Day Laborers Say They Were Jobbed in Sting

The Sheriff’s Department report called it “a sting operation.” Critics called it entrapment of day laborers looking for work.

The Sheriff’s Department one day last year assigned seven deputies to rid a city block of day laborers, whom Dana Point officials said continuously violate a local ordinance prohibiting the solicitation of employment “while standing on a street or highway.”

Deputies nabbed 10 men Nov. 13: Francisco Mosqueda Ortega, Carlos Anibal Alvarado and eight others who were cited, handcuffed and hauled off to Orange County Jail. They sat for about five hours for allegedly violating Dana Point Municipal Code Section 5.06.020(a).

Yet despite the planning and effort put into the sting, the Orange County district attorney’s office declined to prosecute the 10 men and a spokesman could not explain why. Undeterred, Dana Point city officials ordered City Atty. Jerry M. Patterson to prosecute the alleged lawbreakers.

Now, as two of the men await court hearings three months after the sting operation and the arrests, new questions are being raised about the deputies’ conduct in the investigation and the jailing of the men. What’s more, the job soliciting that the arrests were intended to deter goes on.

Lawyers and supporters of the men arrested in November have several complaints about the case. For starters, they said, the men were jailed for a misdemeanor infraction that normally is handled with a citation and $25 fine.

Some of the men, moreover, said they were not told at the time why they were being arrested. Some of the 10 men also said that small amounts of money were taken from them at the jail. A Sheriff’s Department spokesman said the accusations will be looked into if any of the men file a complaint.

Alvarado, 24, said he had $86 when arrested, but a jail property receipt shows that he had only $46 when booked. He said that he tried to complain about the missing money when he was released but was chased away by a deputy.

Alvarado’s gold property receipt, a carbon copy of the original usually signed by an inmate to acknowledge the amount of money and personal items taken from him while in custody, is unsigned. However, Sheriff’s spokesman Lt. Ron Wilkerson said the original copy has Alvarado’s signature.

Meanwhile, Ortega, 40, a Mexican immigrant who has lived in South County for 10 years, and Alvarado, 24, a Guatemalan who immigrated three years ago, pleaded not guilty. The two men have a court appearance scheduled March 20.

Of the other men involved, one has not been located, four have arrest warrants out for them for failure to appear in court and three pleaded guilty to soliciting employment and each paid a $252 fine. These three men, frightened by the specter of one year in jail and a $1,000 fine--the maximum punishment for the offense--agreed to plead guilty and pay the fine without ever consulting an attorney.

Both Ortega and Alvarado remain resolute in their claims of innocence, and that they were entrapped.

“My only crime was that I wanted to work. Other than that, I did nothing wrong,” Ortega said.

In an ironic twist to the story, Ortega received a summons from the county last week to report for jury duty in March, two days after he goes to court. “Isn’t this stupid? They treat me like a criminal and throw me in jail, but they still think I’m honorable enough to sit in judgment of someone else. Crazy,” he said.

Unskilled workers, most of them Mexican immigrants, have been gathering at the corner of Doheny Park Road and Domingo Street for more than a decade, competing for low-paying jobs that range from gardening to light construction. About 20 men are found in that area every day, hoping to land a temporary job at $5 or $6 an hour, and many are legal residents.

Dana Point City Manager Stephen B. Julian said the ordinance was enacted about five years ago after officials received numerous complaints from merchants that the groups of men were a “nuisance” and impeding business.

He said the sting operation last fall was the first of its kind in Dana Point and was conducted only after it became apparent that the frequent citations given by deputies to the workers and people who hire them were not having a deterrent effect.

“This is a persistent problem. In the past, everyone has gotten off with tickets and warnings. But we keep getting complaints from citizens and merchants, and we decided to push for prosecution this time,” Julian said.

Neither he nor Patterson could explain the district attorney’s decision not to prosecute the cases.

Attorney Kathryn Terry, who counseled some of the arrestees, said she believed the district attorney’s office balked at prosecuting the men because the sting bordered on entrapment, which entails tricking or deceiving someone into committing a crime.

On the day of the arrests, the two deputies dressed in civilian clothes arrived in the red Nissan truck and “asked for six workers for landscaping jobs,” Ortega said. There was a group of about 20 men waiting at the corner and several hurried toward the truck, he added.

