Tyson Smuggled Help for Years, U.S. Alleges

A U.S. prosecutor on Wednesday outlined to jurors what he said was a years-long scheme by managers at Tyson Foods Inc. to hire undocumented workers for low-wage jobs at its chicken-processing plants around the country.

The company, the world’s largest maker of poultry products and the supplier of about a fourth of the chicken bought in the United States, is on trial in U.S. District Court here on criminal charges that it conspired to smuggle undocumented migrants from Mexico and Central America for jobs at up to 21 plants, including one in Shelbyville, Tenn.

Assistant U.S. Atty. John P. MacCoon said Tyson officials pursued a strategy during the 1990s of importing and hiring undocumented workers as a way of keeping up with rapid turnover at its poultry plants without raising pay.

“This trial is about corporate greed,” MacCoon said during his opening statement. “It’s about what happens when a corrupt corporate culture makes the bottom line the all-consuming priority.”

Two Tyson managers and a third executive, now retired, are co-defendants. Two other managers included in a 36-count indictment pleaded guilty last month to conspiracy and are expected to testify for the prosecution. A sixth Tyson supervisor committed suicide after the indictments were announced in December 2001.

Tyson said it has never knowingly hired workers who lacked legal documents. The company, based in Springdale, Ark., has insisted that its senior executives were unaware of any violations by lower-level supervisors and said misconduct was limited to a few managers at a handful of plants.

“No senior executive forced any employee, directly or indirectly, to commit the crimes charged in this indictment,” said Tom Green, a Washington attorney representing Tyson.

The case marks the first time that immigrant-smuggling charges have been brought against a company as large as Tyson. Most often, prosecutions target individual smugglers and occasionally employers. In recent years, the Immigration and Naturalization Service has been criticized for cutting back on work-site enforcement while building up its presence on the U.S.-Mexico border.

“This is a significant prosecution because enforcement of employer penalties for hiring undocumented workers has virtually collapsed,” said Wayne Cornelius, director of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at UC San Diego.

“By singling out a major employer” like Tyson, Cornelius added, “INS is signaling that it is not a completely toothless tiger in the workplace.”

The case is also unusual because federal prosecutors hope to seize millions of dollars from Tyson that they charge were the fruits of the company’s reliance on a lower-paid undocumented workforce. The maneuver is not unlike asset forfeitures in drug cases. Tyson has said that federal authorities initially put the amount at more than $130 million, but prosecutors are tight-lipped about how much they will seek during the separate forfeiture phase, if they win conviction. The trial is expected to last at least two months.

The charges grew from a 2 1/2-year undercover investigation beginning in late 1997 in which federal agents transported 154 undocumented immigrants to six Tyson plants. The indictment includes smuggling charges going back to 1994.

The government’s case against Tyson rests heavily on conversations, taped by a pair of undercover immigration agents, in which Tyson managers allegedly arranged transportation for undocumented workers who had been provided with fraudulent papers. Managers at the Shelbyville plant, for example, are said to have paid agents $200 for each worker with false Social Security documents. More than 400 of the tapes are to be played in court.

According to prosecutors, Tyson sought to deflect attention from its unlawful hiring by volunteering to join a test program offered by the INS that enabled companies to check by computer whether an applicant is authorized to work in the United States. Participation made the company appear committed to enforcement of immigration laws, MacCoon said, even as it sought ways around the restrictions.

Tyson later shifted from hiring directly to relying on placement agencies, even though its executives believed those firms offered mainly undocumented workers, according to the government.

“Tyson management knew what was going on in hiring at its plants and let it go,” MacCoon said.

Lawyers for Tyson and the three remaining co-defendants said the prosecution’s case is flimsy and overly dependent on the testimony of several people who already have entered guilty pleas but have not yet been sentenced.

Green said the allegations represent a small number of employees in a worldwide company with facilities in 19 states and 13 foreign countries during 1999, when the investigation was underway. The workforce, which numbered 67,000 then, is now 120,000 due to Tyson’s merger with IBP Inc.

“When you have 67,000 employees, there’s always going to be a few who resist those policies, or who violate those policies,” Green said.

He said the company had scrupulously followed hiring rules, noting that while the undercover investigation was proceeding, Tyson was being investigated by civil rights officials of the Justice Department for allegedly scrutinizing too aggressively Latino applicants at its facility in Sedalia, Mo.

Green also disputed that the firm’s increased use of temporary workers had saved money. He said such hiring may have been more expensive and, in any case, was not unlawful since Tyson relied upon the placement agencies to make sure the workers had work papers.

Robert M. Adler, lawyer for one of the indicted executives, Gerald Lankford, said his client was not mentioned in the secretly taped conversations and had no way of knowing that managers at individual plants were arranging for the hiring of workers who lacked papers. Lankford, 64, is now retired.

Two other Tyson officials -- Robert Hash, 50, a divisional vice president, and Keith Snyder, 43, who manages a Tyson complex in Noel, Mo. -- were placed on administrative leave pending the outcome of the case. Their attorneys said they were not involved.