Biography
Alberto de Jesús Berríos was a Puerto Rican independence activist — for years a distributor of the Puerto Rican Socialist Party newspaper and an activist in the National Support Committee for Vieques — who became the first name on the FBI list of 25 people and groups drawn up after the December 3, 1979 attack on a U.S. Navy bus at Sabana Seca. Subjected to constant FBI surveillance and harassment though never charged in the attack, he left the island in 1980 and settled in Green Bay, Wisconsin, working as a cabinet maker. On January 17, 1983 he was arrested as a supposed fugitive and brought before the federal grand jury investigating Sabana Seca; when he refused to testify he was jailed nine months for civil contempt, first in New York City and then in Miami. Two days before his contempt term was up, the government charged him with misuse of a social security number — from the false identity he had used to escape the harassment — and set bail at two million dollars, later reduced. He was convicted in January 1984 and was awaiting sentencing when The Militant interviewed him that spring; a De Jesús Support Association organized in Wisconsin around his defense. Reconstructed from The Militant, April 6, 1984; the sentencing outcome has not been located.
