The Miami Herald from Miami, Florida • 14

2B The Miami Herald Monday July 7 1986 F-2 A weekly follow-up on the news Family and Bicentennial baby continue pursuit of happiness By TINA MONTALVO Herald Staff Writer July 4 1976 was a day to bury hermetically sealed time capsules preserving for posterity all manner of mementos from a $15 million budget to a sugar cookie It was a time to dedicate parks and hang murals a time for Freedom Trains tall ships and the musical extravaganza Gerald Delisfort with his wife MARC SEROTA Miami Herald Mireille and 10-year-old daughter Natacha The spectacle that was Dade Bicentennial celebration paled in the light of Lady torch this past weekend But for one Dade family the memories of that Fourth of July are as fresh and clear as the smile on a young face was a great Haitian-born Gerald Delisfort remembers He and 7200 other immigrants packed into the Miami Beach Convention Center that afternoon took the oath of allegiance and left as United States citizens Twelve hours later at 3 am July 5 wife Mireille gave birth to an eight-pound seven-ounce girl they named Natacha In a front-page newspaper story Natacha was welcomed as first baby of the third century This Fourth of July Natacha saw the fireworks over Miami Beach looked forward to a birthday cake in any flavor long as not and watched the Statue of Liberty festivities on TV She is tall for her age and slim nearly five feet 85 pounds and shy with strangers She plays Chinese checkers likes math spelling and movies In August she begins fifth grade at St School probably be a she said want to help Her father is proud growing up now going to Catholic school doing great getting good grades She always gets good Life has been steady for the Delisforts The family still lives in the three-bedroom house the couple bought in 1969 after leaving Port-au-Prince for the promise of a better life in Miami And Gerald 40 has the same job he took soon after his arrival working in the shipping department of a Fort Lauderdale steel company He and Mireille a deputy court clerk consider the growth and successes of their children before Natacha came Gerald now 13 and Muriel 12 the highlights of their marriage Even the fall of Baby Doc regime in Haiti earlier this year takes second billing to the security though they were glad to see it 30 years of hardship I think good Delisfort said country gets free Said Mireille: still missing Haiti Life here is a lot harder a big difference and the kids are raised up totally different You're at work when at home we have a house here and we have family Delisfort think twice when asked how life has most changed since that great day in 1976 The answer: son Michael six months old 10 years having a baby in the house a great thing Then he echoes the words he had for his daughter a decade before set down in the newspaper article his wife keeps in a drawer reserved for the family treasures the report cards the school awards the miniature mortarboards worn to kindergarten graduations hope he becomes great I want him to learn to get a college degree I want him to be The Delisforts admire newborn Natacha in 1976 Miami assignment is a coveted job new chief says AAARC SEROTA Miami Herald Businessman Ramiro Chong characterizes South Chinese-Americans as preferring to keep a profile in the low profile shattered by a series of crimes the danger that everyone faces in law Wells at 48 is a silver-haired man who is every bit the administrator He chooses his words carefully On key investigations: cannot discuss any ongoing On expected cuts in the budget brought on by passage of the Gramm-Rudman Act: FBI will perform its investigations with the revenues Congress On steamy summer heat: "Everybody forgets how hot it can get in Wells knows it well Since 1984 he served as a deputy assistant director of the headquarters in Washington From 1982 to 1984 he was one of four special agents in charge of the 800-person New York office where he was responsible for administration Before that Wells served as assistant special agent in charge in the Los Angeles office where he headed a number of organized crime and white collar investigations The most well known BriLab ended in the conviction of Carlos Marcello the top boss in New Orleans Agents say heard more of investigations than his administrative abilities supposed to be very good on white-collar cases and said an agent who declined to be named heard he has a good investigative Wells who earned his degree from Northeastern State College in Oklahoma and a degree in personnel management from Pepperdine University says anxious to return to investigations In Miami he says that return will come quickly is no such thing as a routine investigation down he said WELLS from IB offjces that stretch from Key West to