Growing up, he experienced both poverty and bigotry, being called "frog", "papist", "lazy" and "stupid"—ethnic slurs and stereotypes targeting his French-Canadian background, French language, and Catholic upbringing.

This experience began to radicalize him as the treatment and ridicule of the Vietnamese people and culture reminded him of the white supremacy he'd experienced growing up.

[2] There he began studying revolutionary nationalism and socialism, reading the works of Marx, Lenin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Che, Malcom X, Fanon, and Bakunin, as well as literature and poetry.

Drawing inspiration from the Black Panthers and Malcolm X, he recognized the importance of prisoners to social justice movements, and in 1972, Levasseur helped form the Statewide Correctional Alliance for Reform (SCAR), a prisoners'-rights organization.

[2] Becoming convinced of the need for militant action, this group split from SCAR, and in August 1974, opened the radical bookshop Red Star North Bookstore in Portland, "selling radical literature and running a Marxist study group in the evenings, while being subject to intense police surveillance and threats of violence.

In 1983, it is believed by Levasseur that UFF associate Richard Williams shot and killed New Jersey State trooper Philip J. Lamonaco during a traffic stop.

[10][4] The death of Trooper Lamonaco lead to several years of Levasseur, Gros, Manning, and other UFF associates living "on the run" from the FBI and state law enforcement agencies.

A series of accidental "run-in's" occurred in 1982, and after each, the group would immediately abandon their current living situation, move, and take on new fake identities.

[4] Intermittently, Levasseur and the UFF conducted bombings targeted at corporations and institutions supporting the South African apartheid regime and US foreign policy in Central America.

[11] In 1983, the Boston FBI office formed the Bos-Luc Joint Terrorist Task Force in pursuit of the members of the UFF.

[6] On November 4, 1984, members of the Hostage Rescue Team (HRT) arrested Levasseur, 38, and Gros, 30, after their van was halted in Deerfield, Ohio.