Farm Workers Say They Were Enslaved : Labor: Immigrants from Mexico charge that flower ranch in Ventura County kept them captive and paid them about $1 an hour.

State and federal agencies are investigating reports that Mexican laborers were imprisoned behind walls at a Ventura County flower ranch and forced to work for sub-minimum wages.

Workers at the Griffith-Ives Co. ranch in Somis received about $1 an hour while routinely toiling 16 hours a day and were required to buy food and supplies from a company store at inflated prices, they said in interviews with The Times.

“It was slave labor,” said 49-year-old Fernando Maldonado, who said he worked at the ranch for three weeks last November before escaping under a 7-foot barbed-wire fence and fleeing at night through a deep ravine.

The laborers, many recruited from rural Mexico, said they were forbidden from leaving until hundreds of dollars in debts owed to a smuggler were deducted from their earnings. Even after the debts were paid--usually within two months, the workers said--they were ordered not to leave the compound or they would be fired and immigration agents alerted.

“We could not leave,” Maldonado 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, which is owned by Edwin M. Ives of Los Angeles, for possible violations of wage, labor and immigration laws, spokesmen said.

Pedro Pinzon, manager of the ranch, said ranch owner Ives is in Europe and unavailable for comment. Pinzon and a real estate agent who said he is attempting to sell the Somis ranch for $2.5 million referred inquiries to attorney Stephen Gordon of Woodland Hills. Gordon said he would make no comment on the allegations.

Lawyers for the workers called the camp a highly structured case of modern-day serfdom. Virtually every minute of the laborers’ day was controlled by supervisors, who used threats and physical abuse to enforce rules, they said.

“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.’ ”

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 attorneys said. The smuggler, or coyote, charged about $450 for transportation and documents, they said.

Griffith-Ives, which grows and dyes ornamental leaves and flowers at ranches in Somis and Moorpark, was investigated by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division four times between 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.

Tom O’Brien, deputy state labor commissioner, said a three-month probe of Griffith-Ives found that the company owes laborers $160,000 in back wages. California Rural Legal Assistance lawyers said they believe $161,507 in back wages are due the 20 workers they represent.

O’Brien, a 15-year labor investigator, said he has never before heard of migrant workers allegedly being held captive by an employer.

“Conditions have been deplorable generally in agriculture,” O’Brien said, “but this is something new.”

The findings of the state labor commissioner last week were presented to the Ventura County district attorney’s office, which will decide if criminal prosecution is warranted.

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.

According to Abarca and Lee Pliscou, another attorney for California Rural Legal Assistance, the Griffith-Ives labor system favored laborers from the south of Mexico who knew little of working conditions in the United States. Many 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.”

Maldonado added: “The Oaxaquenos were like burros. They just worked. They were the most passive.”

Attorneys for the laborers said they have been told by current workers that conditions at the ranch have improved since December, when about 60 undocumented workers allegedly were fired and the state and federal investigations began.

Until recently, however, the laborers’ typical workday 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 a lengthy list of 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,” the laborers told The Times.

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

Reports about the ranch began to surface after two young workers, Armando Dominguez and Ricardo Portilla, escaped from the compound last November. They 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.

Times staff writer Tracey Kaplan also contributed to this story.