FLORIDA TIMES-UNION June 12, 2005 PALATKA CAMP HARD TO ESCAPE By MATT GALNOR EAST PALATKA -- Darkness has been here an hour when the bus finally rolls in. Workers file off the bus, a couple of hundred yards inside the fence -- the fence topped with barbed wire and an imposing sign alerting trespassers they're not welcome at this labor camp. People scatter into their modest quarters. Lights flash on and off as they take their tired bodies to the showers, capping another 12-hour day in the fields as farmers squeeze what they can out of the last few days of potato season. The workers, most of whom were recruited from a homeless shelter somewhere in the Southeast, ignore the strangers waiting outside the gate. They're used to the uninvited company by now. And hardly anyone's talking. They rarely do. And if there was a time to start, this isn't it. Not after the cops kicked in doors this month, cuffed people and arrested workers with outstanding warrants. Not after the camp owner and three others were federally indicted on labor violations, bringing the cameras and unwanted attention to Evans Labor Camp, a modest smattering of yellow and red one-story cabins tucked away on a secluded road, about 60 miles south of Jacksonville. Not after the questions started coming, as they do every so often when a raid comes down. Questions about contractors recruiting workers at homeless shelters, preying on people who'll buy a bottle of beer, a pack of smokes or half a crack rock on credit -- even if it means they've already smoked and drank most of their earnings when payday rolls around Saturday. Questions about just how free these workers are to leave. The gate at Ronald Evans' camp is rarely closed, employees say, but one former worker calls the place a "slave camp." He says debts rack up so quickly that, when the week's done, people usually average less than a dollar an hour for packing cabbage or potatoes. Some end the week with the same empty pockets, but a larger debt than they started with. Across the state, most of the farm workers are illegal immigrants. Here, they're down and out American citizens. Evans' camp is one of about a dozen in Putnam and St. Johns counties that run from about October to June, working cabbage fields in the winter, then potato farms. Northeast Florida is known as the last bastion of the "company store" model of labor camps. In these camps, homeless men are lured to the camp with promises of work and a nice place to stay, said Lisa Butler, an attorney for Florida Rural Legal Services that represents farm workers. What they often find are long hours, short paydays and a string of broken promises.
"Primitive" conditions For now, Evans can't set foot on the camp he owns and runs. That's part of the deal that keeps him out of jail while he awaits court hearings on five charges, including making false statements to labor officials. Evans turned himself in June 5, two days after the raid. If convicted, he faces up to 13 years in prison. Evans' attorney, Robert Fields, declined to comment on the case. Those running the camp in Evans' absence also declined comment. Three others were charged with other labor violations, including unauthorized driving of labor workers and also making false statements to labor officials. Conditions at the camp are "primitive," according to a warrant signed for the Environmental Protection Agency. Environmental violations are also possible, focusing on a pipe that flows into Cow Creek, just behind the camp. The stench of human waste is unavoidable just outside the camp. Tests in the creek show fecal coliform counts more than 3,000 times the state standard, but officials are still determining whether the pipe flows directly from the restroom facilities, said Jill Johnson, a spokeswoman with the state Department of Environmental Protection. Until the raid, the camp was in compliance with all DEP standards and the state signed off on the drinking water supply during its last regular inspection in 2003. Putnam County Health Department records also show, until this month, the camp passed all its inspections since 2002. When the cops raided the place, they found 148 rocks of crack cocaine, about 20 cases of beer and dozens of packs of cigarettes in a shed on the property, said Capt. Gary Bowling of the Putnam County Sheriff's Office. No drug charges have been filed. Bowling said so many people have access to the shed, it wouldn't be fair to charge any one person. Federal prosecutors have an ongoing investigation, but spokesman Steve Cole said he could not comment about whether further charges were forthcoming. "We still have some work to do out there," Cole said. In anticipation of the June 3 raid, Department of Justice officials called a handful of Jacksonville area homeless shelters to see if there was room for people who might leave the camp. After all, the shelters are likely where most of the workers came from. "Always paying them back"
