Slavery Case Figure Remains an Enigma : Courts: Edwin M. Ives is scheduled to plead guilty to lesser charges. Prosecutors can’t reconcile image of a greedy employer with that of the good family man that admirers say he is.

As a Los Angeles high school student in the 1950s, Eddie Isaac impressed classmates as a hustler by hawking flowers from street corners after school.

The son of a neighborhood shopkeeper, Isaac later worked the downtown Los Angeles flower markets, operated a flower shop in West Hollywood and eventually bought a small ranch near San Fernando.

But riches eluded him until 1979, when Isaac--who by then had changed his name to Edwin M. Ives--borrowed heavily to buy two flower ranches in Somis and Moorpark.

He recruited Zapotec and Miztec Indian laborers from the rural mountaintops of southern Mexico, allegedly smuggling them into the country and imprisoning them behind high gates and barbed-wire fences at a 50-acre compound in Somis.

They worked for about $1 an hour. Their heads allegedly were shaved upon arrival and virtually every minute of their 16-hour workday was controlled.

As his workers toiled to harvest and dye ornamental leaves and flowers that Ives sold nationwide, prosecutors say his profits reached $1 million a year. Along the way, they say, Ives turned into a modern-day slave master.

Ives’ assets totaled more than $5 million when a federal grand jury indicted him in 1990 in the most far-reaching slavery case ever filed by the United States.

The government says he cheated at least 300 poor and ignorant workers out of $3 million during the 1980s.

Ives, 55, of Los Angeles, agreed March 23 to plead guilty to seven immigration and labor law violations and to pay about $1.5 million in back wages, the stiffest fine ever in a U.S. immigration case. His farming company also will admit to organized-crime activity, the first racketeering conviction in a federal civil rights case, prosecutors say.

In exchange, the government will dismiss the extortion and slavery counts that brought the case international attention. Ives faces up to 18 years in prison, although defense lawyers will ask for probation.

The plea-bargain, though not official until Ives changes his plea at a hearing scheduled for Monday, was a major turning point in a bizarre case whose central figure remains an enigma.

Even those who prosecuted him say the voracious ambition that marked his business activities does not appear to jibe with the ethical values that apparently guided his personal life.

Defense attorneys describe Ives as a hard-working rancher who parlayed a lifetime in the flower business into success, a loner whose solitary nature made others suspicious, and a devout family man whose frequent pilgrimages to Israel reflect the depth of his Orthodox Jewish faith.

Indeed, the case’s essential paradox is that Ives could be the simple, honest and charitable man admired by friends in his community and also a rancher so greedy he would callously mistreat hundreds of workers for extra profit.

Ives has lived much of his life in Los Angeles’ Fairfax area, graduating from high school, marrying, raising three children and attending a nearby synagogue.

Even as he prospered, Ives assumed few trappings of wealth.

His home is a relatively modest 2,700 square feet. And it is only in the last several years that Ives and his wife, Dolly, bought a condo in Palm Springs, began to drive new cars and sometimes splurged while shopping in Beverly Hills, Palm Springs and New York, prosecutors said.

“They lived a fairly modest life for a long time,” said Assistant U.S. Atty. Carol L. Gillam, lead prosecutor in the case.

Ives’ diligence was noted even in high school.

“His dad had a little neighborhood dry-goods store,” recalled high school chum Larry Navis. “Eddie would sell flowers on a corner. He was a hard-working, good, honest guy.”

“He was a hustler, a street-smart kid,” dentist Burt Schnierow said of his former classmate. “There were a lot of them in Fairfax in those days. We were all middle-class Jewish kids trying to work our way up, and a lot of us did.”

Rabbi Jack Simcha Cohen of Congregation Shaarei Tefila said before the plea-bargain that he had no doubt that Ives, a friend for 14 years, was innocent.

“It’s inconceivable that this kind, decent man would have been involved in these outrageous, immoral acts,” Cohen said. “They’re so outlandish, they have to be false. This is a good person. . . . That’s why in the community there is tremendous support for him.”

Ives can be judged not only by his character but by that of his children, the youngest of whom is a teen-ager, Cohen said.

“They run youth groups, they are the first people to care for the poor or to visit the sick in hospitals,” the rabbi said.

Ives himself--sometimes accompanied by his wife and children in court and dapper in dark suits and a British racing cap--has refused to be interviewed except for quick comments at hearings when he has said he has been treated unfairly by the government and the news media.

After Ives was indicted in May, 1990, the government pressed its prosecution with uncommon zeal, returning twice to the grand jury to add charges, determined to use the case to teach abusive agricultural employers a lesson.

Former U.S. Atty. Gen. Dick Thornburgh personally emphasized the importance of the case, saying it “demonstrates our strong determination to extend the umbrella of human and civil rights protections to all--including illegal immigrants.”

