Cheese Raids Over Health Peril Baffle Some in Case

Gurbial Singh was working behind the counter at a South-Central Los Angeles liquor store Tuesday night when the men in suits entered. As he tells it, one of the men pulled out a gun and ordered him not to touch the cash register.

“I’m scared,” recalled Singh, 38, a native of India who spoke broken English. “I think I’m maybe being held up.”

Singh did not feel much better when the stranger added, “I have a search warrant.” The other men, he said, began rifling through shelves, food lockers and a safe. He thought they wanted money. He was wrong. They were after cheese.

The Stop Rite where Singh works was one of seven places raided Tuesday night and Wednesday morning in what Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner described as a crackdown on the production of Mexican-style cheese and sausages under conditions so foul, “you wouldn’t allow your pet to eat the food.”

Deadly Episode

Reiner said the raid was the product of a state-federal undercover operation. He reminded reporters of the 1985 Jalisco cheese-poisoning episode, in which the deaths of 38 infants and fetuses, along with two adults, were attributed to contaminated soft, or Mexican-style, cheese.

Seized in the Tuesday night raids were 1,900 pounds of cheese, 1,300 gallons of milk, 1,750 pounds of a type of sour cream and 1,000 pounds of sausage. All the food items were to be inspected by health officials for contamination.

“They are not licensed by the state and therefore not inspected,” Deputy Dist. Atty Richard Healey said of the locations raided. “The investigators who searched them . . . described them as filthy beyond belief.”

The cheese roundup was announced Wednesday. The day after, residents and employees at the raided locations were either reluctant to talk about it or seemed mystified that they would have been singled out by law enforcement authorities.

One of the so-called cheese factories was a converted garage beside a trash-strewn alley in Watts, about six blocks east of the Watts Towers. It was being guarded by four men who claimed to be friends of a group that had manufactured cheese there for three months.

“Here, there were four illegals (from Mexico) who earned a little money by making cheese in a garage,” said one of the men who, fearing deportation, asked not to be identified by name. “They sold what they made at local markets, swap meets and by going door-to-door at homes and apartments.

“It’s not hard to make cheese if you’re from Mexico and lived on a ranch. There are people who’ve eaten it for years without a single problem.”

Woman Worried

At a modest yellow stucco house in Los Angeles, 18-year-old Carolina Ortega worried about her 28-year-old brother, Antonio, who was arrested after a 4 a.m. raid Wednesday at their home. Parked behind the house were two large, white milk trucks that she said belonged to her brother. One of them carried a personalized license plate that said “LCHERO,” a contraction of the Spanish word for milkman.

“I guess they figured he was selling milk to others who made cheese,” said Ortega, whose brother was in custody on suspicion of providing milk for the manufacture of cheese not licensed by the state. “They took a lot of milk from the trucks.”

Across town, at a South-Central home allegedly used as a warehouse for boxes, ice chests and salt used in the illegal manufacture of Mexican-style cheese, Vividiana Sanchez, 23, refused to discuss the issue. Instead, she joked, “The police said the cheese was fresh and delicious.”

At the Stop Rite liquor store, Singh said the raiders had left with 13 four-gallon buckets of sour cream. The store’s owner, Ali Hassan, said the raid was “absolutely unfair. The way they walked in here was uncivilized,” he complained.

“They took sour cream from me that I bought (legally), and I have the invoices to prove it.”

Deputy Dist. Atty. Richard Healey, however, had a different view: “We think he (Hassan) knew it (sour cream sold in the store) was used in cheese production at unlicensed plants, which is also a felony.”