Anderson says he and some other men were offered a job that would pay about $200 a week. The driver promised a nice place to stay -- a campus with a pool and some basketball courts. He climbed in. The van stopped a couple of other places on the way, looking for more workers. When the van pulled into the Evans' shabby camp, reality set in. No pool. No place to shoot hoops. Would the pay end up being a lie, too, Anderson wondered. He'd know in a week or so. Crews would leave on a bus, sometimes as early as 6 a.m., and head to the cabbage patches. Some of the smaller men would cut the cabbage. Anderson, slender and over 6 feet tall, was assigned to pack the heads into boxes. Days were long. Always more than eight hours, some as long as 16, he said. To unwind after work, tenants would hit the company store, a small shed on the property. There, workers could buy beer, cigarettes and crack on credit, Anderson said. The people selling the goods would keep a tab in a notebook, tallying how much each person bought. Crack would go for as much as $40 a rock, well above street prices, Anderson said. Rocks were cut smaller, sometimes a third of the normal size, to keep people coming back, Anderson said. When his first Saturday payday came, Anderson's loot didn't sniff $200. Try about $30. He rarely made much more. "Every time I looked up, I was always paying them back, not having any of my own," Anderson said. And that was the plan, the formula that repeats itself over and over again on labor camps here, workers' advocates said. "He had you," Anderson said. "He knew he had you." Anderson toiled in the fields a few months, working to the point he'd be able to leave. Some men he worked alongside had been with Evans for a decade. They were thousands of dollars in debt for drugs and booze, to the point they had resigned themselves to the fact they were stuck, Anderson said. "If you owed anything," Anderson said, "you were not leaving that camp." Evans often kept a close eye in the fields, Anderson said. If people were moving slow, Evans would move them out of the way and do it right. He'd lift up his shirt, revealing the pistol on his hip. "He'd tell you he wasn't afraid to use it," Anderson said. If you got in a fight the night before with another worker, you relied on friends to bandage you up, he said. If you were sick, too bad. You had to get to work, had to pay your debt back. After a few months, Anderson was fed up. He was drinking and smoking crack. Not enough to be completely in debt, but enough that he was walking away with peanuts on payday. In the middle of one week late in cabbage season, Anderson told Evans he'd be gone after payday. Evans didn't like it, Anderson said, but the boss complied. Anderson was then completely cut off from the store. No more beer. No more cigarettes. No more crack. At the end of the week, they settled up. He was taken to Evans's house, where Anderson said a woman gave him $90. He got in a van and was dropped off near a shelter about 200 miles from where he was picked up in Tampa. A couple of weeks ago, Anderson was up toward Palatka for work. He looked around. Horrible memories raced back to him, he said. He couldn't get away quick enough. 'We try to warn people' Anderson's story won't shock anyone running Jacksonville area homeless shelters. The vans will roll in, often on Sundays, looking for a fresh crew. Officials at the Jacksonville area shelters cringe or sigh at the mention of the camps. Some have posted signs, warning people not to get in the van. Others talk to their residents about the dangers. But with so many people flowing in and out of town, and the offers sounding so good to a guy down on his luck, there's always a few people to fill seats in the van. Tammy Byrer sees about 15 or 20 former camp workers a year at St. Francis House, the 28-bed shelter she runs in St. Augustine. Some are injured. Some have escaped. All are practically broke and say they're done with the camps. The camps thrive on exploitation, officials say. St. Francis volunteers and employees deliver about 16,000 sandwiches a month to the camps. All of the camps have been cut off at one time or another for taking the sandwiches and selling them to the workers, Byrer said. Anderson said clothes that would come from the shelter would often end up in the bonfire pit. These types of camps only lure people who have some type of weakness the crew leaders can manipulate, said Rob Williams, director of the Migrant Farmworker Justice Project of Florida Legal Services in Tallahassee. For some it's alcohol or drugs. Others have mental problems. Others have too many convictions and too little education to find other work. "We try to warn people," said Paul Stasi, social services director for the local Salvation Army. "But they think they have a job, they hop in the van and take off." Even though the local seasons are almost over, the need for workers is always there. Evans's vans will make the drive 500 miles north. Records show he has another camp in Benson, N.C. -- a