Biography
James W. Barrett was convicted of the October 4, 1975 armed robbery of the Northeast Bank's Lunts Corner branch in Portland, Maine — a holdup carried out with Raymond Levasseur, Thomas Manning, and Joseph Aceto of the Sam Melville/Jonathan Jackson Unit, who framed such robberies as political "expropriations." Barrett, who knew Manning from prison, was recruited for the robbery but, by his own court testimony, was then asked to join the group's wider campaign of bombings, kidnappings, and robberies and refused — so he is best understood as a one-time accomplice rather than a committed member of the clandestine cell. He was convicted of armed bank robbery (United States v. Barrett, 766 F.2d 609) and sentenced to a long federal prison term.