DATE LINES
Conniff, Ruth & Ocasio, Linda & Blitt, Connie & Bernstein, Dennis
DATE LINES Of Arms, Drugs, Contras, and the CIA WICHITA, KANSAS The smuggler had planned to take off from Colombia in the middle of the afternoon, so it would be sunset by the time he dropped the...
...And it will create new job descriptions using questionnaires completed by workers...
...Customs Service from Walter Conlogue of Newton, Kansas...
...A Federal grant bought the brick and mortar to build a saw and shingle mill, but Sister Lucy scorns Federal aid for most of her projects...
...deserving of the fullest form of inquiry to ascertain if it is true...
...Recently, HOME workers rebuilt a twenty-three-room house that will become a shelter for adults...
...And it just struck me, my goodness," Judge Kelly told The Progressive, "if he's made those statements publicly and no one has even interviewed him from the Justice Department, they surely should...
...All the old men in town knew where it was...
...Other provisions of the contract call for new job training programs for workers trapped in low-grade, dead-end jobs, as well as training programs for members of the community surrounding Yale in New Haven—which is the seventh poorest city of its size in the United States...
...Work opportunities here are limited to the paper mills, blueberry picking, motels, and jobs serving the tourist trade," she notes...
...This was the first time they negotiated jointly...
...Lack of available land is a big part of the problem...
...Ruth Conniff (Ruth Conniff is an undergraduate at Yale University...
...As the deadline for a settlement neared, students carried off 85 per cent of the dishes and silverware from dining halls...
...The Attorney General must take the lead in finding out what has happened...
...Although the shelter is intended to be transitional housing, no one will be forced to leave...
...We're building two-family single-parent homes, to inspire single parents to help each other," says Sister Lucy...
...It is a spiritual community open to everyone," says Sister Lucy...
...Sister Lucy negotiated with the prison administrators to release some of the women to HOME, where they could serve out the balance of their sentences united with their children...
...HOME is not a Ford grantee...
...Workers will get an across-the-board wage increase of 6 per cent per year and improved health and safety policies...
...I left the order in 1975 to become more activist," she says...
...The intense need for housing has sparked new projects...
...For the first time in twenty years, workers in the university's two unions did not walk out when their contracts expired...
...They have also helped build housing for other local residents and many volunteer on various projects initiated by HOME...
...Sister Lucy's Down East Haven ORLAND, MAINE Lucy Poulin recites the statistics by heart: "Thirty-five per cent of the population are in poverty, 25 per cent are illiterate, and 80 per cent of the land lies fallow...
...We discovered three people living in a car," says Sister Lucy...
...There were other reasons to reject Federal aid, as noted in a recent issue of HOME'S journal, This Time...
...Both administration and union officials say the community's resistance to a strike was instrumental in bringing about the agreement...
...The only thing I say to you, sir, as a judge who has such testimony brought before this court, is first of all I find it incredulous [sic], but...
...The clerical and technical workers will win because they are right," Jackson proclaimed...
...She calls the successful cooperation of the two locals an important lesson for unions struggling separately at other universities...
...Union Victory Prevents Strike at Yale NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT When the dining halls at Yale University opened for breakfast as usual on a Tuesday morning in late January, it was a major event in Yale history...
...He has even, he claims, landed a plane filled with 25,000 pounds of marijuana at Homestead Air Force Base, just south of Miami...
...Justice Department spokesman Pat Korten downplays the importance of Toliver's assertions...
...The White House has acknowledged receipt, and the judge has also heard from the special prosecutor and from Representative William Hughes, a member of the House Judiciary Committee, both expressing interest in looking further into the matter...
...Toliver says he could find his own return load or be supplied by a network run by Oliver North, with a guaranteed safe landing...
...In 1970, she started Home-workers Organized for More Employment, or HOME, a cooperative for selling home-based work, usually handcrafts such as quilts, but also any other items that residents could make to supplement their incomes...
...Since classes began last fall, members of the university community had been preparing for what would have been Yale's sixth consecutive strike...
...I learned a lesson and looked to volunteers and workers who have a commitment...
...She is speaking of Hancock County, in the part of Maine known as "Down East," and it is not the Maine of vacation homes and country squires...
...HOME helps undocumented workers get their papers under the new immigration law—and also helps them get into nearby Canada...
...Hancock County has also seen a small but growing number of refugees from Central America...
