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Though the group presented itself as a sort of union, the idea wasn't to get the doctor and his colleagues to negotiate better conditions. Instead, the cadre "said we're looking for a few key people that could bring more members, basically," recalled Junghans, who stopped volunteering after just a few outings. "I found it — I don't want to say weird — I found it odd."
Illinois attorney Robin Fahlberg was a NatlFed member for 15 years during the 1980s and '90s, and ran its Eastern Farm Workers Association front group in upper New York state. She came away thinking the organization's leaders were more interested in going through the motions of doing good works in order to attract volunteers than actually achieving success. She recalled one instance where she was poised to reach a settlement in a civil rights case. She considered a settlement offer a victory, but group leaders felt otherwise: "I got a call from the national headquarters saying, 'We're not going to take this settlement.' My jaw dropped."
Perhaps the most significant public accomplishment in NatlFed 's 40-year history came in October 2006, when the California Senate allocated $601,000 to settle Vega v. Mallory, a lawsuit backed by the Coalition of Concerned Legal Professionals and the Western Farm Workers Association. The suit, won on appeal, alleged that laborers were overcharged for housing in a program overseen by California's Office of Migrant Services.
"That was a good lawsuit, and the volunteer attorneys on it were great," said San Francisco lawyer Tony Palik, an attorney on the case.
In his experience, leaders of the Coalition of Concerned Legal Professionals seemed more concerned about getting him to attend Marxist indoctrination sessions and using his work on the farmworker litigation case to recruit new volunteers and members than about actually succeeding with the suit: "The organization itself was more of a hindrance than a help." Palik split with the group in 2002.
According to ex-members Whitnack and Fahlberg, professionals such as doctors and lawyers are to NatlFed what movie stars are to Scientology. They're recruited to lend authority to the group, but aren't necessarily informed of its core revolutionary mission, and are not required to endure the isolation and other privations of full-time members.
Notwithstanding, Palik learned enough during his seven years with the Coalition of Concerned Legal Professionals and the Western Farm Workers Association to look back at his experience with anger. "Their mission, or their objective, is so all encompassing for them, whatever that is," he said. "They were never very forthcoming about it. They were so dedicated to it in a bizarre, cultlike way, that everything, everything for them — it's all a means to an end. And the end is very murky, and weird, and kind of sinister, even."
The mastermind behind NatlFed's bizarre revolutionary philosophy was Gerald Doeden, a man known as a brilliant con man who recited Shakespeare at length and once dodged a bar tab by signing a check as Jesus H. Christ. The former Marysville disc jockey reinvented himself in the '70s as a revolutionary named Gino Perente, who claimed (falsely) to be a comrade of César Chávez and a veteran of worldwide insurrectional movements. He walked with a limp, which he told his followers was the result of a gunshot wound sustained while fighting in Latin American rebel movements (he actually limped because of a old car wreck injury).
In 1970, Perente established a base of operations at the Little Red Bookstore on Mission Street, from which he issued a declaration of war against Northern California. The following year, as part of the armed rebellion, 30 armed individuals were supposed to kidnap city officials in Berkeley and blow up the Bank of America building in San Francisco, according to his FBI file. A San Francisco Examiner article at the time said law enforcement officials considered him harmless and saw his dozen or so followers as kooks.
Perente later moved to New York City and founded another group with a more benign-seeming purpose named the Long Island Farm Workers Association; it was later renamed the Eastern Farm Workers Association. This group eventually evolved into NatlFed and the Provisional Communist Party.
For years, Perente told his Provisional Communist Party members that they were an elite vanguard who would lead a second American revolution. During the early 1980s, he began setting a specific date for armed takeover of the U.S. government, and the FBI infiltrated the group.
An FBI agent put it this way in a report from the time: "This takeover ... is referred to by members as the 'Proscenium Tactic.' The party is divided into several cells, which they call 'fractions,' with one of these fractions being called the 'Military Fraction' (MF). The MF requires a minimum one-year full-time membership, complete with political education, training, and evaluation. Several sources have reported that the MF participates in military drills. It was also reported by sources that weapons were stored at 1107 Carroll Street, Brooklyn, New York."
Although Perente's planned coups never materialized, followers ate up his speeches about revolution, even during his deteriorated, drug-addicted later years.
"He would be sitting, smoking Lucky Strikes, leg withered, in a wheelchair, very skinny and decrepit," said Irene Davidson, who volunteered with the group in the mid-1990s to extricate a daughter who had joined. "He would dress in white suits and cowboy hats to give his talks, but his suits were really filthy. He had no teeth. He didn't make sense. But the group treated him like God."
One woman, who was recruited to the group at age 16 in the 1970s and stayed until 1996, recalls the euphoria associated with believing Perente's rantings to be true.
"There were classes in Marxist-Leninist theory," the former Perente assistant said. "They were called 'arenas' because these were battlegrounds ... because it was supposed to be an armed revolution at some point. The theory being, sooner or later, you're going to have to take up a gun and shoot somebody. I remember having conversations with people saying, 'Okay, you can be in charge of this town, and you can be in charge of the state of New York.'"
