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The deeper motive behind the interest in Philadelphia was not charity but opportunism, according to Fahlberg. The fire had been caused when police bombed the headquarters of a radical black power group called MOVE, provoking nationwide liberal outrage. This was a type of opportunity NatlFed was prepared for.
"They had people on the phone full-time from NatlFed headquarters in Brooklyn, making up stories," Davidson said. "They had people cold-calling, and they were notorious for that. If you ever gave a penny, they would never leave you alone."
Fahlberg said NatlFed's leaders saw the bombing as a golden chance to raise money for the cause. "I do know that in New York, they were raising money for our organization, based on the bombing of the MOVE group in Philadelphia," she said. "That money all went right to the national organization."
Fahlberg told me that after leaving NatlFed during the mid-1990s, she contacted law enforcement in Illinois to report her belief that the National Equal Justice Association existed to dupe donors, a practice that, in her mind, was laundering money for a cult.
In my own review of NEJA documents on file with the IRS and the California Registry of Charitable Trusts, I found no evidence that the organization was used to break any laws. However, I did find a very unusual nonprofit that had no discernible public presence; it does not seem to hold public events, and it has no Web site. Yet during the three years of reports to the IRS ending in 2008, the group has attracted more than $500,000 in donations, a pace consistent with previous years. Among those who have made contributions are major corporations: In 2000, when NEJA reported the names of donors on its IRS forms, it declared gifts of $22,500 from Novartis, $27,000 from SmithKline Beecham, and $15,000 from Lipton.
Historically, ex-members and volunteers say, the money has really been raised by a boiler room of NatlFed cold-callers in Brooklyn and through front groups. IRS documents indicate NEJA apparently then gave the money back to NatlFed fronts in the form of grants. Those former insiders say they understood NEJA's role as allowing donors to make tax-deductible gifts that might eventually end up at NatlFed headquarters in New York.
Fahlberg recalled that when she was operations manager of NatlFed's Eastern Farm Workers Association in New York state, she was instructed to ask donors to make checks out to the National Equal Justice Association.
Later, she received a grant check from NEJA, deposited it in the bank, and paid bills for an organizing drive. "Yes, it was money laundering, and that was how they did it," she said. "In my mind, they told supporters that this money they were raising was for a particular purpose, and then the money instead went to support the bills of the national office. They would write a check to one of these other organizations, such as the Eastern Farm Workers Association or the Finger Lakes Equal Justice Association, and then tell them to bring the money back into headquarters to make it look legit."
A former NatlFed assistant to Perente, who didn't want her name published because she doesn't want her former association with the group to become public, said she was also responsible for cashing NEJA checks as part of her work as operations manager of one of the West Coast front groups.
"For the people who were doing really big donations, they were afforded the opportunity to send it to NEJA so they could get the tax break, but then all the money goes to the entities," she said, using NatlFed's term for front groups. "The entities get the check, but they don't keep the money. You're supposed to cash the check, and you send another check to the national office. Or you get the cash, and it's carried to the national office. But you weren't allowed to spend that money, because it wasn't considered yours."
The Chicago ex-volunteer said that he, too, saw transactions involving NEJA that might have skirted the bounds of propriety.
"I've written letters to the IRS saying, by the way, they might be running a money-laundering scam," he said. "When I was a volunteer, they gave me instructions, when I was on the phone soliciting donations, to say, by the way, if someone wants to make a large donation, then you have to make it out to the National Equal Justice Association."
But Sheila Warren, a San Francisco attorney and Golden Gate University adjunct professor who specializes in nonprofit law, said that these transactions do not demonstrate that the organization was violating the law. It would be easy for NEJA to argue that its grants went toward charitable purposes, given that NatlFed's front groups do perform real, socially beneficial work.
"It's certainly unusual, but it's not implausible that they're actually conducting themselves in a manner that complies with the tax laws," she said.
Notwithstanding, it's unlikely that donors and others snared in NEJA's web realize they're involving themselves with an organization that has a stated purpose of overthrowing the U.S. government.
The Reverend Schuyler Rhodes, pastor of Temple United Methodist Church in the Sunset (where I happen to attend), has been on NEJA's board of advisers for five years, a fact I discovered while reporting this article. He was recruited by activist Gail Williamson, NEJA's secretary-treasurer, who subsequently called him every year or so to say, in very general terms, that the group was advancing the cause of equal justice.
Like most volunteers for organizations with apparent links to the National Labor Federation, Rhodes had no inkling of NatlFed's existence, let alone its secret revolutionary goal. "I thought it was a mom-and-pop outfit that did civil rights work," he said. "I certainly don't like being lied to."
When asked whether NEJA had ever donated to a group that was not a NatlFed front, Williamson said she was in a hurry and would call me back. She did not return a subsequent message in which I described the money-laundering allegations.
