$5 Million Awarded to 4 Workers Fired by Target

A Ventura County jury has awarded $5 million in damages to four former auto mechanics, ruling that the huge Target Stores chain fired them after falsely accusing them of theft.

Witnesses testified during the eight-week trial that Target employees Larry Mangum, Jose Ragatz, Ivor Benci-Woodward and Paul Reyes were fired from the Oxnard store by a company detective whose quota was to apprehend one thieving employee every 18 hours.

The jury ended the 6-year-old lawsuit and eight-week trial by ruling that the men were unjustly fired by Target and its parent company, the Dayton-Hudson Corp. of Minneapolis.

Target has not decided whether to appeal Monday’s verdict, said company spokesman George Hite, who declined further comment until Target’s lawyers can review the court record.

The men said they had vindication in mind, not money, when they filed the suit. And they were reveling in the jury’s finding that Target and company detective Dana Pereau improperly took their jobs.

“It took a long time, and it’s been a roller-coaster ride--we’ve had our ups and downs,” said Ragatz, 28, who now runs a Santa Paula bicycle shop. “I’m still in shock, really. I couldn’t sleep last night. I just hope that Target gets the message . . . You don’t treat employees like they’re in Germany, the Gestapo, Russia, like that. They’re human beings.”

“They’ve offered us many settlements over the years, most recently about a week before the jury verdict,” said Mangum, 35, now a mechanic for the city of Ventura.

The story began on May 30, 1984, when Pereau entered the auto shop at the Oxnard Target store. The men had been working there since the store opened 14 months earlier.

Pereau was a burly, mustachioed loss-prevention expert who ferreted out employee theft in stores throughout Target’s Western region, from Minneapolis to Seattle. Word got around that he wanted “to collect a lot of scalps” when he arrived in Oxnard, Mangum testified during the trial.

The men’s attorney, John H. Howard, said Pereau used the same approach during each interview with his clients; he would seat the employee in the farthest corner from the door and himself less than three feet away in another chair.

Witnesses testified that Pereau would imply that he had reports that the employee was stealing. He would encourage the employee to confess, saying “ ‘You think about it while I go look at the videotapes,’ which didn’t exist,” Howard said.

Then he would return and threaten to turn over the employee to the district attorney for prosecution on theft charges, unless the employee confessed, Howard said.

Mangum testified that he was fired for theft of company services: He gave $5 worth of free tire balancing to a customer who had to wait two hours because of a clerical error.

Reyes, 26, said he was fired after confessing that he stole 30 seconds of Target’s shop time by turning an ignition key for a co-worker who was adjusting his points in the store parking lot.

Benci-Woodward, 45, said he was fired after he was falsely accused of several thefts. In one, he was accused of working on his co-workers’ cars during company time when, in fact, his superiors had approved using the cars for training when business was slow.

And Ragatz said he was fired for helping to adjust his own brakes, for which he paid Target. Ragatz said he signed a blank sheet of paper, on which Pereau’s staff then typed his resignation.

Benci-Woodward recalled that his worst moment was when a Target executive yelled at him in a crowded hallway, “I’m glad they finally caught you, you rip-off!”

Hite said Pereau left the company in 1985 but did not know under what circumstances.