Who is Al Pina?

Who is Al Pina?

By Francis X. Gilpin

Associate Editor

July 8 was a glorious day for Al Pina, a self-styled advocate for Florida's dispossessed.

Pina was finishing his second week of going without food to protest what he considers SunTrust Banks Inc.'s shortcomings as a lender in Florida neighborhoods where blacks and Hispanics tend to settle. But sustenance for his stomach and his cause was just hours away.

That morning, business columnist Robert Trigaux gave sympathetic treatment to Pina's hunger strike in the St. Petersburg Times. Later in the day, SunTrust issued a news release claiming the Atlanta bank had made more than $24 billion in loans to low- and moderate-income, minority and small business borrowers in Florida during the past five years. Furthermore, SunTrust informed the news media that it would exceed the $24 billion figure when making new loans to those groups during the next five years.

Was there a connection between Trigaux's column and what Pina views as SunTrust's capitulation? "Absolutely," says Pina.

The Tampa Tribune, Orlando Sentinel and Miami Herald all joined the Times in reporting the next day that Pina had broken his all-water fast. Herald readers even found out that Pina's first post-fast meal consisted of Jell-O and brown rice.

During the past two years, Pina, 43, of Belleair, has emerged as one of Florida's most-quoted anti-poverty activists. The hunger strike - or the threat of one - is his public-relations weapon of choice, particularly against major banks. It is a PR tactic almost guaranteed to grab the attention of media outlets sensitive to criticism that the banks marginalized ethnic and racial minorities for decades.

"A hunger strike is an act of love," says Pina, who professes admiration for the late United Farm Workers of America founder Cesar Chavez. "We don't believe in violence. We believe in systemic change through love."

That might be news to Ann Marie Nielsen, his 39-year-old former wife.

Between the summer of 2002 and the fall of 2003, Nielsen was granted three injunctions to keep Pina away from her because she feared domestic violence.

In the first of her petitions, filed in August 2002, Nielsen swore under oath that Pina "becomes enraged over minor incidents." During one tantrum, Nielsen says Pina wouldn't let her leave their apartment in Clearwater's Feather Sound community.

In a subsequent petition, Nielsen wrote: "He is often very enibriated [sic] with alcohol when he is leaving abusive messages, following me or trying to break into my apartment." Nielsen reported that Pina had harmed her household pets and threatened to kill her.

They were wed in 2001, Pina's second marriage.

Pina was jailed earlier this year before he would pay court-ordered support to Nielsen, who is working on a Ph.D. in psychology and suffers from hepatitis, a disease that can infect the liver. He declined to contest her divorce petition, which was granted by a Pinellas County judge last year.

"It's all lies and bullshit," Pina told the Gulf Coast Business Review. "I will not engage in a system that corrupts families."

His ex-wife's tales are hard to reconcile with Pina's press clips. He will only offer that certain unnamed people attempted to use his bitter parting with Nielsen to undermine his crusade for more home mortgages and business loans in Florida's poorer neighborhoods.

The well-traveled activist says the divorce is why he is sticking around here for a while.

"I'm staying in Florida and fighting," says Pina. "I'll be damned if I'll allow anybody to intimidate me. Because if they intimidate me, and I'm a leader, how is a poor family in East Tampa or West Tampa, how in the hell are they going to have any rights or have any say or have any hope?"

Reformed capitalist

Albert Robert Pina III was born in Arizona. Pina says his father was a labor union organizer in the Phoenix area. They used to debate the virtues of collective bargaining for better wages and working conditions. Pina took the side of business owners.

"Ten years ago, I was a capitalist," says Pina. "All I cared about was money. I was greedy. I was what was wrong with this country."

After a tour of duty in the U.S. Air Force, Pina says, he used his business degree from Arizona State University to land jobs at Philip Morris Cos. and PepsiCo Inc., managing distributorships and business relations in the western United States.

Then Pina got a stomach ailment that required major surgery in the mid-1990s. He moved in with his mother, who lived in a Phoenix barrio. During a three-month convalescence, Pina says he was appalled at the conditions around her home. He decided to dedicate himself to reviving inner cities.

"Now, I'm an organizer," says Pina, smiling at the memory of those arguments.

Pina says he embarked on a string of projects, from starting a Latino-owned bank in Washington, D.C., to helping Ricardo Montalban acquire an old Hollywood theater for the actor's Hispanic drama troupe.

While in Southern California, Pina became involved with the East Los Angeles Community Union. TELACU is a network of non-profit and for-profit entities founded in 1968 to provide business ownership and employment opportunities to minorities who survived the riots in Watts and other Los Angeles slums.

