In the dingiest slums of Manhattan's Harlem, a humble, $3,000-a-year fruit peddler by the name of Adolfo Camarena got word last week from the Dominican Republic's President Hector Trujillo (brother of the nation's real ruler: Strongman Rafael Leonidas Trujillo). Camarena, Trujillo announced, was to be the Dominican Republic's consul in Los Angeles, at a salary of $18,000 a year.
There was method in the Strongman's apparent whimsy. An exile from his island country since 1937, Adolfo Camarena, 44, had long been a leader of the feverish, ineffectual group of New York Dominicans who unendingly plot Trujillo's overthrow. The dictator's courts...