MAN ACCUSED OF PAYING WORKERS WITH COCAINE

Some workers took part of their pay in crack cocaine, witnesses said
at the outset of the trial of a North Florida labor contractor.

JACKSONVILLE - The migrant workers were recruited to Ronald Evans
Sr.'s labor camp from homeless shelters, soup kitchens and
underpasses -- and took part of their wages in cocaine, a federal
prosecutor told jurors at the start of the labor contractor's criminal trial.

Some of the workers who toiled in the potato and cabbage fields took
part of their pay in $10 foil packages of cocaine called "bells" that
they got at a makeshift company store, with the price of the cocaine
and other purchases deducted from their cash wages each week,
according to details emerging in the trial.

Sometimes, after deductions for cigarettes, beer and crack and other
items, some workers owed the company money at the end of the week,
Assistant U.S. Attorney John Sciorintino told jurors.

The practice affected the "lowest and most vulnerable people in
society," he said.

The multicount indictment accuses Evans of, among other things,
engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise to distribute and aid
and abet the distribution of cocaine.

Evans' wife, Jequita, is also charged with one count of conspiracy to
distribute cocaine.

The defense says that whatever drugs the workers got at Evans Labor
Camp near Palatka came not from the Evanses but from other workers or
from local Palatka drug dealers. The Evanses had nothing to do with
drugs, Ronald Evans' attorney, William M. Kent, told the jury.
Instead, they gave people food and a place to live and provided them
with legitimate work, he said.

Jequita Evans also faces one less serious charge in the indictment
not related to drugs; her husband faces six other less serious charges.

Four former Evans workers have pleaded guilty to drug charges. One is
Emma Mae Johnson, a former crack user and longtime Evans employee who
testified that she is now clean.

Johnson agreed to help the government and said she is hoping to get a
less severe sentence for her cooperation.

She testified that each weeknight after dinner, the migrant workers
who wanted beer, cigarettes and cocaine would assemble at a pump
house at the labor camp near Palatka in a process referred to by the
workers as "the line."

Johnson said that for a while, she recorded the transactions on notebook paper.

Sometimes, she said, she received cocaine in her pay envelope. She
said Jequita Evans usually distributed the pay envelopes in Florida.

Johnson said it was common for local drug dealers to come around the
camp, especially around payday.

Johnson did not connect Ronald Evans to the drugs. She testified that
she never saw him at "the line" or at Saturday paydays. Nor was he
around when cocaine sellers were at the camp, she said.

Late Tuesday, Wilbur Cain, a field laborer who worked for Evans, said
that for a time he was given four cocaine rocks a week for cleaning
the bathroom at the camp.

He also told jurors he was given cocaine by Evans during a brief
period when he worked on the grounds of the Evans labor camp in North Carolina.

Cain is serving time in a Pennsylvania prison.