...The cooperative now has 280 members and a payroll of $220,000, with individual receipts ranging from $5 to $4,700 for products including Christmas wreaths, wooden magazine racks, and rugs...
...I've listened to him a lot, on a number of occasions, and I do not think he had any motivation to make it up and lie...
...Toliver has told his story on CBS television's West 57th Street, but Kelly was surprised to learn from the U.S...
...attorney's office in Kansas that there is no evidence Toliver has ever been interviewed by the Justice Department...
...In examining the pattern of Toliver's relationship with the U.S...
...So far, there has been no reply from the FBI or CIA...
...After such harrowing experiences, it's easy to see why, three years later in 1986, Toliver was delighted to be let in on a drug route that was allegedly protected by the U.S...
...This is the kind of response Toliver himself anticipated...
...Quite the opposite...
...The smuggler says he was paid for secretly ferrying weapons for the contras from Florida to Honduras, and then was allowed to return to the States with a planeload of drugs...
...Not only was dependency being promoted, but the community was divided into haves and have-nots...
...Only two women at a time are released to their custody, but several have stayed on as staff members...
...The new contract will last four years rather than three, so that students will not be subjected to the threat of a strike more than once in their four-year stint at Yale...
...Although Korten would not say whether there is an ongoing investigation of Toliver's claims, he says, "So far as our investigators are concerned, his credibility as a witness is somewhat in doubt, [he is] not the most reliable witness the department has come across...
...The average minority worker was underpaid by about $710...
...A student-labor support group circulated a petition calling for negotiations in good faith and organized such activities as a march and rally outside the president's office while a meeting of the Yale Corporation was in progress...
...The land trust now owns 220 acres of land and has built ten houses with volunteer labor, at a cost of $25,000 for a three-bedroom house with a greenhouse, woodshed, and garage...
...For nearly twenty years here, Lucy Poulin has lived and worked among the poor...
...But most people still call her Sister Lucy, and in 1976 she founded the St...
...Kelly vowed to send Toliver's allegations to the heads of all relevant Government agencies, and he directed Federal marshals to deliver Toliver's Kansas deposition and the transcript of the immunity hearing directly into the hands of President Reagan...
...Kelly first heard the allegations in his Wichita courtroom when Toliver was recently called to give a deposition in a civil suit involving the airplane he crash-landed near the Cayman Islands in 1983...
...Yale President Benno Schmidt called the settlement "the beginning of a new era of relative harmony and stability in our labor relations...
...Government, Conlogue's attorney asked the smuggler to describe how the drug trade works and to tell of his later flights involving the contra re-supply network...
...The university agreed to reduce the number of pay grades for each union, in accord with their initial demands...
...According to a union survey, the average female clerical or technical worker earned about $ 1,280 less than the average man in an equivalent job...
...It used to be a 'red-light house,' " says Sister Lucy...
...What the women told her about was their fear of losing their children during their prison terms...
...It wasn't until he was battling a storm south of Jamaica that it became apparent the fuel tank had been damaged and the plane was almost out of gas...
...In a recent special hearing in which Toliver was given immunity from criminal prosecution for his testimony, a proceeding rarely needed in a civil case, Judge Kelly expressed his astonishment at the drugs-for-arms-to-the-contras scheme...
...Such tales of Government-sanctioned drug running, with shares of the profits going to covert supply of the contras, shocked Federal Judge Patrick Kelly...
...Finally, ten days after expiration of the old contract, in a thirty-five-hour, round-the-clock bargaining session, the university administration and Locals 34 and 35 of the hotel and restaurant workers' union reached an agreement...
...Faculty members and New Haven officials and church leaders sent open letters to President Schmidt, demanding that he take decisive action to avoid a strike...
...But when the men loading the plane spotted the dust trails of vehicles closing in on their clandestine location, he decided on an early departure...
...Linda Ocasio (Linda Ocasio is a staff writer for the Ford Foundation...
...They work on egg farms and are provided with housing by the employers, but they're dumped if there's any trouble with immigration authorities...
...By restoring the century-old house, HOME has also saved a town landmark...
...Top priority for the leaders of Local 34 (pink-collar clerical and technical workers) and Local 35 (predominantly male blue-collar service and maintenance workers) in these negotiations was an overhaul of the university's job classification system, which they say amounted to economic discrimination...
...Francis Community, a collective that provides a haven for those seeking to live the Gospel or who have no other place to go...
