Yadira Rodriguez and Margarita Parra. (LORI SHEPLER / Los Angeles Times )

Modern-day Fagins hire children for grueling door-to-door sales, then pay them little or nothing. Officials say the labor law violators are hard to catch and prosecute.

By CARLA RIVERA, TIMES STAFF WRITER

Thirteen-year-old Margarita Parra was looking to earn some spending money, and the flier she spotted on a fence in her South-Central Los Angeles neighborhood seemed to offer a fun way:

"TEEN JOBS. EARN UP TO $125 A WEEK AND MORE. PLUS! WIN PRIZES, CASH BONUSES AND TRIPS TO MAGIC MOUNTAIN, UNIVERSAL STUDIOS, KNOTTS . . . ALL TRANSPORTATION PROVIDED."

Juan Garcia, who helped start probe of a child labor scam, works for UCLA program to teach young workers their rights. (KEN HIVELY / Los Angeles Times)

She called the number and two days later a van belonging to a group called Tomorrow's Future picked her up. She spent the next two weeks knocking on doors in far-away neighborhoods, urging residents to buy cookies and candies at $6 a pop. Following a script from her bosses, she told customers the money would help her stay away from gangs and drugs and win her prizes. In the end, she was paid nothing and there were no theme park trips. And the money she took in flowed to a shadowy business, not a nonprofit.

Margarita's story is a familiar one to officials trying to crack down on a burgeoning child labor practice that they say exploits youngsters, even exposing some to fatal accidents. Government investigators contend that the adult crew leaders and those who run the operations are raking in as much as $1 billion annually in untaxed sales revenues nationally while many youngsters are left empty-handed.

An estimated 50,000 minors, some as young as 8, peddle goods on any given day on street corners, in front of supermarkets and on front porches from coast to coast.

Many work for outfits that present themselves as charities when in fact they do not have tax-exempt status and their proceeds do not support programs that help youths.

Of course, not every child selling on the street is working for a modern-day Fagin, officials point out. Many are legitimately selling candy as volunteers for churches, schools and charities.

But thousands of other children are exploited for their labor, working more hours than allowed by law, being underpaid or not paid at all and working in unsupervised, often dangerous conditions, prosecutors allege. The younger their age, the more heartfelt their appeal to unwary consumers, they say.

"How many people think it's safe for their own kids to ring doorbells in strange neighborhoods?" asked Darlene Adkins, who coordinates child labor issues as vice president of the National Consumers League. "They're out late at night and in all kinds of weather."

On many street corners, especially in low-income black and Latino neighborhoods and around schools, fliers can be spotted advertising such work. They usually list telephone numbers that invariably turn out to be pagers. They rarely mention a business name.

"They are very difficult to deal with from an enforcement perspective; they're very elusive," said Corlis Sellers, the U.S. Labor Department's national child labor coordinator. "By the time we get a complaint or a sighting and send someone out, [the operators are] usually gone."

To help improve enforcement, a national conference will convene next month in Atlantic City to consider how federal and state authorities can better coordinate regulation of labor laws, including door-to-door sales by children.

Margarita Parra, now 15, entered that world two years ago. During her first phone conversation with recruiters, she was told the work would be a great way to get involved in a nonprofit community group.

"They gave us a script to memorize that we were supposed to read to customers and they said this was our training," said Margarita, who will be a sophomore this fall at King/Drew High School and has been active in a government action against Tomorrow's Future. "They said they would deduct $50 from our pay for training, but they never explained anything to us."

According to her accounts, the van that picked her up carried five or six other youngsters, some of whom had to pile into the back where there were no seat belts. They were taken downtown and to neighborhoods in North Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley where they had never been before.

Margarita worked from 3:30 to 9:30 p.m. on school days and from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. on weekends selling chocolates, fruit-flavored candy, Pokemon toys and cookies with no adult supervision, no rest breaks, no food money. She was expected to ask the strangers on whose doors she knocked for water and the use of their toilet.

If the children didn't sell enough, they were punished. One boy, she said, was made to sit in the hot van all day.

"One time they left a girl [in a far-off neighborhood]. She was new and only sold one item so they got upset. They kicked her off the van, gave her some change and told her to go home. We had come on the freeway, so it was a pretty long way," she said.

Margarita quit after two weeks. When she asked for her earnings--$1.50 for every item she sold--she was told she'd be paid that night. She got nothing.

A few months later, Margarita and a friend mentioned their experiences to Juan Garcia, 21, a youth organizer for the nonprofit group Concerned Citizens of South Central Los Angeles. Garcia brought it to the attention of the state labor commissioner's office, which filed a complaint on behalf of seven teenagers.

After nearly 18 months of investigation, two of the Tomorrow's Future employees were tracked down. Twenty-year-old Orlando Sanabria, whom the youngsters identified as one of the van drivers, pleaded no contest in December to a misdemeanor charge of transporting a minor more than 10 miles from home without a permit. Sanabria was fined $540 and placed on probation.

