Gino Perente

Eugenio Mario Perente-Ramos (Gino Perente) (21 November 1937 Some reporters, cult-watchers, and the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) inferred in the early 1980s that Perente was born Gerald William Doeden, a disc jockey from California.

While in college, 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.

Doeden married Ruth Mikkelsen in 1960, and had a daughter. Doeden, however, reportedly also fathered a child outside of his marriage. He and Mikkelsen were divorced in 1962, and he later spent some time in jail for non-payment of child support. Some observers have suggested that he may have left California to avoid child support payments.

A number of individuals associated with the store reportedly formed a short-lived group called Liberation Army Revolutionary Group Organizations (LARGO). In March 1970, the group sent letters to government offices "announcing that armed guerrilla groups were about to attack public buildings." 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.

As head of EFWA and NATLFED Within a few years, Perente's followers had started similar organizations patterned on EFWA in California and elsewhere on the east coast, and eventually one farm worker organizing drive had spawned a network of twenty such drives, called the National Labor Federation (NATLFED). and "The Genesis," a story of the origins of NATLFED claiming that the party was part of a secret International including the Communist Party of Cuba, the Sandinistas and revolutionaries in Chile and El Salvador,

Perente retreated from public view in the mid- to late-1970s. 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. In 2016 former cadre Sonja Larsen's memoir Red Star Tattoo- My Life as a Girl Revolutionary was published by Random House Canada. The book details her personal relationship with Gino Perente/Gerald Doeden and the emotional, physical and sexual abuse of women which she witnessed while living at the safe house around the time of the organization's revolutionary 'countdown.'

Death

Perente died March 18, 1995, in the Crown Heights apartment of congestive heart failure. He was buried at Oak Hill Cemetery in Stony Brook, NY by the organization he founded. The New York Times printed his obituary, 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 longtime critics of Perente, including Chip Berlet, and, after fact checking the initial obituary, the Times issued a corrected obituary the next day.

Publications Perente, Eugenio Mario (1973). The Essential Organizer. Eastern Farmworkers Association, s.l.