‘Victims’ Are Split Over Slavery Charge : Laborers: A U.S. inquiry deep in Mexico reveals that some villagers see a Ventura County rancher as their benefactor.

It was an unlikely entourage that Assistant U.S. Atty. Carol Gillam led up a muddy and narrow road to an isolated mountaintop in southern Mexico.

Their two Ford Broncos churning through rain and fog, Gillam and a party that included five FBI and immigration agents had spent five hours on the twisting road from Oaxaca.

The Los Angeles prosecutor implored the Zapotec Indians of the tiny village of Santa Ana Yareni to trust her, to trust in the American government and to turn against their only consistent employer in the United States.

Dozens of villagers, all of whom had once worked for Ventura County flower rancher Edwin M. Ives, listened in silence. Then two rose to speak.

“They wanted to say things in favor of Ed Ives,” Gillam recalled. “They said he offered the people an opportunity to work they might not have had otherwise, and if he was in trouble now, maybe the people should support him.”

The difficult moment passed, Gillam said, when she shut off debate and appealed to the villagers for the truth.

About 35 villagers eventually agreed to be interviewed by agents. They are now potential witnesses in what Gillam described as the most far-reaching slavery case ever filed by the United States--a case that she said is intended to teach abusive employers a lesson.

That June meeting 2,200 miles from the Somis compound into which Ives allegedly smuggled impoverished villagers is seen by Gillam as a government victory.

But to Ives’ attorneys, it was government misconduct--including possible improper sharing of information by prosecutors with civil attorneys--that could become a critical issue in the case.

The meeting also demonstrated the same sharp split within the community of former Ives employees that has surprised attorneys on both sides since the case broke in April.

The most striking example of this dichotomy is a former Ives laborer who first joined a civil lawsuit against the rancher but recently withdrew from the case and went back to work at the Somis compound, lawyers say.

Prosecutors say they could call nearly 100 laborers--most from Santa Ana Yareni and the neighboring mountain pueblo of San Ysidro--to testify that for years Ives profited by virtually imprisoning workers and paying them a fraction of the legal minimum wage.

But the rancher’s attorneys say they have found more than 100 other workers who insist that Ives was a fair and decent employer to whom they returned year after year. At least eight former employees have sought out the lawyers to say that the charges against Ives are a lie, they said.

Gillam said she has never seen so many witnesses with such drastically different views in a case.

Stephen B. Sadowsky, a point man for a high-powered legal team that he said has already cost Ives hundreds of thousands of dollars, agreed.

“It’s really amazing,” he said, “the gap between the allegations and the fruits of our investigation. It’s the width of the Grand Canyon. And that’s not normal.”

Ives, a 54-year-old Los Angeles resident, was charged May 29 along with six ranch overseers and an alleged smuggler from Oxnard by a federal grand jury with recruiting workers from rural Mexican villages, imprisoning them at the Somis ranch until smuggling fees were paid, forcing them to work for $1 an hour and coercing them into buying food and sundries at inflated prices from a company store.

The workers’ heads allegedly were shaved upon arrival and virtually every minute of their 16-hour workdays controlled by employers in a highly structured regimen similar to a military boot camp. And they were sometimes physically abused, according to the 15-count indictment.

Prosecutors said evidence shows that Ives, a longtime flower retailer who bought the Somis property in 1979, had engaged in the illegal activity at least since 1984. More than 400 victims have been identified, they said.

“The victims in this case are among the most vulnerable, least educated people ever encountered in a criminal case,” Gillam states in court documents.

Since slavery charges were filed amid international news coverage in May, Ives and the Griffith-Ives Co., which he owns with his wife, Dolly, have been sued three times and face millions of dollars in fines, penalties and back wages.

Last month, Gillam revealed that the federal grand jury in Los Angeles is still gathering evidence that could lead to more criminal charges. She has subpoenaed records from Ives’ accountant for the expanded case. The rancher’s assets, which records show are worth several million dollars, “were derived in large part from the proceeds of a criminal enterprise,” she asserts in a document.

Yet in the four months since the Ives case became public, the most surprising development has been the defection of one laborer supposedly abused at the Somis ranch.

Lazaro Medina Delgadillo, one of 27 plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed in June, has withdrawn from the suit and returned to work for Ives, confirmed Marco Antonio Abarca, an attorney for California Rural Legal Assistance in Oxnard.

“Basically, he said that it was a mistake on his part, and now he’s back at the ranch and doesn’t want us as his attorney,” Abarca said. “We had 27 plaintiffs; now we have 26.”

Sadowsky said the Medina defection just begins to reveal problems criminal prosecutors and civil attorneys will have when they try to prove that Ives was a slave lord.

Medina, in fact, considers most of the charges against Ives to be untrue, Sadowsky said. And when Ives’ criminal trial begins in March, the defense will prove that “99% of what is being said is absolutely and totally false,” he said.