“The victims in this case are among the most vulnerable, least educated people ever encountered in a criminal case,” Gillam said. “He realized that the way to make real money was not to use local workers, but to recruit them from out of the country.”

While slavery charges are extremely rare, prosecutors said that some of the abuses uncovered on Ives’ ranch are found in farm communities around the state.

“The Ives case,” said Lee Pliscou, a California Rural Legal Assistance attorney who has filed a lawsuit for 29 former Ives employees, “represents the extreme. When people are hungry, even the worst job imaginable is better than no job.”

But, despite his guilty pleas, Ives’ attorneys insist that the rancher is hardly the slave lord depicted by the government. They say he agreed to plead guilty to avoid ruinous legal costs in criminal and civil cases and the prosecution of his 48-year-old wife, Dolly. The deal also averted the possible seizure of his two houses and three ranches under a federal racketeering law.

And they add that they could have produced 100 witnesses--about the same number as the prosecution--to testify that Ives was a fair employer to whom laborers returned year after year for work, and not the modern-day Simon Legree seen by the government.

Even prosecutors have expressed surprise at the sharp split of opinion among former Ives employees. When they drove muddy, twisting Oaxacan roads to the rural villages from which Ives’ recruiters hired workers, they found not only potential government witnesses but workers still loyal to Ives.

At one village meeting in 1990, two Indian workers argued that townspeople should stand by Ives in his time of trouble because he had given them a chance to work that they might not have had otherwise, prosecutor Gillam recalled.

Defense attorneys claim that government charges were grossly exaggerated, and that slavery, extortion, witness tampering and racketeering charges were filed only to force pleas to lesser offenses and to send a frightening message to agricultural employers. In all, Edwin and Dolly Ives, their Griffith-Ives Co., eight ranch overseers and an alleged smuggler were charged in a 51-count indictment.

“They wanted to scare the stuffing out of every other grower and rancher in Southern California,” defense lawyer Stephen Sadowsky said.

The case’s contradictions, however, go beyond the politics of a high-profile prosecution or the spin opposing attorneys put on the same facts.

Though accused of running an illegal sweatshop, Ives has befriended many of his employees, his attorneys say.

After charges were filed two years ago, at least eight former ranch hands sought out Ives’ lawyers to say the allegations were a lie, Sadowsky said. Prosecutors acknowledge that selected employees, especially longtime ranch foremen, were apparently treated well.

Sadowsky described Ives as “a gentleman farmer who sees God and God’s commandments in the natural world around him and takes that as his guide in dealing with his fellow man.”

“If you could see him at his ranch, you would see there is this natural desire to be alone,” the lawyer said. “And that’s one of the big problems in this case. He doesn’t go out and glad-hand and fit in. . . . He’s a stranger, an outsider.”

However, many former employees and business associates have joined prosecutors in concluding that Edwin Mitchell Ives is nobody’s victim, but rather a businessman of extreme shrewdness, ambition and even cruelty.

Wholesalers and managers at flower markets in downtown Los Angeles in the 1970s saw Ives as excessively calculating. Some growers who did business with him in the 1980s said they were cheated.

“If Ed called to go to coffee, you knew he wanted something,” said Johnny Mellano, manager of the Los Angeles Flower Market. “Ed always had an edge to him, everything he did, he had a motive.”

The desire to become a big flower rancher apparently germinated at Ives’ small San Fernando farm in the late 1970s. There, Ives began to buy oval eucalyptus leaves from growers and treat them with glycerin so they would not be brittle in flower arrangements. He also began to grow the crop himself.

In 1979, Ives moved to become one of the nation’s largest growers and processors of eucalyptus leaves and wispy baby’s-breath flowers, both staples for florists nationwide.

He paid about $600,000 for 50 acres and a farmhouse in Somis, property records show. Two years later, he bought 92 acres in Moorpark for about $900,000, a seller said. Then he bought a smaller ranch in Upland. Prosecutors say Ives borrowed heavily to make the purchases.

The federal prosecution of Ives involved allegations rumored in Somis, five miles north of Camarillo, almost since Ives bought an orange orchard there in 1979 and began to transform it into a walled compound.

For several years, dozens of workers would regularly emerge from the compound to cash checks, buy groceries and socialize. But that stopped suddenly in about 1983 or 1984, a Somis merchant said. Workers could be glimpsed inside the compound, but only a few would still frequent local businesses.

Ives was the subject of local and federal investigations throughout the 1980s. He was convicted of seven misdemeanors involving building, safety and zoning violations after a major fire at the compound in 1987, court records show.

The Griffith-Ives Co., which Ives owns, was investigated by the U.S. Department of Labor four times between 1979 and 1985. Though they had no access to Ives’ compound, U.S. Border Patrol officers arrested 14 undocumented workers outside of it in 1984 and six more in 1989.

