Trust Built and Broken

Walk along the streets of downtown Santa Ana and you will see one storefront sign after another offering help with immigration and, usually in bold letters, the services of a notary public.

Never mind that it is illegal in California for immigration consultants to advertise themselves as notaries. This law, on the books since 1977, was intended to prevent notaries from creating a false sense of importance. In most other countries, notaries are qualified attorneys or judges.

But this is Santa Ana, home to some 13,000 notaries, 10 times the statewide average. A high proportion of immigration advisors, travel services, garment contractors and employment agencies also depend on the city’s 320,000 residents--most of them immigrants--70% of them Latino and 10% Asian.

Santa Ana is a modern-day Ellis Island, a town flowing with newcomers largely from Mexico’s countryside.

Perhaps more than any other city in the state, it is also a crucible of immigrant exploitation: in housing, in employment, even on the streets, where confidence men and women lie in wait like hawks.

Although fraud against newcomers has increased throughout California as immigration has boomed, it is particularly prevalent in ethnic strongholds like Santa Ana. Here one can see the quintessential immigrant victims, the varied scams they face and law enforcement’s efforts to clamp down on a costly societal problem that few have addressed.

“Fraud is the No. 1 crime committed against the foreign-born Latino in Santa Ana,” said Jose Vargas, a 21-year Santa Ana police officer who works the Latino affairs beat. “Not gangs, not dope, but fraud.”

Santa Ana, like other areas, does not track crimes by ethnicity. But Vargas knows the magnitude of the problem in his town: He receives five complaints of fraud from Latinos every day. And for each one, he estimates 20 more are unreported, even though Latinos in his city, largely through his efforts, are more likely to report crimes than in other ethnic communities.

Some of the fraud attempts would be almost laughable, Vargas says, if they weren’t so brazen and persistent.

He cited the day laborers who were picked up by a man in a van and told they would be cleaning a swimming pool in a fancy hotel. They were provided a change of cutoffs and old T-shirts and then abandoned at the front desk, robbed of the belongings and money they had left in the van.

“This happened not only once, but many times,” Vargas said.

Lured by a Wish for Citizenship

Ada Elena and Jose Luis Rojas entered the blue house on Myrtle Street at dusk. The young Mexican couple alleged that they had given $3,000 in cash to Fernando Sanchez, an elderly man who promised them quick U.S. citizenships.

Ada Rojas said Sanchez whispered to them not to ask questions and do what he said. The Rojases were directed to a table. On it, they said, were two ivory-colored papers saying “Award Achievement,” with a blank box in the bottom right corner.

The Rojases penned their names and placed their thumbprints in the box, as a slim, gap-toothed blond man stood by silently. The couple said Sanchez told them the man’s name was “Mr. Johnson,” a top official of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.

The process took just a few minutes, but according to interviews and police reports, it was all part of a scam that would fleece the Rojases and at least a dozen others in Santa Ana of thousands of dollars.

The targets were mostly desperate undocumented immigrants like the Rojases. The lure: their distrust of government. “Sanchez told us, ‘President Clinton was behind all this. Clinton wanted votes from Latinos, so he would make citizens of us before the election,’ ” Ada Rojas said.

But they never got to vote. Two weeks before the election, Sanchez was arrested and charged with grand theft. On Dec. 6, he pleaded not guilty.

His lawyer, deputy public defender Mindy Graves, said Sanchez was not behind the scam. He was a “mule” for somebody else, she said.

Residents of the Townsend area of Santa Ana say they recall Sanchez roaming their neighborhood on Sunday mornings, dressed as a Salvation Army volunteer. They said he would march in the streets, Bible in hand, preaching loudly as a drummer alongside him pounded away.

On one such morning, Guadalupe Valencia, 47, opened the window of her second-floor apartment. “Let me know if you need to use the restroom or anything else,’ ” Valencia said she told them. Sanchez came up.

In the ensuing months, she said, the pudgy, gray-haired man would frequently call on her. He would take naps in her apartment, she would fix him soft-boiled eggs, he would use her phone.

Sanchez told Valencia that he spoke three languages, had studied abroad and knew people in high places.

Valencia, a single mother of two who has no education but learned to read by poring over the Bible, said she had no reason to doubt Sanchez. A permanent resident, Valencia said she paid him $850 for a U.S. citizenship, and 13 friends of hers also bought into Sanchez’s offer.

