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Highlands Today

It Happened In Lake Placid

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By Gary Pinnell | Highlands Today

Published: September 30, 2007

LAKE PLACID — It's still an unsolved mystery, what happened that night in 1997 when a call came to the Highlands County Sheriff's Office.

Lt. John Chess recalls, dimly because it was 10 years ago. His recollection and the murder files, he says, don't match author John Bowe's book, "Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy." (Hardcover, 336 pages. Price: $25.95)

But Chess agrees with the premise of the book, that indentured servitude certainly does exist today, because he's a veteran police officer.

"This has been going on for years," Chess said.

Bowe describes one case in "Nobodies," where three Mexican men cross the border, are found by a driver who takes them to Lake Placid, and they're greeted by Juan "Nino" Ramos. Since the three men have no money, Ramos pays the driver $1,000 each.

"You're going to have to pay us back," the book quotes Ramos as saying. "And the work is very hard. If I pay for you, and you leave, we're going to beat the ---- out of you."

Now, the Lake Placid labor contractor "owns" the three men.

The sheriff's office is in the process of converting old, unsolved murders into the new "Smart Cops" system, Chess said.

"That's good that this book is coming out," Chess said. "It may generate some new leads."

The death of Ariosto Roblero, who was shot in the back of the head, has never been tried in court, in part because the Hispanic laborers who witnessed the slaying shifted into the American agricultural landscape, probably to pick cucumbers in North Carolina, then maybe tobacco, and peaches, and apples, and corn, moving from state to state, each time perhaps with a different name and Social Security number.

"They do not trust the police," Chess said, then promised, "but if they are involved in a crime, we will work it."

Two Lake Placid labor contractors, John and Ramiro Ramos, were eventually convicted of 15 of 16 counts of federal labor violations, and were sentenced to 12 years in prison. They were not charged in Roblero's murder.

Rowe said he talked to Ramos brothers and hung out with their lawyers, but they were always circumspect about what they said. He also talked to field workers and one labor leader, Laura Germino, who drove him to Lake Placid.

Violent Business

Bowe describes an incident similar to the murder. Roblero was a bus driver who picked up Hispanics and took them to other jobs. Another bus driver in 2000 got his head bashed in because he was picking up laborers who "belonged" to another labor contractor and taking them to a different contractor. He survived.

Bowe, a contributor to the New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, GQ and others, doesn't play by newspaper journalism rules in the book. He never names the FBI agents or the prosecuting attorneys. In a telephone interview, he said that was because Department of Justice guys couldn't talk to him on the record, that they would have to send him to a spokesman. That doesn't explain why deputies' names aren't reprinted from local reports.

As to whether virtual slavery is still going on in Lake Placid, Bowe says he hasn't been here since 2002. "But let's face it, the conditions for the average farm worker on a good, legal day, are only a couple of steps away from something illegal."

Enforcement is lax at the Department of Labor, and the growers themselves, Bowe said, are "particularly unenlightened." In his book, Bowe intimates that growers hire contractors because they don't want to know what's going on with undocumented and underpaid Hispanic workers.

Bowe added, however, that he doesn't mean to single out Florida. He also documents other cases in Oklahoma and Saipan, and says workers are also taken advantage of in many American states.

Bowe will be in St. Petersburg for a reading of his book on Oct. 27.

---

Here is an excerpt, reprinted with permission from Random House:

