by Ted Genoways
It was a spotlight on another horrifying but legal practice. No surprise, then, that lobbyists from the poultry industry soon helped the effort to move similar bills onto the legislative agenda in Florida and Iowa, as well as Minnesota. Wilton Simpson, an egg farmer and now a member of the Florida Senate, pushed the legislation in the Sunshine State. In Iowa, where egg mogul Jack DeCoster was under a federal investigation that eventually found that filthy conditions at his facilities had led to a salmonella outbreak and nationwide egg recall, the Iowa Poultry Association freely admits the role it played in shaping the bill. Introduced by then–state representative Annette Sweeney, former executive director of the Iowa Angus Association, the bill—supposedly composed around Sweeney’s kitchen table—was nearly identical in language to the bill introduced by Hamilton and Magnus in Minnesota.
When I reached Hamilton by phone at his office at Christensen Family Farms to inquire about the origin of the bill, he searched his computer for his notes. “Was that House File 1369?” he asked. “Let me pull that up again—because I know that was brought to me from an ag group, and I introduced it.” I asked if the group in question was the Minnesota Agri-Growth Council; Hamilton ignored the question. “So it was brought forth,” he said, “and I said that, yeah, I will put my name on it, so that we could have some discussion around that.” Later that same day, he sent me an email to revise his statements: the issues of farm trespass, hiring under false pretenses, and the shooting of undercover videos was “brought to me by a number of people and not simply a single group or organization.”
Sally Jo Sorensen, president of the McLeod County Farmers’ Union, wasn’t buying it. “At a time when a significant share of the consumer food market is clamoring to know about their food, the Agri-Growth Council seeks to impose a government-enforced ban on information,” she wrote. “Maybe that’s what that big party the Council threw for the RNC in 2008 that the journos loved so much was all about.”
In the meantime, back in Bayard, Shawn Lyons had hired a lawyer in hopes of mounting a defense against the charges against him, but he was dead to rights. His abuse of sows at MowMar Farms had been captured on video, and he’d confessed to the deputy sheriff.
“They got you, dude,” Lyons said his attorney told him. “Do you want to plead guilty?”
Lyons shook his head remembering. “Might as well.”
His lawyer met with the county attorney and worked out a plea agreement—six months probation and a $625 fine plus court fees. On January 15, 2009, Lyons went to the magistrate to plead guilty to one count of livestock neglect and sign an admission of guilt: “On or about August 27, 2008, I did the following: intentionally cause pain and suffering, or otherwise fail to provide livestock care consistent with customary animal husbandry practice.” The date cited for the abuse was ten days after MowMar Farms had taken ownership of the facility. Despite all the denials from Julie Craven, the eventual conviction for Lyons and others was for actions documented after the facility was under contract to Hormel—but the press didn’t seem to notice. And, with no more ceremony than that, Shawn Lyons became the first person ever convicted of livestock abuse on a midwestern farm—and, according to PETA, only the third person convicted of that crime in the history of the American meat industry.
What Lyons remembered more clearly were the months it took him to pay off that fine now that he had no job and the immediate cold shoulder he received from everyone in Bayard. Every time he went to Sparky’s, the local watering hole, all of the farmers shunned him and gave him dirty looks. “They completely snubbed him,” Lyons’s wife, Sherri, told me. “It was brutal for six months after that.” Then, at the end of June 2009, Richard Ralston, Alan Rettig, and Greg Hackler pleaded guilty to multiple counts of livestock abuse and received two-year suspended sentences along with fines. Jordan Anderson pleaded guilty to aiding and abetting livestock abuse and was fined as well. (Shelly Mauch’s charges were listed at the time as still “in process”—and appear to have since been dropped.)
In all, it was six convictions—a major PR win for PETA, which often appeals to local authorities to make arrests but rarely gets the kind of cooperation they got from the Greene County Sheriff’s Office. But it was also a hollow victory. “Who in their right mind would want to work in a dusty, ammonia-ridden pig shed for nine bucks an hour but somebody who, literally, had no other options?” asked Dan Paden, the senior researcher at PETA who helped run the investigation. “And at the end of a long, frustrating day, when you are trying to move a pig who hasn’t been out of its crate in [months], that’s when these beatings occur—and people do stupid, cruel, illegal things.” PETA was urging prosecutors to go beyond plea agreements for farmworkers; they wanted charges against farm owners and their corporate backers, to hold them responsible for crimes committed by undertrained, overburdened employees. But the sheriff’s office closed the investigation and never seems to have taken a look at charging Gary Weihs or Lynn Becker or any of the other off-site managers, much less anyone at Hormel.