Meanwhile, Ives was building a reputation in the tightly knit ornamental leaf-and-flower industry that generally was not flattering. Two Camarillo growers, for example, say Ives bought eucalyptus from them, then tried to pay them far less than he had agreed to pay.

Sepulveda nursery operator Edward Frolich, who raised seedling eucalyptus trees for Ives, said he liked the rancher.

“But he was not very popular in the trade,” Frolich said. “People just refused to do business with him after a while.”

Ives also has allies in the flower business, however. John Whitton, a Santa Paula competitor, said he has had no problems with Ives in almost 20 years.

“I had to learn how to deal with him,” Whitton said. “He was extraordinarily sophisticated and shrewd. It was like dealing with a Philadelphia lawyer, to tell you the truth.

“Mr. Ives is a man totally committed to a mission. It appears to me he wanted to be the General Motors of the dried and preserved foliage business.”

Whitton said Ives lived frugally when he was at his ranch, almost as if he had taken a vow of poverty. The rancher would drive a beat-up station wagon, sleep on a couch in a room with no other furniture and boil potatoes for his lunch.

Whitton said he was one of very few outsiders who ever penetrated the tight security at Ives’ compound.

From there, Whitton said he saw examples of Ives’ kindness: Ives would take employees to get driver’s licenses, to court dates or to the airport, Whitton said.

“I really think he’s a fairly decent man,” Whitton said. “I think he cared about his workers.”

But dozens of laborers, in interviews with The Times and statements to investigators, have described Ives as a man who was regularly involved in illegal activities--personally forbidding workers to leave his ranch, telling them to buy at his company store and once paying a smuggler while workers watched.

Ives was at the ranch almost every day, the workers told investigators. They claimed they were sometimes physically abused by overseers. One laborer collapsed in a field and died in 1988 because he was denied proper medical care, they added.

Laborer Fernando Maldonado said Ives usually recruited workers from rural villages, instead of cities, because the Indian laborers were so unsophisticated that they would work “like burros.”

Maldonado, 49, said he worked for Ives for three weeks in 1989 before escaping under a high fence and through a deep ravine that borders the rancher’s compound on three sides.

“It was slave labor,” Maldonado said. “We realized we had entered the mouth of the wolf.”

More than a dozen workers, plaintiffs in a lawsuit against Ives, complained in interviews of a system of work and abuse that left them too tired to eat or to flee.

The laborers said they were forbidden to leave the compound--where two locked gates guard the only entrance--until $435 in debts owed to a smuggler were deducted from their earnings.

Once the debts were paid, the workers said, overseers threatened to turn them over to immigration agents if they left the compound.

Their typical workday began at 3:30 a.m. and ended at 8 p.m., they said. They allegedly were forbidden to drink water or use restrooms except at morning and noon breaks.

Workers were paid as little as $100 every other week, after deductions, for nearly 200 hours of work, they said.

Food purchased from a tiny company store was overpriced, they said: $4.50 for a gallon of milk; $3.50 for a six-pack of soda and $1.50 for a pack of tortillas that costs 59 cents at supermarkets.

They claimed that the Griffith-Ives Co. deducted exorbitant amounts from paychecks for other necessities of life: $40 every two weeks to sleep in a filthy wooden barracks and to use feces-strewn restrooms; $2 for cleaning; and additional charges for blankets, sheets, pillows, toilet paper and even for the tools they used on the job.

Defense attorneys say many of the allegations are ridiculous.

Sadowsky said there is strong evidence to show that former employees 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.

Why would Indian villagers return to Ives’ ranch year after year if they were abused and enslaved? Sadowsky asked.

Prosecutors acknowledge that some Indian workers have returned to Ives’ ranch, but only because they saw it as their only job prospect in the United States. Most workers had never been outside the state of Oaxaca, Gillam 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.”

The Griffith-Ives system began to unravel almost by accident in November, 1989, lawyers say, when two young workers escaped from the compound after being locked in a room for several hours as punishment for being late for work.

The two men were brought by a field laborer to the Mexican Consulate in Oxnard, then taken to a California Rural Legal Assistance office nearby.

Today, after a two-year slowdown, the Griffith-Ives Co. ranches are again productive, competitors said. Dolly Ives represented the company at a national buyers forum in Atlanta in January and was offering ornamental eucalyptus leaves at prices well under the market rate, competitors said.

Many of Ives’ former workers now live in caves or cardboard boxes on hillsides in northern San Diego County, prosecutors said. Some of Ives’ defenders say the laborers were better off at the Somis compound.

“But just ask those guys if they’re happier on the hillsides or at the ranch.” Gillam said. “They’ll say they’re a lot happier now. Don’t underestimate the importance of freedom to these guys.”