Violent Robbers Target Mexican Migrants

Antonio Diaz cashed his paycheck and pocketed the money that covers rent and food and helps support his parents, three brothers and three sisters back home in the Mexican state of Guanajuato.

Early the next morning, four thieves armed with guns crashed through the flimsy front door of the sparsely decorated two-bedroom apartment he shares with nine other Mexican migrant workers.

“They come in and show the guns,” the wiry 24-year-old said of the recent robbery. “They hit one guy in the head and said, ‘Get down or I’ll shoot you!’ One guy started looking in our pockets. They looked everywhere, took some wallets.

“I was scared. . . . I say, ‘Here it is. It’s all I have.’ ”

Two minutes later, the robbers vanished. The take: $1,500.

Diaz and his next-door neighbors were the latest targets of what police call a violent group of criminals who struck four times one recent week in the tiny southeastern Pennsylvania towns of Kennett Square and New Garden.

Twenty-nine victims--all men, all Mexican, all working on mushroom farms, in landscaping or in construction, most of them migrants who return home in the winter--have been beaten, kicked and pistol-whipped. One went to the hospital with a gunshot wound after he put up a fight with a gunman who stormed his bedroom.

The crimes have rattled thousands of Mexican workers living hand-to-mouth in an area where a quarter of the nation’s button mushrooms are grown.

“Their method is intimidation,” Kennett Square Police Chief Albert McCarthy said. “They seize control quickly. And . . . they’re not afraid to shoot.”

The thieves hit one apartment at a Kennett Square apartment building May 2, tried to rob a 24-year-old worker at his New Garden apartment the next day and stormed the New Garden trailer behind the Frezzo Mushroom Co. sheds May 4. On May 9, they robbed the Kennett Square apartment again.

Why target some of the county’s poorest residents?

Thieves expect each apartment to be packed with people carrying cash, authorities say. And they gamble that their victims might not report the incident to police.

“Unfortunately, some of [the workers] are undocumented and they are, of course, suspicious of anyone in law enforcement, that they might report them to immigration,” said Anita O’Connor, director of La Comunidad Hispana.

Many migrants don’t deposit their money in banks because the Mexican financial institutions tend to be less stable.

“There’s a suspicion that if they put their money in a bank, they won’t get it back,” O’Connor said.