Patricia Gros Levasseur
Biography
Patricia Gros Levasseur, also known as Patricia Rowbottom and Pat Gros, was raised in a white working-class family on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. She became active in organizing against racism, sexism, economic inequality, and U.S. foreign policy. Gros Levasseur spent years underground with Raymond Luc Levasseur and was associated with the United Freedom Front and the group of defendants known as the Ohio 7. Federal agents arrested her in Deerfield, Ohio, on November 4, 1984. A jury convicted her of harboring Levasseur and possessing false identification documents, and the court imposed a five-year federal sentence. She completed that sentence and was released on bail in early March 1988 while facing the Springfield sedition and racketeering trial. In November 1989, the jury acquitted her of seditious conspiracy and racketeering conspiracy; it acquitted her on one substantive racketeering count and did not reach a verdict on the remaining count.
The Malcolm X Grassroots Movement submission describes Levasseur’s post-prison work as a paralegal at a New York City law firm after five years working at the Center for Constitutional Rights. Its summary of five years served does not establish different physical custody endpoints or replace the separately documented release on bail in early March 1988. Source: https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/media/publications/10.%20Political%20Prisoners%20in%20the%20United%20States%2C%20ICCPR%20Coalition%20Report.pdf#page=11
Breakthrough’s Winter 1990 account dates the Springfield seditious-conspiracy acquittal of Raymond Luc Levasseur, Richard Williams and Patricia Gros Levasseur to November 30, 1989. Its collective report says the jury failed to reach a verdict on RICO charges, a mistrial was declared, and the government announced five days later that it would not seek another RICO trial. The report’s broad treatment of the RICO counts is preserved as an attributed contemporary account, without replacing more detailed count-by-count outcomes already recorded. The acquittal is not treated as release from other sentences, and no custody endpoint or numeric total changes.
The Ohio Five’s March 25, 1985 statement reports placement in disciplinary cells upon arrival at New York’s Metropolitan Correctional Center on March 20.
The Justice Department’s 1985 annual report dates Patricia Gros’s Ohio conviction for harboring and three false-identification counts to February 25, 1985.