town 30 miles south of Raleigh. Other contractors work in Delaware, anywhere there's vegetable farms on the East Coast, said Butler, one of the attorneys. "They like to get people from far away," Butler said, "then, they're less likely to have anywhere to go." Those who know the business say drivers will keep trolling Jacksonville, making the same promises. Those who've been there, like Anderson, can only hope others won't take the same bait he did, won't buy a one-way, debt-ridden ticket to the "slave camp." Journey from farm's clutches back to family By MARK WOODS, The Times-Union His eyes were glassy. The clothes hanging on his thin body were filthy. He smelled. His face was weathered and gaunt, making it hard for Megan Wall, an attorney for Jacksonville Area Legal Aid, to guess that he was 45 years old. And as she was finding out, he couldn't tell her that or much else. She asked where he was born, when he was born, if his birthday fell when it was warm or cold. He said nothing. All she knew about him was on the form that had been filled out that morning, most likely by the mysterious friend who brought him to the office. No address. No phone number. Nothing but the one thing he could tell her. His name. "Wendell Green." She noticed he was wearing a wristband from Shands Jacksonville. She called the hospital. Someone looked up the number on the band and found no information about him, other than that he had ended up at Shands after eating something out of a Dumpster and becoming violently ill. Finally, after getting nowhere -- not even figuring out why Green was there -- she asked the friend who had brought him there that morning, in December 2002, to come in and have a seat. "I take it you want me to help get him food stamps and SSI [Supplemental Security Income]," she said. "We do that all the time." The friend shook his head. Green had food stamps. He had Medicaid. He had Social Security checks. But the money was going to a farm crew chief in Hastings -- a man named Ronald Jones who, according to Social Security documents obtained later by the Times-Union, received 43 monthly checks worth a total of more than $22,000. He told her about things that were happening on some migrant farms in North Florida -- the kind of things that led to national news and "modern-day slavery" headlines last weekend after federal agents raided a different labor camp in East Palatka. He told her that while it was common for the camps to send vans to homeless shelters in Jacksonville to pick up laborers, what one of them had done with Green was different. They had driven him awayfrom the farms and dropped him off in Jacksonville, where he was living on the street -- perhaps even dying on the street -- not getting any of his disability checks. The friend already had taken Green to the Social Security office. But without an ID or Social Security number for Green, they had been told nothing could be done, to get out of line. "Next," the official had said. "Don't just say next!" the friend had said. "You have to help him. He's starving." Someone in line had told them to go to Legal Aid. So there they were. One man who only could tell her his name. The other who would tell her everything but his name. "He said, 'I'll be killed,'" she said. "He was shaking. He kept saying, 'I want you to promise you'll never describe me to anybody. ... People disappear.'" Lost from Loris Wendell Green did disappear. At least as far as his family was concerned, he did. He grew up in Loris, S.C., a small town about 35 miles from Myrtle Beach. He was the youngest of five children. The entire family lived and worked on the farm of G.L. Hill. They say that it was a good life and that Hill was a good man. His life -- all of their lives -- changed on Nov. 19, 1989. That's when Thelma Hardee Green, their mother and the one who held the family together, died. After her death, Wendell followed one of his brothers, Charles, down to Florida. A man loading up a bus full of farm laborers told him he could make $50 a day, and that they had a place for him to stay. He didn't say that Green probably would see very little of that money. Or that he would be living in a rotting shack. Or that by the end of a typical week, the farm contractor would say he was in debt, that he owed money for food, beer, whiskey, cigarettes, women and 100 percent interest. Not knowing any of that, it seemed like a natural move. Farm work was what his family did. He was going to stay in Florida for a few months, then return to South Carolina. More than a decade later, he still hadn't come back. He started out on the Gulf Coast of Florida, picking oranges near Bradenton. At least that's where his monthly SSI checks were going. The year his mother died, Green began receiving SSI, a benefit designed, according to the Social Security Web site, "for people with little or no income and resources." From August 1993 to March 1996, more than $2,000 went to a woman in Bradenton named Mary Jennings. In April 