Feed My Brother the Wizard of Dominica
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June 7, 1981
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The plot was so bizarre and the conspirators so ill-assorted that the newspaper here called it a ''comic-book escapade.'' In New Orleans, where even the Federal judge hearing the case isn't sure how to pronounce ''Dominica,'' they call the affair the ''Bayou of Pigs.''
Rightist white mercenaries drawn from the Ku Klux Klan in the United States and Canada planned to join black terrorists and disgruntled soldiers in taking over the small, poor Caribbean island of Dominica and setting up what investigators have described as a drug, gambling and offshore banking empire under a left-of-center prime minister.
The invaders had automatic weapons, a Nazi flag, a rubber raft and bad luck: A Dominica army officer inadvertently gave away the plot in a note he tried to smuggle out of jail, and a disabled Vietnam veteran, the only hero of this story, helped Federal agents trap the invaders before they left Louisiana.
On Dominica, the 99-member army has been dissolved, the police have taken 11 persons into custody, including Patrick R. John, the former prime minister, and the authorities are still hunting terrorists in the bush. In Louisiana, seven persons have pleaded guilty to planning the invasion, three others face trial June 15, and a Federal jury is expected afterward to indict the money men behind the scheme.
Meanwhile, the much-publicized invasion attempt has introduced a new and unsettling element into life in Dominica, whose voters last July overwhelmingly elected a conservative, pro-Western government. Dominicans, who are mostly blacks, now seem wary and sometimes genuinely afraid of American and Canadian whites. Bananas and Marijuana
Dominica (pronounced DOM-in-EE-ka) is a 300-square-mile island lying between the French islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique, 400 miles southeast of San Juan, P.R. The English-speaking nation became independent from Britain in November 1978.
Most of the people here grow bananas, although the isolated mountain slopes are also ideal for marijuana, a crop whose trafficking the Government estimates at $10 million a year, or roughly half the country's annual budget.
''It's much easier to grow $300 worth of marijuana than $300 worth of bananas,'' said Prime Minister Mary Eugenia Charles, who has been trying to fight the drug smugglers. Dominica has no airplanes and one very slow police boat.
Looking for alternatives to bananas, Mr. John had begun, after independence, to seek industrial development, but his efforts brought down his Government in a month.
First, it was disclosed that he intended to take land from small farmers to set up a free port run by Americans that would be a virtual state within a state. Then the British Broadcasting Corporation disclosed that Mr. John's representatives were trying to purchase oil on behalf of South Africa. An Ouster and a Plot
The political crisis, made worse when members of the army fired into a crowd of outraged citizens, killing one, ended in June 1979 with the ouster of Mr. John.
The plan to bring Mr. John back to power by force apparently began that summer, although it was not until Sept. 20, 1980, according to an indictment handed up in Louisiana, that Mr. John signed a contract with Michael E. Perdue, 32 years old, a truck driver living in Houston, Tex., who was to execute the plan.
According to the indictment, Mr. Perdue agreed to set Mr. John up as prime minister again in exchange for $150,000, a high-level government position and the right to train and oversee an expanded army.
In addition, Mr. Perdue would be the agent for Nortic Enterprises, a concern that would construct an airport, direct tourism and gambling, and control agriculture and forestry. ''Mike had a lot of big plans over the years,'' Mr. Perdue's brother, William, said recently, ''and we never took him seriously. This is the first time he actually tried to carry one of them through.''
According to his brother, Michael Perdue had been involved with the Ku Klux Klan as a high school student and had been to Dominica ''several times.''
''He said there were a group of politicians and bankers who were backing him - Americans they were,'' William Perdue said. ''Mike traveled all over the United States and Canada. We never did find out who was backing him.'' Introduced to the Dreads
Oliver N. Phillip, the Dominica police commissioner, said that one of those whom Michael Perdue had met in Dominica was Mr. John, who ''took him to the hills where he was introduced to Dreads.''
''Dreads'' are what Dominicans call members of the Rastafarian cult who wear their hair in long locks, live in the bush and grow and smuggle marijuana. Unlike members of this cult elsewhere, who are generally pacific, the Dreads in Dominica have been engaged since 1974 in murders, kidnappings, robberies and shootouts with the police, after which they melt away into the dense forests where they live.
The Dominican authorities, who had known that top-ranking army officers were regular smokers of marijuana, grew more alarmed last winter when they realized that soldiers were training the Dreads and had met with leaders of both opposition political parties.
In December, when Prime Minister Charles asked for legislation that would allow members of the army to be court-martialed, 36 soldiers in uniform stormed up the stairs to her office to protest. She looked the door, called the police and had all 36 suspended from service.
Then in January, two Dreads, August Lloyd, 16, and Robert Eugene, 23, were sentenced to hang for the 1980 murder of a 65-year-old farmer they hacked to death with cutlasses after telling him, according to a witness, that God had sent them ''to put him right.''
At about the same time, residents of Dominica's isolated mountain villages began to complain that the Dreads were stealing their crops and threatening to kidnap their daughters. A police patrol sent out to investigate the complaints came under such heavy fire that it was forced to retreat. Two Killed in Police Raid
On Feb. 12, two Dreads were shot to death by the police when the police raided a Dread camp in search of weapons. Within hours, the Dreads retaliated by kidnapping Ted Honychurch, 57, his wife and two servants from their farm near the village of Giraudel and burning their home to the ground. Mr. Honychurch's son, Lennox, is the Government's press secretary.
Mrs. Honychurch and the servants were let go with a note demanding the release of Mr. Lloyd and Mr. Eugene. The Government refused, and Mr. Honychurch, a kindly farmer who had befriended the Dreads, was not heard from again.
