Company owner forced over a dozen workers into 'slavery': feds

A Florida contractor was sentenced to nearly a decade in prison and ordered to repay more than a dozen workers he forced into slavery.

Bladimir Moreno, a Bartow farm labor contractor, pleaded guilty Dec. 29 to conspiracy to commit forced labor and racketeering charges, after federal prosecutors said he recruited workers in Mexico, made them pay to work for Los Villatoros Harvesting and lied about their housing and pay once they arrived in Florida, reported the Miami Herald.

LVH and its recruiters manipulated the workers by withholding their pay, violated federal law by moving them to an unapproved Florida farm, and then intermittently to Kentucky and Indiana, to harvest watermelons for Wachula’s Carlton Farms, which does business as Sun Fresh Farms, and that fruit was sold to Walmart and Kroger.

Other melons packed in Indiana were by a distributor to chains such as Kroger, Schnucks and Sam’s Club.

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Moreno's guilty plea indicated he knew that about six workers were living in a single hotel room and 75 more were housed in a warehouse, and investigators found that workers lacked their own beds or packed with more than four in a room.

A federal judge sentenced him to nine years and 10 months in federal prison with $173,125 restitution to 17 of those workers, which comes out to an average of $10,183 per worker.

Moreno is also a defendant in a North Carolina federal civil court class action lawsuit on similar complaints, and he was banned from participating in the H-2A temporary agricultural workers visa program and fined more than $203,000.