Security Guard Watches Out for Farm Workers : Growers Hire Private Officer to Patrol Camps in North County Fields

It’s after midnight under a moonless sky and George Hruby, armed with a handgun and wearing all black, is confidently--almost cockily--maneuvering along a narrow trail that cuts through brush and rocks.

He reaches a hilltop that affords a millionaire’s nighttime view of Del Mar to the west and Rancho Penasquitos to the east.

Hruby stops and turns on his flashlight for the first time. The beam illuminates a small tent constructed of plastic sheeting and tomato stakes. He drops the light onto the face of a middle-aged man, exhausted from a day in the fields, sleeping like a baby inside the open-flapped tent. The light doesn’t wake him.

There’s the awkward sense of standing undetected in someone’s bedroom.

A few feet away--but it’s too dark to tell where--someone else stirs, awakened by the light that appeared out of nowhere.

“ Rancho policia ,” Hruby says, announcing himself. There are a few moments of subdued but friendly banter before Hruby turns off his flashlight and disappears into the darkness, setting off for another village of hooches on this strange foot patrol of his.

The worker goes back to sleep.

But the next day there’s bound to be some mention in the fields of how, early in the morning, the ranch cop appeared out of the darkness to check on things.

Some private security officers walk up and down shopping malls, on the watch for shoplifters and troublesome teen-agers. Others shake doors in business and retail districts. Some drive through industrial parks and flood the loading ramps and trash dumpsters with their spotlights.

Then there’s George Hruby.

His beat is North County’s agriculture fields and its subculture of migrant workers living in squalor.

He is hired by the growers to patrol hidden villages of hooches and spider holes where thousands of people set up primitive housekeeping.

These villages are on private property and are not patrolled by regular law officers. At times robbers, thugs and rapists, pimps and beer sellers are like so many wolves stalking around the chicken coop; the workers are more often innocent victims of crime, not instigators of it.

When it occurs--a worker being robbed at gunpoint on payday, a woman being raped, a man being sliced open with a machete--the crime often goes unreported to law enforcement agencies, police say. Undocumented workers are hesitant to report crime to police for fear they will end up being deported.

When a crime is reported, it draws attention to the problems surrounding migrant workers and focuses unfavorable publicity on the growers who hire them. And it draws attention to the area’s worst-kept secret: whole communities of illegal aliens working for and being paid by American agribusiness, all the while trying to escape the dragnet of the Border Patrol and Immigration and Naturalization Service.

It’s not against the law for a grower to hire undocumented workers; a grower is not required to query a man about his citizenship. And it is in the grower’s best interests to keep a protective eye on those employees who work and live on his property.

So, while it may seem incongruous, it’s becoming more common in the fields and hillsides of San Diego County: Frustrated immigration authorities are trying to snare illegal aliens while growers are spending thousands of dollars a year to help protect those same workers from crime.

George Hruby is 28, a former Marine Corps infantryman and military police officer who was hired a couple of years ago by a grower to help keep things copacetic among the migrant workers in his fields.

One thing led to another, and this summer Hruby formed Ranch-Industrial Patrol Co., or Ripco. His is one of four or five security companies along the North County coast that offer security patrols in agricultural fields.

Typically, the security officers drive down the wide trails of North County farms in marked vehicles, spraying the fields with their spotlights.

Hruby uses a different approach. He says his brash tactics, like walking around in the dark among the sleeping villages, have reduced the amount of crime significantly in the fields of North County. If police statistics don’t back him up, because much of that crime was not reported in the first place, police say there is probably validity to what he says.

But they question his method.

“His tactics are wrong, from the basis of his own personal safety,” says Carlsbad Detective Richard Castaneda, who has worked with the problem of migrant workers for years and knows of the dangers lurking in the hills and fields.

“There are certain areas you just don’t go--especially at night,” Castaneda said. “There are smugglers (of illegal aliens) back there, and a lot of people who are armed just in self-defense--people who might want to take a shot at you if they don’t know who you are. I wouldn’t go where Hruby goes, and I’m a cop.”

Sgt. Leon Tipton of the San Diego Police Department describes Hruby’s work as “preventive maintenance by heading off problems before they occur. And that saves us a lot of problems.” But he says he wouldn’t imitate Hruby’s tactics.

“I wouldn’t want to go out where he goes, with just one other partner, and walk in those canyon hooch areas,” Tipton said. “You’re a long way from help. I’m a little too old for that. He can have the job, as far as I’m concerned.”

Hruby says:

“We’re not running a paramilitary or a vigilante operation. This is a security operation; we’re here to deter crime before it happens. We’re not the INS, trying to get rid of everybody, nor are we the police trying to enforce laws.

“We’re just helping the landowner control what goes on on his property. When something happens on his land, it creates a problem for him, politically and with the community. So we’re here to try to keep things quiet.”

Keeping things quiet includes enforcing the growers’ “house rules,” including a prohibition on beer and prostitutes on their land, Hruby says.

“I tell my clients that if they want to reduce problems on their land, the first thing they’ve got to do is cut out the beer,” he said. “If there’s beer, they (the workers) will get drunk. One thing will lead to another and they’ll end up fighting and hurting each other. That’s not in the best interest of the grower.”

Prostitutes are a problem, too, because of the accompanying bandits who will make their hits while the men are occupied.

So Hruby’s job is pretty straightfoward: When he sees beer, he confiscates it and reports the drinkers’ names to the grower the next morning for whatever action he wants to take. If he sees prostitutes, he will shoo them off the property. If he catches someone selling cases of beer or smuggling weapons, he will turn them over to police.

