MIAMI HERALD August 16, 2006
Man accused of paying workers with cocaine trial of a North Florida labor contractor.
JACKSONVILLE - The migrant workers were recruited to Ronald Evans Sr.'s labor camp from homeless shelters, soup kitchens and underpasses -- and took part of their wages in cocaine, a federal prosecutor told jurors at the start of the labor contractor's criminal trial. Some of the workers who toiled in the potato and cabbage fields took part of their pay in $10 foil packages of cocaine called ''bells'' that they got at a makeshift company store, with the price of the cocaine and other purchases deducted from their cash wages each week, according to details emerging in the trial. Sometimes, after deductions for cigarettes, beer and crack and other items, some workers owed the company money at the end of the week, Assistant U.S. Attorney John Sciorintino told jurors. The practice affected the ''lowest and most vulnerable people in society,'' he said. The multicount indictment accuses Evans of, among other things, engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise to distribute and aid and abet the distribution of cocaine. Evans' wife, Jequita, is also charged with one count of conspiracy to distribute cocaine. The defense says that whatever drugs the workers got at Evans Labor Camp near Palatka came not from the Evanses but from other workers or from local Palatka drug dealers. The Evanses had nothing to do with drugs, Ronald Evans' attorney, William M. Kent, told the jury. Instead, they gave people food and a place to live and provided them with legitimate work, he said. Jequita Evans also faces one less serious charge in the indictment not related to drugs; her husband faces six other less serious charges. Four former Evans workers have pleaded guilty to drug charges. One is Emma Mae Johnson, a former crack user and longtime Evans employee who testified that she is now clean. Johnson agreed to help the government and said she is hoping to get a less severe sentence for her cooperation. She testified that each weeknight after dinner, the migrant workers who wanted beer, cigarettes and cocaine would assemble at a pump house at the labor camp near Palatka in a process referred to by the workers as ``the line.'' Johnson said that for a while, she recorded the transactions on notebook paper. Sometimes, she said, she received cocaine in her pay envelope. She said Jequita Evans usually distributed the pay envelopes in Florida. Johnson said it was common for local drug dealers to come around the camp, especially around payday. Johnson did not connect Ronald Evans to the drugs. She testified that she never saw him at ''the line'' or at Saturday paydays. Nor was he around when cocaine sellers were at the camp, she said. Late Tuesday, Wilbur Cain, a field laborer who worked for Evans, said that for a time he was given four cocaine rocks a week for cleaning the bathroom at the camp. He also told jurors he was given cocaine by Evans during a brief period when he worked on the grounds of the Evans labor camp in North Carolina. Cain is serving time in a Pennsylvania prison.
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