By Ruben Castaneda
Washington Post Staff Writer

Brimming with optimism, 23 Mexican men piled into a bus in Veracruz the first week of April and rode 2,855 miles over three days and nights to Washington and the
promise of landscaping jobs.

Among them were young university students, weathered agricultural workers, military men, a plumber, a welder. They would earn, the men were told, $8 an hour
plus overtime and live four to a two-bedroom apartment. On that promise, each paid $435 to a recruiter who arranged for guest worker visas and transportation.

For six weeks, all 23 lived in one sparsely furnished four-bedroom, two-bathroom house in Anacostia -- for which the pay of each was docked $175 a month. Soon
afterward, a dozen were fired, but under the conditions of their special H2-B visas, they could not legally work elsewhere in this country.

By last month, all but one of the men had been fired, and the others had returned to Mexico.

Now, the U.S. Labor Department says it is investigating Jeffrey L. Jones, owner of Lawn Restoration Service Inc., of Capitol Heights, over his treatment and pay of
the workers. A source familiar with the investigation says it includes allegations that Jones shorted the workers' pay by more than $100,000.

Jones, whose firm has a $675,000 contract with the D.C. recreation department and a $60,000 Department of Education contract, had told the Labor Department in
his application to bring in the workers that he would pay them $9.05 an hour.

"They were paid $8 an hour. What's the violation?" Jones said in a brief interview, during which he denied breaking any laws. Then he declined to talk further, citing
the Labor Department investigation.

The day after that interview in mid-October, Jones fired all but one of the remaining workers, the workers said. Then, they said, he told them he could not give them
their final paychecks because of the anthrax scare.

Officials in Bladensburg, where Jones moved some of the men into a home his company owns, confirmed that they also are investigating Jones for possible housing
violations. That home had a toilet that functioned only after water from the bathtub was dumped into it, a Bladensburg housing inspector said.

"I have nothing to hide," Jones said.

The workers, a dozen of whom were interviewed before they returned to Mexico, said problems with Jones began the day they arrived in Washington. They said
Jones jammed them into the back of his enclosed commercial truck and drove them to the Anacostia house.

Through the summer, the workers were picked up at 6 or 7 a.m. and were driven to and from city parks -- including Benning Stoddert Park in Southeast Washington
and Deanwood Recreation Center in Northeast -- in the enclosed, boxcarlike metal cabin of Jones's truck, where there was no ventilation and the temperature
sometimes soared.

The men performed routine landscaping work -- mowing, weeding and hedging -- which Jones certified he could find no U.S. workers to do, a condition of his being
able to obtain visas for them.

But the fired workers said they were not paid for the overtime they worked or for their final week of employment.

"Unfortunately, the abuse of guest workers is relatively common," said Bruce Goldstein, co-executive director of the Farmworker Justice Fund. "The workers are
very vulnerable. They can only legally work for the employer who got them the visa. Their right to stay in the country stops when their employment stops."

Goldstein said there is an annual limit of about 65,000 such visas for guest workers.

Erasmo Luis Fernandez, 23, one of the men who was fired by Jones, said the promise of employment "sounded fair."

"I wanted to take advantage of the opportunity. But the reality was different," said Fernandez, a university student in civil engineering.

A month ago, Fernandez and three co-workers packed their bags and left the Anacostia house to take the bus back to Mexico.

The departing workers embraced a half-dozen co-workers who remained. One worker walked a few blocks to a convenience store where he worked for three
months after being fired by Jones. Though he doesn't speak English and the Korean store owners don't speak Spanish, the man had mimed his way into a job -- he
mimicked picking up boxes and sweeping -- and was hired.

The middle-aged store owner wept as she hugged the man and said goodbye.

The four departing workers walked down the block to the home of Mark Calligan, the owner of the house in which they had been living. They hugged Calligan and
used inexpensive cameras to take photos of themselves with Calligan, who had helped them.

Calligan, a former D.C. corrections officer who is a real estate agent, said he rented the Anacostia house to Jones with the understanding that eight, perhaps 10,
workers would stay there for six months.

When he learned Jones was placing all of the workers in one house, Calligan said, he urged Jones to provide them with mattresses, blankets and other furnishings,
which he said Jones did not do.

Calligan brought the workers spare mattresses, blankets and pots and pans. When the weather turned hot, Calligan installed a window air-conditioning unit in one of
the bedrooms.

When Calligan pressed Jones about providing better living conditions for the workers, Jones replied, "It's better than what they have in their country," Calligan
recalled.

In May, Jones laid off a dozen of the workers. Six of them, led by Fernandez, who speaks some English, went to Calligan's house that night.

They said Jones told them he was throwing them out of the house, and they pleaded with Calligan to let them stay. Calligan said they could.

"If not for [Calligan], we all would have been back in Mexico months ago," Augustin Carmona, one of the workers who left two weeks ago, said in an interview.

In June, five of the workers went to the Mexican Embassy for help.

Juan Carlos Cue, minister for consular affairs, said his office relayed the allegations of mistreatment to the Justice Department's office of special counsel, which
referred the matter to the Labor Department.

The appeal to the Mexican consul's office demonstrated how resourceful the migrants became even though only one of them spoke English. On weekends, the men
sometimes used the Metro to visit museums and the National Zoo.

Despite their experience, many of the workers said they would like to come back to Washington to work.

"For a different employer," Fernandez said.

                                               © 2001