The Miami News from Miami, Florida • 1

Preview of tomorrow's playoffs Sports, IB Saturday, January 16, 1988 LIFESTYLE 0 MIAMI HISTORY 0 NEW YORK TIMES CROSSWORD 126 Pages Air Latin accord's author reportedly demanding final timetable for compliance REID G. MILLER Associated Press contra rebels who are trying to overthrow Nicaragua's leftist Sandinista government. Reagan had planned to ask Congress for $270 million in new contra aid last fall, but delayed the request at the insistence of Democratic congressional leaders who urged to give the peace plan a chance to work. Rey Prendes said that if the Central American presidents established a new deadline prior to Feb. 5 Plaasa see PEACE, 8A Arias and the presidents of Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala opened a summit here yesterday to review their efforts to meet the plan's goals.

Their meeting took them into the early morning hours today. But the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Arias coupled his proposal with a demand that any new deadline be the final, unalterable date for compliance with the major provisions of the peace accord. Except for Arias, the presidents faced a difficult choice. Adolfo Rey Prendes, El Salvador's minister of communications and a key adviser to President Jose Napoleon Duarte, summed it up: A deadline before Feb. 5 means the leaders are playing into the hands of President Reagan.

A later deadline gives President Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua the upper hand. "They're between a rock and a hard place," Rey Prendes said. The U.S. Congress plans to vote the first week in February on Reagan's request for new aid to the SAN JOSE, Costa Rica President Oscar Arias today urged four Central American presidents to extend the deadline for the region's peace plan, sources said, a day after the initiative technically expired. Arias, who won the 1987 Nobel Peace Prize for devising the peace proposal, was expected to succeed in pushing the deadline back 30 to 45 days, according to a source.

Recalling Martin Luther King's pleasure trips to Miami Tension grips Haiti on eve of election i i Combined Miami Newt Services PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti leaders claimed soldiers were intimidating citizens into going to the polls tomorrow and urged Haitians to observe a nationwide strike today to protest government-run general elections. Lt. Gen. Henri Namnhv. leader nf '(, -v.

fn Hi ii am iii mi 1 m. I 1 the military-domi- Namphy nated junta, denounced the calls for "savage, economically destabilizing strikes, too frequent street demonstrations (and) calls for revolt and violence." Namphy promised tomorrow's elections would be carried out with "order and security." But dozens of peasants said they had no idea who was running or where polling stations were set up. They said soldiers were coercing peasants to vote in the elections for president and National Assembly, a report confirmed by priests and opposition leaders. The four main opposition leaders Sylvio Claude, Marc Bazin, Louis Dejoie and Gerard Gourgue called the strike to protest what they say will be rigged voting. Late yesterday, the Communist Party and the biggest union, the Autonomous Central of Haitian Workers, joined their cause.

Namphy, in a speech on state-run television yesterday, urged citizens to ignore the calls. "Hours away from elections we feel we have accomplished a worthy job we call today on the electorate to carry out its civic duty," Namphy said. He promised a peaceful transition to democracy "in accord with the profound Please see HAITI. 8A Photo courtesy ot Arrington Major Mexican cocaine ring is busted the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, Iris Shirley.

Martin and Cor etta King. Juanita Abernathy and Dr. Edwin S. Shirley A greatly enlarged snapshot of Martin Luther King center, at Virginia Beach in the late 1950s. From left, Jeannette Shirley.

Civil rights leader frequently slipped into town for Associated Press SAN DIEGO A cocaine ring involving Mexican officials and believed capable of producing about half the drugs consumed in the United States was broken up by luring seven key members here on the pretense of receiving a SI million payment, authorities said yesterday. Twelve foreign nationals, including five Mexicans with past or present ties to the Mexican government, are accused of operating the cocaine ring. Attorney Peter Nunez said in announcing the unsealing of a 15-count indictment and criminal complaint. "The thrust of the investigation was to document the flow of narcotics from Bolivia through Central America to CATESBY LEIGH and PETE COLLINS Miami Ntwi Reporters It is the embattled 1960s and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

is lounging in the Miami living room of Geraldine and Henry Arrington. The civil rights leader, who won't live out the decade, jokes with his local friends about a nasty jail and the vicious police dogs he's confronted. As with most of his 40-odd visits to Miami, King is here for rest and recreation not to plot a rally or demonstration. In the 1950s, he began regularly slipping into town for weekend fishing trips or a picnic with a few friends on Virginia Key, one of the few Florida beaches open to blacks. It is the memories of those times that come to former colleagues.