The crackdown, however, has had some broader effects. Today, workers at MowMar Farms, now renamed Fair Creek, watch weekly training videos on a large flat-screen TV in the break room, where they are reminded of the fundamentals of “day one” piglet care. Piglets are now kept warm with heat lamps, and sows are moved much less frequently. “We try to leave pigs home with Mom,” Becker’s health manager told the National Hog Farmer. “Never move more pigs than you have to.” The new system has dramatically reduced piglet mortality rates—and, according to one worker, runts are now euthanized via the carbon monoxide system preferred by PETA, rather than the blunt-force thumping of old. “I didn’t completely buy into it when we first started focusing on day-one pig care,” said the new farm manager, “but it really works.”
These changes have not only improved conditions for the hogs at the facility in Iowa, but also helped increase the profit margin for its owners. In the end, improved care has been touted as a win for everyone. But would it have occurred without the harsh light of public scrutiny? I asked Becker if the industry might not be better served by increased transparency, rather than tightened security. Why not open up Fair Creek to journalists to prove that it no longer resembles the days when it was MowMar Farms? He gave a list of reasons—sow health, proprietary practices—why it wouldn’t be possible. Months of follow-up requests went unanswered.
Shawn Lyons, who spent two years unemployed after being fired from MowMar Farms, finally got a job with a security company. He installs video cameras in hospitals, nursing homes, and schools for twenty-four-hour monitoring. Before I packed up my things and left his tiny house, Lyons asked me whatever became of Becker’s promise to investigate the possibility of installing security cameras in his hog barns. “That’s what I do now,” he said.
His wife, Sherri, chimed in. “They could have some kind of a committee set up that can come in and check anytime that they want, someone that’s not associated with the company. I think that would be the better way to do it. So that people are well aware of the fact that there’s cameras here, and there’s this group of people that can come in anytime and look. So, you know, be on your best behavior.”
Part Four
Chapter 10
I THOUGHT IT WAS FISHY
On March 19, 2009, Roxanne Tarrant received a phone call from AIG Claim Services, informing her that she should complete an R-8 Notice of Rehabilitation Plan Closure form for Pablo Ruiz. Tarrant knew that Ruiz was still suffering from the same blinding migraines and searing pain in his hands and lower legs that she had first recorded in his file more than a year before. In fact, his condition had worsened with diabetes from his steroid treatments, and Dr. Lachance at the Mayo Clinic had expressed concern that Ruiz might be suffering from some form of meningitis. When Tarrant asked AIG why coverage for someone as obviously unwell as Ruiz was being terminated, she was referred to his attorney. Thomas Patterson, the lawyer now handling the claims of the Hispanic workers from QPP, told he
r that he had been mailed a VHS cassette containing short clips of secret surveillance video, crudely cut together into a montage of Ruiz performing everyday tasks—tasks that AIG said would be impossible if he were being honest with Dr. Lachance about his pain levels. They were terminating coverage on the assertion that Ruiz was lying about the extent of his injuries.
To this day, it remains unclear what motivation Ruiz would have. The implication was that he intended to sue QPP in hopes of receiving an out-of-court settlement, but after more than seven years, Ruiz has never sought compensation for anything more than his medical bills, and he has repeatedly told me that his examinations and treatments are often excruciating: spinal taps, sweat tests, bone scans, MRIs—the kinds of procedures no one would choose to endure. More than that, a number of Ruiz’s symptoms were measurable by those tests. Before the termination call, his most recent sweat test indicated lingering effects of polyradiculoneuropathy, and his blood work still showed spikes in his sugar levels brought on by his type 2 diabetes. Drs. Lachance and Dyck believed that Ruiz’s recovery was being slowed by clinical depression and chronic pain; they had jointly recommended referral for Ruiz to the Mayo Clinic’s Pain Management Program as “a charity case,” which the hospital had already approved. According to Ruiz’s insurance file, the doctors felt it was “imperative that Mr. Ruiz receives immediate treatment for his depression and chronic pain,” noting that they both believed that “these are as a result of his 11/20/07 date of injury.”
