Perot Tells Of Death Threat -- `Mafia-Like' Pro-Nafta Group Is Responsible, He Says

WASHINGTON - Ross Perot said yesterday that he has been targeted for assassination by a "Mafia-like" group working to pass the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Speaking to 3,000 people cheering his anti-NAFTA message at a rally in Tampa, Perot said the FBI had relayed information that the unidentified pro-NAFTA organization had recruited six Cubans to kill him - possibly at the rally or during his scheduled debate here tomorrow night with Vice President Al Gore.

Justice Department spokesman Carl Stern confirmed the death threat but not its legitimacy.

Stern said authorities in Albuquerque, N.M., got a tip that a man heard about the plot while in a Mexican prison.

The tip was passed on to the Los Angeles FBI office, then to Tampa authorities and the Secret Service because of the debate with Gore.

Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen refused to comment on the legitimacy of the tip, but said, "That's been turned over to law-enforcement agencies, and obviously Treasury enforcement officials also will be looking into it." Secret Service is a branch of Treasury.

Perot said a Tampa police officer had handed him a note yesterday morning from the FBI describing the plot. The assassination attempt "would take place in Tampa or at the debate in Washington. . . . The organization is a Mafia-like group in favor of the North American Free Trade Agreement," he said.

"I am willing to stand up here like a clay pigeon, if you will write your congressman," Perot told the rally, which ended without incident. "Let him know you don't want NAFTA. I'm not worried about these dudes getting their acts together and doing something to me."

Tampa police Capt. B.K. Winton said an FBI agent reported "two death threats" against Perot.

A federal law-enforcement official said the Los Angeles FBI office had received a call Saturday night from an Albuquerque "tip line" about the alleged plot.

An anonymous caller to the tip line reported that he was with a man who spoke no English and who claimed to have just gotten out of a Mexican prison where he had heard of a Cuban plot, the official said.

Over the years, Perot, who received 19 percent of the vote in last year's presidential election, has claimed he was the target of death plots by North Vietnamese communists upset about his efforts to free American prisoners of war, Black Panthers and Texas drug dealers.

Last year, he asserted during an interview on CBS' "60 Minutes" that he aborted his initial exploratory presidential campaign because he learned that a Republican "dirty tricks" squad had wiretapped his Dallas office and was planning to disrupt his daughter's wedding and smear her with a faked photograph.

No evidence to support Perot's assertions ever surfaced, and they were vehemently denied by Republican campaign officials. Perot later acknowledged that some of his information came from a former California police officer described by federal law-enforcement sources as a publicity-seeking hoaxer upon whom Perot occasionally has relied for tips about the fate of Americans who were missing in action during the Vietnam War.