On April 20, 1997, at around 10 p.m., the Highlands County, Florida, Sheriff's Office received a 911 call; something strange had happened out in the migrant-worker ghetto near Highlands Boulevard. The "neighborhood," a mishmash of rotting trailer homes and plywood shacks, was hidden outside the town of Lake Placid, a mile or two back from the main road. By day, the place was forbidding and cheerless, silent, its forlorn dwellings perched awry, in seeming danger of oozing into the swamp. By night, it was downright menacing, humid and thick with mosquitoes.
When the sheriff's officers arrived, they found an empty van parked beside a lonely, narrow lane. The doors were closed, the lights were still on, and a few feet away, in the steamy hiss of night, a man lay facedown in a pool of blood. He had been shot once in the back of the head, execution-style. Beyond his body stood a pay phone, mounted on a pole.
The 911 caller had offered a description of a truck the sheriff's officers recognized as belonging to a local labor contractor named Ramiro Ramos. At 1:30 a.m., officers were dispatched to Ramos's house.
It's unclear how much the officers knew about the relationship between Ramos and his employees. Migrant farmworkers — nearly all undocumented Mexican and Central Americans, in this case-usually arrive in this country with little comprehension of English or of American culture. Since they frequently come with little money and few connections, the contractor, or crew boss, as he's often called, often provides food, housing, and transportation to and from work. As a result, many farmworkers labor under the near-total control of their employers. Whether the sheriff's officers were or weren't clued in to the fraught implications of this dynamic, they would undoubtedly have gained insight into Ramos's temperament if they'd known the nickname for him used by his crew of seven hundred orange pickers. They called him "El Diablo."
At Ramos's house, police found a truck fitting the caller's description. When a quick search of the vehicle yielded a .45-caliber bullet, police decided to bring in Ramos, his son, and a cousin for questioning. Interrogated at the station house, Ramos admitted that the night before, he had gone driving around the dirt roads outside town, collecting rent from his workers and looking, he said, "for one of his people." But when the police asked him if his search had any connection with the shooting, he said he didn't know anything about it. According to the sheriff's report, Ramos at this point became "upset" and said he wished to leave. He and his relatives were released.
The deputies went into the night, looking for migrant workers who might be willing to offer additional testimony. Witness by witness, a story began to take shape. The dead chofer, or van driver, was a Guatemalan named Ariosto Roblero. The van had belonged to a servicio de transporte, a sort of informal bus company used by migrants. The van and its passengers had been heading from South Florida, where orange season was ending, to North Carolina, where cucumber season was getting under way. Everything seemed fine until they hit the migrant ghetto outside Lake Placid. Roblero had stopped to make a pickup. And then, as the van waited, a car and a pickup truck raced up, screeched to a halt behind and in front of it, and blocked it off. An unknown number of men jumped out, yanked the chofer from his seat, and shot him. The other driver and the terrified passengers scattered into the night.
With each new detail, an increasingly disturbing picture of Ramos's operation began to emerge. El Diablo, it seemed, had been lending money to his workers, then overcharging them for substandard "barracks-style" housing, gouging them with miscellaneous fees, and encouraging them to shop at a high-priced grocery store, conveniently owned by his wife. By the time El Diablo had deducted for this, that, and the other thing, workers said, they were barely breaking even.
Worse, they were trapped. El Diablo's labor camp was in a tiny, isolated country town. He and his family, a network of cousins and in-laws, many of whom also worked as labor contractors, patrolled the area in their massive Ford F-250 pickup trucks, communicating with one another through Nextel walkie-talkie phones. For foreigners unfamiliar with the area, escape was almost unthinkable. But just to make matters crystal clear, El Diablo told his workers that anyone indebted caught trying to run away would be killed.
The previous night's murder, the witnesses alleged, had taken place when an indebted employee had left. The murder was meant to send a signal to local workers and to chofers thinking about aiding their departure from El Diablo's territory.
If the case sounds like a slam dunk, what happened next was, unfortunately, all too common in cases involving undocumented workers. After spilling most of the beans off the record, all the informants but one declined to name Ramos or his accomplices as the perpetrators, or even to offer their own names. One of the passengers in the murder victim's van told detectives that he couldn't remember a single thing about the incident. He managed not to see the color, the model, or the make of either assailant's vehicle, nor did he see who shot whom, or whether, in fact, anyone had even been shot. He only said that he was leaving for Mexico the next day, never to return.
Another witness acknowledged seeing the murder but, according to the sheriff's report, refused to name the shooter, stating his belief that "if he told, he would be killed by the Ramos family." The Ramoses knew where his family lived in Mexico, he said; if they didn't kill him personally, they would kill one of his relatives. He, too, was leaving town and wouldn't tell where he could be reached.
The sheriff's office was stumped. There wasn't much they could do without firmer testimony. However, they contacted federal authorities, and a few weeks later, at dawn on May 1, 1997, local law enforcement agents, backed by the Border Patrol and the U.S. Department of Labor, returned to Ramiro Ramos's house armed with a search warrant. The house and office yielded an arsenal of weapons not generally considered essential to labor management, including a Savage 7-millimeter rifle, a Marlin .22 rifle, an AK-47, a semiautomatic rifle, a Browning 9-millimeter semiautomatic pistol, and a Remington 700 7-millimeter Magnum rifle. The agents arrested Ramos and charged him with immigration violations.
One would think, perhaps, that authorities would have enough evidence to halt a clearly and alarmingly exploitive situation. Here were seven hundred workers on U.S. soil working under threat of death, for low pay or possibly no money at all.
Five days later, Ramos was released on $20,000 bail. The labor charges were dropped. Weapons charges were never brought. Business went on as usual. And the murder of Ariosto Roblero remains, to this day, "unsolved."

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