On October 20, 1981, a joint BLA–May 19th unit robbed a Brink's armored truck of $1.6 million at the Nanuet Mall near Nyack, New York. The robbery went catastrophically wrong: guard Peter Paige was killed at the mall, and at a roadblock minutes later BLA fighter Mtayari Shabaka Sundiata and officers Waverly Brown and Edward O'Grady died in the shootout. Weather veterans Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, acting as drivers, were captured that day with Judith Clark and Sam Brown; Kuwasi Balagoon, Sekou Odinga, and Marilyn Buck were taken in the months that followed.
The prosecutions defined the decade's political trials: Balagoon, Gilbert, and Clark, refusing the court's legitimacy as prisoners of war, drew 75-to-life; Boudin pleaded to 20-to-life and was paroled in 2003; Clark's sentence was commuted by Governor Cuomo and she was paroled in 2019; Gilbert's was commuted in 2021. Balagoon died of AIDS in prison in 1986. Brink's shattered both organizations and opened the era of the grand-jury resisters jailed for refusing to testify about it.