Word: barkers
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...veterans of the fight against Fidel Castro, the four refugees from Cuba saw themselves as good soldiers on the Watergate front. "I was not there to think," as Bernard Barker put it. "I was there to follow orders." Caught in the Democratic National Committee's Watergate offices on that fateful night of June 17, 1972, they all stoically pleaded guilty and trooped off to jail. As the scandal has expanded, they have become its forgotten men: Bernard ("Macho") Barker, 56; Virgilio ("Villo") Gonzalez, 47; Eugenio ("Musculito") Martinez, 51; and Frank Sturgis...
Today, six months into their provisional 40-year sentences, they are filled with indignation, convinced that they, too, were victims of the complex scandal. Exclaims Barker's daughter, Maria-Elena Moffett: "They feel like they have been used, thrown out, ignored, stepped on and left without any hope of justice. They do not want to be lumped together with men like Haldeman and Ehrlichman−those who knew exactly what they were doing. They are little people who thought they were helping fight Communism." As Barker explained to the Ervin committee, he was told that the Democrats had received...
That possibility weighs heavily on the prisoners' minds. In a rare interview, Barker told TIME Correspondent Sandra Burton: "I've been in jail for nine months and I still don't know what my sentence is. Today I am 56 years old, my real estate business has dissolved, and I am in prison where the population is calling me one of 'Nixon's boys.' If I had to choose between going through this Watergate imprisonment or World War II [where he spent 16 months in a German prison camp] again, I would definitely select...
...addition, they managed to rouse the interest of a potentially powerful ally: Connecticut Senator Lowell Weicker of the Ervin committee. Barker's daughter had singled him out "because he was the Senator in all the hearings I liked best." She appealed to him, and during the congressional recess Weicker went to Danbury twice to meet with the prisoners. He said that he was "upset to see the men who are least able to afford it sitting in jail while all the others wander around the country." Though the Senator added that he could make no promises, he has turned...
Among the least savory cowboys is Nixon's closest comrade-in-arms, C. G. "Bebe" Rebozo, a Florida real estate speculator whose associates reportedly included Bernard Barker...