Sadowsky said he has strong evidence to show that former employees who have sued Ives were free to leave the ranch to visit family and friends and shop for groceries and that they did, in fact, buy designer clothing, cameras, stereos, radios and guitars. They took taxis to Oxnard and sometimes stayed in motels. And they “spent or saved money in amounts far in excess of what they claim they were paid,” the attorney said in court documents filed in August.

As the scope of the Ives investigation has grown to hundreds of potential witnesses, attorneys on both sides have become increasingly testy.

Each side says the inconsistency in witness recollections reveals something sinister. Each accuses the other of improper contact with witnesses and of essentially buying testimony.

Gillam, in a July 25 statement to U.S. District Judge Terry J. Hatter opposing travel to Mexico by ranch foreman Alvaro Ruiz, said the government had found “very disturbing information about contact between defendants and their investigators with former workers residing in Oaxaca.”

Though saying she was not prepared to elaborate, Gillam said that evidence indicates that “certain defendants, including Ruiz, may be attempting to obstruct justice by offering workers incentives to testify falsely about the actual conditions at the ranch.”

Likewise, Ives’ attorneys have long insisted that former employees have lied about the rancher to get thousands of dollars each through lawsuits.

In a court document, Sadowsky also maintains that evidence exists that some former employees have asked family and friends to commit perjury “in a desperate and wholly misguided effort to secure ‘corroborating witnesses’ to their fabricated and false claims.”

Sadowsky also said in an interview last week that a central issue in the criminal case against Ives is the conduct of prosecutors, whom he believes have shared government information with attorneys representing 26 former workers.

“Whether or not there was collusion of the criminal and civil sides will be one of the critical focal points of this criminal litigation,” Sadowsky said.

Ives’ lawyers have subpoenaed documents from California Rural Legal Assistance and a co-counsel in the civil case seeking to prove an improper relationship with the government, Abarca of legal assistance confirmed.

Sadowsky said he is looking carefully at Gillam’s trip to Santa Ana Yareni for evidence of impropriety. Ives’ investigators interviewed villagers before and after the government’s visit, he said.

“There was unbelievable misconduct by the government in respect to people of that town and in respect to potential witnesses,” Sadowsky said. “And it’s going to have to be litigated.”

He noted that civil lawyer Abarca accompanied Gillam to Santa Ana Yareni.

Abarca said the government has never shared anything with him.

“They’re the most secretive people I’ve ever dealt with,” the lawyer said. Sadowsky is trying to divert attention from the wrongdoing of Edwin Ives, he said.

“They’re making serious claims,” Abarca said. “They’re going to have to back it up, and they’re not going to able to, because there’s nothing there.”

Abarca acknowledged his trip to Santa Ana Yareni and confirmed that a friend, a student in Mexico, acted as interpreter for Gillam.

“Up in the mountains in Oaxaca, you need to have an in,” Abarca said. But he said he spoke only briefly at Gillam’s meeting with former workers and was not allowed to participate in interviews.

“She gave her speech and I think the people were impressed by her,” he said.

Gillam said Abarca was never part of the official government party: “We certainly didn’t invite him along . . . . He coordinated his visit with ours. We were there on official government business. He was not.”

The legal-assistance attorney accompanied her to the village only because he could not find another four-wheel-drive vehicle to rent, she said.

Gillam said she emphasized her role and Abarca’s separate status when she spoke with villagers. “We were certainly trying to keep our distance from him,” she said.

It is her responsibility to solicit information from attorneys such as Abarca, who discover cases that apparently involve crime, Gillam said. “But we don’t make the contents of our investigation public.”

Gillam agrees with defense attorney Sadowsky on one point, however: Key information in the case against Ives was evident in the government’s trip to Santa Ana Yareni.

The explanation for why laborers abused by Ives would return year after year to work for him can be found in such villages, she said.

“The mayor of that town told us not to expect much cooperation,” she said. “He said that a lot of people had been told that conditions at the ranch were much improved and since that was the only job prospect they had in the States,” they should protect it.

Many of the workers recruited to Somis were from Oaxaca and most of them were Zapotec and Miztec Indians, among the least educated and poorest groups in the poorest region of Mexico, she said. Even Spanish is a second language to the villagers there, she said.

“The overwhelming majority had never been in the United States” or even outside the state of Oaxaca before being recruited by Ives, Gillam said in a court filing. Their desperate poverty and lack of sophistication made it possible for Ives to keep the workers within his compound of high fences and locked gates, she said.

“The walls were not impermeable, if they hadn’t feared what was on the outside--a world they had never seen,” Gillam said. “But they were told they would be arrested by immigration authorities if they left. Part of this reign of terror was the constant reminder of the horrible things that would befall them if they did leave the ranch.”

Sadowsky also looks to Santa Ana Yareni for proof that Ives--who he said entered the flower business 20 years ago by selling flowers on street corners in Los Angeles--must be innocent of enslaving workers.

“That village was a source of employees for a whole number of years,” the lawyer said. “And it is absolutely inconceivable that if the allegations they are making are true, that these people would keep on coming back. Fathers come and their sons come. Their friends and their relatives come. It just wouldn’t happen if this were true.”