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By Frank J. Prial Nov. 22, 1983

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On Aug. 15, 1979, Antonio Langdon was making repairs at his mother’s home, three miles from St. George’s, Grenada. His 5-year-old daughter, Shauna, was playing at his feet.

Almost casually, as he recalls it, a car stopped and two men got out. ”Come along,” one said, ”the boss wants to ask you a few questions.”

”Who is your boss?” Mr. Langdon asked.

”Listen,” said one of the two men. ”This is not the Gairy time anymore. We don’t have to tell you anything.” The reference was to Sir Eric Gairy, the former Prime Minister.

According to Mr. Langdon, he was thrown to the ground, kicked, handcuffed and shoved into the back seat of the car. He would not see the house or his daughter for four years – until American troops invaded Grenada last month.

Mr. Langdon, a resident of Brooklyn, said he had briefly returned to Grenada only to take over the house that he inherited after his mother’s death.

Mr. Langdon was arrested six months after Prime Minister Maurice Bishop installed a Marxist Government on the island. Last month, Mr. Bishop was deposed and slain along with several of his Cabinet ministers, and this led to the American invasion. First to Tell of Experiences

It was known that Mr. Bishop had kept political opponents in prison. Mr. Langdon is one of the first of these to discuss his ordeal.

Mr. Langdon said he had been active in Grenadian groups in New York but had had no political connections either with Mr. Bishop’s Government or the preceding Government of Sir Eric Gairy. There were Grenadian exile groups in the United States that opposed Mr. Bishop. Some exiles continued to support Sir Eric.

”I was a political prisoner who had never been involved in politics,” Mr. Langdon said Saturday in an interview at his brother’s home in Orange, N.J.

For more than a year, Mr. Langdon said, he was not even sure that he was a political prisoner.

”Eventually,” he said, ”I learned that I was in preventive custody and that I had been accused of making remarks critical of the Grenadian revolution. I was supposed to have made the remarks in Brooklyn.”

Mr. Langdon, 40 years old, who is known as Clem, was born in Grenada and was brought to New York as a child. He made occasional trips back on his Grenadian passport, but his home was in Brooklyn, where he was operating a men’s clothing store at the time of his arrest in 1979. Accused of Opposing Revolution

Mr. Langdon said his captors were convinced that he was actively opposed to the revolution, as they called it.

”They kept asking me why I had returned to the island,” he said. ”When I insisted it was only to take over the house my mother had left me, I was beaten and tortured.”

Initially, Mr. Langdon said, he was kept with some 300 other political prisoners at Richmond Hill Prison, a large installation on a hillside overlooking St. George’s and its harbor.

According to a source familiar with the plight of the political detainees at Richmond Hill, Mr. Langdon was never a docile prisoner. Mr. Langdon was viewed as an American by a strongly anti-American government, the source said, but he nevertheless went on hunger strikes, refused to work and constantly demanded to be told the charges against him. His conduct drew the ire of not only the prison officials but the leaders of the Bishop Government, the source said.

Mr. Langdon said that on several occasions when he refused to work or to eat to protest his imprisonment, he was sent to a forced labor camp at Hopeville, near the north end of Grenada. ‘Mostly Agricultural Work’

”We did mostly agricultural work there,” he said, ”but the days were long and people got sick. When they were accused of not working, they were beaten and forced to carry armfuls of bricks.”

He said that in the days just before the American forces arrived in October, the labor camp was used as a holding pen for members of Mr. Bishop’s private security force. ”They were rounded up when Bishop was killed and put in Hopeville,” Mr. Langdon said.

There were never more than about 300 prisoners at Richmond Hill, Mr. Langdon said, but the turnover was frequent. ”Most people were arrested for about a nine-month term,” he said. ”They would let out about 100 and another 100 would come in.”

He estimated that during the four and a half years of the Bishop Government, as many as 6,000 Grenadians were detained one time or another as political dissidents. Shot 3 Times

On May 7, 1980, while protesting his detainment by conducting a hunger strike, Mr. Langdon said he was shot at close range by a prison official and was thought to have been killed. Opening his shirt and displaying deep scars on his left side and chest, Mr. Langdon said he had been shot at least three times with an AK-47 automatic rifle.

”They were putting me into the prison morgue,” Mr. Langdon said, ”when I began to cough up blood and they realized I was alive.” In the next few months, he said, he hovered between life and death on several occasions. ”The doctors recommended that I be transferred to a hospital on Barbados to have my lungs drained,” he said, ”but Maurice Bishop personally intervened and said I must not be allowed to leave the island.”

In all, Mr. Langdon said, he spent almost two years of his imprisonment in Grenada’s General Hospital, most of it as a result of the shooting. ”The doctors and technicans were all Cubans,” he said, ”and there was usually a Cuban on hand when you were tortured. We were told they were neurologists.”

Mr. Langdon said he was often beaten, but was occasionally tortured. In one session, he said, he was chained to a floor, face down, while guards under the supervision of a Cuban woman supposed to be a neurologist inserted long steel wires into his shoulders and back.

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