Charitable Front

"Systemic organizing" is NatlFed jargon for methods compiled by Perente during the 1970s in The Essential Organizer, a collection of stapled, photocopied pages ex-members say has been recited as if it were the group's bible.

Although the FBI's investigation did not name the Physicians Organizing Committee as a NatlFed spinoff, it certainly seems to have NatlFed links. Fahlberg says that during her time with the group, she saw documents referring to the committee as a NatlFed entity. A former Perente aide confirmed it was part of the Provisional Communist Party's medical fraction. The Physicians Organizing Committee received a $5,000 grant in 1999 from NEJA, NatlFed's apparent funding arm. In 2005, Geoff Wilson, who was identified as the Physicians Organizing Committee's manager in a Pacific Sun story six years ago, donated more than $20,000 worth of stock to NEJA. And Whitnack, who volunteered with the group in 1984, said he worked alongside Wilson in the Coalition of Concerned Medical Professionals, described in NatlFed's FBI file as a front group.

Frank Gaglione

S.F. attorney Tony Palik says leaders of the Coalition of Concerned Legal Professionals were more interested in getting him to attend Marxist indoctrination sessions than in improving the lives of farmworkers.

Brian Pinard

The headstone of Gerald Doeden, who created a new identity for himself as revolutionary leader Eugenio Mario Perente-Ramos, Gino Perente for short.

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• Gino Perente
• Physicians Organizing Committee
• National Equal Justice Association
• Labor Unions
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A few days after speaking with Tseng, I called the Physicians Organizing Committee a second time and left a message saying I wanted to discuss the group's links to NatlFed. Tseng didn't respond, so I visited him in the committee's small 18th-floor office on Sutter Street.

"So is it correct to say you refuse to state whether you are linked to the National Labor Federation?" I asked, after having the door closed in my face twice.

"Look, this is starting to constitute harassment," Tseng said. A young woman at his side added, "We only do interviews with people who submit a letter," and shut the door in my face again.