Still, the video showed a sequence of short scenes that AIG claimed were hard evidence of Ruiz’s physical fitness. In the first segment, shot on December 8, 2008, just days after Dale Wicks brought him in to question his immigration status, Ruiz is shown returning from an appointment in the Gonda Building of the Mayo Clinic. His wife gets out of their car to pump gas, and Ruiz walks gingerly with their six-year-old son into the station to pay. “I was walking slowly, because that day the winter was pretty bad,” Ruiz told me. During the appointment, Lachance had given him 40 milligrams of OxyContin, more than enough to temporarily dull Ruiz’s pain. “After I take my medicine I can be out for a little bit of time, walking slow. But I still had the headaches. The headaches never go away,” he said. “And I never said that I can’t walk. I walk short distances. Longer distances make me tired and short of breath and a lot of pain.”
The second video was shot at the Old Country Buffet in Rochester on December 12. This time Ruiz was shown leaving a consultation for his diabetes. “I had to check out my blood, do my insulin, and eat something,” Ruiz explained. In the video, someone has to carry Ruiz’s tray from the buffet line back to the table, but he manages to walk that distance on his own. In the third segment, shot on December 18 at the Value Store, Ruiz is shown in the parking lot after buying Christmas presents. He lifts several boxes from their cart and hands them to his wife to load into the car.
Ruiz told me that when his attorney saw the video, he started “kind of freaking.”
“This is bad for us,” Ruiz remembered him saying. “What do you think Dr. Lachance thought when he saw those videos? What do you think he’s going to say? He’s going to say, ‘Oh, he can walk. He can work.’”
And, in fact, when I asked Lachance specifically about Ruiz’s case, he seemed clearly to have been swayed by the video. Bound by confidentiality, he couldn’t answer my questions as directly as I had asked them, but—slowly, carefully—he explained his interpretation. “For most patients that have gone on to have complaints, their complaints consist of a purely subjective phenomenon which is pain—something you really can’t measure,” he told me. “One example is an individual who was apparently severely affected by pain, dramatically so, who, it turns out, was investigated and videotaped secretly by workers’ comp investigators and was found, outside the context of the office, to behave completely normally.”
I asked Lachance what possible reason there would be to lie, for months and now years.
“I think there’s a whole psychology that relates to work injuries—people’s response to being injured in the workplace, the possibilities of compensation and secondary gain.”
Lachance smiled to be sure I understood his meaning.
“Put yourself in the place of these people who do these godawful jobs,” he said. “Who wouldn’t want to see if there was some alternative for their livelihood?”
In the early morning hours of June 12, 2009, police arrived at Eleventh Avenue SW. The neighborhood is poor even by Austin standards—tiny clapboard houses clustered along unlit streets that dead-end into a muddy oxbow of Turtle Creek—and officers had been dispatched after Patricia Rodriguez-Sanchez called 911 to report that her husband had tried to strangle her. When she came to the door, her face was scratched, and her neck bore the bright red imprint of a man’s hand. “You’re lucky to be alive,” one cop told her. He arrested the young woman’s husband and told her to get an order for protection as soon as the courthouse opened. The police loaded her husband into their cruiser and took him to jail.
At the detention center, officers discovered that Sanchez’s husband had a Matrícula Consular card, a form of identification issued by the Mexican government to nationals living outside the country, with the name Delfino Sanchez-Hernandez but he was also carrying paperwork from Quality Pork Processors with the name Richard Morones-Hernandez. He explained that he was Richard Hernandez and claimed that the Matrícula Consular card was his brother’s. Not sure who they had in custody, police obtained a warrant to search the couple’s home for anything that could prove that the man they had arrested was living in the country without legal documents and had received government identification in violation of state law.
