Justice doesn’t wait — not even after 50 years.
Long-grieving families who lost loved ones in the 1975 bombing of Manhattan’s Fraunces Tavern called on the new Trump administration to demand the extradition of the domestic terrorist behind the blast, who are now harbored in Cuba.
The small group made the plea as they huddled outside the Financial District tavern where the likes of George Washington once dined on Friday — 50 years to the day of the atrocity that killed four people and injured nearly 60.
Joseph Connor, who lost his father Frank Connor in the attack, renewed his call for the blast’s suspected Puerto Rican nationalist bomb maker William “Guillermo” Morales to finally face justice.
“Our fight for justice began 50 years ago,” he said. “When I was 9 years old, our 33-year-old father was murdered with three innocent men that day. Finally, after all these years, despite numerous betrayals by politicians, including clemencies — including multiple removals of Cuba from the state sponsored terror list — we have the opportunity for justice.”
“(With) a new administration and Marco Rubio as the new secretary of state. Now is the time to bring William Morales and the other fugitives back from Cuba.”
The families called for the passage of The Frank Connor and Trooper Werner Foerster Justice Act, a bill introduced last year by Rubio in his waning days as a Florida senator.
Their plea is the latest volley in a decades-old fight.
The attack unfolded on Jan. 24, 1975, when members of FALN — a Puerto Rican nationalist group — planted a bomb in the tavern.
The lunchtime blast shattered windows, destroyed a staircase and damaged the pre-Revolutionary War building on Pearl Street — a storied city landmark noted for being the location where Washington gave his farewell to Continental Army officers.
A note found nearby chillingly warned of further violence: “You have unleashed a storm from which you comfortable Yankis (sic) cannot escape.”
FALN, an acronym for Fuerzas Armadas de Liberacion Nacional, carried through on that promise, repeatedly setting off explosives in the city through 1982.
NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch, who joined the families outside the tavern, called the bombing “terrorism in its purest form.”
“For New York, terrorism did not begin on Sept. 11, 2001,” she said.
“Fraunces Tavern was one of the most most violent acts of domestic terrorism in our city’s history, and it was part of a string of extremist attacks that struck the nation throughout the 70s.”
The wave of terror largely became a historical footnote in the ensuing decades, overshadowed by the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the Sept. 11 attacks that felled the Twin Towers.
But the bombings weren’t completely forgotten in New York City.
The decision to honor Oscar Lopez Rivera — a FALN leader who served more than 35 years in prison before former President Barack Obama commuted his sentence — at National Puerto Rican Day Parade in 2017 drew condemnation and a boycott by prominent Big Apple pols, law enforcement groups and corporate backers.
Rivera’s defenders, such as the City Council’s then-Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, cast him as a political prisoner who wasn’t directly linked to bombings.
Other accused FALN terrorists were arrested, although one implicated in the Fraunces Tavern bombing frustratingly evaded lasting capture.
Morales, suspected to be the bomb maker behind the deadly blast, had been arrested in 1978 after one of his explosive devices inside a Queens bomb factory blew up in his face, causing him to lose an eye and nine fingers.
He was sentenced to up to 89 years in prison but escaped from Bellevue General Hospital by climbing a homemade rope of elastic bandages — and with the assistance of allied radical groups.
After a violent sojourn in Mexico, Morales ended up in Cuba during 1988, where he has since remained as a guest of the Communist regime — and a fugitive from US justice.
“I’m not asking for anything other than exactly what he was sentenced to,” Connor said. “He escaped from prison, he’s been a fugitive for the last 40 years, and it’s time to get him back. I’m not asking for a second more in prison than he was that he was sentenced to.”
The Rubio bill is also named after Werner Foerster, a New Jersey state trooper shot and killed by Black Liberation Army radical Joanne Chesimard during a 1973 traffic stop.
Chesimard received a life sentence for the murder, but — like Morales — escaped from prison and found a safe haven in Cuba.
The pair retained a misguided notoriety in the Big Apple, where leftist students at City College in 1990 named a campus room the Morales/Shakur Center — after Morales and Chesimard’s adopted moniker Assata Shakur.
The college finally closed the student center room in 2013 — an act celebrated by Connor as long overdue.
Patrick Hendry, president of Police Benevolent Association union, said Cuba needs to cough up Morales at long last.
“This notorious person who started this is still out and still hiding to this day,” he said. And to make matters worse, he’s not hiding alone — he’s hiding with one of the most notorious cop killers in the United States.
“It doesn’t matter how long it takes, doesn’t matter if it’s 20 years, 50 years, 100 years, there is no expiration on justice.”