The organization has had its ups and downs over the years.

The U.S. Small Business Administration closed a finance subsidiary of TELACU in 1981 and seized $3.2 million in assets, citing sloppy management and self-dealing among its officers. A 1982 Los Angeles Times expose of extravagant living by TELACU executives led a judge to order the group to repay $1 million to the federal government.

TELACU reported gross receipts of $7.1 million and assets of $32.5 million in its latest annual filing with the IRS.

Pina signed on as a roving vice president for TELACU, which paid him $56,876 in 2002. That same year, after Arizona carved out a new congressional district suited for a Hispanic candidate, Pina moved to Tucson and announced his candidacy.

It was not Pina's first bid for public office. He ran unsuccessfully for Phoenix City Council as an independent in 1997. In Tucson, the former Democrat registered Republican in a heavily Democratic district. Pina liked his chances. "I was going to run against this other Hispanic who had some questionable issues regarding some of his approaches to the community," he says.

But the questions mostly dogged Pina's campaign.

Pina plunked down $50,000 of his own money for the congressional race to supplement another $20,000 he raised from individuals and groups such as the National Association of Minority Automobile Dealers. He claimed to have endorsements from Montalban and former Republican vice presidential nominee Jack Kemp.

But Pina refused to answer voter queries funneled to him and other contenders through the Arizona Daily Star newspaper. Less than two weeks before the primary election, Pina suddenly dropped out of the race.

The candidate announced his withdrawal to reporters via electronic mail. His campaign advisers at Jamestown Associates LLC claim Pina skipped out on a $26,355 consulting bill.

His campaign manager seemed taken aback by the abrupt turn of events. "He said he had a lot of family problems and could not go on," Rosa Julia Nenninger told the Star. "That's all the information we've got."

Turbulent home life

Pina was having problems back in Florida.

On Aug. 27, 2002, the day that the Star reported Pina's withdrawal, a Pima County sheriff's deputy attempted to serve him with the first of the protective orders that his wife had obtained in Clearwater. The deputy spoke with a worker cleaning out the Tucson campaign headquarters. "He stated that they had not seen Mr. Pina in weeks," the deputy wrote in a brief report.

Pina told the Review that the second half of 2002 was rough on him. "I'm going to be really, really candid here," Pina says. "There were more reasons I wanted to quit."

Ann Marie Nielsen was pregnant at the time and not feeling well. "I wanted to save the baby," says Pina.

But Pina's behavior had so upset his wife that she found it difficult to write down her account of the incidents for a judge. "Shaking too much" is scrawled on one of her court documents.

Over the course of three weeks in November 2002, Pina says, Nielsen miscarried seven months into the pregnancy and his brother was murdered in Phoenix. "It was very traumatic," he says.

Nielsen told the Review that she would prefer not to comment on her marriage to Pina beyond what is in the court record.

Pina sought pastoral counseling and accepted instruction on anger management, prompting his wife to let the first domestic-violence injunction expire. But the fury returned in 2003, court records show.

After smashing a desk, Pina destroyed other possessions in anger, his wife told the court. "He has threatened to harm my animals, and they have been harmed on two occasions and needed medical attention," she wrote.

Nielsen moved across the bay to Tampa's Davis Islands. In March 2003, however, she asked that the restraining order be canceled so that she and Pina could undergo counseling.

"Understanding of our cultural and temperamental differences has clarified much of the actions and reactions that occurred subsequent to a traumatic loss that we suffered in November of 2002," she wrote to a Pinellas judge.

Nielsen stated that she and her husband wanted to be free to decide how "we may best follow our Christian convictions concerning our marriage."

Pina relocated to Indian Rocks Beach in Pinellas and became active with the Florida State Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.

In the summer of 2003, Gov. Jeb Bush announced an economic development partnership called Access Florida between the Hispanic chamber and the Florida Black Business Investment Board. Pina was quoted as chamber chairman in a news release from the governor's office.

In a financial affidavit filed with the court, Nielsen projected that Pina would make more than $200,000 a year from Access Florida.

Around the same time, the Hispanic chamber announced that the SBA was contributing tens of millions of federal tax dollars to a fund for Latino entrepreneurs in Florida. "This is critical to creating good-paying jobs that could help a family and increase their earning and buying capacity," Pina told the Sarasota Herald-Tribune.

By the fall of 2003, though, Nielsen was determined to go through with the divorce. The counseling hadn't worked. "I realize now this was a mistake," she wrote.

