FAYETTEVILLE (North Carolina) OBSERVER

July 30, 2006

Drugs, vices kept laborers tied to camps

By Greg Barnes
Staff writer

MEADOWS — The farm laborers are gone now, scattered back to the streets when their camp was forced to closed last year.

Weeds grow tall beside the red vans that once plucked the workers from homeless shelters and brought them to this former labor camp at the end of a desolate, rutted dirt lane about 10 miles southeast of Benson.

Here, investigators say, Ronald Evans Sr. supplied the workers with alcohol, cigarettes and crack cocaine on credit, keeping many indebted to him while he and his family made money off their labor.

Evans’ son, Ronald Evans Jr., pleaded guilty this month to selling crack cocaine to the workers at the family’s two labor camps, in North Carolina and Florida.

Evans Sr., 59, and his wife, Jequita, 45, will be tried in August on cocaine and other charges, including labor violations and environmental infractions. Prosecutors in Florida upgraded the charges against Evans Sr. this month, saying he ran a “continuing criminal enterprise.” He faces a minimum 20 years in prison if convicted. He and his wife have pleaded not guilty.

Five other former Evans employees charged in the case have pleaded guilty. In plea agreements, they indicated that Evans deceived, manipulated and coerced workers — a deliberate attempt to keep them addicted to cocaine and indebted to their boss. Evans Jr. did not enter into a plea agreement and faces between 10 years and life in prison.

Homeless recruits

According to federal court documents, this is what happened to the workers:

Beginning as early as 1991, Evans’ vans pulled up to homeless shelters in cities throughout the South: Miami, Atlanta, New Orleans, Tampa, Orlando, Winston-Salem and elsewhere.

Homeless black men were told they could earn minimum wage or more by working as farm laborers. They were told they would be provided food and a place to stay for about $50 a week. The documents say homeless black men were sought because they were willing to do farm labor and were susceptible to accepting drugs as payment.

One such man told investigators that he was recruited outside a homeless shelter in Miami. He said he was promised $500 a week, minus $50 room and board, to pick cabbage, sweet potatoes and tobacco. The man said he and five other homeless men accepted the offer.

On the way to Evans’ labor camp in East Palatka, Fla., the homeless man told investigators, the van’s driver picked up about 50 “dime” pieces of crack cocaine.

When they arrived at the camp, the man said he saw the van driver hand Evans the cocaine. The man, identified in documents only as witness No. 3, described Evans as weighing about 350 pounds, having gold teeth and wearing a lot of jewelry.

In the documents, investigators cautioned the court about the reliability of the witnesses, who have no known addresses and who use crack cocaine. Many have criminal backgrounds. Regardless, witness accounts varied little.

Behind closed doors

Meadows is a rural crossroads community — a restaurant and a few stores surrounded by fields.

Farm laborers who come and go through the community rarely cause trouble, said Thel Johnson, a Meadows native who owns a fertilizer business behind the general mercantile store.

Johnson said Evans’ workers were no exception. The labor crews worked at potato and vegetable farms around Meadows in the summer and early fall. They returned to northeastern Florida in October or November for the cabbage and potato seasons.

In Meadows, Johnson said, Evans’ laborers got off a bus at the store after working in the fields each day. They sat on wooden benches beside the store and ate and relaxed before returning to the labor camp.

“They had one guy named Ron who was just straight as an arrow,” Johnson said. “I never heard nobody complain about his camp or nothing.

“Ron Evans was just a tip-top man to run his business. What they did in that camp, I have no idea.”

Jeff Parker, who lives just down Barefoot Road from the labor camp, described Evans in similar terms.

Parker, who is 23, said his family often hired Evans’ laborers and rarely had a problem with them. If a worker returned to the camp with a radio or something else he wasn’t supposed to have, Parker said, Evans would call the family to inquire about it.

“What they did behind closed doors, I had no idea about,” Parker said. “As far as them toward us, they never gave us any problems.”