(This week, Eric Joseph, a Dread, confessed that he shot Mr. Honychurch in the head the day after the kidnapping on orders from Leroy Etienne, a gang leader. Afterward, Mr. Joseph said, the body was burned.)
As the Dominica police combed the forests for Mr. Honychurch, they found evidence of a plot to disrupt the island's main annual social event, Carnival, in early March. Capt. Malcolm Reid, second in command of the army, and Sgt. Ronnie Roberts were ordered detained in connection with the plot.
A few days later in Louisiana, on Feb. 23, Michael Perdue approached Michael S. Howell, a disabled Vietnam War veteran who operates a 52-foot charter boat from New Orleans, the Manana, and asked him to take a group of mercenaries to invade Dominica. 'Said He Was With the C.I.A.'
''This guy said he was with the C.I.A.,'' Mr. Howell said in an interview. ''He sounded hokey. I didn't think we were doing covert overthrows anymore.''
Mr. Howell said he called the State Department and a friend of his at the Treasury Department's Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Mr. Howell then managed to intrdouce John L. Osburg, a bureau agent posing as a crew member of the boat, to Mr. Perdue. In the weeks that followed, Mr. Osburg, who tape-recorded everything, picked up $17,200 in payments from Mr. Perdue toward the charter.
Meanwhile in Dominica, which has neither a courthouse nor a prison, Captain Reid, one of the officers detained after the Carnival plot became known, had tried to hasten the invasion from his cell at police headquarters by asking a policeman to take a note to Maj. Fred Newton, the commander of the army.
The note, which the police later allowed to be published in the local newspaper, urged Major Newton to telephone Mr. Perdue, to proceed with the invasion and to strike the police station first. ''Don't PANIC we must make it!!'' the note concluded.
Major Newton and Mr. John were locked up, along with three soldiers and two civilians, including the former manager of the Dominica broadcasting service, Dennis Joseph.
''We just couldn't let them go ahead,'' Prime Minister Charles explained. ''It never dawned on me that the people abroad would continue to plan.'' A Plan to Disembark
But in New Orleans, preparations did continue. On April 26, Mr. Perdue and Wolfgang W. Droege, a Ku Klux Klan leader from Toronto, told the undercover agent that the entire group planned to disembark the following day, according to the indictment.
On the night of April 27, the 10 mercenaries, now accompanied by three undercover agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, met at Fort Pike State Park in New Orleans, put their weapons in a truck and climbed into a closed van for a ride to a nearby marina to meet the Manana.
When they arrived, police weapons teams from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, agents from the firearms bureau and the Customs Service, and the police were waiting to take them to jail.
The officers confiscated eight Bushmaster automatic rifles, 10 shotguns, five rifles, 10 handguns, 10 pounds of dynamite and 5,246 rounds of ammunition.
''A lot of people would have died,'' Miss Charles said. ''I'm not saying they could have held our country for two days. Other countries would have come to our defense.''
Among the equipment for the invasion, called Operation Red Dog, was a large red and black Nazi flag. Many of those arrested have had ties with the Ku Klux Klan or neo-Nazi organizations, although the Federal authorities do not believe these groups sponsored the effort.
''It was strictly economic,'' said Bob Guthrie, the Customs agent working on the case. ''They had visions of grandeur and beaucoup money to be made.'' According to the indictment, the initial payment was to be $3,000 apiece. Violated the Neutrality Act
Seven persons, including Mr. Perdue and Mr. Droege, have pleaded guilty to violating the Neutrality Act, which forbids assaults on nations with which the United States is not at war.
Others who have pleaded guilty and agreed to testify for the Government include George T. Malvaney, 21, who left the Navy after organizing a Klan rally in Virginia Beach in 1979 and now lives in Jackson, Miss.; Robert Prichard, 30, of Raleigh, N.C., a member of the National Socialist White People's Party of America; William B. Waldrop Jr., 33, of Braxton, Miss.; Larry L. Jacklin, 22, of Listowel, Ontario, and Christopher B. Anderson, 41, a bus driver from Oklahoma City who once was the police chief of Kiowa, Kan.
The three still facing trial are Michael S. Norris, 21, a security guard from Tuscaloosa, Ala., who said in an interview that he left the Klan about 18 months ago to join the National Alliance, a white supremacist group; Stephen Don Black, a former Grand Wizard of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan from Birmingham, Ala.; and Joe D. Hawkins, 37, a former Klan member from Jackson, Miss.
Two days after the arrests in New Orleans, a Toronto woman, Mary Anne McGuire, was arrested in Dominica after the receptionist in her hotel became alarmed by a telephone message that said, ''Alexander is dead,'' meaning, Miss McGuire explained later, that the invasion had failed and she should return home.
Miss McGuire has admitted her role as a gatherer of intelligence for the operation and is facing three criminal conspiracy charges in Dominica. Another Canadian, Harold Woods, arrested in Dominica on charges of trying to rescue Miss McGuire, is also awaiting trial.
No charges have been filed against the Dominicans who are being detained, although their cases have been reviewed by a tribunal. The authorities said they were waiting to see what additional evidence might evolve from the investigation in New Orleans.
In May three more Dreads were shot dead by the police, but the two leaders of the cult, Mr. Etienne and Mal Esprit, are still being sought. And in Giraudel, Mr. Honychurch's neighbors live in terror.
''They kill the village,'' said one of them, Eugenia Alfred, as she paused from her gardening while curtains of rain swept along the mountain. At night, she said, ''if the dog bark, I get up and listen, listen, listen.''
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1981/06/07/us/no-headline-147552.html
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