PALATKA DAILY NEWS

June 7, 2005

Feds arrest camp owner; Future of compound remains uncertain

By Robert Morris

EAST PALATKA -- The owner of an East Palatka labor camp raided Friday by federal agents has been arrested and charged with five violations of federal laws, officials said, but the future of the camp itself remains uncertain.

Ronald Evans Sr., 47, faces 13 years in federal prison if convicted of two counts of making false statements to labor officials and three counts of transporting labor workers without authorization, the indictment states.

Evans was not at the raid that brought more than 80 local and federal investigators to Evans Labor Camp on Stewart Road in East Palatka in search of violations of the federal Clean Water Act because he was attending a funeral out of town, said his attorney, Robert Fields of Palatka.

Fields said neither he nor his client wanted to comment on the charges. "At this time, it would be irresponsible to comment," Fields said in a telephone interview Monday afternoon.

During the raid, authorities searched the labor camp and Evans' East Palatka home for evidence of illegal dumping of raw sewage through a drainage pipe from the camp into Cow's Creek, a tributary of the St. Johns River. Agents from the Environmental Protection Agency collected samples from the pipe and interviewed each of the 78 labor camp residents about their knowledge of the camp's sewer facilities.

EPA spokesman Fred Burnside said it was "too early and too sensitive" to discuss the the evidence investigators found or the investigation that brought the agents to the camp. He said the agents did find violations of the Clean Water Act, but they were not included in Monday's indictments against Evans.

Lisa Butler, a Fort Myers-based farmworkers' rights attorney for Florida Rural Legal Services, Inc., was already in civil discussions with Fields regarding farmworker issues at Evans' camp, but there is no litigation pending, she said. Though she called the charges against Evans a "significant development," she would not comment on their impact on her case. Instead, she said she planned to travel to East Palatka today to check on the farmworkers still at the camp after several left with federal attorneys Friday evening.

"Who's running the camp? What's going to happen to the people out there?" Butler said. "Stopping abusive practices is a good thing, if they were happening, but there are several ways to do that. Obviously, through the criminal justice system, there will be some pain that goes with the process and some of that will impact the workers as well."

Continuing investigation

The indictment alleges that Evans understated the number of workers at his camp and the number of farms where they worked to federal labor investigators. Fields said Evans turned himself over to a federal special agent from the U.S. Department of Labor on Sunday evening, appeared before a judge Monday morning and was released on $50,000 bond.

Three others were arrested at the camp Friday on labor violations. Emma Mae Johnson, 44, and James Bryant, 56, were each arrested on charges of making false statements to labor officials and Gilbert LaBeaud, 50, was arrested on a charge of driving workers without authorization, according to a press release from the U.S. Attorney's Office. Johnson's bond was set at $25,000 and Bryant and LaBeaud will each have detention hearings Wednesday, the release states.

Even after the arrests, the investigation is continuing, said Sheriff Dean Kelly on Monday. Some workers remained at Evans Labor Camp on Monday, but Kelly reiterated that the camp's future is uncertain as additional state and local agencies look into conditions there.

"This has definitely raised a lot of eyebrows," Kelly said. "There's a lot the owners will have to do to come into compliance with not just state but federal law as well. Either way, they'll get out of terrible working conditions, either by shutting the camp down or by giving them better working conditions."

In a small, padlocked central shed at the compound, investigators found a cooler full of beer, cartons of untaxed cigarettes and 148 rocks of crack cocaine packaged for individual sale, said Capt. Gary Bowling of the Putnam County Sheriff's Office. Bowling said state cocaine possession charges are unlikely, because of the difficulty of figuring out who put the cocaine in the shed, but that does not diminish its value as evidence.

"It's very important to the feds," Bowling said. "It speaks volumes that it wasn't a trafficking amount, because it was possibly used as payment."

The presence of the shed that authorities said was used as a shop to sell crack, beer and cigarettes to workers was of particular interest to Butler, because of the possibility that it was a "company store."

"There's a long tradition in farm employment of farm leaders turning over the workers' pay to crew leaders and the crew leaders looking for a way to make a profit over the workers' wages. One way is to run a company store," Butler said. "The modern-day company store evidently has cocaine in it."

NAACP leader "shocked

Eight buildings painted red and yellow with bars on the windows surround a road of freshly poured red dirt in the center of the camp, including the shed containing the drugs and alcohol, a small central bathhouse, a large maintenance barn and five residential buildings. At least one of the buildings was a mobile home, but the others were concrete structures divided into approximately 10-by-15-foot rooms.

Most rooms had just enough space for a bed, a closet, a side table and perhaps a chair. Clothing lay scattered around most of the furniture, with fans on the floor and cigarette lighters on the table. Trash was at a minimum, but the air in the buildings and across the yard reeked of waste.

"The grounds were a little better than I expected," said Kelly, who has made numerous prior trips to the labor camp as a deputy and rescue worker. "But that just masks what was really there — drugs, allegations of unfair labor practices and obviously dumping raw sewage."

Nearly all the laborers gathering in the compound yard waiting for interviews with investigators appeared to be African-American. Ralph Dallas, president of the Putnam County chapter of the NAACP, said he was "shocked" to hear the reports of abuse at Evans' camp, because he knows Evans personally and the chapter has never had any complaints of farmworker abuse.

"We weren't aware that there was something of this magnitude going on," Dallas said. "We're always concerned with any level of mistreatment, whether it's African-Americans or whites or anybody being deprived of their rights."

Most labor camps have vastly improved since the "earlier era" when his uncle worked for one, Dallas said, because of federal intervention in the way they are run. Aside from fights breaking out, he said systematic abuse is "almost unheard of nowadays."

Few people actually want to work in a labor camp, Dallas said, but many of the laborers are there because they have no other choice — forced into the lifestyle by lack of schooling or a checkered past. Because so many are from out of town — and most of those interviewed by investigators said they came to camp from cities such as Miami, Jacksonville and New Orleans — they may not have been aware of a local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Dallas said, and the NAACP would not have known them.

"But I'm certain we will be talking about it now," Dallas said. "There's a lot of things we are doing that have not been done in the past."

"This is far-reaching. This is serious business when it comes to the treatment of people," Kelly said. "I hope in the long run these workers can be placed somewhere else or the owners become compliant."