Waiting for justice

TULSA, Okla. (AP) — The train ride to Bombay took several hours, and then Jagdish Prajapati had to wait in a line that often stretched out the door, sometimes wrapped around the block.

Hundreds of men would apply for dozens of jobs, coming back week after week to try again.

It took months for Prajapati to get an interview, and then he had to pay two months' salary as an "application fee."

"That's what people are willing to do because they love their families and want a better life for their children," says Prajapati, who gave up an engineering job in India to become a welder in the United States.

"In India, even if you have a job, you don't have any money. I always dreamed of life in America."

Ten years after coming to Tulsa to work for the John Pickle Co., Prajapati is finally living the life he imagined, but only after "going through hell," as he describes it.

"I was asking myself, what have I done? Why did I come here?"

Prajapati became a key witness in the landmark "virtual slavery" trial, where more than 50 workers from India accused Pickle of trapping them inside the factory and forcing them to work for just dollars a day.

The company denied keeping the men against their will. But Prajapati described confronting an armed guard outside the workers' dormitory.

"He took the gun out of his pocket and showed it to me," Prajapati told the judge in March 2005. "It was very scary. I thought if somebody cannot leave without permission, then maybe he can shoot somebody."

His testimony helped win a $1.3 million judgment against the company and its owner, John Pickle.

But a full decade after the story broke, and six years after the trial ended, the victims haven't received a dime.

The case remains under litigation, possibly headed to the Oklahoma Supreme Court this spring.

"I don't care about the money because I have gone on with my life," says Prajapati, who's now raising two children in Tulsa and, along with his wife, working toward U.S. citizenship.

"All we ever wanted was justice."

The bad publicity chased customers away, and the Pickle factory closed in August 2002, costing more than 75 Americans their jobs.

The case nearly wrecked Kent Felty's bank account, too, after he started turning away paying clients to represent the Indian workers, who couldn't afford attorney fees.

With 52 separate plaintiffs who spoke broken English, at best — and facing well-paid defense attorneys who produced a barrage of discovery motions and affidavits — Felty's small office struggled just to keep up with the paperwork.

At one point, the judge dressed him down for not knowing how to spell his clients' names.

"It was overwhelming," remembers Felty, who is now practicing in Colorado but still represents the Indian workers.

"The defense thought they could outspend us and outmaneuver us and run out the clock."

Just when the case seemed to be losing momentum in December 2002, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission gave it a big push, accusing Pickle of violating federal anti-discrimination laws.

The U.S. government, obviously, could match Pickle dollar-for-dollar, propelling the case through an on-again, off-again trial that lasted three years.

In the end, U.S. District Chief Judge Claire Eagan issued a 71-page decision that found the Pickle Co. guilty of fraud, false imprisonment and civil rights violations.

Except that wasn't quite the end, after all. Felty and the EEOC are still trying to collect the $1.3 million, plus accruing interest.

"We'll never give up," Felty promises. "If it takes another 10 years, we're not going to quit."

A blue-collar worker who became a millionaire entrepreneur, John Pickle ran a sprawling industrial site west of downtown Tulsa. His company manufactured gigantic pressure vessels that are used in oil refineries and power plants.

He has always denied mistreating the Indian workers. And now he denies another allegation — that he's hiding financial assets to avoid paying the judgment.

Most controversially, Pickle sold the factory to his daughter and son-in-law, who run a similar business.

Felty and the EEOC describe the sale as part of an effort to disguise his holdings under different names.

"It's not about the money," Felty says. "It's never been about the money. It's about the rule of law and our faith that nobody is above the law."

Three years ago, a district judge dismissed the collection effort, partly because most of the Indian workers have long since left Tulsa, and Felty couldn't say where many of them were.

This month, however, the Oklahoma Court of Civil Appeals overturned that ruling, allowing the collection effort to continue.

Now attorneys for the Pickle family hope to take the case to the state Supreme Court.

"They paid fair market value for the property," says Jim Reed, a Tulsa attorney who represents Christina Pickle Carter and her husband, who weren't named in the original federal case.

"My clients had nothing to do with those allegations," Reed says. "They weren't involved at all.

"What Mr. Pickle did with the money, I don't know. He's a separate defendant with separate counsel."

Pickle's attorney didn't comment for this story.

