Migrants Swindled by Job Come-Ons, Officials Say : Probe: Employment agency operator to be tried on charges of using phony, high-paying job offers to bilk Mexican migrants.

In the corner of a Tijuana newspaper called El Mexicano, a small ad promised big things.

“Magnificent Opportunity!” it said in Spanish. “Work in Alaska with good salary, food and board. Temporary work.” For details, the ad said, call a phone number in San Ysidro, on the U.S. side of the border.

The ad, which ran last summer, led to a deluge of calls from job-seeking Mexican migrants. Word got around fast that the San Ysidro number was offering work at canneries in Seattle or on fishing boats in Alaska, and promising sky-high salaries, as much as $1,200 a week, migrants said.

All it took was a fee up front--$230 for workers with the right immigration papers, $430 for undocumented migrants--for the guarantee of one of those high-paying jobs, migrants said.

But that’s not the way it turned out, migrants said. There were few cannery or fishing jobs available, and none guaranteed. What work there was paid about minimum wage. And for a final indignity, the hotel they were directed to was a Seattle homeless shelter, migrants said.

Prosecutors in San Diego said the ads promoted a scam that preyed upon migrants unfamiliar with the nuances of the U.S. business culture, luring jobless men who sought nothing more than honest pay for honest work. Nearly 200 migrants may have lost a combined $40,000 or more, prosecutors said.

In San Diego Municipal Court this month, prosecutors unveiled their case against Francisco (Frank) Vitetta, 59, a Long Beach man alleged to be the promoter of the scheme. After testimony from dozens of migrants, Judge Lawrence W. Stirling ordered Vitetta to stand trial in Superior Court on 62 charges, most of them theft.

Vitetta, who was convicted in 1987 in Los Angeles federal court of theft, is due to be back in court in San Diego this week4. If convicted, he could draw 10 years or more in prison, said Deputy Dist. Atty. Jeff Brodrick, the prosecutor in the case.

Officials at the Mexican consulate in San Diego have taken an interest in the case.

“There are a lot of people . . . who want to take advantage of Mexican nationals,” said Virginia Arteaga, who works in the consular protection office and scribbled notes last week in court. “We are going to do our best to see that justice is done.”

Vitetta, who described himself in court documents as an “independent contractor,” remains free on $10,000 bail. In an interview during a break in the court proceedings, he said he was innocent of all charges. “You have to wait for the final verdict,” he said.

Deputy Public Defender Robert Carlin said Vitetta maintains that there has been a “misunderstanding.”

At Vitetta’s first court date a few weeks ago, when some 20 migrants were due to testify against Vitetta, about 50 showed up, court officials said. The case was put over for a few days to let tempers cool and give Carlin more time to read some 200 pages of documents in the case.

When the case formally began, on March 16, about 30 migrants jammed the hall outside Stirling’s courtroom. Some were waiting to testify. Others were there to commiserate and to blow off steam.

“If I could, I would shoot this guy,” said Armando Coronado, 30, who said he was out $230--and his old job. Last summer, after seeing the ad in El Mexicano, he quit his job as an auto mechanic for the opportunity to go to the American Northwest, only to find out there was no job waiting for him at any cannery anywhere, he said.

“The best thing would be to give us our money back,” said Jose Ariel Solano, 31, who had been a salesman in Tijuana before jumping at the chance for $1,200 weekly, and had paid extra for the right papers to work in the United States. “The next best thing would be for him to go to jail for a long, long time.”

It’s no surprise the ad attracted hundreds of migrants, said Claudia Smith, an attorney with California Rural Legal Assistance in Oceanside. Even with the downturn in the U.S. economy, job prospects remain far better here than in many parts of Mexico, she said.

“I’ve never seen the immigrant pool so large and, consequently, so underemployed and so unemployed as I’ve seen it the last year or so,” Smith said.

The promise of a high-paying job--even in Alaska or Seattle, a long way away from Mexico--instilled “such ilusion “ in the migrants, Smith said, using the Spanish word that in this context means great hopes or expectations.

“They had such ilusion they were blinded,” Smith said. “It was too good to be true. When I found out about it, I just had the feeling it would all come tumbling down.”

The advertisement led job-seekers to the Alaska Employment Agency in San Ysidro.

That turned out to be a branch office allegedly set up by Vitetta, who ran the “agency” from an office in Long Beach, district attorney’s office investigators said in court documents. The San Ysidro office did not have the surety bond state officials require to operate as an employment agency, prosecutors charge.

Not knowing or caring about surety bonds, job-seekers deluged the office. Response to the ad was so intense that the agency was forced to move down the block to a bigger space, investigators said.

