A Harvest of Charges, Countercharges : Bitter Battle Between Migrant Workers, Grower Moves Into Vista Courtroom

It is a case of outrageous accusations and glaring contradictions: hair-raising stories of farm owners opening fire on hapless migrant workers who dared ask for their paychecks; angry retorts that unscrupulous lawyers have coerced naive workers into paying exorbitant sums to have immigration papers processed.

And then there are the workers themselves, dozens of them. Disheveled and frightened-looking, they line the halls of the Vista courthouse before every hearing on their case, waiting to tell their story.

The case involves 42 migrant farm workers who united to sue their former employer, the Ukegawa Bros. Inc. The lawsuit, filed almost two years ago, will finally go to trial today in the North County courtroom of Superior Court Judge David B. Moon, unless a last-minute settlement is reached.

Each side in the hotly contested case plans to present 40 to 50 witnesses to bolster its claims. Lawyers on both sides have suggested that the trial--which may last three weeks--will teem with surprises, drama and bold-faced lies.

‘Greed and Intimidation’

“You’re going to see a lot of greed and intimidation on the part of he lawyers,” said attorney William N. Sauer of his rivals, in an interview last week. Sauer, a neighbor and 20-year acquaintance of the Ukegawas, says the claims that the growers physically abused their workers were entirely fabricated.

Not surprisingly, the lawyers representing the farmhands intend to present a different story. Attorney Oscar Ruiz de Chavez said his clients are honest, hard-working laborers who have no reason to lie about the alleged atrocities. “It will be interesting to see who’s on their side, and what they’re saying,” Ruiz de Chavez said in a recent interview from his office in Calexico. “Obviously, somebody’s not telling the truth.”

Until recently, brothers Joe and Hiroshi Ukegawa and their sons had one of the largest tomato business in California. With farms in Del Mar, Olivenhain, Carlsbad and Oceanside, the Ukegawas have employed thousands of laborers over more than two decades--the majority of them undocumented migrants from Mexico.

Recent economic hardships, partly due to the litigation, have crippled the once-profitable business, according to Sauer. Now the Ukegawas are “desperately trying to get back on their feet,” he said.

In the early days, the Ukegawa Bros. toiled in relative isolation in the largely undeveloped North County. But the 1970s brought a population boom to North County and increased public awareness of the laborers living in the fields next to the newly built subdivisions.

Trouble has dogged the growers ever since.

In 1975 and 1976, United Farm Workers representatives who tried to unionize the laborers were chased off the Ukegawa farms. Employees who joined the union were fired or isolated from other workers--six years later, the state Labor Relations Board ordered the Ukegawas to rehire 39 of the workers who lost their jobs in the union dispute, with back pay.

In 1978, the Ukegawas again did battle with the state over the unsanitary living conditions of their workers. Ordered by the county health department to provide drinking water and toilets for the laborers, they did so--then bulldozed the squalid encampment in the fields where the workers had been living.

That action earned the Ukegawas the nickname Los Diablos, or “the devils”--a designation the workers still use today when referring to the company or the Del Mar farm where the camps were razed, according to one lawyer.

The controversy continued with a state audit in 1981 that showed that the company owed 2,000 of its employees more than $275,000 in overtime wages.

In 1984, neighbors in the burgeoning neighborhoods east of Del Mar complained of pesticide poisoning from the Ukegawa farm, and in 1986 they were cited by the state Department of Fish and Game for plowing over a stream bed to make way for a farm expansion.

Came to a Head in 1987

Things came to a head in 1987, in the midst of the drive to obtain legal documentation for workers who wished to qualify for amnesty under the federal government’s new immigration reform law.

Ruiz de Chavez, an immigration lawyer who had an office in Leucadia, said clients of his who worked for Ukegawa Bros. told him about the difficulty they were having in obtaining the necessary documents to prove their employment. Many of the workers claimed that, when they asked for documents, or sometimes when they just asked for their paychecks, they were threatened, beaten and even shot. “Similar stories kept appearing over and over, and it aroused our curiosity,” Ruiz de Chavez said.

“The guys told me (Joe T. Ukegawa) would just fire the (pellet) gun at them whenever he felt like it, with no rhyme or reason,” Ruiz de Chavez said. “When I asked about it, the farm manager told me one time they were just playing games and didn’t mean any harm by it.”

