Five Laborers Paid in Exploitation Case

More than three years after a Ventura County flower rancher was charged with exploiting hundreds of Mexican laborers, five former employees have received their share of $1.25 million in court-ordered back wages.

Checks ranging from $2,300 to $4,700 were issued Monday to five workers from Oxnard. Checks for the remaining 377 laborers who worked at Edwin M. Ives’ compound in Somis will be issued when the employees are located.

The amount of the checks will range from $577 to $13,620, depending on length of employment.

Ives, 57, of Los Angeles was sentenced Sept. 13 to three years in prison after pleading guilty to corporate racketeering and to numerous labor and immigration violations.

He agreed to pay a restitution amount believed to be the stiffest fine ever levied in a U.S. immigration case.

In exchange for the guilty plea and restitution, prosecutors agreed to dismiss extortion and slavery charges that had drawn widespread attention when Ives was indicted in 1990.

“Rather than have the funds exhausted in continued litigation and defense of the case, we were able to work out an agreement that actually got money back to the abused workers,” said U.S. Atty. Terree A. Bowers. “That’s a very satisfactory result.”

Prosecutors said the case is significant because it will send a stern message to employers who abuse vulnerable workers or hire illegal immigrants. Bowers called the case historic because it is the first federal conviction for racketeering in a civil rights case.

To the workers who received checks Monday, the moment seemed a long time coming. Dressed in cowboy boots, jeans and work shirts, the men stood silently as government officials spoke and then presented the checks.

Speaking through an interpreter, most said they planned to deposit the checks in bank accounts and weigh carefully how they would spend the money.

“I wasn’t sure I was going to get the check today, so I’m in shock,” said Erasto Angeles, 47. “I didn’t know the date, but I always knew the day would come.”

Serafin Carrillo, 59, said he hopes to eventually use the money to help his wife and daughter become U.S. citizens.

The workers told of being awakened at 2 or 3 a.m. and being forced to work 16-hour days, six days a week. They said they were shielded from the outside world and virtually imprisoned on Ives’ 50-acre compound, which was surrounded by high fences, locked gates and secured by attack dogs inside.

“We worked a lot of hours and we couldn’t go out of the ranch,” Carrillo said.

Most of the workers have returned to Mexico, and federal officials plan to travel there to disburse the rest of the back wages. Workers who are in the United States illegally will have to claim their wages through Mexican authorities, said Assistant U.S. Atty. Alfredo X. Jarrin.