the Treasure Coast will entail more than even he expected "The caliber of active investigations in South Florida is most he said I came here knowing it was Wells promises there will be little change in the priorities in South Florida He agrees with the way his predecessor Joseph Corless ran the office ran the agents and ran investigations He also agrees with plan to combine the Miami and Fort Lauderdale offices in a new building at the Golden Glades interchange The move is expected in about a year As a ranking FBI administrator Wells is required to assign agents to crimes the bureau has given national priority: organized crime (including drug trafficking) white-collar crime foreign counter-intelligence and anti-terrorist activity As a special agent in charge he has the latitude to apply agents to South Florida crimes he deems important is clearly an emphasis on Wells said will continue to But that emphasis make balancing other investigations any easier have never seen a field division in my experience that has so much activity in each of our he said is difficult to prioritize because of the amount of that That activity can turn deadly a potential made real with explosive force April 11 when two FBI agents were shot dead and five others wounded during a Kendall shootout with two bank robbery suspects been a pulling-together process" he said just brought home to our people that every investigation is so important and Broward fire routs Dozens of elderly residents scrambled down stairs Sunday after smoke from a third-floor kitchen fire spread through their 16-story apartment tower in Fort Lauderdale Two residents and a security guard were treated at North Beach Medical Center for smoke inhala in sea Exchange program ending By PAUL SALTZMAN Herald Staff Writer An international exchange program that brought the people of Hollywood and San Salvador together is dead the victim of El continuing war For 24 years residents of each of the two cities would travel once a year to visit their counterparts abroad in a to program first suggested by President Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s Through the Hollywood-San Salvador People-to-People Committee Salvadoran students got scholarships to study English refugees of the Central American civil war got food and orphan children received clothing Eisenhower said this was a good way that Americans could get to know people from other countries better and they could get to know Americans Horst Grabs who had been part of the program from the beginning said Sunday made friends Those people that we met just like brothers and sisters to us all it was really going we had a couple of hundred said Grabs 64 retired manager of the St Vincent dePaul thrift store in Hollywood go down to El Salvador every year with a big group of about 70" Hollywood officials had chosen San Salvador the capital city of El Salvador as their sister city in the program after traveling throughout Central America in 1962 Salvador is a very beautiful city and we liked El Salvador because very ambitious recalled Kay Demmerle 83 a retired Hollywood real estate business owner and the last president of the Hollywood organization When the war began in El Salvador 6 2 years ago the visits to San Salvador stopped because of the fear of violence interest kind of cooled down without the personal Demmerle said With the membership down to 10 it has disbanded The members have donated the last of their money just less than $6000 for needy children in Hollywood through a YMCA summer camp and in El Salvador FHP works TICKETS from IB aircraft is virtually nonexistent since a stopwatch clocks the suspect car entering and exiting a predetermined quarter-mile Bernosky explained The stretches are usually marked by horizontal white lines every quarter mile While flying between 1500 to 1700 feet over the highway the pilot observes the suspect speeder and ground units are told of any excessive speed based on a precalculated chart the description and color eyesight is not that good that he can calibrate someone doing 57 among cars running 55 but someone doing 60 is going to stand he said The Intensified Speed Limit Enforcement (ISLE) grant authorizes 10 hours of overtime per week per trooper between June 27 and Sept 4 bad all the time not just on holidays and not Dr Samuel Lee associate dean of the college of engineering at the University of Miami is a deacon in the church He became a while studying technical engineering at the University of California at Berkeley He holds Bible study for UM students in his home His wife I-Ying is an assistant lab chief at Miami Hospital A son Samson has a BS from Rensselaer and is a graduate student of genetic engineering at Lehigh A younger son Stephen studies mechanical engineering at Carnegie-Mellon