Densho Digital Archive - Bob Santos Interview III (denshovh-sbob

<Begin Segment 6>

TI: Okay. I'm gonna kind of move on. We could stay in the International District for hours and hours with different issues, but I want to move on to some other issues. One was, in the early '80s there was a tragic murder, Gene Viernes and Silme Domingo.

BS: Yes.

TI: And it rocked the community. I mean, I guess I was, I had graduated by then from University of Washington but knew these guys and wanted to get your sense of why this happened and the cannery workers, and just explain that a little bit.

BS: You know, the Local 37, the cannery worker union, was established way back in the '30s, and before the war -- excuse me [coughs] -- the workers that would file up to Alaska and work the seafood industry were Japanese, young Japanese Americans, some Japanese nationals, students, and Filipinos would go up to the canneries and work the seafood industry for the summer and make some bucks. So for the young people, they earned enough money for a college education. And when the war happened and the Filipinos were left behind, the Filipinos sort of took over that industry, at least from the war years on, and so the unions worked out deals with the seafood companies that workers that would work in the, in the cannery section would be union workers. And the company signed off on that. There was a labor agreement with the companies. And it was good for the companies, right? 'Cause they didn't have to go out and hustle workers to come up; the union would dispatch all these workers that would come into Seattle, from all over the country, mainly from California. They'd come up around May, September, springtime, in May, June, and the president of the union and the dispatcher of the union were very, very powerful figures. If you wanted to go up to Alaska and the many canneries that were really, really prominent at that time, you wanted to get ahead of the line, you paid the dispatcher a couple of bucks, or maybe more than a couple of bucks, so that became sort of the system. There there was a seniority system, but you could bypass the seniority system by paying under the table, and so it was, it began to be very corrupt and the dispatcher held a lot of power over the workers of, up in Alaska. Some of the very shrewd gambling owners, in the International District/Chinatown core there was a lot of gambling operations, the Filipino Improvement Club owned by Rudy Santos, the Bataan Club was owned by a guy named Dan Sarisol. These were big casinos, underground, underground casinos. Well, they wanted to, because all these Filipinos were going up to Alaska, they wanted to establish gambling in the canneries where they would send, where the gambling establishments would send up their people to be the dealers, 'cause all these, here you have all these guys with nothing to do and they come, they'd make a lot of money up there. And there was a system of keeping track, whatever kind of system it was, and a lot of these workers, cannery workers would lose their whole, their whole salary to the gamblers. When they, before they left Alaska and got their checks, there it was, so that became very lucrative. So the gambling industry in the cannery, canneries of Alaska, was very prominent, and so in order for that to happen the gamblers would pay off the dispatcher to get their people up. They were in place when the rest of the workers came up. So, and I was one of those cannery worker kids out of high school, two years, 1951 and 1952 I went to Alaska, but my dad was a very prominent boxer, so he got me in without having to pay off the dispatcher.

So when Silme and Gene and Nemesio Domingo, they're involved in a very progressive leftist political group called KDP. The KDP was formed -- it's a Filipino word, that's an acronym for a Filipino word that I can't remember -- but they're opposing Ferdinand Marcos and the Marcos regime in the Philippines, and they're with the KDP and they're trying to gain support of the American, the Filipinos in America and other people to really question the support, the United States support of the dictatorship in the Philippines. The United States government, of course, had to be very careful how they treated Marcos and those people because we needed the military bases that were in the Philippines. The naval bases and the air bases, that was our protective zone for the whole Far East, all those military bases we have. So from President Reagan on allowed Marcos to do almost anything he wanted to during his dictatorship. These young people said, "No, that's not right. We want a democratic form of government." And so they became very prominent in the anti-Marcos movement. In the same time, Silme and Gene became also very prominent in the union reform movement at the cannery workers, okay? So they were working with the -- well, first of all, remember I talked about Tyree Scott and the United Construction Workers, and he was a super organizer? When that, when the construction industry became open to minorities, Tyree got us together, Nemesio Domingo, Silme Domingo, myself, some other folks, to talk about, now we want to hit the discrimination in the seafood industry. So that's when the Alaska Cannery Workers Association was formed, was formed out of Tyree Scott's office, and then Nemesio Domingo, Gene Viernes, and Silme Domingo, David Della, and a bunch of cannery workers filed a class action suit against the seafood industry. And they became prominent in the union. They were, they were kickin' the seafood industry companies in the butt, and in the meantime they were getting themselves in leadership in the union. They had to take over the union from the corrupt, from the corrupt past. And so you had these, you had these activists, almost radicals, that were embarrassing the leadership of the Filipino community who also had ties with the Philippine government, well, with Marcos and the Philippine government. Many of the immigrants from the Philippines in Seattle came from the provinces where Marcos, the Ilocos Sur province where Marcos came from, and so there were these blood bonds and all that stuff. So Silme and Gene and David Della take over some key spots in the union. One of 'em, Gene Viernes became the dispatcher, and when, when the gambling, the gangs, Filipino gangs wanted to send their people to Alaska as part of the gambling consortium, whatever that was, Gene said, "No, we're going by seniority." So he was targeted, and some folks were hired, but they didn't have money, so they turned to the president of the union, a guy named Tony Baruso, who had connections with the Marcos regime. So that started to form some kind of a plan to put pressure on the union, the new union leadership that included Silme and Gene.