Ortega said he too approached the truck but retreated when someone else recognized one of the men inside as a deputy, nicknamed “El Camaron” (the shrimp) by local Latinos, who frequently works undercover in Dana Point. Despite the warning, the lure of employment was too strong for five men who willingly hopped inside the camper shell, Ortega said.

About 20 minutes later, the two deputies returned and asked for three more workers, Ortega said. At that point, some of the workers “said the men in the truck probably weren’t cops,” and three other workers agreed to go with them, he added.

Another 20 or 30 minutes passed and the men in the red pickup truck returned, asking for two more workers, he said. Ortega, who has a wife and three teenage children in Mexico, said he volunteered to go with the deputies.

Alvarado said he was walking to his car to return home when the pickup truck pulled up alongside of him and one of the occupants inside the cab asked, “Do you want to work?”

“I asked him how much they were paying and he said $6 [per hour]. I said ‘OK’ and jumped inside and sat next to Ortega,” said Alvarado, who also works at night at a San Juan Capistrano restaurant.

According to the deputies’ version of events, both Alvarado and Ortega did the soliciting. The two men were taken into custody, along with the eight other workers, and charged with violating the Dana Point ordinance.

Terry, whose specialty is immigration law, said that deputies and city officials trampled on the rights of Alvarado, Ortega and the other men who were arrested. She advised them to plead not guilty and ask for a public defender.

“They were intimidated by the deputies, jailed for a misdemeanor offense that is normally settled with a ticket and coaxed by the prosecuting attorney into pleading guilty and paying a fine. Some of these guys ended up paying a [$252] fine even after spending a day in jail,” Terry said.

Alvarado said that attorney Elizabeth R. Feffer, hired by Patterson to prosecute the 10 defendants, allegedly pressured some of them into pleading guilty and paying the fine. According to Alvarado, Feffer and an interpreter met with him and four other defendants in a room at Municipal Court in Laguna Niguel and “asked us to consider pleading guilty.”

Alvarado said that the interpreter warned the men that if they pleaded not guilty and were convicted at trial, they would have to pay up to a $1,000 fine.

“Three of the men said they would rather lose $252 than $1,000, so they pleaded guilty. They never talked with an attorney,” Alvarado said. He said that when he informed Feffer that he was going to stick with a not-guilty plea, she allegedly told him to leave the room.

Feffer declined repeated requests for interviews and referred all questions to Patterson, who did not return phone calls on Friday.

Julian said the workers’ complaint of entrapment “sounds like an argument that somebody would use when he was caught.”

Despite the arrests and continued enforcement by deputies, small groups of workers continue to congregate in the area, and they keep getting hired by contractors or residents who need cheap labor.

Derik Furtado, owner of Dana Point Jet Ski, is one of what officials said is a large number of business owners who have complained about the day laborers gathering at the corner. The men sometimes gather on a vacant lot next to Furtado’s store.

“I’ve had problems with them getting drunk and littering. I’ve called the sheriff once or twice to disperse them,” Furtado said. “When somebody comes into my store to spend $20,000 on a boat, the last thing you want them to see is a bunch of illegal Mexicans standing here.”

But Jack Saunderson, whose family has owned Lucy’s El Patio restaurant for 45 years, said the day laborers have never bothered them or their customers. The restaurant is half a block from the intersection where the men gather each morning.

“We’ve never had any problems with them, nor are they our customers. Most of them are hard-working guys who have families. They’re out here ever morning waiting for somebody to offer them work and are usually gone by 11 a.m. or noon. They have as much right to look for work as any of us,” Saunderson said.

Attorney Terry scoffed at the “hypocrisy” of Dana Point city officials and residents “who don’t think twice about hiring these men as cheap labor but don’t want them on the street when they’re of no use to them.”

“Their attitude reeks of prejudice and discrimination. When are these people going to wake up to the fact that it’s these same immigrants who clean their homes, tend their gardens and work in the fancy restaurants where they eat, all for cheap. It’s so hypocritical,” Terry said.

Julian said the city set up a job hotline for the benefit of day laborers and employers. However, the workers complained that the telephone is not always staffed and that jobs are not always available.