The next morning, Patricia Sanchez filled out the paperwork for a protection order at the court clerk’s window before going to work at QPP. While she was beginning her shift, police arrived at her home to execute the warrant. In the bedroom of the house, officers searched two purses. In one, they found QPP pay stubs for Lisa Salazar, a letter from the IRS to Lisa Salazar, receipts for money orders sent to Mexico by Lisa Salazar, and a Minnesota Health Care Program card for Salazar’s five-year-old son. In the other, they found a letter from the IRS to Patricia Sanchez, letters from Mower County Human Services to Patricia Sanchez. Then one officer noticed a QPP Employee of the Month plaque from 2006 hanging on the living room wall. Mounted on the plaque was a photograph of the woman who had identified herself to officers as Patricia Sanchez, posing in her hard hat and white smock, but the name plate was engraved “Lisa M. Salazar.”
As the officers were leaving, Sanchez returned home from her shift at QPP. Through an interpreter, police asked her to identify herself, pointing out that the picture on the plaque appeared to be her. Sanchez admitted that she worked at QPP under the name Salazar. After later checking state records, police learned that a fraudulent Minnesota driver’s license had been issued to Lisa Salazar. And QPP confirmed that the license was among the pieces of identification presented at the time of her hiring. Sanchez was brought to the police station, read her Miranda warning, and then presented with the evidence. She waived her rights and again admitted to working at QPP under the name of Lisa Salazar. Police informed her that she was under arrest on two counts of aggravated forgery.
The arrest was in accordance with the law, but it didn’t sit right with Detective Sergeant David McKichan. As a member of the Southeast Minnesota Narcotics and Gang Task Force, he knew from fellow police officers in Worthington that Hispanic immigrants there still refused to cooperate with police investigations out of fear of deportation, more than two years after the Swift raids. There was already a climate of fear among immigrants after Austin police investigators recently had strung together an unusually interconnected set of stolen identities, resulting in twenty-two cases of aggravated forgery. Stories in the local press were beginning to make note of the fact that almost every case involved either QPP or Select Foods, and anti-immigration activists had not only renewed their push for the
city government to implement a measure similar to the ordinance proposed in Fremont, but more extreme elements had begun to surface.
Only days before Sanchez’s arrest, Samuel Johnson, a member of the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement, had staged the first in a series of anti-immigration rallies at the Mower County Veterans Memorial in front of the county courthouse. For two hours, Johnson and fellow NSM member Robert Hester took turns barking into a megaphone, decrying immigrants for stealing American jobs and bringing gang violence to the streets of Austin, while supporters held banners reading DEPORT ILLEGALS and yelled at counterprotesters and passersby. Johnson shouted at Hispanics gathered in the park, “You think America’s going to let you get away with this? Not a chance.” Another protester called out, “Hitler is not dead; he’s alive in our hearts.” Austin police had served as peace officers at those events and worried that immigrants wouldn’t come forward to report crimes against them or yield information vital to major crime cases already under investigation if they in turn would be investigated for aggravated forgery.
McKichan told Jeremy Clinefelter, the assistant Mower County attorney, that he didn’t think the office should prosecute cases like Sanchez’s. Clinefelter agreed with the sentiment. “It didn’t feel right morally,” he later told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. “We’re prosecutors. But more than that, we’re here to be fair and just.” But, until Clinefelter could get higher-ups to agree to an official policy, the only action would have to originate from within QPP.
In an unusual move, both CEO Kelly Wadding and human resources director Dale Wicks agreed to speak to the Austin Daily Herald about the process they used to clear potential employees—but only to defend their hiring practices. QPP, they explained, asked all applicants to fill out a standard I-9 form, which required a name, address, date of birth, Social Security number, statement of citizenship, and documents to support identity and eligibility to work. Human Resources would then run that information through the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s online E-Verify program, as well as a Social Security database purchased by QPP to check that the date and place that the card was issued matched the date and place of birth on the I-9. They said that the process occasionally raised red flags—sometimes turning up an invalid birth certificate or passport, sometimes uncovering a Social Security number with a date of issuance before the applicant’s stated birth date or a number registered as belonging to someone deceased. But more often, everything would come back okay. In such instances, Wadding said, “We’re obligated to hire them.”