Migrant Workers Call Somis Ranch a Prison : Labor: State and federal officials are investigating allegations of imprisonment and exploitation.

State and federal agencies are investigating claims that the operator of a Somis flower ranch has imprisoned Mexican laborers behind barbed-wire fences in a labor system described as a mix between military boot camp and medieval serfdom.

The workers, some recruited from Mexican Indian villages so rural that not even Spanish is spoken there, received about $1 an hour while routinely toiling 16 hours a day, they said in interviews with The Times.

The laborers said they were forbidden to leave the walled, 50-acre compound on Somis Road--where two locked gates guard the only entrance--until hundreds of dollars in debts owed to a smuggler were deducted from their earnings.

While kept inside the compound, the workers said, they were forced to shop exclusively at a company store and charged exorbitant prices for food and sundries.

Once the debts were paid, usually within two months, the workers said, they still were ordered not to leave the compound or they would be fired and immigration agents alerted.

“It was slave labor,” said 49-year-old Fernando Maldonado. He said he worked at the ranch for three weeks in November before escaping under a seven-foot fence and through a deep ravine that borders the ranch on three sides.

“We could not leave,” he said. “We realized we had entered the mouth of the wolf.”

The U.S. Border Patrol and state and federal labor agencies are investigating the charges against Griffith-Ives Co., which is owned by Edwin M. Ives of Los Angeles, for possible violations of wage, labor and immigration laws, spokesmen said.

The probes center on a labor system described by the workers’ attorneys as highly structured, modern-day serfdom, where virtually every minute of the laborers’ day was controlled by employers and where earnings were deducted by the company to pay for the necessities of life.

“They controlled these people through a regimen of psychological abuse and terror. And it worked perfectly,” said Marco Antonio Abarca, of California Rural Legal Assistance in Oxnard.

“You shave their heads when they arrive, then you work them all the time,” the lawyer said. “You don’t let them sleep. They’re too tired to eat. You scream at them constantly. You hit a person here and there. Then you scare them with stories of how they will be picked up by immigration.”

According to their lawyers, the workers were illegally brought into the United States by a border smuggler who maintained homes in Tijuana and Oxnard and worked directly with Griffith-Ives. The coyote charged about $450 for transportation and documents, they said.

Griffith-Ives, which grows and dyes ornamental leaves and flowers at ranches in Moorpark and Somis, was investigated by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division four times previously from 1979 to 1985, department spokesman Ned Sullivan said. He would not discuss the results of those inquiries.

“In light of the importance of the open case, I will release nothing,” he said.

A spokesman for the U.S. Border Patrol, Alan Dwelley, said agents twice have arrested undocumented Griffith-Ives workers while they were assigned to duties outside the compound. Fourteen were arrested in 1984 and six last December, he said.

“That’s the only significant contact we’ve had,” he said. “That compound is really inaccessible.”

State Deputy Labor Commissioner Tom O’Brien, who is ending a three-month probe of Griffith-Ives, has concluded that the company owes a total of about $160,000 in back wages. California Rural Legal Assistance lawyers said they plan to claim in a lawsuit that $161,507 in back wages are due the 20 workers they represent.

O’Brien, a 15-year labor investigator, said he has never heard allegations before about migrant workers being held captive by an employer. “Conditions have been deplorable generally in agriculture,” he said, “but this is something new.”

Representatives of the state labor commissioner on Thursday presented their findings to the Ventura County district attorney’s office for possible criminal prosecution of labor code violations.

After the meeting, Deputy Dist. Atty. Gregory W. Brose said: “Our office is going to review the information from that agency and coordinate with federal agencies before making a determination on what action we should take, if any.”

Ranch owner Ives was convicted of seven misdemeanor crimes involving building, safety and zoning violations after a major fire at the Somis compound in November, 1987, court records show. He paid fines and penalties of about $5,000 and was sentenced to two years probation. Several of the more than 30 buildings on the property still are not up to code, county inspectors said last week.

Somis ranch manager Pedro Pinzon said Ives is in Europe and unavailable for comment. Phone calls to Ives at the ranch and at his home in Los Angeles were not returned. Pinzon and a real estate agent who said he is attempting to sell the Somis ranch for $2.5 million both referred questions to attorney Stephen Gordon.

Gordon told The Times Friday that he had no comment on the allegations.

According to Abarca and Lee Pliscou, attorneys for the California Rural Legal Assistance office, the Griffith-Ives labor system has been effective because the company has recruited only employees who knew little about working conditions in the United States.

Both the lawyers and former Griffith-Ives workers said many of the laborers came from Indian villages in the rural southeastern Mexican state of Oaxaca.

“Mr. Ives, the boss, he didn’t want people from Mexico City, they’d talk too much,” laborer Juan Carlos Aguilar Valencia said in an interview. “He wanted the Oaxaquenos. They didn’t even know they needed green cards.”

Worker Maldonado said, “The Oaxaquenos were like burros. They just worked. They were the most passive.”

Abarca and Pliscou said they represent laborers whose ages range from 18 to 58 and who worked at the compound from 10 days to 20 months during a period of almost three years between February, 1987, and December, 1989.

The lawyers said they have been told by current workers at the ranch that conditions have improved since December, when about 60 undocumented workers allegedly were fired en masse and state and federal investigations were started.

Until recently, however, the laborers’ typical workday at Griffith-Ives had begun at 3:30 a.m. and ended at 8 p.m., they said in interviews. They allegedly were forbidden from drinking water or using restrooms except at morning and noon breaks. There was no break during an afternoon work period that usually lasted seven hours, they said.