“I feel very sad. I recommended him to all these people,” said Valencia, tears welling in her eyes. “The money is not important to me. What I suffered emotionally, all the nights that I cried. Even one friend asked me if I had kept some of the money.”

Lack of Education Often a Factor

In many ways, Valencia is the archetypal immigrant victim: unschooled, isolated and unfamiliar with the English language or American ways--and trusting of compatriots.

She is a native of the state of Michoacan, a rural region southwest of Mexico City that is, in fact, home to many of the Mexican-born residents here, says Marisela Quijano, the Mexican consul in Santa Ana.

“If you come from Mexico City, you don’t trust anybody,” Quijano said. “But people coming from the countryside, it’s different. They are from small villages. They trust each other, they help each other. It’s easy for another people to commit fraud against our people.”

In Santa Ana, 46% of the residents have less than a high school education, compared to 23% statewide, according to 1996 data prepared for The Times by Claritas Inc., a market research firm. And many in Santa Ana, like Valencia, never sat in a schoolroom at all.

“Their world is so small,” said Eli Reyna, a case worker at the Orange County Human Relations Commission in Santa Ana and an immigrant from Mexico. Last September, Reyna was visited by Hector Morales, a 28-year-old painter who feared he and his family would lose everything.

Morales told Reyna that he was several days behind in rent when a manager at his apartment complex gave him this three days’ notice: Either you pay the rent or move out and leave your furniture and belongings, so the landlord can sell them.

Reyna told Morales that a three days’ notice means an owner can only file an eviction case in court, which starts the process. “He really did not know he had any rights about this,” Reyna said. “But he believed it was the law because he knew it had happened to others.”

Reyna added: “There is a cultural element. Especially Mexicans, we are very indirect in communications. That means it’s difficult to say no. It is kind of rude to be confrontational.”

A Rapidly Changing City

For decades, Santa Ana had had its barrio of farm workers. Beginning in the 1970s, land reform and harsh living conditions in Mexico and the booming California economy helped prompt an influx of new arrivals, said Bill Gayk, head of demographic research at Cal State Fullerton.

The pace accelerated in the ‘80s as California absorbed an unprecedented wave of immigrants, mostly from Mexico and Asia. Thousands of Southeast Asian refugees also settled in Santa Ana, driven by the large settlement in nearby Little Saigon.

In the 1970s, Santa Ana was a town of fewer than 200,000 people--a majority of them whites. But some of those residents migrated and the new arrivals were predominantly Mexican immigrants who were drawn by familial ties and the comforts of a city where Spanish was as much spoken as English.

As the face of the city changed, it became a magnet for garment contractors and other businesses eager to draw on the huge pool of immigrants, including many undocumented people.

Among them was Clothes Connection, which in 1993 established an apparel factory on Dyer Road. Within months, the company employed 2,000 workers, almost all of them immigrants. But government investigators said Clothes Connection didn’t pay overtime, illegally charged workers for company badges and work tools, and exposed employees to serious health hazards from tagging guns.

Two months ago, Clothes Connection shut down and moved to Tijuana--without paying workers their unpaid wages, state officials said. “The agreement was that they were to pay $90,000,” said Jose Millan, a former assistant labor commissioner who had investigated the company. “But the state can’t do anything now. If they go to Mexico, they’ll be outside state jurisdiction.” The company and its attorney did not return telephone calls.

At about the time that Clothes Connection left, Juan Flores-Quintero, 37, was clearing out his employment service business in the historic Barrister Building downtown. But not before he had placed some 1,100 Latinos, mostly undocumented immigrants, as nannies and housekeepers throughout Orange County, according to authorities.

Immigration agents said Flores, a recently naturalized U.S. citizen who speaks fluent English, advertised in Spanish-language newspapers and fliers. They allege that when women answered the ads for Ecuadorean Eagle Express, he asked them if they had immigration papers. If the answer was no, he sent them to 4th and Main and other street corners where they could easily buy forged documents, authorities said.

Although Flores placed these women in jobs, authorities allege he required them to leave jewelry or immigration papers as collateral until they returned with the first week’s paycheck, which he kept. Some women were paid as little as $90 a week for full-time work.

Flores pleaded guilty on Jan. 2 to one count of fraud and misuse of immigration employment documents. He faces a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison.