1996, the checks started going to Beatrice Treet, a farm labor contractor in St. Johns County. And then, in October 1999, Green's checks started going to a P.O. Box in Hastings registered to Ronald Jones. Jones, a 6-foot-4, 240-pound farm crew chief nicknamed "Too Tall," worked for Bulls-Hit Ranch and Farm in Hastings. Last year the state revoked his license, citing violations involving worker wage payments and taxes. He and Thomas Lee, the owner of Bulls-Hit, also faced a lawsuit filed on behalf of 12 laborers by Lisa Butler, a lawyer for Florida Rural Legal Services. When asked last week by the Times-Union if he remembered a worker named Wendell Green, Jones said: "Wendell Green never worked for me. Wendell Green never has been able to work. He was on disability. ... I was over his checks for a while, just paying his rent and stuff." According to Social Security records released to the Times-Union with Green's consent, Jones received Green's monthly checks, ranging from $450 to $552 and for a total of $22,676.18, for nearly four years. During the end of that period, according to a trail of police reports, Green was living in Jacksonville, on the street and in homeless centers and jail cells. One of those checks was cut on the same day that Green and his anonymous friend showed up at the Legal Aid office in Jacksonville. And after Wall, the Legal Aid attorney, called Jones' number that day and talked to his wife, Sylvia, one check for $545 was forwarded to Jacksonville. "Please let us know where he is," the attached note said. "Tell him we said hello." Odds are that Green was at the Greyhound station. In and out of jail During an eight-month period, from December 2002 to August 2003, he was arrested 13 times. Usually at the Greyhound station. Usually for trespassing, disorderly conduct or public intoxication. He even spent Christmas in jail. The report, after an arrest at the Greyhound station, said he didn't know his Social Security number, that his speech was difficult to understand and that he listed his occupation as "farmer." He was sentenced to five days in jail. He got out, returned to the station and was arrested again. He was arrested there on Jan. 4, Feb. 11, March 7, March 9 and April 5. He kept going to the Duval County jail. His checks kept going to Jones. In May 2003, the checks stopped going anywhere, but Green's pattern continued with some slight changes -- an arrest at a Food Lion, at the JTA bus hub, at a Walgreens -- until Aug. 5. That arrest, back at the Greyhound station, led to an appearance in the courtroom of Judge James Ruth. Green was assigned to public defender Erin McCarty George. He didn't know it, but it was his lucky day. For some reason, the public defender, then 31 and working part-time after the birth of her first child, wanted to know more about Mr. Green. When she tells the story, that's what she calls him. "Mr. Green." Mr. Green wouldn't tell her much of anything, she said. So perhaps that challenge, that intrigue, was part of the initial reason why she went beyond the call of duty, trying to figure out his story and how he got stuck in this legal spin cycle. She asked the judge to keep Green in jail for a day, to prevent him from going right back out on the streets and to give her time to research his background. The judge agreed. And her worries about keeping him in jail, which goes against what a public defender typically does for a client, were allayed when he found bright spots in solitary confinement. He had his own room. They brought him food on a tray. She asked Green the same questions that others had been asking him. And she got the same answers. Or lack of them. Basically all she could find out was that he was from Loris, S.C. So she went online, got a list of all the Greens in Loris and started dialing. Eventually, she reached a man whose wife was a cousin of Earline Green Keel. "I had been praying and asking the Lord to give me a sign whether he was dead or alive," Keel said, breaking into tears when recalling what happened next. "I got the call from Miss Erin. What that woman did, my soul gets overwhelmed when I think about it." The public defender began working on getting her client back to South Carolina. He couldn't travel on the train, because he didn't have identification. So there basically was one place to go, a place where he had a trespass warrant. The bus station. She talked to Greyhound managers. They said as long as she was with him, he could come to the station. So on Sept. 2, 2003, Ruth released Green to her. She picked him up at 1:30 a.m., gave him some clothes and took him to the bus station for a 3:30 a.m. departure. She gave him a card to carry with him. It listed important information. Where he was going, his sister's name and number, her name and number. As he ate a cheeseburger, fries and a Coke, she coached him for the trip, reminding him to sit near the driver and wait until they got to the fifth stop of the route. "Where are you going?" she