Workers who violated the rules would be insulted and sometimes pinched on the arm or struck on the back with an open hand by a foreman known to the workers as “Ronnie,” they told The Times.

The workers said they were promised “good money,” $500 to $700 every two weeks. They received as little as $100 every other week, after deductions, for nearly 200 hours of work, they said.

They were never sure, the workers said, how much they were earning because company foremen insisted on punching their time cards for them and cashing their checks for a $2 fee.

They did know, they said, that they were charged $40 every two weeks to live in filthy wooden barracks and to use feces-strewn restrooms. Other deductions included $2 for cleaning and $2 for videotape rentals whether they watched them or not, the workers said.

Additionally, the workers were charged for their blankets, sheets and pillows. They even had to pay for toilet paper and for the tools they used on the job, they said.

Food purchased from a tiny company store open once every two weeks was overpriced, the workers said: $4.50 for a gallon of milk, $3.50 for a six-pack of soda and $1.50 for a pack of tortillas that costs 59 cents in supermarkets.

“We would say, ‘This is very expensive,’ and they would say, ‘Don’t buy it. Don’t eat,’ ” Valencia said.

Worker Juan Mendez Cruz, 33, said he sent money home to Mexico three times during 8 1/2 months at the ranch and was charged $40 each time by a ranch foreman. “I said, ‘That’s too much money,’ and he said, ‘I’m charging for my time. If you don’t like it, take a cab.’ ”

Upon arrival at the ranch, the workers were given a set of 53 rules, they said. The rules, translated into English by the California Rural Legal Assistance office, declare that “workers should take water before starting work.” They prohibit picture taking, use of alcohol and the playing of radios during work hours.

“Visits from friends, families or children are not permitted unless prior permission is obtained from manager,” declares Rule No. 30.

Rule No. 43 states: “Our company is an agricultural operation that functions on the principles of collective work. For example: all the workers eat together and work together to complete the daily work. We start work together and we finish together. No one will receive special treatment.”

Workers are admonished “not to buy too many clothes, not more than needed for work . . . “

The rules conclude with a declaration that must be signed by each worker. It states that the laborer understands that “all work is considered piecework” and that it is the worker’s responsibility to “immediately stop working” if he determines that he is earning less than the minimum legal wage. But the state minimum wage of $4.25 an hour is not listed on the document.

The workers said they never knew how much they were making or what the minimum wage is. “We didn’t know what was going on with the hours,” Valencia said. “They said, ‘This is what you worked and this is what you get.’ ”

Pliscou and Abarca said some wage statements obtained from Griffith-Ives reflect workdays of three to six hours, when the workers themselves maintain that they were on the job for 16 hours.

While on the job, some workers thought that their earnings were too low. But many others did not and never protested or attempted to leave, Pliscou said.

“Imagine yourself going to a foreign country where you don’t speak the language, and you are told you are earning good pay. What rights would you think you had?” he said.

The Griffith-Ives system began to unravel almost by accident in November, Abarca said. That was when two young workers, Armando Dominguez and Ricardo Portilla, said they had escaped from the compound in response to being locked in a room for several hours as punishment for being late for work.

The two men were brought by a field laborer to the Mexican Consulate in Oxnard, Consul Zoila Arroyo de Rodriguez said.

“They said they worked from 3 o’clock in the morning until 8 o’clock at night and were not allowed to leave this place. I believed them,” Arroyo said. She took them to California Rural Legal Assistance.

A few days later, the two workers dug under a ranch fence at night and rescued Maldonado and his 18-year-old son, they said.

In mid-December, 15 other workers now represented by rural legal assistance lawyers were fired because Griffith-Ives feared a raid by immigration, the workers said.

Agents had picked up six workers who were clearing weeds in front of the compound, so the ranch moved about 60 undocumented workers to Moorpark for three days, then dropped them off in Oxnard after offering to buy them bus tickets to the border, several workers said.

Most workers took the offer. But the more sophisticated ones from Mexico City did not. And they soon heard about Rural Legal Assistance’s interest in Griffith-Ives, they said.

Current investigations involve charges first told to county officials in 1987 and that have been rumored in tiny Somis almost since Ives bought an orange orchard there in 1979 and began to transform it into a walled compound.

A rancher described the allegations in detail in an interview and said they have been discussed often at a community cafe. “You’d see workers go in there, but you’d never see them come out to buy groceries or anything,” he said.

For a couple of years, dozens of workers would emerge from the compound to cash checks, buy groceries and socialize. But that stopped suddenly about six or seven years ago, a Somis merchant said.

Sheldon Klain, the county’s senior code enforcement officer, said that when he responded to the three-alarm fire at the ranch in 1987, he was told by firefighters about workers’ allegations that Griffith-Ives was importing undocumented workers and keeping them locked within the compound. But the charges would have been hard to prove “because a lot of illegals are not going to talk,” Klain said.

Fire Capt. Richard Dorn, who also was at the 1987 fire, said he was struck by what he found behind the locked gates.

“It was unbelievable the amount of people living in tight quarters like that and locked up in a compound,” he said, estimating the number at perhaps 60.

“It was a very interesting compound with double barbed-wire fences,” Dorn said. “It didn’t give the image of what you expect of a nursery or a commercial business.

“And the minute we went from being firefighters to looking at codes,” Ives said, “ ‘the fire is over, get out of here.’ ”

Times staff writer Tracey Kaplan contributed to this story.