Federal investigators say they have a big problem with what happened behind those closed doors.

Daily offerings

After returning from the fields each day, farm laborers told investigators, they would line up in the kitchen and wait for the camp’s staff to hand out crack, alcohol and cigarettes. The packets of cocaine, wrapped in tinfoil, were called bells.

The workers said no money exchanged hands. Instead, the drugs, alcohol and cigarettes were offered on credit, and a camp staff member recorded the transactions in a notebook. The prices varied. Some workers said they paid $1.50 for a 16-ounce can of beer, $20 for a rock of crack cocaine and $3 for a pack of cigarettes. They said the prices were inflated.

In 2002, documents show, a sheriff’s deputy stopped an Evans employee in Georgia and found 500 cases of untaxed beer and 48 cases of untaxed cigarettes.

Paydays were either Friday or Saturday, but few workers said they received much money — if any. Instead, many wound up owing Evans for the drugs and other items he provided, documents show.

“In fact, witness No. 4 said that some laborers had been at the camp for over five years because of their crack consumption,” an application for a search warrant says.

That laborer said he once saw a confrontation between Evans and two of his workers over pay. The workers went missing the next day.

“Witness No. 4 said he was upset how black people were treating other poor black people at the camp, and that it was ‘like slavery,’” the document said.

Other laborers described beatings by camp staff members. The man identified as witness No. 3 said Evans accused a worker of stealing cocaine from the kitchen.

“About 30 minutes after Ron Evans Sr. confronted the laborer, several men appeared and beat the laborer so severely that the laborer’s jaw was broken, his head split open, his right arm broken and teeth knocked out,’’ the man told investigators. When the injured man returned from the hospital, the witness said, Evans told him that he owed $5,000 and that, “By the time you have paid me you will have died up here.”

Laborers also told investigators that Evans and his son, Ron Evans Jr., carried pistols and that a staff member circled the fenced-in camp at night with a flashlight and a machete. Evans Jr. ran the Meadows camp.

Camp staff workers who have pleaded guilty, including Nathaniel Davenport and Emma Mae Johnson, backed up many of the accounts that laborers gave investigators, the documents show.

Investigations begin

The documents indicate that the FBI started investigating Evans’ labor camps in 2003. Laborers told the same stories as they did later, but a warrant to search the camps back then was never executed, according to the documents. Prosecutors declined to comment on why the warrant went unexecuted. Evans’ lawyer could not be reached for comment.

In May 2004, the U.S. Department of Labor Wage and Hour Division conducted another investigation of the Evans camp in Florida. During that investigation, records show, Evans told investigators that he did not advance money to workers, and no workers bought anything from him. Investigators said Evans tried to intimidate his workers into keeping silent. His efforts didn’t work for long.

While federal investigators continued their investigation, Johnston County sheriff’s Lt. Angela Bryan received a 911 call Sept. 5, 2004, saying a worker at the labor camp outside Meadows had been stabbed by another worker.

The injured worker, who received 20 stitches in his face, told Bryan about Evans’ operation, including the cocaine, the documents say.

The documents say that a grand jury for the Middle District of Florida indicted Evans, Emma Mae Johnson and James Bryant, another staff worker, on May 25, 2005. Nine days later, two warrants were issued to search Evans’ home and labor camp in Florida. The warrants were to search for evidence of violations of the federal Clean Water Act. Evans was accused of dumping raw sewage into a creek behind the camp.

Not only did investigators find sewage violations, the records show, they found 148 rocks of crack cocaine, about 20 cases of beer and dozens of packs of untaxed cigarettes.

Evans faces forfeiture of his land in Florida and North Carolina and on his 17 vehicles, including a 1991 Corvette convertible, two Mercedes-Benzes, a 2005 motor home and a 1998 Lexus.

Some of the vehicles still sit outside the labor camp near Meadows, testimony to the years that Evans is said to have induced men to leave homeless shelters on the promise of a better life.