Joseph Michael Remiro (born 1947) is an American convicted murderer and one of the founding members of the Symbionese Liberation Army in the early fall of 1973.
Remiro was born in 1947 and raised in San Francisco in a lower-middle-class family of Italian and Mexican ancestry.
He also joined the more radical organization Venceremos, which had many Chicano or Mexican-American members and was militating for civil rights for its people.
[4] This small group became founding members of the Symbionese Liberation Army, along with Donald DeFreeze, Patricia Soltysik, Nancy Ling Perry, Thero Wheeler, Mary Alice Siem, Camilla Hall, and married couple Bill and Emily Harris.
Concerned about surveillance at their high-profile, Maoist radical commune, they moved DeFreeze to a less well-known house in Concord, which was rented by Nancy Ling Perry.
DeFreeze, who may have been an informant setting up sting operations, offered guns, explosives, and related supplies for sale to radicals he came into contact with.
[6][7] Veteran Remiro used his knowledge of weaponry to train the small group of affiliated radicals into an armed force.
[1] During that period the group was joined by Thero Wheeler, a former Black Panther who knew DeFreeze from the BCA in Vacaville.
[8] With the internal opposition cleared out of the way after Wheeler left, the SLA prepared for its first action, the assassination of Marcus Foster, Superintendent of Oakland Public Schools.
(SLA members later testified that DeFreeze, Perry and Soltysik were responsible for the shooting of Foster and his deputy.)
Although there were no eyewitnesses who could identify the assailants, circumstantial evidence discovered in January 1974 implicated Joe Remiro and Russ Little in the murder.
You go down on East 14th Street in Oakland and explain it to the people, because the SLA hasn't bothered!” said Carolyn Craven, a black reporter with strong leftist sympathies.
[9]Speculation circulated through leftist publications that the previously unknown group who assassinated a popular liberal figure was a right-wing false flag operation.
On January 10, 1974, Remiro and Russell Little were apprehended by police, as they were driving suspiciously in a quiet neighborhood in Concord, California, at 1:30 a.m. in a battered van.
[4] As soon as Remiro and Little were booked into Concord City Jail, an extra shift of guards was called in to surround the building.
The two were transferred almost immediately to Contra Costa County Jail, where armed guards on the roof were joined by extra street patrols.
Not wanting to allow any chance for escape or for an assisted breakout, it was decided that Remiro and Little would be transferred to California's most secure penitentiary, San Quentin prison.
They said that they were being held in isolation, "the hole" on Death Row, were not adequately fed, and other claims of harassment, intimidation and violence.
[18] On February 18, 1976, Patty Hearst at her armed robbery trial testified that she had been told that Little and Remiro were waiting in the car while Foster was killed by other members.
In 1977, the California Supreme Court ruled that this dynamite charge prejudiced the right to a fair jury trial.