their continued Los Angeles County jail confinement after the November 19, 1977 arrests. The accompanying mail directory prints Leslie Mullin’s historical local jail number as 4610250. It is not represented as a current BOP register number. The authors identify their confinement at the Sybil Brand Institute and describe high-security Section 5000 confinement since their arrests; their efforts to represent themselves helped secure a jail law library. The directory explicitly says Mullin was booked as Grace Fortmer; this is a documented booking alias. The reported four months already held is preserved as a documented known subtotal of actual custody, with the overall total still unknown; the planned June trial is not treated as an actual disposition.