If he comes across a new face and the stranger can’t produce evidence--like a pay stub--that he works for the grower, he will be allowed to live on the property for a couple of days to try to get work, then asked to leave if he’s unsuccessful.

Hruby says his system is paying off. Where he once found cases of beer he now finds an occasional six-pack.

He has developed his own network of informants, gathering information on smugglers and burglars, which he turns over to police.

“He passes information to us that we otherwise wouldn’t get, because the aliens would never talk to us because they’re afraid of us and they know we’d turn them over to the Border Patrol,” Tipton said. “But since Hruby’s out there looking out for their welfare, the workers trust him. They’ll talk to him.”

Indeed, it’s not unusual for Hruby and his partner for the evening to be invited to a dinner of tortillas and spicy chicken soup. Hruby usually accepts the offer.

“It’s better around here now that he’s here,” said Salvadore Bustos, a migrant worker living in a labor camp in Fallbrook where Hruby also patrols. Beer drinking is banned on the premises, but until Hruby began his patrols, late-night drinking among some of the workers went unchecked, making life miserable for the others.

“Now it’s more tranquil around here,” Bustos said. “Now we can get some sleep.”

Hruby recognizes that, with just a couple of part-time security officers to help him patrol more than 25 square miles of fields and canyons, the challenge of appearing omnipresent is not unlike playing with mirrors.

At night he will drive his four-wheel-drive, black Ford Bronco without lights and position himself on a key ridge to view the hooch villages with the aid of a night-vision scope--the same kind used by the Border Patrol and military.

If nothing unusual is occurring--no prostitutes working the villages or men lugging cases of beer--he will then turn on his car lights for a few moments, to let his presence be known, then turn them off again. He’ll drive to another hillside, turn the lights on again, and then off again. Here, then there, then over there, and the message is soon clear to anyone who is up to no good: Hruby is out there, driving around.

Sometimes he’ll rent a helicopter and fly low over the villages during the day.

Sometimes he’ll hire extra help just for the evening, as a show of force.

And there are the foot patrols from one set of hooches to another.

“It’s a cat-and-mouse game out here,” he says. “You want them to wonder where you’re going to be any given night, and make them think there are more of you than there are.”

Sometimes, Hruby will patrol during the day, when the workers are off in the fields. He’ll inspect the living quarters, and if he finds signs of ammunition but no weapon, he’ll come back at 3 or 4 the next morning and take the weapon by confronting the suspect while he’s asleep.

Hruby has confiscated rifles, pistols, machetes, brass knuckles and knives.

He doesn’t concern himself too much with the question of civil rights--of denying men their beer, or of searching their living quarters without their permission.

“I’m more worried about violence than I am about their rights,” he said. “We can worry about their rights later.”

Most growers along the coast do not hire private security companies to patrol their fields, Detective Castaneda said.

“They say it (violence among the workers) is not their problem. But I tell them that when we have to involve ourselves on their ranches, it becomes their problem,” he said. “I tell them they had better straighten out their people or we’ll come aboard and put a stop to it ourselves.”

So more growers are considering hiring private security companies.

“These are hard workers, and it’s in our best interests to help protect them from” Mexican gang members, said one North County grower who asked that he not be named.

“These people are foreigners in a strange country. That’s scary enough for them. Then you’ve got people who are trying to take advantage of them, or take their money. We feel it’s our duty to protect them, as well as keep unwanted elements from entering our property.

“We want to keep an eye out for our employees. That makes them come back to us, year after year, and be loyal to us.”

Other growers--and other security companies--refused to discuss the matter at all.

“The immigration problem gets enough bad publicity as it is. It’s everyone’s position that the less said about it and written about it the better. We’ll try to take care of the problem ourselves,” one grower said.

“The fact that we’re hiring private security companies could give the impression that we’ve got lots of trouble out here, like it’s a Dodge City. We don’t want to give that message.”

Sheriff’s Sgt. Manny Castillo says there is another role for security companies, one that public law enforcement agencies can’t offer.

“A security officer can go out into a field and selectively tell some people to leave while letting other ones stay behind,” Castillo said. “We can’t. If we’re called out on private property because of trespassers, we can’t be selective. In our mind, they all are trespassers. We can’t say, ‘OK, you’ve got to go, but you can stay.’ Private security can do that.”

For the most part, the workers--at least, those with nothing to hide from Hruby--seem to welcome the security.

“Since he’s been around there’s been no drinking, no gambling, no girls. And that’s just fine with the older guys,” said Felipe Rivera, who manages the kitchen operation at a migrant workers labor camp in Fallbrook.

Pascual Jimenez, manager of the United Farm Workers office in San Ysidro, said he is concerned about Hruby and other security officers rousting migrant workers and inspecting their living quarters without provocation or notice.

But, he said, no one has complained to him about Hruby’s activities.

A Border Patrol spokesman said he had no strong feelings about security officers patrolling the hills on behalf of illegal aliens.

“What private landowners do for security of their private property is their business,” agent Ed Pyeatt said.

“I’ve been shot at two times in two years,” Hruby said about the danger of his work. “Both times it was white people who told the police later that they thought they were shooting at aliens.

“Out here, there’s no justice system, no law enforcement, no laws. The kind of work we’re doing has got to be done. The whole issue of migrant workers is politically hot. But I’m trying to separate the politics from the reality, which is that these people have got to be protected, no matter who they are.”