Activists Under Fire Over Fees for Helping Blacks Find Work : Recovery: Critics say Black Fund is exploiting employees and practicing extortion. The group’s organizers deny charges.

It had been eight months since the bottom fell out of Ron Evans’ once-thriving South Los Angeles construction business, eight months of driving from one building site to the next without any luck in finding work.

Three weeks ago, Evans’ luck suddenly changed when he got a call from the Black Fund, one of several activist groups that use street protests to persuade contractors to hire more African-American workers in the rebuilding of riot-torn South Los Angeles. The Black Fund found Evans a job as a skilled tradesman at the site of a new AIDS hospice on West Adams Boulevard.

Under an agreement worked out between the Black Fund and the builder, Evans works for RLB Construction Co., which is owned by fund organizers, and is paid $12 an hour. But the agreement also requires the builder to pay RLB and the Black Fund an additional $5 for every hour Evans works--a fee arrangement that other black activists say exploits the workers that the Black Fund says it helps.

“I’d hope my piece would be a little bigger, but it’s better than being paid nothing,” said Evans, who added that he does not mind the arrangement.

Founded in anonymity a year ago, the Black Fund is now a familiar--if not always welcome--player in the growing effort to increase the number of blacks on work crews at South Los Angeles construction sites. Its following has grown steadily since the riots. More than 50 residents showed up at a recent meeting for employment and business advice.

As its visibility grows, so does criticism of the group. Other activists complain that the group is mixing public activism with private profit--obtaining contracts for itself as a result of street demonstrations.

In addition to those complaints, at least one construction contractor has told police that one of the group threatened his business with violence to pressure him into bringing on more workers.

Danny Bakewell, president of the Brotherhood Crusade, has asked Robert Bridges, chairman of the Black Fund, to stop using the name because of its similarity to the Black United Fund, a subsidiary of the Brotherhood Crusade. Bakewell contends that the group is trying to cash in on the similarity. If Bridges does not comply with the request, Bakewell said, he will take legal action.

“The names are confusingly familiar and I believe they are implying that they are with us,” he said.

The Black Fund’s organizers--Bridges, Prentiss Jenkins and Saul Williams--emphatically deny any exploitation. Insisting that his organization is being smeared by enemies who are jealous or fearful of its successes, Jenkins says that “this is what happens when you stand up as black men for black men.”

Bridges said the organization was conceived 14 months ago out of his desire to find more financing for his South Los Angeles-based building firm. Two RLB employees, Jenkins and Williams, helped him organize the fund. The idea was to pool money and services in the black community to promote economic development, he said.

The trio met with little success at first, he said. But as the city turned its attention to rebuilding neighborhoods after last spring’s riots, black residents began endorsing the idea that the Black Fund had been unable to sell only weeks earlier, Bridges said.

The group decided to mount protests after seeing Bakewell capture media attention by shutting down rebuilding sites where few or no black workers were employed.

Bridges says that since May the Black Fund has persuaded contractors to hire more than 50 black laborers and skilled tradesmen. It also provides free advice to small-business owners and entrepreneurs who are seeking financing. Bridges says that fund organizers plan to meet with local bank officials to persuade them to increase the number of business loans to riot-torn areas.

But even as the Black Fund tries to broaden its scope, its tactics have been challenged. The owners of the Van Nuys-based Wilson Simons Construction Co. said last week that Black Fund organizers threatened earlier this month to harm him and destroy his business even after he hired two African-American workers on his job site, not far from Florence and Normandie avenues.

“They are extortionists,” Durk Hagen, a part owner in the firm, said of the Black Fund.

Hagen’s partner, Tony Wilson, said he reported the alleged threat to officers at the Los Angeles Police Department’s 77th Street Division. Lt. Thomas Maeweather said a crime report was taken by telephone. But he said the investigation had stalled because detectives had not heard from the caller again and have not been able to contact him.

Jenkins acknowledges talking with Wilson and Hagen. But at no time, he said, did he threaten them. Black Fund organizers also deny using strong-arm tactics on any other contractors.

But another builder, Terry Bensinger, said he never felt he was being threatened or intimidated despite being warned that there would be pickets at his construction site if he did not negotiate with the group.

Bensinger awarded four contracts to RLB Construction for work at the Crenshaw Boulevard site of a Smart and Final store.

“It’s a good thing these guys did come up because they can supply all the men we need,” Bensinger said. “They had a good price.”

The Black Fund, Jenkins said, will continue to pressure contractors to hire more blacks “because (contractors) know what they are doing is wrong.”

Under the arrangements negotiated between the Black Fund and contractors, Bridges says, builders pay RLB Construction a set hourly wage for each worker. RLB pays the workers’ salaries after deducting hourly fees for the Black Fund.

Bakewell alleges that the Black Fund does not pass “the smell test of a legitimate organization.” And Deacon Alexander, another activist who has also used street demonstrations to press for more jobs for South Los Angeles residents, says the Black Fund cuts into the already low wages that are typically paid to non-union construction workers.

“They are no more than an employment agency,” Alexander said. “They represent themselves . . . as representatives of subcontractors. They don’t represent subcontractors, they represent one contractor.”

Alexander adds that he extracts no fees from workers who obtain jobs through protests and negotiations organized by his group, the Los Angeles Unemployed Council.

Bridges denies that there is anything improper about his arrangement with builders. He said that RLB uses the money to pay for such expenses as workers’ compensation, liability insurance and monitoring of workers’ performance. The Black Fund also must pay for overhead costs such as clerical services and mailings, he said.

Pierre Sain, union business manager for the Southern California District Council of Carpenters, said that even with contractors’ payments to RLB, the workers aided by the Black Fund are still making more than some non-union laborers. Sain says he has heard of cases where laborers have been paid as little as $5 an hour.

Williams of the Black Fund says his organization takes great care in its dealings with the unemployed not to harm them in any way.

The money paid to RLB “pays for everything we (the Black Fund) do,” he said. “And everything we have done has been done with diplomacy and decorum.”