The woman working at the office originally had responded to the ad, then decided not to go to Alaska, according to court documents. Vitetta asked her to run the San Ysidro office, the documents said.

The woman, Haydee Soria Puffelis, has not been charged with any criminal conduct. She could not be reached for comment.

According to court documents, Vitetta told Puffelis to charge migrants $200 for a job and $30 for her processing fee.

Vitetta told Puffelis to tell migrants that the $200 fee was to cover air fare to Seattle and lodging there, according to court documents. He told her to charge more for migrants not having work permits to be in the United States, the documents said.

He also told her the salary was $1,200 a week for the jobs, the documents said.

Vitetta also told Puffelis to fill out a receipt--in English--that said Alaska Employment Agency was “not responsible for the time consumed for finding a job in Alaska,” the court documents said. Of the 30 Spanish-speaking, would-be workers interviewed in the San Diego County courthouse during Vitetta’s preliminary hearing, none spoke English fluently.

Puffelis quickly established a routine. Each day, she took the money orders, applications and invoices she collected and sent them to Vitetta in Long Beach, investigators said.

Usually, Puffelis would then send the job-seekers on to Long Beach, too. There, Vitetta gave them a list of companies waiting for them in Seattle, including Golden Age Fisheries, North Pacific Fishing Inc. and MarcoAlaska Management, Dist. Atty. Investigator Joe Maggio said.

At one point last August, Maggio called Vitetta, suspecting a fraud, according to court documents. Vitetta told him that he was doing business “on a contract basis” with about 50 companies in Seattle and Alaska, and that the persons he sent north could make as much as $1,200 a week, Maggio said in court filings.

Rafael Cornejo, 42, laid off from a construction job, never saw a dime. He drove up last summer in a rented car with four others, clutching papers Vitetta gave him that listed canneries and directed him to what he had been told was a nice hotel. “I was also told it was $1,200 a week, plus expenses and food and uniforms,” he said.

When the group arrived in Seattle, the map led them to a mission for the homeless.

“I was in complete shock,” Cornejo said. “Another Mexican came up to us and said, ‘This is a fraud.’ He was stuck there, too. And he said, ‘Any application for a cannery I can get for you. Or you can get it yourself. They’re free.’ ”

“I’m really upset,” Cornejo said. “Heidi told me Frank Vitetta was an honorable, nice person who was going to help people, who loved helping people out.”

Colleen Myers, employment manager at MarcoAlaska Management, said in a phone interview that the company had some--albeit extremely limited--contact last summer with Vitetta. But it had no contract with him to provide workers, she said.

“We didn’t hire him to recruit the people,” Myers said. “We didn’t have a contractual agreement to do this. One day, he called and he just inquired about jobs in Alaska. Our receptionist gave him information about our company and sent him applications. That’s all.”

Even if there had been cannery jobs available, salaries were a far cry from $1,200 a week. Entry-level pay for MarcoAlaska workers is $4.75 an hour, climbing to $7.13 for overtime work, Myers said.

Some of the migrants who stuck around Seattle managed to find work of some sort. Most returned to Southern California, investigators said. Some asked Smith of the California Rural Legal Assistance for help. Still others complained to the Mexican consulate, Arteaga said.

A few went to Long Beach, confronted Vitetta and asked for a refund. Last Aug. 16, when refunds weren’t forthcoming, a group of 15 men called Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies to Vitetta’s Long Beach office.

According to court documents, after sheriff’s Deputy Kevin Russell arrived at the office, he picked up the phone to call one of the companies the migrants said they had been told to contact in Seattle and Vitetta told him, “Well, I don’t really deal with them.”

Russell began to dial another company and Vitetta said, “I don’t really work with them, either,” according to court documents.

Vitetta also told deputies he couldn’t issue refunds because he didn’t have records listing who had paid what amounts, the court documents indicate.

“He was definitely taking advantage of people just trying to make a living,” Russell said in an interview. “A lot of unfortunate people are involved.”

Vitetta has refunded some money, prosecutors said. But it is unclear how many men have been paid back, since the number of migrants claiming to have done business with the Alaska Employment Agency keeps climbing, Dist. Atty. Investigator Maggio said. “And a lot of people just gave up (on a refund) when they knew it was a fraud,” Maggio said.

During a break in the court proceedings, Vitetta said migrants who showed up in Seattle must have been rejected by the canneries because they had no experience in the fish business. “The companies said, ‘We don’t want to see nobody like this,’ ” he said.

He also said he did not understand why so many men in the courthouse hallway were so angry. “We gave the money back,” he said. “Now they come in here, (using) another name, and they want to get it again. We don’t have $1 million to pay these people.”