Rancher to Pay $1.5-Million Fine in Slavery Case

A Ventura County flower rancher charged with enslaving hundreds of Mexican laborers has agreed to plead guilty to corporate racketeering and to pay about $1.5 million in back wages to former workers, the stiffest fine ever levied in a U.S. immigration case, prosecutors said Monday.

In exchange for Edwin M. Ives’ plea, the U.S. attorney’s office agreed to dismiss extortion and slavery counts that brought the case international attention as the largest such prosecution in U.S. history when it broke in 1990.

The company’s organized-crime conviction would be the first in a civil rights case, federal prosecutors said.

“This settlement certainly sends out a message to the agricultural community that this kind of conduct will not be tolerated,” said Assistant U.S. Atty. Carol L. Gillam.

Ives, 55, and 10 other defendants are charged with imprisoning laborers recruited from Mexican villages, forcing them to work for $1 an hour and selling them food and sundries at inflated prices from a company store.

Ives is accused of running a labor system under which workers’ heads were shaved upon arrival and their 16-hour workdays were controlled in a highly structured regimen similar to a military boot camp, according to government documents.

The laborers allegedly were paid subminimum wages and deductions were made to pay for food, clothing and other necessities.

Under the agreement, Ives, of Los Angeles, will plead guilty to three felony and four misdemeanor immigration and wage violations and face up to 18 years in prison, Gillam said.

Ives’ farming corporation, Griffith-Ives Co., will admit to nine criminal counts, including racketeering and wire fraud, and pay at least $1.5 million to about 300 laborers who worked at the rancher’s 50-acre compound near Camarillo during the 1980s.

The workers, many recruited from Indian villages so rural that Spanish is not spoken, will receive between $1,000 and $15,000, depending on how long they worked for Ives, Gillam said. Attorneys for 29 workers who filed a civil lawsuit against Ives have not yet approved the agreement, a condition Ives has insisted upon. But at a hearing in Los Angeles on Monday, Gillam and defense attorney Robert M. Talcott both told U.S. District Judge Consuelo B. Marshall that a settlement had been reached verbally.

The judge set April 13 for a change of plea by Ives, his corporation and two former ranch foremen also charged in the case. Attorneys for seven other defendants--most former ranch overseers--said settlement negotiations are continuing. All defendants had pleaded not guilty in the 51-count indictment.

As part of the plea agreement, the government not only dropped slavery charges against Ives, but agreed to dismiss all charges against the rancher’s 48-year-old wife, Dolly, who prosecutors said ran the company’s business office.

“It’s still our position that this was a bunch of hogwash, that this is not a slave case, and this is not an extortion case,” Talcott said. “This is a wage-and-hour case that would have been a yawner if they had not thrown in the slavery count.”

Ives and his wife both declined comment Monday.

“We don’t wish to talk,” Dolly Ives said before the hearing.

The government agreed to drop the peonage counts, invoked under a rarely used 82-year-old anti-slavery statute, because Ives’ corporation agreed to plead guilty to racketeering, Gillam said.

“It’s a pragmatic settlement,” the prosecutor said. “It saves the government money. It puts money in the hands of workers far sooner. And now we have a precedent that this kind of activity constitutes racketeering.”

That is important, she said, because in racketeering cases--usually brought against organized-crime syndicates--illegally gained money and property can be confiscated by the government. Ives stood to lose about $5 million if he had been tried and convicted of racketeering.

Defense attorney Stephen Sadowsky said the legal cost of a criminal trial--and of several civil actions pending against Ives--was the most compelling argument for Ives to settle.

Gillam said she believes strongly that Ives enslaved hundreds of workers at his Ventura County compound between 1984 and 1990, first by forbidding them to leave until smuggling fees were paid and then by threatening to turn them in to immigration agents if they fled.

The government’s allegations will be tested at a sentencing hearing in midsummer.

The hearing is expected to be a minitrial of the case, attorneys said. Defense attorneys said they will call numerous witnesses who will testify that Ives was a good employer to whom workers returned year after year.

“We will argue for probation,” Sadowsky said, “because this whole thing was a remarkable government-inspired extortion. Our clients have been extorted.”

Gillam said she will argue that Ives should receive the maximum 18 years in prison, or a term nearly as long.

The plea bargain nearly ends a case that began in December, 1989, when workers who said they had dug their way out of Ives’ compound reported the situation to the Mexican Consulate in Oxnard.

Ives, who grew and dyed ornamental eucalyptus leaves and baby’s breath flowers at two ranches in Ventura County, was arrested four months later.

Marco Antonio Abarca, a California Rural Legal Assistance lawyer who represents the 29 workers in the civil case, said he was pleased with the settlement.

“If this comes through, it will show that the system worked, that the most marginalized group of people in the United States, undocumented Mexican migrant farm workers, had their rights protected,” Abarca said. “It sends a message that exploitation is unacceptable.”