The Crusades of Cesar Chavez (39 page)

Chavez believed the commitment to the voluntary life of poverty had propelled the movement to its success. Now he saw danger signs. Staff members who had accepted the subsistence lifestyle during the grape strike asked whether the union should start paying salaries now that the contracts generated significant income from dues. Staff still received $5 a week plus room and board. Some had asked for an increase. “I'm very worried,” Chavez said in October 1971 to a group of religious leaders visiting La Paz. He singled out for criticism the farmworkers on the union staff. Under the grape contracts, they could earn as much as $3.50 an hour during the harvest season. The lettuce workers earned more. “So if you want to make that kind of money,” Chavez said, “we tell the workers, ‘You go back. That's where the money's going to be. Not here.'”

He was adamant in his opposition to paying wages. “We'll organize workers in this movement as long as we're willing to sacrifice. The moment we stop sacrificing,
¹³
we stop organizing. I guarantee that . . . We're not going to do it by paying wages.”

Chavez thought communal living might offer a solution to the looming problem about compensation. He talked about Saint Francis as a model for building community and read books on Scandinavian co-ops. Chavez focused most sharply on Gandhi's experiments with ashrams because the Indian leader had harnessed power from spiritual communities and used it for political ends. “I'm at heart an experimenter,”
¹⁴
Chavez said. “I hate to do things routinely. I want to experiment in forming a community.”

The potential to build a community in La Paz, with its wide-open spaces and abundant housing, was much of its attraction. The first time he visited the site, Chavez had talked to Chatfield about kibbutzim and other forms of cooperative living. Chavez envisioned a commune that offered volunteers an alternative lifestyle, providing security and community in exchange for their financial sacrifice.

For farmworkers, Chavez argued, the stakes were even higher. Contracts alone would not lift millions of people out of poverty; owning land was the key to economic stability. La Paz could serve as his laboratory. Chavez talked to Jacques Levy about how the black Muslim movement acquired land. He researched Wall Street corporations to explore how he might pool the credit of many people to purchase more property. Referring to Mao's saying that power comes out of the barrel of a gun, Chavez said, “Power also comes out of credit.
¹⁵
In a capitalist society the biggest gun is credit, and credit in a society like ours means people.”

Gradually Chavez invited more families to join the Murguias in the ramshackle buildings on the rolling hills of La Paz. The UFW headquarters remained at Forty Acres, but Chavez shifted more of the union's business out of Delano. He took his computer expert, Dave Smith, to see La Paz, and Smith picked out a perfect home for the union's new computer system—a T-shaped building where the minicomputer could sit in the middle, the keypunch operators on one side, and the programmers on the other.

Chavez convened a group at La Paz to restart
El Malcriado
,
¹⁶
which he had shut down years earlier because of unhappiness with its independent and often provocative stance. Chavez allocated funds for an $18,000 press and a $7,000 structure to house a printing operation. He appointed a new editor and asked Levy to hold weekly sessions to critique prototype papers. They planned three versions: English for farmworkers, English for liberal supporters, and Spanish for farmworkers. Chavez invoked Gandhi as a model and said
El Malcriado
should break news that the mainstream media would follow. Like Gandhi, they would print only a small number of papers but gain outsize influence. To distribute the paper, Chavez looked to the model of the Jehovah's Witnesses and sent aides to collect information on how the group operated. He wanted to find “fanatics” to distribute
El
Malcriado
with equal religious fervor; perhaps they should have a uniform, too, with white shirts.

The linchpin of Chavez's growing network of nonprofit entities remained his first entrepreneurial venture, the National Farm Workers Service Center. Groups like the Catholic Church could funnel money to Chavez through the Service Center and avow that not one penny was going to the union. “The whole game
¹⁷
since 1966 has been to use the Service Center to defray much of the cost of running the union, because it was easier to raise the money there,” Frank Denison, the lawyer who handled the nonprofits, explained to the union's leaders.

