Farms Workers' Base Raided In Brooklyn

A police raid on the headquarters of the Eastern Farm Workers Association, an organization founded by Eugenio Perente-Ramos, or Gerald Doeden as he was really called, was in The New York Times, center front page yesterday, with more space allotted to it than a mid-air plane crash in India that killed 351 people.

Also known as the Provisional Communist Party or the National Labor Federation, the group, or cult as it has been called by police, had survived since its leader's death in March of last year. Experts believe it has several hundred members.

On Tuesday, a complaint about a crying child led police to the movement's headquarters in Brooklyn's Crown Heights, where they discovered a large cache of weapons and five canisters of black powder.

No Illegal Acts

Thirty people were taken into custody, six of them charged with possessing illegal weatpons, and one, who was said to be beating a child with a belt, charged with assault and endangering the welfare of a child.

Otherwise, Brooklyn police said, they did not know of any illegal acts committed by the group; in fact, they had not known it existed.

The group is known for its power to ensnare gullible young inductees, who in the past have been given endless make-work clerical jobs they were told were vital in the battle for the poor and oppressed.

Based in Riverhead on the East End, the Eastern Farm Workers first appeared in The Star's pages in 1986, when prominent East End artists, writers, and public figures were persuaded to hold an art auction to raise money for what was billed as a grass-roots, self-help organization reaching out to poor black and Latino migrant workers.

Auction Cancelled

Interested in finding out more about the organization, a Star reporter, Uri Berliner, now a writer for The San Diego Union-Tribune, ran into a baffling wall of obfuscation and double talk.

He wrote an article expressing doubt that the organization did anything at all for farm workers, and it was met with an outraged barrage of letters, which also appeared in The Star. A further article followed, just two days before the auction, exposing the group's connection with Lyndon LaRouche and another of Mr. Perente-Ramos's projects, the Liberation Army Revolution Group. The auction was canceled.

After such exposure, which included later articles as well, the group might have been expected to avoid its East End haunts. But members of the organization continued over the years to solicit contributions in East Hampton and other South Fork communities, outside the A&P, for example, allegedly to help workers with tuberculosis.

Whether the confiscation of weapons by the police this week will mean the cult's demise remains to be seen.