In the meantime, let's see how this, this was working... the anti Marcos, the anti Marcos movement became very prominent in Seattle. We were demonstrating once a week, I think it was every Tuesday at the Philippine consulate for the end of the martial law. Gene and Silme, as part of the union, went to the International Longshore Warehouse, International Warehouse Union, Longshore Union that had their convention in Hawaii, and they got the national, international union to support the resolution from Gene and Silme against, to come out publicly against the martial law and the discrimination of the Filipino workers in the Philippines. So that struck a chord with the Marcos regime that this anti martial law alliance was getting a little bit bigger than they wanted to get big 'cause they were getting international support from unions and officials from all over the United States, so the two guys were targeted. Money was sent from the Marcos regime through couriers, military couriers that came to United States and went to, came to California. And there was a guy named Dr. Malabed, who had a very, he was a very prominent physician in San Francisco, and the money went to him and it was traced, and from there, fifteen thousand came up to Seattle to pay for Tony Baruso and the shooters, five thousand apiece to the two shooters that assassinated those two guys. And so to a ten year period -- the shooters were actually convicted in criminal court almost immediately -- and there was a committee that was formed, the Justice Committee for Domingo Viernes. I was a part of that committee, and we took the president of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos and his wife, we charged them in civil court for the complicity of those murders, and after a ten year trial they were convicted. First and only time a head of state was convicted in a U.S. civil court of a major crime, and it was, the guy had passed away since, before the settlement, but that was sort of the victory to the anti martial law alliances throughout the United States that finally caught up with Marcos, and it was because of a lot of this that he eventually was forced out of office, February 26th of that year, forgot what year it was -- '74? -- that he was forced out of office.

TI: What was the impact on you? I mean, so these were men that you knew personally and they were activists and you're an activist, and all of a sudden you see the dangers of being an activist. It could mean your life.

BS: Yes.

TI: So you personally, what, what was your...

BS: Well, I was sort of the spokesperson. Every time the Justice Committee, after the deaths, there were meetings, we had meetings constantly, the Justice Committee for Domingo Viernes, to prepare this civil suit, and it was a ten year period. And knowing that there were agents from the Philippines who were still around, we knew that they were around, so when there, and I, and I wasn't involved in the core meetings right now. I was, every time there was a press conference I would be given a script. And me and a guy named Bill Cate -- he was from the Church Council of Greater Seattle -- him and I would be the spokespeople that opened up the press conference, but I wasn't in the everyday meetings and details of the conspiracy, conspiracy theory of the government involvement in the murders. But when the committees, the small group of committees, when they would meet and when they got home they would check on each other by phone to see if they, make sure that they each got home, 'cause they knew the direction, I mean, the routes that they would take home 'cause it was always a concern that something might happen to the core group of planners for this murder trial, for the civil murder trial. So that was a danger there. You sort of knew that there was trouble out there. I was working at InterIm and right out our window -- we were in the Bush Hotel -- right out our window was the headquarters of the Tulisian gang, whose members, three members were convicted of the murder, the planner, Tony Dictado, a guy named Guloy, and another young guy. They hung out across the street on King Street. That was their hangout, and the gang was still there. They were still formed there. So it was a little bit of --

TI: So that had to be, had to be unsettling for you.

BS: They'd say, "Oh, hi, Mr. Santos. Hi, Uncle Bob." But I knew that they didn't really, we got their three buddies convicted, so we weren't very well liked, but they didn't want to get caught up as being involved in the murder, so they were trying to be nice to us so that we would, we wouldn't bother them. But it was, it was a five to six, seven year period of time where we had to watch our backs.