The Service Center paid for cars driven by union staff, ran the clinics, owned Forty Acres, and acted as the movement's landlord, charging rent to the union and other entities for office space. Chavez served as president, and Ross, Hartmire, and Chatfield sat on the board. Chavez assured donors they maintained the requisite legal separation. In reality, the lines blurred whenever necessary. When the union ran short on funds, the Service Center paid for conferences and expenses, effectively extending a $90,000 loan.
¹⁸
A Field Foundation grant to the Service Center paid the salaries of lawyers, who then “volunteered” to help the union.

When an inflammatory quote from a union lawyer appeared in the
New York Times
, Field Foundation president Leslie Dunbar grew alarmed. “To you, it may seem artificial
¹⁹
to distinguish the Union from the Center,” Dunbar wrote Chavez. “If it is, in fact, an artificial distinction, then I believe we may be in trouble.” The Field Foundation contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars, and Dunbar viewed the movement as “a vital and good spirit and force for America and for humanity.” Chavez assured Dunbar
²⁰
that union leaders had “final say” over the policies of all related entities, but “this does not mean that we are inflexible when it comes to accommodating ourselves to the needs of those who are helping us.” Dunbar eased his conscience by asking that the Field Foundation contribution be shifted from the lawyers' salaries to other purposes.

The fuzzy lines between the union and the Service Center set the pattern for Chavez's future financial dealings, which increased in complexity as he created more corporations and gained access to larger sums of money. His fundamental disregard for the legal strictures increased along with his reputation. So did donors' willingness to overlook red flags in their eagerness to help the movement.

A year after the union acquired La Paz, Chavez made his most significant move: he proposed relocating the national headquarters out of Delano. Like all his suggestions, the idea was readily approved by the board, despite some trepidation. La Paz was about an hour southeast of Delano, surrounded by desert and mountains, not fields. Chavez told the board that he needed to be outside Delano to carry out his larger mission. In effect, he argued that proximity to the union's members made his job more difficult. In Delano, he had become bogged down in the administrative work of the union, which now had tens of thousands of members in the area.

“I was getting a lot of problems,”
²¹
he explained. “I was being forced to do a lot of work. Though the leadership was there, workers wouldn't talk to the guy in charge of Delano, wouldn't even talk to the ranch committees.”

Not everyone shared his enthusiasm for the remote rolling hills of Keene, a crossroads with a post office and coffee shop, where the nearest city, Tehachapi, was even smaller than Delano. Some objected to the lifestyle imposed by the mountain retreat, and others questioned the wisdom of removing Chavez and other leaders from the fields. “There is a mystic bit
²²
in all of this, something that pulls him off into a dream of a small, perfect community,” Bill Kircher observed. He saw that as a weakness that distracted Chavez from the hundreds of grape contracts the union held and the dozens more they hoped to win in the vegetable fields. Chavez should focus on Delano, Kircher thought, instead of La Paz.

Jerry Cohen was reluctant to leave Delano and felt he would be cut off from the action. Helen Chavez, who knew the place well, was adamant in her refusal to move. As a child, she had shown signs of anemia and malnutrition and been sent to live for months in a program for children housed in the tuberculosis sanatorium that was now being converted into the union headquarters. She had vivid, negative memories.

Some of Chavez's champions and funders expressed concern about the retreat from the fields. “Even those of us who have been ‘outside supporters' of the movement cannot help but feel a slight bit of trauma
²³
at Cesar's decision,” John Moyer, a United Church of Christ official and leading supporter of the Migrant Ministry, wrote to Jim Drake.

Chavez's trump card was security. A convoluted tip about an assassination plot
²⁴
from a petty criminal turned informant evolved into months of intrigue. Chavez used the threat as a rationale to move permanently to La Paz, where his security could allegedly be ensured with a guarded entry and regular patrols of the compound.

