At dawn on August 30, 1985, some 300 FBI agents executed simultaneous raids across Puerto Rico — the largest FBI operation ever mounted on the island — arresting Ojeda Ríos, Segarra Palmer, and a dozen others for the Wells Fargo robbery and hauling them to Hartford for trial as the "Hartford 15." The raids, with their blacked-out helicopters and seized movement archives, were denounced across the island's political spectrum as a colonial show of force; defendants were held years in pretrial detention, some in isolation units.
The prosecutions sprawled for a decade. Ojeda Ríos, who had fired on agents during his arrest, defended himself before a San Juan jury and was acquitted of assault in 1989 — jurors accepting self-defense. Segarra Palmer drew 55 years; Norman Ramírez and others received lesser terms; and in 1999 President Clinton's clemency, which freed the FALN prisoners, cut Segarra Palmer's sentence, releasing him in 2004.