in Pittsburgh Professor Chang with a doctorate in accounting from the University of Texas is in charge of Sunday school teaching at the church She said her family the church and a career are the most important things in her life Her husband Weng is an engineering professor at UM Her son Richard 23 is a resident physician at Baylor Medical Center in Houston Her daughter Margaret 21 is a pre-med student at Rice They all attend the church Chinese Baptist Church satisfies our spiritual needs It has CHINESE from IB black beans Most Chinese restaurants in Dade refuse to open for Sunday lunch The reason is church attendance at the little-known Chinese Baptist Church of Miami a Southern Baptist congregation in Southwest Dade The pastor of the 300-member church is the Rev Kwong-Wah Lau a former editor of a Christian magazine in Hong Kong who came to the US 20 years ago The church began in the early 1960s under the sponsorship of the old Flagler Street Baptist Church in what is now Little Havana That congregation which no longer exists established missions for Cubans and for Chinese Both have proliferated but the Chinese have kept to themselves The 11 am church service is in Mandarin The 5 pm service is in Cantonese people are quiet They like to talk too much They only want to get along with said Lau His son Victor 23 and daughter Irma are both computer engineering graduates from the University of Florida more influence on us than anything in this said Ramiro Chong who came to Miami from Havana in 1962 His wife Nury is Colombian His daughter Litza 16 is a budding star of dance Her specialty is Spanish flamenco Another major social force for the Chinese community is the role of business groups such as the On Leong Merchants Association founded in the 1890s in New York The Miami On Leong publishes a hand-lettered Chinese-language newspaper called the Chinese Community News The On Leong at 1750 Flagler St in Miami was the scene of one of the armed robberies A group of 11 Chinese-American members was held up by four Orientals on May 10 An estimated $2800 in money and jewelry was taken at gun and knifepoint On May 27 a still unidentified Asian woman was murdered on a rocky roadside in the 9900 block of Miramar Boulevard in Miramar Her throat was slashed so badly that investigators at first thought she had been decapitated the only thing we know is that she had Oriental food within an hour before she was said Miramar detective Rick Bellrose high rise residents tion but none was seriously injured authorities said Most residents of the 338-unit Coral Ridge Towers East cooperative were simply shaken A spokesman said the 5 pm blaze may have begun with an overcooked meal or a pot left on the stove r1" Needs Second call CHURCHILL 854-3321 462-8588 ORTGAGE CORP Approval in 24 hr 267S Bayshore Or Lie Mtg Broker overtime in fast lane II Ym Gat Slopped IF YOU get pulled ever for speeding whether you feel you deserve it or not the Florida Highway Patrol recommends the following: SION FOR the ticket Your signature is not an admission of guilt it merely acknowledges that you received your copy of the ticket You still have the options of paying the fine requesting a court appearance or attending traffic school The last one wilt keep points off of your license IT DOES no good to argue Traffic court is not held by the side of the road according to the FHP what judges are for The third major incident was the armed robbery of 47 Chinese men on April 28 at the Golden Buddha Chinese Restaurant at 12395 Bis-cayne Blvd in North Miami One of the robbers an Oriental armed with a sawed-off shotgun was killed in a police shootout Two survivors both native Americans implicated Tom Ngai owner of the New York Tea House restaurant in Palm Beach County Ngai had accumulated $20000 in gambling debts and plotted the holdup to get his money back according to police In both the On Leong and North Miami incidents police suspect gambling was the purpose behind the social events The violence bothered leaders of the community who say it represents the antithesis of what they preach are a very law abiding people It is very important to us It is something we can offer society as an said deacon Lee I seatbelt law violators Different areas throughout Dade County will be targeted everyday through Labor Day utilizing the aircraft VASCAR Visual Average Speed Computer and Recorder and radar know the speed limit is 55 giving tickets to he said just filling in the just on Bernosky said think Florida has been showing an average speed in the 70s trying to get people back into the 55 mph While specifically looking for speeders troopers are also watching for drunk drivers as well as educating the public about the new seatbelt law No tickets will be issued until Jan 1 1987 for I.