Alan Berkman

Alan Berkman (September 4, 1945 – June 5, 2009) was an American physician and activist in the Students for a Democratic Society and Weather Underground who went to prison for his involvement in a number of robberies staged by the organizations and their offshoots. Released after eight years in prison for armed robbery and explosives possession, Berkman provided medical care to the homeless and founded Health GAP to help provide AIDS pharmaceuticals to some of the world's poorest nations.

Berkman was born in Brooklyn and moved with his family to Middletown, Orange County, New York. He was an Eagle Scout who graduated as the salutatorian of his high school class. He earned his undergraduate degree at Cornell University, graduating as an honor student in 1967. Berkman received his medical training at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, which he completed in 1971.

His politics and practice of medicine often overlapped, including his treatment of prisoners after the September 1971 Attica riots. He and his wife evaded the cordon established by the United States Marshals Service during the Wounded Knee incident in 1973.

The Black Liberation Army and May 19th Communist Movement had organized the October 20, 1981, Brinks robbery in Nanuet, New York, in which $1.6 million was taken from a Brink's armored car. In a shootout shortly after the heist, two police officers were killed. A witness told a grand jury that Berkman had treated one of the holdup group's members for a gunshot wound. Berkman refused to talk and spent almost a year in jail for civil contempt. Indicted as an accessory after the fact, Berkman jumped bail and went underground. Berkman's lawyers claimed that he was the only U.S. doctor to be charged for treating a fugitive since Dr. Samuel Mudd was charged and later convicted for his medical treatment of John Wilkes Booth in 1865 after the Abraham Lincoln assassination.

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