In the summer of 1971, an informant went to the local office of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) and said he had been solicited in an arson and murder plot against Chavez. Larry Shears had provided accurate information to the ATF on a separate arson plot, and he asked for a $10,000 contract. The ATF signed him up, but he would receive the money only for information leading to an arrest. He told them that his source, a drug dealer named Richard Pedigo, had said that a grower had put up $25,000 for the killing. On July 28, federal officials notified the UFW and provided a picture of the alleged hit man, a mobster named Buddy Gene Prochnau. The ATF agents wired Shears and assigned an undercover agent who went along to meetings with Pedigo and offered to work as a substitute for Prochnau, who had been arrested in an unrelated case. But Pedigo, who appeared to be high and suffering withdrawal symptoms, said the deal was off because the growers had backed out.

On August 21, ATF agents busted Pedigo for drugs. The lead agent tracked down the grower Pedigo had named, who denied any involvement in a Chavez plot. The ATF told Shears they no longer had jurisdiction in the case and passed their files to the local authorities.

In December, Shears went to a Bakersfield television station with his story. They called UFW officials for comment. Cohen talked to Chavez, and Chavez called Jacques Levy with an urgent request. For the first time in the three years he had spent time with Chavez, the union paid Levy to fly to Bakersfield. Cohen, Richard Chavez, and Larry Shears met Levy at the airport. Shears told his story about the plot to kill Chavez, produced a Treasury Department check to corroborate his informant status, and told them he had tapes of all his conversations with targets of the investigation and ATF officials. He offered to sell the union the tapes. Levy went with the others back to La Paz to report to Chavez and the board.

The union bought the tapes with the intention of using them to publicly denounce authorities for their failure to pursue the investigation. With the help of Sen. Edward Kennedy, the UFW raised a $10,000 reward for information leading to an arrest. At a press conference, Cohen outlined the plot according to Shears, naming both Pedigo and Prochnau.

Meanwhile, Levy contacted Jann Wenner, editor of
Rolling Stone
magazine. Elaborate negotiations between Levy, Cohen, Wenner, and Shears ended in an agreement that Levy would write a magazine story and
Rolling Stone
would get exclusive use of the tapes, finance a private investigator, and pay Shears $2,000 for his cooperation. When Cohen and Levy went to explain the deal to Chavez, Cohen reported, “Cesar objected to paying
²⁵
‘the little bastard' any money, but at the same time asserted the Union should get 95% of the movie rights . . . Cesar then lied, saying that he had never authorized the payment of money to Shears in the first place, and that every morning when he woke up he felt that he had lost a little bit of his principles. He then walked out of the meeting.”

In the end, the tapes were largely unintelligible,
Rolling Stone
killed the story, and the investigations went nowhere. The union's charges of cover-ups were never corroborated, despite extensive federal reviews by multiple agencies over the next several years. The only financial beneficiary was Larry Shears.

But the threat of assassination had seemed plausible, only a few years after Kennedy and King were shot. A group of people living at La Paz were given guns and taken to the police shooting range in Tehachapi for practice. They patrolled the perimeter
²⁶
of La Paz at night with shotguns. One night Lupe Murguia pointed his gun at a rancher who had permission to cross the land, and that ended the official experiment in armed defense.

The threats persuaded Helen. She gave up her resistance, and the family left Delano at the end of 1971 and joined Cesar in La Paz. Soon after, a heavy snow blanketed the complex, which sat at thirty-five hundred feet above sea level. Cesar caught the flu but recovered in time to throw a New Year's party for the growing La Paz community. “Helen and the kids moved up just before Christmas,” Chavez wrote to a friend. “I think she may even like it here now. On her birthday
²⁷
the whole staff came to sing Mañanitas to her.”

As more people moved to La Paz, they added trailers. Chavez was content, happy to live on a rural ranch for the first time since he had left Arizona as a child. He added beehives. “I eat honey
²⁸
like a bear,” he said. He spent five minutes a day training his dogs, using lessons from Jacques Levy.