First Published: New York Times, June 3, 1981.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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SAN DIEGO, June 2–Closing arguments began today in a Federal Court trial that defense lawyers have depicted as a cause celebre for 1930’s-style union activism and that prosecutors have depicted as simply a case of three dissident employees who allegedly plotted to blow up part of a shipyard.
Three former employees of San Diego’s National Steel and Shipbuilding Company, two of them members of the Communist Workers Party, are charged with conspiring to blow up an electric power transformer at the shipyard here, one of the nation’s largest, and of assemblying two Molotov cocktails and a pipe bomb to accomplish this.
According to the Government, the alleged plot was never carried out because an associate of the three men turned out to be an informer for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The credibility of the informer, Ramon Barton, who also worked at the shipyard, and the question whether he entrapped the defendants have been central issues in the five-week trial.
The defendants are Rodney Johnson, 23 years old, and Mark Loo, 29, both members of the Communist Workers Party, and David Boyd, 33.
Mr. Barton was on the witness stand for five days, and the prosecutors produced tape recordings, allegedly made by a concealed recording device that he carried. The recordings, apparently of the four men planning the alleged attack and assembling the explosive devices, dominated much of the trial, which is expected to go to the jury tomorrow.
Defense attorneys, led by Leonard Weinglass, who was often represented left-wing political activists, have argued that the shipyard collaborated with the F.B.I. and the local police in an attempt to frame the three defendants because of their political views and to break the union, Local 627 of the International Association of Bridge, Structural and Ornamental Iron Workers. In recent years, the shipyard has frequently been torn by labor strife, stemming in part from allegedly unsafe working conditions.
Last week, a former labor relations employee for National Steel testified that the company routinely spied on union members and “had informants in all the various unions.” The company has declined to comment on this assertion.
Contending that Mr. Barton instigated the alleged bombing plot, Mr. Weinglass has hit hard in the trial on the fact that the informer had supplied a publication called the James Bond Manual that the three defendants followed when they allegedly built the explosive devices.
In his closing arguments today, Michael Lipman, an Assistant United States Attorney who is prosecuting the case, ridiculed the defense arguments and contended that the evidence was “overwhelming” that the three men had planned the bombing and built the explosive devices, and that Mr. Barton had not induced them to do so.
Mr. Lipman read a transcript of some of the tape-recorded meetings held by the defendants and Mr. Barton in which the defendants appeared to be plotting to bomb the transformer. After one passage in which the defendants appeared to be working on a explosive device, the prosecutor said, “They weren’t building these bombs for a chemistry class.”
Mr. Weinglass, who has compared what he contends is an effort by the Government and the shipyard to suppress union activism by leftleaning employees to union-busting tactics carried out by some companies in the 1930’s, said his closing arguments would rest largely in a contention that if Mr. Barton, the Government’s informer, had not provided the James Bond Manual, “there wouldn’t have been any bomb.”