Negotiations Delay Slavery Case Hearing : Courts: A flower rancher and his co-defendants are charged with forcing Mexican laborers to work for about $1 an hour. Lawyers are holding settlement talks.

A federal judge on Monday postponed the final pretrial hearing in the slavery case against a Ventura County flower rancher because attorneys are involved in intense settlement negotiations and a trial may not be necessary.

“As long as discussions are continuing, it would be a waste of the court’s time,” said Robert M. Talcott, an attorney for rancher Edwin M. Ives.

Talcott and Assistant U. S. Atty. Carol L. Gillam confirmed that the negotiations are under way, saying that a pretrial settlement would avoid a two- to three-month trial and save both sides hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Gillam said she is pressing Ives--charged with slavery, extortion, witness tampering and racketeering--to pay more than $1 million in back wages and restitution to about 300 Mexican laborers who worked on his Somis and Moorpark ranches during the 1980s.

The prosecutor said she also is insisting that Ives, 55, plead guilty to felony charges and serve a prison sentence.

“We’ve been holding out for some sort of serious felony pleas,” Gillam said. “Obviously, we want prison time and money--somewhere in the seven figures.”

She refused to be more specific. “We’re so close,” she said. “It’s a sensitive time.”

U. S. District Judge Consuelo B. Marshall rescheduled Monday’s pretrial hearing for Feb. 3, the day before trial is set to begin on the slavery charges filed in May, 1990.

Ives is named in all 51 counts of a federal indictment. His wife, Dolly, 48, eight former Ives employees and an alleged smuggler are charged with a variety of labor and civil rights violations, mail fraud, witness tampering and extortion.

Prosecutors contend that Ives and his co-defendants conspired to enslave laborers recruited from rural Mexican villages and forced to work for about $1 an hour.

The government maintains that the workers were cheated out of $3 million in wages, and prosecutors have described the case as the largest ever filed under an 82-year-old federal anti-slavery statute.

Defendants have denied keeping laborers on Ives’ ranches against their will. Talcott insisted again Monday that the case is nothing special, despite the rare slavery allegations.

“We’ve said from the beginning that this is not a slave case, this is not a peonage case, this is not a racketeering case,” Talcott said. “Those counts were added to make a ho-hum wage-and-immigration case into something more.”

Those serious felonies--especially the racketeering charge--have been held over Ives to try to get him to plead guilty, Talcott said.

Indeed, Talcott and Gillam agreed that Judge Marshall’s eventual ruling on a pending motion to dismiss the racketeering charges is central to how the case might be settled.

If the judge upholds the legality of the charges, prosecutors can attempt to confiscate $5 million worth of Ives’ property if he is convicted. The law allows the government to take assets if it can prove that they are the result of organized criminal activity.

A ruling for the defense would leave Ives in a better position to plea-bargain, attorneys said.

Talcott argued that federal racketeering statutes should not apply to Ives since they were passed by Congress in the 1950s to break up the Mafia.

“This type of case was never the congressional intent,” he said.

By leaving the issue unresolved, Marshall put pressure on both sides to settle the case since neither wants to gamble on the judge’s last-minute ruling, Gillam said.

Talcott said that despite negotiations, no settlement is imminent because prosecutors cannot prove any of their most serious charges. But the lawyer said the costliness of a trial could be an argument for settlement.

Ives, through the Griffith-Ives Co., has spent between $500,000 and $700,000 to defend himself, his wife and five other co-defendants, his attorneys estimated last summer. The trial could cost much more, Talcott said.

Gillam said government trial costs would be about $250,000, including travel for witnesses who live in Mexico. Prosecutors have spent about $250,000 on the case so far, she said.