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A 1984 raid by the FBI produced crates of paperwork — much of which consisted of records documenting the monitoring of recruits — but no proof NatlFed was a legitimate threat.
In 1996, after Perente died, the New York Police Department raided the group's headquarters, prompted by neighbors who thought they had heard children's cries. Police seized a cache of dusty firearms and more boxes of records. Mayor Rudy Giuliani held a press conference exposing what he characterized as a nefarious cult — hoopla that ended with a whimper as the Village Voice, The New York Times, Newsday, and other papers reported that NatlFed seemed to have never actually done anything. Instead, its members had spent a quarter century aggressively recruiting volunteers, some of whom would abandon society so they, too, could recruit more volunteers.
According to news accounts from the time of the 1996 raid, Margaret Ribar — the head of NatlFed's West Coast operations — succeeded Perente as the group's leader. Given the organization's secrecy, obtaining information about how things are currently run at NatlFed is difficult.
Nate Lescovic, now editor of Performer magazine in Boston, infiltrated the NatlFed-linked Eastern Service Workers' Association in 2004 as an independent journalist. "That was the only way I saw getting any information about them," he said. "I went in as a volunteer, and did a couple of events with them, and went door to door with them, and tried to get a sense of how they ran things."
He came away with an impression of an organization obsessed with its own version of Communist doctrine. Despite some accounts that that the group had mellowed under Ribar's leadership — a 1996 Village Voice story said "she loosened some of the restrictions that prevent members from visiting their families" — Lescovic was troubled by the sheltered lives of the group's young volunteers. "These kids had given up all their family and friends. They were living in poverty, working and living at the office, and doing nothing else, and living off food donations. They always had the same clothes on," he recalled. "It's this kind of taking lives away from people. You could argue that, 'Well, that's their decision. They can do what they want with their lives.' But being around these kids, it seemed like there was more to it than that. It seemed like it was not their decision. They were never happy, at all. There was not much laughter, never any smiles, and they were always running around doing work. None of them seemed to have anything to enjoy in their lives."
Ex-volunteers I spoke with who had been involved with NatlFed affiliates in the post-Perente years also indicate the group continues its cultlike behavior.
"Every two weeks they would sit me down and ask me to increase my commitment," said an ex-volunteer from Chicago, who worked for a front group in 2000. "But you can't ratchet up people's commitment too many times, or bad things start happening. You can't afford rent unless you're independently wealthy. They said, 'You can move in with us.' So I moved in with them. But moving in with them means you have no time off. They isolate them from the things you enjoyed, and things that are familiar, so you are easy to manipulate."
Thin, with a beard, ponytail, and elegant diction, this volunteer wanted to help the poor, "but the price they asked me personally was cutting me off from the rest of society, and disallowing the things that had become important to my identity."
Palik also witnessed what he believed was untoward treatment of volunteers. "They have this unbelievable file of every volunteer who's ever signed up with them going back 30 years," the attorney said. "At first, that seemed harmless. But I later found out it's a little bit sinister, because they seem to keep tabs on people."
One woman I spoke with said NatlFed ruined her relationship with her son, who has turned into a Marxism-spouting automaton whom she rarely sees anymore.
"It's going through hell, with lots of blaming myself," said the woman, who asked not to be identified. "There's lots of anger, with family members blaming each other. There's anger at him. And there's deep, deep sorrow and depression. I resonated with a woman who said, 'You just have to think of them as dead. To think of them as alive is just so painful.' When a person is dead, you know they're gone ... I cannot think of any other situation that is comparable."
Arthur Elcombe, an Anglican priest who retired with his wife to a Hayes Valley Victorian, presented two distinct faces to the world, both of them gentle, generous, and idealistic. But one of them had a sinister twist.
To most, Elcombe was a tireless community organizer who had founded charities and other public benefit groups. To the world inside NatlFed, he was much more than a mere community organizer. He was the sweet old reverend who had secretly devoted his life to the cause of violent revolution.
"I couldn't believe it," recalls a former core member who asked not to be named. "It was like he was so cute and adorable, and he would talk about overthrowing the government. He was part of the central committee."
According to ex-NatlFed members, Elcombe's San Francisco–based nonprofit, the National Equal Justice Association, has been key to the overall organization because it allowed the group to solicit tax-deductible donations which could later be routed to front groups.
Elcombe died in 2005. His obituary in the San Diego Union noted that "[i]n July 1985, the Rev. Elcombe organized the delivery of relief supplies to a west Philadelphia neighborhood ravaged by fire."