Ruiz de Chavez and his former law partner, Jan Culbertson, filed an $89-million lawsuit on Aug. 11, 1987, on behalf of 42 of the workers.

The lawsuit details many instances of alleged violence against 18 of the workers, which purportedly took place from 1980 to 1987. In one incident, worker David Alvarado Solano said that Joe T. Ukegawa, the son of one of the brothers who founded the business, took him to a secluded area of the farm, choked him and struck him in the face with his fist. Ukegawa reportedly told Solano that, if he did not sign a document releasing the company from all claims for back wages, it would cost him his life.

Ramon Delgado Roman claimed that Joe T. Ukegawa shot him with a pellet gun on two occasions when he asked for his paycheck, and told the worker that was the price he had to pay to collect his money. Venustiano Garcia Martinez said Joe T. Ukegawa also shot at him, and told him “he did not give a damn if he shot out his eye, that they had plenty of money.”

Juan Bahena ) Solano claimed he was shot at by Joe T. Ukegawa on 12 occasions in one year, often for no reason at all.

Workers who lived in fear of Joe T. Ukegawa began calling him El Loco, “the crazy one,” according to reports published in The Times two years ago.

Sauer, the Ukegawas’ attorney, said he did not know why the workers singled out young Joe, who “unequivocally” denies ever shooting at his employees. “I don’t know why they picked on Joe,” Sauer said. “He took a lot of them into his home, took them to the zoo, took them out to dinner.”

Sauer said the Japanese-American brothers are familiar with suffering and wouldn’t inflict it on others. Born in the United States, they spent much of their youth in government internment camps during World War II, Sauer said. “So they know what oppression is and are just appalled by these developments.”

The real trouble, said Sauer, was caused by rabble-rousing union recruiters and unscrupulous lawyers who came to the farms and stirred up discontent among the workers.

“In 1987, we had the worst form of pestilence in our fields--we had lawyers,” Sauer said. The lawyers, he said, were trying to sucker the workers into using their services for obtaining legal status, at a cost of $750 or more, even though the Catholic church and other social service agencies were offering assistance for far less.

Contrary to the charges in the initial lawsuit, Sauer said the Ukegawas “supported and encouraged these people to try to expedite the amnesty process, so the workers could get their citizenship.”

Ukegawa Bros. general manager Peter Mackauf, in a July, 1987, interview with The Times, acknowledged that there had been intentional delays because the company feared “losing all our workers all at one time once they become legal.” Mackauf said the company later realized its mistake and started working at a faster pace to help the employees obtain documentation.

In September, 1987, Sauer filed a $55-million counter-suit against Ruiz de Chavez, Culbertson and several other attorneys. The suit charges them with encouraging the workers to slow production and sabotage farm equipment.

The lawsuit alleges that the lawyers induced the workers to show up late for work and commit other acts of insubordination, including putting the wrong chemicals into the spraying tanks for application to the crops.

The suit also details threats that were allegedly made against workers who refused to participate in the lawsuit against the Ukegawas--a practice Sauer says is going on to this day.

Protective Order

Last week, Sauer successfully obtained a protective order for his witnesses from judge Moon. Sauer told the judge that one of his witnesses, Arnulfo Duarte, ran into a farm worker, who was among those who filed the original lawsuit against the Ukegawas, at a barbershop in Tijuana July 8. In an affidavit, Duarte claims his former co-worker said Duarte was “dead meat” if he testified on behalf of the Ukegawas. Duarte also said he was told that, after the trial, “they will kill everyone who testifies against (them).”

The order issued by Moon prohibits anyone on either side of the case from contacting, annoying or harassing those on the other side, and violators are subject to imprisonment for contempt of court.

Ruiz de Chavez said he found Duarte’s allegations “somewhat difficult to believe, because we had no idea at the time who his witnesses were.”

The attorney also disputed Sauer’s charges that he was creating trouble on the Ukegawas’ property, and said neither he nor any member of his staff ever went to the farms.

Ruiz de Chavez said he never encouraged the workers to be late for work or destroy equipment--if anything, he encouraged the opposite. “I told them, don’t ever destroy anything, make them profitable,” he said. “If I want to go after money that belongs to them, that belongs to my clients, I want to make sure they have the money available.”

Another suit against Ukegawa Bros. was filed last year with the state labor commissioner, after an investigation by the state Department of Industrial Relations. The case, alleging unpaid overtime wages, is scheduled to go to trial next year.