"There was a certain kind of ambience about Miami," said King's former spokesman, Junius Griffin. "Those of us who were used to the charged atmosphere of the civil ri.ghts movement found it relaxing." Here King could confer privately with his closest aides in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, his friends said. Here they socialized in a closely knit group that included the Arringtons, Dr. John O. Brown and his wife, Marie, and Dr.

Edwin Shirley and his wife. Iris. King was closest to Henry Arrington, an ambitious and prominent lawyer who, after King's death, got into serious financial difficulties and Pleiase see KING, 6A Geraldine Arrington as Monday's national holiday commemorating King's birthday approaches. To her, the man who would have been 59 this week was more than a relentless civil rights crusader. He was a man who came to her home for respite from the grueling tension with which he lived, a man who felt comfortable enough in her home to raid her ice box.

"He would say, 'Gerri, I'm so tired of hotel food and fancy cooking. I just want some down home Arrington recalled. "He knew he could get himself anything he wanted out of the refrigerator. "People are always saying, 'Oh, I knew and some of them say that because of his greatness. But they didn't know him well, not like I knew him." King was comfortable in Miami, even though the town was deeply segregated, said his friends and Please see BUST, 6A If.

MM Weekend weather Partly cloudy this weekend. High today in the low to Felon's mandatory sentence thrown out Informant scheduled to be released early despite law and court rulings mid-70s. Tomorrow's high in the upper 70s. Lows both days in the low to mid-60s. Complete weather, 2A sL- 1 1 I i MIKE WARD and NANCY McVICAR Mimi Mtw Reporter A convicted felon who has become an informant in the killing of Coconut Grove builder Stanley Cohen has been rewarded for his cooperation by having his mandatory three-year prison term thrown out in apparent violation of state law and several Supreme Court edicts.

Frank Zuccarello, 23, of Hollywood, who also has cooperated in other state and federal probes, was excused from serving the mandatory term for a home-invasion robbery by Acting Dade Circuit Judge Richard Margolius, based on a recommendation by Assistant Dade State Attorney John Kastrenakes. Assistant Attorney General Carolyn Snurkowski said a mandatory sentence cannot be waived after a conviction. But, she added, there is a If the judge, prosecutor and defense attorney agree to a waiver, who is going to stop it even if it's against the law? Richard Shiffrin, chief legal adviser in the Dade State Attorney's Office, researched trie matter and acknowledged that "there is no explicit authorization for us to do it. We have just deemed it part of our discretion when deciding how to handU- a case." Asked how the state could void a mandatory sentence, Zuccarello's attorney, Bruce Raticoff. said, "They wave a wand and it disappears.

Clearly, the state has that discretion." Not so, said the former state senntor who wrote the law. "The law says if you use a gun to commit a crime, you're going away for three years," said Jim Glisson of Eustis, sponsor of the 1975 law. "There's no other way to read it." Several Florida Supreme Court decisions endorsed that intent. In a 1980 case in which a judge decided not to impose the mandatory sentence, the high court said he erred. "This area is a matter of legislative prerogative and is nondiscretionary," the court wrote.

In a 1985 decision, the court said the purpose of the law "is to ensure that (the) defendant will serve at least three years of his sentence, whatever its length, before being considered for parole." Zuccarello. who could have drawn a life sentence for his crimes, was transferred Wednesday to an Please see SENTENCE. 8A 4 Classified ID Movies 10A Comics Tab Racing Green 6B Deaths 4A Religion 4A FditnriaU 12A SDOftS 1B Horoscope Tab Travel 1C Miami History 4C TV-Radio Magazine.