It's not unusual for a lawsuit to drag on for years. But in most cases, a defendant will appeal a judge's decision, hoping for a different outcome or perhaps a lower judgment, explains Vicki Limas, a law professor at the University of Tulsa.

"For a big corporate defendant like that to say, 'Well, we can't pay,' that's unusual," Limas says. "I'd say it's very unusual."

The workers originally hoped for a quick settlement without a trial, with most of them willing to accept half what the judge eventually ordered Pickle to pay.

The EEOC, however, was glad to have a trial, particularly a nonjury trial, ending not with a simple "guilty" or "not guilty" verdict but with a judge's written decision.

"The judgment is a road map that walks us through the law, point by point," explains Robert Canino, the EEOC official who handled the case and who still works as the agency's regional attorney in Dallas.

"Now we can use the Pickle decision as a template for how to handle other cases like it."

Canino took the Pickle case after sitting through a meeting at the U.S. Department of Justice, where federal officials complained that human-trafficking crimes were almost impossible to prosecute.

The evidence simply can't meet a criminal trial's heavy burden of proof, guilty beyond reasonable doubt.

A civil case, like the ones handled by the EEOC, requires only a "preponderance of the evidence."

"I left that meeting wondering how we could bring civil rights law to bear," Canino says. "Pickle offered the chance to find out."

The precedent proved useful right away, as the EEOC investigated an allegation that involved Thai immigrants in California.

"I was able to point at what we had done in Tulsa and say, 'That's the way forward,' " says David Lopez, the commission's general counsel in Washington, D.C.

"It opens a whole new path for dealing with this problem, which is nationwide and bigger than people realize."

In California, for example, the EEOC is suing a farm contractor for allegedly enslaving more than 200 immigrant workers.

Global Horizons forced some of the men to live in rat-infested housing, with dozens sleeping in the same room, many without beds, according to the EEOC.

Meanwhile, in Alabama, the commission is pursuing a case with striking similarities to the Pickle trial.

Signal International allegedly trapped 500 workers from India at shipyards along the Gulf Coast, where the men lived inside of fenced perimeters.

Tulsa's trial laid the groundwork for both of these ongoing cases, Lopez says. But ultimately, he hopes the Pickle decision will serve as a deterrent, too.

"They went out of business, and for a company that's the ultimate price," he says. "Nobody can look at Pickle and think, 'That's the path we want to follow.' "

The factory might still be open, and the case may never have come to light, if not for a lay-minister at Hale Station Pentecostal Church, across the street from the factory's back gate.

Mark Massey introduced himself to some Indian men who sat quietly on the back pew during Sunday morning services.

A sign in their dormitory told the workers not to leave without permission, but they went to church anyway.

At first, they rebuffed Massey. And it took him weeks to develop a rapport.

But eventually, in bits and pieces, they confided in him about conditions at the factory.

Lured to Tulsa by the promise of high-paying jobs, they instead described being forced to live in a warehouse, eating substandard food and working for as little as $2 an hour.

"I really believe that I was put there for a reason," Massey says. "It showed me the kind of work that God was calling me to do."

Late one night toward the end of January 2002, Massey parked a van outside the factory while several of the workers scrambled under a fence before speeding away.

By early February, all of the Indian workers had left, with many of them staying at Massey's house while he moved his family into an apartment.

All but one remains in the country, with permanent legal status.

"They're working hard, saving money, buying houses, raising families," Massey says. "They're living the lives they came here to find."

After the Pickle rescue, Massey went to Louisiana to help two immigrant workers escape from a decrepit motel where a construction company was housing them.

Other employees chased his car before Massey reached a police station in Baton Rouge, where instead of getting help he was arrested on suspicion of assaulting the alleged traffickers.

He spent several days in jail before the Indian workers in Tulsa raised bail. But the district attorney dropped all charges, and more than 200 foreign workers joined a lawsuit against the company.

The incident cemented Massey's national reputation as an advocate for immigrant rights. And over the past 10 years, he has had speaking engagements from coast to coast.

He still volunteers almost every day to help immigrants apply for visas or work permits.

"I've helped hundreds of victims of human trafficking," he says. "And the sad part is that most of the people who do the trafficking seem to slip away real easily, and there's no justice done."

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Information from: Tulsa World, http://www.tulsaworld.com