Employer Arrested in ‘Slave Labor’ Case : Immigration: The grower is charged with violating the civil rights of workers at his Somis and Moorpark ranches.

The owner of a Ventura County flower ranch, where Mexican laborers claim they were imprisoned behind barbed-wire fences and forced to work for sub-minimum wages, was charged Friday with violating the workers’ civil rights.

Edwin M. Ives, 53, surrendered to federal authorities after early-morning raids by about 50 agents at his two ranches in Ventura County and his Griffith-Ives Co. headquarters in West Los Angeles, investigators said.

Three ranch foremen and an alleged smuggler were arrested during the raids and arraigned Friday in Los Angeles federal court on charges that they conspired to smuggle workers from Mexico and to hold them in “involuntary servitude” at Ives’ 50-acre compound in Somis, 15 miles east of Ventura.

After a brief hearing, U.S. Magistrate Venetta Tassopulos released Ives on $150,000 bail and freed Mauro Casares-Padilla, 64, and Pedro Pinzon-Juarez and Rony Havive, both 30, on $25,000 bonds. Alvaro Ruiz-Santiago, 39, remained in custody.

A warrant was issued for the arrest of another Ives ranch foreman, Josue David Pinzon-Juarez, who is out of the country, investigators said.

Robert M. Talcott, Ives’ attorney, maintained that his client is innocent.

“Anybody who goes out to the facility and looks with open eyes will know that the allegations are totally and unequivocally rubbish,” Talcott said. “Nobody’s being held there without their consent.”

Gerald Klippness, the U.S. immigration agent who directed Friday’s raids, agreed that working conditions at Ives’ Somis and Moorpark ranches now appear good. And only two of 22 laborers found at the ranches Friday appear to be in the country illegally, he said.

But Klippness said Ives apparently has known that he was under investigation since December, when the Border Patrol arrested six illegal workers at the front gate of the compound.

“There was no evidence this morning of the kinds of conditions alleged to have been there four months ago,” Klippness said.

Until last December, however, laborers at the Somis compound were forbidden to leave until $435 in debts owed to smuggler Casares-Padilla were deducted from their earnings, according to an Immigration Service affidavit released with the U.S. attorney’s criminal complaint.

Even after debts were paid, workers were ordered not to leave the compound or they would be fired and immigration agents alerted, the affidavit said 20 former ranch workers told federal investigators.

While at the ranch, the workers said, they received only a fraction of the $4.25-an-hour minimum wage while toiling 16 hours a day. They also told investigators that they were required to buy food and supplies from a company store at inflated prices, the affidavit said.

In its criminal complaint, the U.S. attorney’s office cites the case of one worker, Juan Mendez-Cruz.

Ives and his employees kept Mendez-Cruz prisoner for eight months in 1989 by “refusing to allow him to leave the ranch, and forcing him to work approximately 16 hours a day, six days a week, and keeping him at the ranch by means of threats of physical harm and intimidation, and by keeping the gates to the ranch locked and guarded at all times.”

Much of the government’s case apparently is based on evidence gathered by U.S. Department of Labor investigator Charles Logan.

According to the affidavit, Logan found Griffith-Ives to have violated a variety of labor and health laws through inspections of the Somis compound and company records.

Though Griffith-Ives would only allow inspections scheduled through its attorneys, Logan found “squalid and unsanitary bathrooms, showers and sinks which were locked with padlocks and locked refrigerators, all of which are violations” of law, the affidavit said.

Logan concluded that company payroll records appeared to be falsified, the affidavit said.

Company records at the Griffith-Ives Beverly Boulevard headquarters were seized Friday, Klippness said.

Charges by federal prosecutors and investigators echo those leveled by 14 former Ives workers and their lawyers in recent interviews with The Times.

“It was slave labor,” worker Fernando Maldonado said in an interview earlier this month. “We could not leave. We realized we had entered the mouth of the wolf.”

Lawyers for the workers described the labor system at the compound as a mixture of military boot camp and medieval 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.

Many workers were recruited from Indian villages so rural that not even Spanish is spoken there, the lawyers said. Once at the compound, the laborers’ heads were shaved and they usually were forced to work from 3:30 a.m. to 8 p.m., they said.

They allegedly were forbidden to drink water or to use 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 Havive, the laborers told The Times.

The workers said they received as little as $100 every two weeks after money for food and sundries were deducted from their checks.

Klippness said the Immigration Service began its investigation of Griffith-Ives in December, as did state and federal labor agencies. The investigations culminated Friday with the raids at 7:30 a.m. In addition to agents from four federal agencies, investigators from the Ventura County district attorney’s and sheriff’s offices and the Oxnard Police Department participated.

The local agencies were involved because state charges may also be filed against Griffith-Ives, Klippness said.

Times staff writer Linda Chong contributed to this story.