Pina doesn't feel he has to address the imbroglio with Nielsen. "My personal life is my personal life," he says. When pressed, Pina blames the miscarriage, even though that tragedy took place after a domestic-violence injunction was already in place against him.

Four in five marriages cannot survive the loss of a child, Pina says. "And I can see why," he adds.

"Devil lawyer"

Ann Marie Nielsen says her decision to end the marriage angered Pina. "I am very fearful that as the court date in December comes closer or at the time that I appear in court for the dissolution that he will escalate to the point of seriously injuring me," she wrote to a judge in November 2003.

Sheriff's deputies and other officials had tried to serve papers on Pina in Manatee and Pinellas counties as well as in Arizona, before they finally caught up with him in Broward County.

A Nov. 6, 2003, e-mail from Pina warned Nielsen that he didn't recognize any court authority. "I will never respond to the laws of man only God," he wrote. "I got the papers in ft. lauderdale and like before did not read them only threw them in the waste just like the papers i was served with today."

Another Pina e-mail later in the month demonized Nielsen's lawyer, Donald L. Gilbert of Tampa.

"After your devil lawyer sends me a summons on default of court action to pay his fees (because i will not pay the devil a cent), i will then not appear on the court date of the summons and the court will issue a warrant for my arrest," wrote Pina. "After the final divorce decree i will never have contact with you again for helping the devil destroy me.

"I love God enought [sic] to take my life before i allow the devil ever to win and jail me."

Pina, who was named one of the Tribune's 25 people to watch in 2004, was right about the arrest warrant.

After the divorce became final last year, Gilbert filed for a contempt order against Pina. Gilbert accused Pina of denying Nielsen any financial assistance for three years, even though he had deposited almost $140,000 into several bank accounts between June 2001 and January 2003. Without medical insurance, Nielsen's hepatitis had worsened, her lawyer stated.

Gilbert, who no longer represents Nielsen, declined comment to the Review, through an employee in his law office.

Last September, Pinellas Circuit Judge Nancy Moate Ley ordered Pina taken into custody for failure to pay $48,107 in back support and attorney fees to Nielsen. In January, two Pinellas sheriff's detectives cornered Pina at his Belleair apartment. Pina hid in the attic for almost an hour before surrendering.

"I was scared," he told the detectives.

In February, Pina was sentenced to two days in jail after pleading no contest to a charge of resisting arrest without violence. In March, Pina consented to pay $1,500 a month in alimony to his former wife.

The split was best for Nielsen, according to some of her associates. Clearwater psychologist Timothy D. Foster, who supervised Nielsen in an internship, expressed his dismay at her situation in a letter to the court.

"I knew her prior to her relationship with Al Pina, and I have met him, had dinner with him and been in his presence on a handful of occasions," Foster wrote. "There is no doubt [in] my mind that Ann Marie's mental and physical health is worse now tha[n] before she met him. I believe her mood has been depressed and her self-esteem injured as a result of this relationship."

Clearwater acupuncture physician Carol Ann Bates, who was treating Nielsen for the hepatitis, expressed similar concerns. "A small framed woman to begin with," Bates wrote to the court in December 2003, "she has lost a record 18 pounds in the last few months due to the stress."

Activist again

In an interview last month, Pina attributed the marital problems to his outspokenness. "People in Tampa that were well-off ended up getting involved in my relationship that had no business there," he says. "I saw these people had interfered in my personal life, tried to intimidate me, legally, economically."

A self-described born-again Christian, Pina says he has taken a vow of poverty. "I live like the poor," he says. "I feel the pain and suffering of those I serve."

Pina says his failed marriage has cost him dearly. "The lawyers were getting rich," he says.

Since his incarceration, Pina has resumed his activism. By late February, the Times was reporting on Pina's "Wachovia Yes, Bank of America NO" campaign. Pina intended to conduct a hunger strike until Bank of America Corp. agreed to top an earlier $21 billion loan commitment by Wachovia Corp. to underserved Florida neighborhoods.

Upon receiving Wachovia's written pledge, Pina told the Times: "I just smiled and said, 'Thank you, this is a wonderful day for Florida.'"

Following the recent SunTrust announcement, Pina's Florida Minority Community Reinvestment Coalition is hosting a summit on revitalizing blighted areas later this month. Sponsors of the two-day event in Miami include Bank of America and Wachovia.

Pina volunteers his vision of Florida in five years. "I'd like to see five to seven mini-TELACUs," he says, referring to himself in the third person. "Then I'd like to see 10 Als out there."