The operator, Jesse Banerjee, 31, was charged with 42 criminal counts of labor code violations, including paying less than the minimum wage, failure to obtain work permits or register with state labor authorities, and requiring the employees to work excessive hours. Each misdemeanor count carries a maximum penalty of six months in jail and/or a $1,000 fine. Banerjee disappeared before a court hearing and a warrant was issued for his arrest.

State labor officials calculated that Tomorrow's Future owed the seven victims in the lawsuit $5,579 in back wages.

Some proponents tout door-to-door sales as a good learning experience, especially for youths living in poor areas, where job opportunities are limited.

But it often is difficult for young people and their parents to separate the legitimate from the bogus.

Three Los Angeles high schools are trying to educate young workers about their rights through a UCLA curriculum called the Labor Occupational Safety and Health Young Worker Project. It covers such issues as safety, sexual harassment and door-to-door sales, said Garcia, who works for the project.

California is one of 17 states that place some restrictions on peddling by youths. Employers of minors engaged in door-to-door sales more than 10 miles from their homes are supposed to register with the state labor commissioner. But according to officials, not a single company holds a permit in the state. The one application submitted was denied because of the criminal background of the applicant, said Dean Fryer, a spokesman for the California Department of Industrial Relations.

Those under 16 employed by for-profit businesses in California can sell door-to-door only if they do so in pairs, are within sight or sound of an adult supervisor every 15 minutes and are paid at least the minimum wage. Minors employed to sell or deliver newspapers are exempt from such restrictions.

Part of the problem facing labor agencies is limited manpower for enforcement. California's labor agency has about 100 field investigators, but none dedicated exclusively to child labor problems.

Other states have banned such for-profit sales outright. Nevada last year outlawed peddling by those under 16, but state law allows children to volunteer for nonprofit groups such as the Girl Scouts.

Nevada authorities acted after several disturbing incidents, including the death of a 10-year-old candy vendor who was struck by a hit-and-run driver as he tried to cross a street after 10 p.m. In another case, an adult crew leader driving a vanload of children ran over and killed a security guard.

Federal Legislation Targets Con Artists

Missouri lawmakers last year introduced legislation that would have banned door-to-door for-profit sales by anyone under 18. It failed, but backers hope to try again in the next session.

Federal legislation introduced this year by two Democratic senators--Herbert Kohl of Wisconsin and Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts--would forbid overnight sales trips for those under 18. It is before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions.

That proposal stems from an accident two years ago in Wisconsin in which seven members of a sales crew, including two 16-year-olds, were killed when the van in which they were traveling crashed.

Documents disclosed that the crews typically made $15 for 12 hours of work. The Wisconsin youths said they were choked for insubordination and fined for falling asleep in the vans. Others told of being abandoned in strange towns if they talked of quitting.

Florida authorities in the last two years broke up peddling groups in which the operators had criminal histories of trafficking in drugs, procuring prostitutes, vehicle thefts and drunk driving.

"These people are not there to facilitate the growth of kids, but to profit," said Francisco Rivera, a child labor lawyer for the state of Florida.

Florida investigators obtained documents from one peddling operation indicating that the operator was making between $100,000 and $150,000 a year, figures that Rivera considers grossly understated.

Sales receipts from another group in Panama City, Fla., showed that it had links to operations in Detroit, Chicago, Des Moines, Boston, Cincinnati, Albuquerque, Milwaukee, San Bernardino and Moreno Valley, authorities said.

"Kids are being taught to be con artists; they know they're lying," Rivera added.

But the young people in the Los Angeles case say they signed on with good intentions.

Yadira Rodriguez was 17 and attending Fremont High School when she began working for Tomorrow's Future, joining her then-15-year-old brother, Noe. She was on school break and worked from 10 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. The crew leaders promised free trips and prizes.

But Rodriguez was unsettled from the start.

"Almost every day I felt scared walking on the streets alone," Yadira, now 19, said. She remembers that on occasion the kids would get 99-cent hamburgers but only one large soda to share among them all. And one time a little boy was lost by the van driver only to be found hours later, scared and crying.

All the while, her mother, Guillermina Gonzales, was growing more concerned about her children and angry about their work experience.

"The fliers said it was to keep kids off drugs and out of gangs, and that's what parents want for their kids also," she said.

Yadira and Noe quit after a few weeks and were never paid.

Deputy City Atty. David Shepherd, who prosecuted Tomorrow's Future, conceded that it will be hard to find Banerjee, one of the men authorities say manipulated the youngsters.

"Unfortunately, it's typical in a misdemeanor case. There are so many felons on the loose who get priority."

Yadira Rodriguez and Margarita said they don't expect to see any of the money owed to them. But they do hope to see Banerjee in court one day.

"I hope he gets caught," Rodriguez said. "I feel like he's doing this somewhere else, making good money off kids."