Myra Sun, a public defender representing Flores, said she has not seen any evidence that her client had “as a matter of routine” knowingly hired undocumented workers or directed them to obtain false immigration cards.

“The most prevalent form of immigrant exploitation [in Santa Ana] is employment,” said Rocky Concepcion, supervisory special agent for the INS in Orange County, which last year concentrated its forces in Santa Ana. “They know there are many people here who are desperate.”

Healers Can Betray Faith

About a year ago, Jose Rovelo went to a small house on 17th Street that had been converted to a business by a curandero--a faith healer. Rovelo, 59, was concerned about his sexual potency, he confided to the curandero, who had an answer.

Giving Rovelo two tea bag-sized pouches, one black, one red, filled with little trinkets, the curandero told him to keep them in his pockets. Rovelo says he paid $540 in cash for the pouches. “Come back in two weeks and bring a picture, an egg and $200,” the curandero told him, Rovelo said.

Three months later he walked into the Santa Ana Police Station, saying he had been taken. By then, it was too late. The curandero, whom Rovelo knew only as the “chief” of some obscure society, had vanished. Neighbors said he had gone to Texas.

“Oh, he was popular,” said one nearby resident who had observed the traffic. “He would sit in the back outside, and people would stand in line waiting for him to do his magic.”

Like shamans in some Eastern cultures--who are part medicine men, part priests--curanderos go back centuries in Latin America. “In Mexico, the curandero is born and raised in that particular village and is one of the more respectable persons in town,” Vargas said.

But many of the curanderos Vargas has investigated in Santa Ana often practice for a while and then skip town, he says.

“We have no less than 30 curanderos here,” Vargas said. “They tell you, ‘Oh, you have no money, no girlfriend. That’s because you don’t have any good gold around you. Bring back some gold and I’ll make it good gold.’

“So you buy gold and bring it to the curandero. He says he will bury it and make it good gold. But the only magic is that the curandero is gone.”

Notaries Abound in Santa Ana

Similarly, a notary public here is not what it is in Latin America.

To be a notario publico in Mexico, one must be an attorney with at least five years of professional activity, pass a lengthy exam, then be selected by the state bar and the governor.

“It is a highly qualified and regarded position,” said Miguel Escobar, a Mexican consul in Los Angeles. In capital of his home state of Sonora, Escobar said, there are no more than a dozen or two notarios in a population of 1 million.

Not so in the United States. In California, a notary commission can be obtained by anyone without a criminal record who pays $72 and passes a short exam. In Santa Ana, there is a notary for every 25 residents, compared with one for every 185 people statewide, according to estimates from the National Notary Assn.

Up a flight of narrow stairs in a storefront on 4th Street, Rocio and Ramiro De La Riva operate Capilla Santa Ana, one of scores of multi-service shops downtown. In their business cards, leaflets and storefront signs, the Rivas advertise notary public, citizenship, evictions, immigration, reentry, credit repair.

Asked whether they were aware that it is unlawful to advertise oneself as both a notary and immigration service, Ramiro De La Riva responded: “I didn’t know that. Nobody told me. A lot of people do the same thing.”

State and Santa Ana authorities believe some notaries are truly unaware of the laws governing their practice. But they also say many notaries who are also immigration consultants abuse that title and take advantage of desperate immigrants.

“For Mexicans living in their own culture, it’s hard for them not to maintain the respect they have for notaries as they did in their own country,” said Kathryn Terry, a Santa Ana immigration attorney. Terry was a member of the Orange County fraud task force in the mid-’80s when notaries and consultants took advantage of the asylum program. But that task force was dissolved in 1990.

“There’s never been any enforcement” of unscrupulous notaries, Terry said.

Bill Jones, California’s secretary of state, which enforces notaries, says it has been hard to crack down in areas such as Santa Ana with limited resources. The agency has just one notary investigator, who doesn’t speak Spanish.

Jones said he plans to hire two more agents soon. But he also suggested that the Legislature should consider toughening penalties against unscrupulous notaries who are immigration consultants.