asked. "South Carolina," he said. "Where in South Carolina?" she asked. "Conway," he said. Eventually, he began to talk. He told her some stories about happy times. Then, before getting on the bus, he gave her a hug. "It was such a sweet moment," she said. Finally with family His sister was waiting at the bus station in Conway. He got off the bus and walked right past her. He was staggering, she says, not because he was drunk but because something was wrong with his balance. She grabbed his arm. "Who are you?" he said. "You don't know?" she said. "I'm Earline." He grabbed her and gave her a hug. After a stop at the Social Security office -- the public defender in Florida had faxed paperwork there to make sure his checks would follow him to South Carolina -- they headed back to Little River, S.C., and her two-bedroom apartment, a place that to him seemed like a mansion. "He was so ugly, nasty, dirty," she said. "He was like a man who came out of the woods." She took him to get a haircut, then bathed him and doused him with cologne. At one point, as they watched TV, he said: "Are we going to stay in this movie theater all night?" She told him that this wasn't a theater, this was where she lived and that was her big-screen TV. She showed him where he would sleep, in a bed with white sheets and a white bedspread. "He said, 'You don't live in these white peoples' house,'" she said. "He's been out of commission so long he thinks only white people got nice houses and snow-white bed sheets." This was October 2003. Green no longer was at her house. He had gone to live with his other sister, Linda Reaves, and her husband, Johnnie. When a reporter visited them in Loris, the Reaveses explained that he wasn't home, that he was in jail. It was a similar story. Only in this case, when he got out of jail the next day, he had a group of family members waiting for him. "We're going back to the house," Johnnie said, putting his arm around him. Once back at their small apartment, friends gathered. Several of them recalled also going to Florida to work on migrant farms. One recalled going to urinate in the woods and being followed by the crew chief, "a big man with a gun and a Cadillac." Another remembered hitching a ride back to South Carolina with a trucker. "I knew I had to get out," Linwood James said. "It ain't just bad. It's horrible." James said he has a good job. He's a brick mason. He has people working for him. He pointed to other side of the room, to Green, a friend dating back to when they were teenagers, and said: "Who's to say Wendell couldn't have done the same thing if he got back here?" As his friends and family talked, Green sat quietly. When asked questions about what happened during the last decade, he tried to answer. But he often mixed up dates and places and people. He seemed confused -- until he was shown a St. Johns County Sheriff's Office photo of a man arrested on charges of domestic battery in 2000. Ronald Jones. "That's the one," he said. "He had the red and brown truck. He'd go and pick up my check, go to the store, buy some gas and put the rest of the money in his pocket. Him and his old lady. Yeah, that's the one right there who was messing with my checks. I couldn't never get it. That's the man right there. Too Tall." Green doesn't remember whenhe ended up in Jacksonville. He did, however, remember how he got there. There was this van. A woman was driving. She dropped him off near the bus station. "They were supposed to come back and pick me up," he said. "They didn't never show back up." He ended up on the streets, eating out of Dumpsters, stuck in a cycle until three people -- his mysterious friend, the Legal Aid lawyer and the public defender -- helped pull him out of it. After his return, the two sisters debated who should take care of him -- and who should receive his checks on his behalf. He ended up with Linda. Then he ended up in the hospital. "He got drunk and went out in the street and a car hit him," his oldest sister, Earline, said last week. "He had to stay in a hospital in Charleston for a long time. He's in a nursing home in Sumter, I believe." She isn't sure. She has lost contact with him. Again. People disappear in North Florida. And sometimes, even when they reappear in South Carolina, it isn't a storybook ending. "They're using them up and spitting them out," said Wall, the Legal Aid attorney. "And then we all pay. You would think people would care. I would think average Joe Taxpayer would say, 'Even if I'm against SSI, if I'm going to pay it, I want it to go to the disabled person.'" In Hastings, which bills itself as the "Potato Capital," another season wrapped up last week. The migrant laborers piled on buses and headed north to the Carolinas. During the summer, they will pick tobacco in places not far from Wendell Green's hometown. Then, in the fall, the buses will return to Florida. Another crop of potatoes, another crop of workers
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