...Apartments on the ground floor are reserved for the elderly and the handicapped...
...In 1978, Sister Lucy started the Covenant Community Land Trust, a sister organization to HOME...
...Each family has access to ten acres of land for gardens, animals, and fuel...
...Got both of the engines going and got the cows off the runway," recalls Michael Tol-iver...
...She first became acquainted with the problems of the county when she was a Carmelite nun...
...I looked at how organizations failed when Federal money dried up," she says...
...The Emmaus Movement is an international group that assists the poor through projects that build self-reliance and empowerment, values that HOME shares...
...They've helped establish a literacy center, a project to deliver free wood to the needy, and a shelter for battered women...
...Homelessness in this area is often caused by the deterioration of houses, which literally crumble around the inhabitants, who are either too poor or too old to maintain them...
...Administrators said the unions' charges were "offensive and unfounded," but they accepted the findings of a joint union/university committee reporting discrepancies in the classification of employees with similar jobs...
...Toliver heard bullets penetrate the plane and hoped they had passed through the fuselage and imbedded themselves...
...The tension between her desire to do more and the demands of the Carmelites, a cloistered order, led her to make a choice...
...Unlike past administrations, says university secretary Sheila Wellington, "this administration recognizes the unions' right to exist and that they are part of life at Yale...
...On the takeoff, all I could see was people coming up with trucks shooting machine guns, hand-held machine guns, at the people in the other trucks and the airplane...
...As the Wichita Eagle-Beacon has reported, he found the allegations compelling enough to call them to the attention of President Ronald Reagan, as well as the CIA, the FBI, special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh, and Congress...
...Research was contributed by Peter Shinkle...
...Sister Lucy tells how one project got started: "I was a guest at a prison program, and all the women wanted to talk-women prisoners don't get the attention that male prisoners do...
...Some local residents donated woodlots, the Sisters of Mercy of New Hampshire provided low-interest mortgage money, and the Emmaus Movement donated $10,000 for the first house...
...The plane had been leased by the U.S...
...Federal programs divided the community by creating a class of clients dependent on a privileged group of service providers...
...Speaking in behalf of the unions, he called the system "structured economic violence...
...Central Intelligence Agency...
...I can't say the man's a liar," he says...
...Residents range in age from two to eighty-three and live in small houses that many of them helped to build...
...Sister Lucy recites familiar statistics: "Eighty-eight per cent of the land is owned by seven paper companies, and 6 per cent of the land is owned by people who 'live away.' As in other small towns and big cities, the working poor have been priced out of the real-estate market...
...A three-room house rents for $350 a month, which may not seem like a lot, but $400 a month is usually the total family income in the county," she points out...
...Connie Blitt and Dennis Bernstein (Connie Blitt and Dennis Bernstein are producers of "Contragate," a daily investigative report on the Iran-contra scandal on WBAI in New York City...
...In return for guarantees of job security, the university will get greater flexibility in subcontracting...
...He told reporters his stories would be dismissed as "the rantings and ravings of a convicted drug smuggler who's merely blowing a smokescreen to hide his illegal endeavors and garner some amnesty or get out of jail on some future prosecution...
...He ordered the crew to drop the bales into the sea and landed the plane belly-down in the water just short of Grand Cayman Island...
...The committee found that "the possibilities for interpretive variance [in the job classification system] are staggering...
...Toliver had worked off and on as an informant for the agency, but the Government claims he was on his own the day he crashed the plane and refuses to pay Conlogue the $413,000 cost of the aircraft...
...Miami public defender John Mattes, who has heard many smugglers' tales, thinks Toliver should be taken seriously...
...We have spent years working on this," said Local 34 President Lucille Dickess, "and the end result is a new system which will remedy the situation...
...Officers of both unions attribute much of their success to their cooperation with each other...
...The university didn't count on our being able to join together and work in solidarity," says Dickess...
...More than 300 professors arranged to use rooms in local churches and grade schools, so students would not have to cross picket lines to attend class...
...DATE LINES Of Arms, Drugs, Contras, and the CIA WICHITA, KANSAS The smuggler had planned to take off from Colombia in the middle of the afternoon, so it would be sunset by the time he dropped the bales of marijuana over southern Florida...
...A few days after the contract expired, Democratic Presidential candidate Jesse Jackson visited the campus...
Vol. 52 • April 1988 • No. 4
