Gino Perente

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Eugenio Perente-Ramos (Gino Perente) (20 November 1934-18 March 1995) Perente was the founder of the National Labor Federation, a collection of organizations described by critics as "a left-wing political cult." Some reporters, cult-watchers, and the FBI inferred that he was born Gerald William Doeden. Perente and his organization have not denied this claim.

Gerald Doeden was born in Crookston, Minnesota and grew up in Idaho and Yuba City/Marysville, California. He was an amateur actor, performing in plays at Yuba College.

Doeden married Ruth Mikkelsen in 1960, and had a daughter. Weidner reports that he had an illegitimate child and divorced Mikkelsen in 1962. He spent some time in jail for non-payment of child support, and some observers have suggested that he may have left California to avoid child support payments.

Doeden was injured in a car accident and walked with a limp for the rest of his life. He was known in Marysville as a small-scale con artist. (Kifner, 1996)

After working in Yuba City as a disc jockey for the radio station KAGR for about five years, Doeden began working at the Little Red Bookstore in San Francisco.

A number of individuals associated with the store reportedly formed a short-lived group called Liberation Army Revolutionary Group Organizations. The group declared war on the state of California in March of 1970. While this quickly attracted the attention of the authorities, the group was described as quixotic by the media and dismissed by law enforcement.

In 1971, Doeden left California and resurfaced as Eugenio "Gino" Perente-Ramos in New York City. There he worked for two months in the office of the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee, the predecessor of United Farm Workers of America (UFW). Perente had already developed a devoted core of followers, who occupied the UFW offices with Perente. Perente was fired and his followers expelled from the offices when the UFW sent Jose Gomez to head the office. About 20 years later, he was remembered by Dolores Huerta as a "colorful biker type who played a small role in the boycott for about nine months or a year. . . He created a lot of problems for the union, attacking us in the press. Then he went off and formed his own group." After leaving UFW, Perente founded the Eastern Farm Workers Association (EFWA) in Suffolk County, New York, an agricultural region on Long Island.

Within a few years, Perente's followers were reported to have started organizations patterned on EFWA in California and elsewhere on the east coast, and led to the formation of an umbrella group called the National Labor Federation (NATLFED).

By the late 1970s, Perente's activities were increasingly limited to giving lectures to volunteers interpreting the writings of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin, and directing the daily activities of his followers. Perente also co-authored a number of tracts, like The Essential Organizer, a training manual of the EFWA, and "the Genesis" which includes fictitious claims that the party was part of a secret International including the Communist Party of Cuba, the Sandinistas and revolutionaries in Chile and El Salvador, and that members of the Weather Underground were among its founders.[1]

Individuals associated with Perente purchased 1107-1115 Carrol St, an apartment building in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, and he lived there, surrounded by volunteers for his organizations, for the rest of his life. Some ex-full-time volunteers have alleged that Perente was a drug addict, sexually harassed female volunteers, and regularly physically abused some volunteer organizers during this period(http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2004/11/304593.shtml).

Perente died March 18, 1995 in this apartment, of congestive heart failure. He was buried by the organization he founded. The New York Times printed an obituary of him, and then a correction. The initial obituary relied primarily on information from two close associates, Daniel Fiske and Christopher Day. The Times was then contacted by his former wife, former colleagues, and long-time critics of Perente, including Chip Berlet, and after fact-checking the initial obituary, the Times issued a corrected obituary the next day.[2]

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