• Former member of the Symbionese Liberation Army

Michael Bortin was a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army, a domestic terrorist group of the 1970s. He became associated with the organization when Kathleen Soliah (Sara Jane Olson) joined it in 1974. In 2002, Bortin pleaded guilty to second-degree murder for his involvement in the killing of Myrna Opsahl during a 1975 robbery of the Crocker Bank in Carmichael, California. He was sentenced to six years in prison.

Reflecting on his days as a radical, Bortin has said:

• It seemed like at least 50% of radicals were Jewish, I was half Jewish and the thing that you remember growing up was "we saved the world from Hitler." And then you turn around and we're being Hitler, you know, you see this every night, and the thing that everyone was told, especially the Jewish people, was "you can't let something like this happen again." And yet every night you watch Walter Cronkite on TV, waiting for him to say something [about social injustices], waiting for all these people to say [something], that never say anything...
• Before Bobby Kennedy was killed, I had hope within the system. But not after that. Especially with black people... that issue was more important to me in the long run... that was the one that was going to stay with us and that's what you see every day. And the, I mean, it was like he was a savior to the black community from what I could see just going door to door... it was the only time I've ever seen so many black people with so much hope. You know? To me, [RFK's assassination] was even more devastating than [that of] Martin Luther King...
• Most everybody that I ever knew that was a radical... were go-getters in high school. I was a national science finalist, I had a gigantic IQ... and most everybody did. It was all these high achievers... We were just so shocked at how bad our country had become that we didn't want any part of it... everything stemmed from that. We had to make... everything we did an in-your-face statement. It was almost like a kid that decided their parents were just disgusting people. I know that's a weird way to sum it up, but we just felt like there was no future...
• How did I express my rebellion? Well, I helped start a lot of riots, shut down the college, 'cause I was a student then at U.C.-Berkeley. I was pretty militant. I burned a lot of flags... turned over police cars, lit them up, and that happened pretty often... and threw bricks in cops' faces... I was in S.D.S. [Students for a Democratic Society], I was a pretty good rioter, I was good at climbing up flagpoles and burning flags. But I never did a bombing....
• We did a lot... in Berkeley as far as rights and all that, but, no one ever owned a gun... that was the difference between white and black radicals. I mean, blacks were armed. We were unfamiliar with that... I was only 22 years old and I wasn't a violent person...
• To give you an idea of how Berkeley was in those days, this radio station KSAN was a radical station. People would go by LeConte Avenue where this garage was, and all of a sudden they'd be followed by police because they had staked it out. So people had actually called into KSAN, "I don't know what's going on, but stay away from that area, LeConte Avenue," and if any of us had heard that broadcast, we would never had been arrested. That's how crazy Berkeley was -- you actually got warnings on the radio...
• [The Hearst kidnapping] was what we always wanted in a way. It was like a dream, that you didn't want to wake up from because, first of all, it was instant gratification. The S.L.A. said, "food program" -- there was a food program, just like that. There were thousands of poor black people and poor Hispanics in line, showing poverty in America, which is what we wanted to show for years and no one would listen. Started co-ops and this, that, and no one was interested. People were interested in Vietnam but not local issues that much, and to see what a threat they were being perceived [as] even in the early stages -- [California governor Ronald] Reagan was ready to have a stroke. He was threatening to arrest the people who were getting food and charging them with [being an] accessory [to a crime]... the reaction of the government was so incredible. It was Bonnie and Clyde. It was that kind of thing that's very American, actually, at the core. These guys were just doing it so artistically.