Said Ricardo Manvanares, a longtime news director of KWIZ, a Spanish-language radio station based in Santa Ana: “The fraud is really high because our community doesn’t understand many of the laws. It’s the lack of education.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

The New Santa Ana

The face of Santa Ana has changed dramatically since the 1980s. Today Latinos and Asians, many of them immigrants from Mexico and Southeast Asia, comprise the vast majority of residents. How the population has changed:

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1980 1996 White 45% 18% Latino 44% 67% Asian 7% 12% Black 4% 3% Total population 203,713 323,186

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****

Reflecting its large immigrant population, Santa Ana residents tend to be younger, have less educated and are more likely to work in blue-collar occupations:

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California Santa Ana Median age 33.4 28.4 Education Elementary school or less 11% 30% Some high school 13% 16% High school degree 22% 17% Some college 31% 23% College degree 23% 14% Occupation White collar 61% 43% Service jobs 12% 16% Blue collar 24% 37% Farm or fishing 3% 4% Household size 1-2 persons 55% 40% 3-4 31% 28% 5 or more 14% 32%

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Sources: U.S. Bureau of Census, Bureau of Labor Statistics; Center for Demographic Research at Cal State Fullerton; Claritas Inc.

Researched by DON LEE / Los Angeles Times

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Where to Go For Help

Agencies providing multilingual assistance in resolving labor, immigration and consumer issues:

LEGAL AND SOCIAL SERVICES

* Asian Pacific American Legal Center of Southern Califomia

1010 S. Flower Street, Room 302, Los Angeles

9 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday through Friday

(213) 748-2022

* Public Counsel

601 S. Ardmore St., Los Angeles

9 a.m.-12:30 p.m. and 1:30-5:15 p.m. Monday through Friday.

(213) 385-2977

* Bet Tzedek Legal Services--Los Angeles

145 S. Fairfax Avenue, Suite 200

9 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday through Friday

(213) 939-0506

* Bet Tzedek Legal Services--San Fernando Valley

12821 Victory Blvd., North Hollywood

9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday

(818) 769-0136

* Central American Resource Center

1636 W. 8th St., Suite 215, Los Angeles

9 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday through Friday

(213) 385-7800

* Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles

9 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday through Friday

(800) 399-4529

* Legal Services Program--Pasadena

81 N. Mentor Ave., Pasadena

9 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday through Friday

(818) 795-3233

* Legal Services Program--San Gabriel/Pomona Valley

201 E. Mission Blvd., Pomona

9 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday through Friday

(909) 623-6357

* Legal Aid Society of Orange County

9 a.m.-7:30 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 9 a.m.-3:45 p.m. Fridays.

(800) 834-5001

* Southeast Asian Legal Outreach Program

Vietnamese Community of Orange County Resources Center

14541 Brookhurst St., Suite C-9, Westminster

2-5 p.m. Fridays

Public Law Center (714) 541-1010

* El Rescate

1340 S. Bonnie Brae St., Los Angeles

9 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday through Friday

(213) 387-3284

* Los Angeles County Bar Assn. Immigration Legal Assistance Project

300 N. Los Angeles St., Room 3107, Los Angeles

8 a.m.-noon and 1-3 p.m. Monday through Friday

(213) 485-1872

CONSUMER ORGANIZATIONS

* Better Business Bureau

9 a.m.-5 p.m.

(800) 955-5100

* Inland Mediation Board

Landlord-tenant dispute mediation agency serving San Bernardino County

8 a.m.-noon and 1-5 p.m.

(800) 321-1911

STATE AND LOCAL AGENCIES

* Orange County District Attorney Consumer Protection Division

405 W. 5th St. Suite 606, Santa Ana

8 a.m.-5p.m.

(714) 568-1200

* Los Angeles City Attorney

Consumer Protection Division

200 N. Main St., Los Angeles

8:30 a.m.-5 p.m.

(213) 485-4515

* Riverside County District Attorney

Consumer Protection Division

4075 Main St., Riverside

8a.m.-5p.m.

(909) 275-5491

* California Attorney General’s Office Public Inquiry Unit

8 a.m.-5 p.m.

(800) 952-5225

* California Department of Consumer Affairs

7:30 a.m.-5 p.m.

(800) 952-5210

* California Department of Corporations

8a.m.-5 p.m.

(800) 347-6995

* Medical Board of California Central Complaint Unit

8 a.m.-5 p.m.

(800) 633-2322 to file a complaint or

(916) 263-2382 to check the status of a physician’s license

* California Labor Commissioner

(complaint forms, information on local offices)

8 a.m.-5p.m.

(916) 323-4920