If anyone seemed to embody the American dream, it was Simon Nget.
Reaching New York’s shores in 1981 as an unlettered 18-year-old Chinese refugee from Cambodia, where he said relatives had starved to death under the Khmer Rouge, Mr. Nget learned his A B C’s in high school in Chinatown and the Bronx, as he recounted, the homework sometimes taking him 10 hours a night.
But he graduated and went on to college, packing delivery orders of Chinese food, waiting tables and cleaning offices until he saved up enough to marry and buy a coffee shop in Queens. From there, it was a Vietnamese restaurant on Broadway, where, he recalled, he lived for two years, sleeping in a chair. Then there was a second Manhattan restaurant, and a third, all grossing, by 2006, a total of $7 million a year.
“I come to this country, what I do is work, work hard, learn hard, and you learn something; you work hard, you save money,” he testified in a federal court case. “Save money, work hard making money, save money, that’s very important.”
Maybe too important, if the accusations against him are proved. On Dec. 3, Mr. Nget, 45, and his wife, Michelle, 51, mother of their two children, were arrested on 242 state criminal charges each of cheating the food deliverers for their Saigon Grill restaurants out of millions of dollars in minimum wages, falsifying business records, taking kickbacks and defrauding the state’s unemployment insurance system. Each count carries a prison sentence of up to four years.
The Ngets, who pleaded not guilty, were released on bond and continue to operate their two remaining restaurants, at Amsterdam and 90th Street and on University Place between 12th and 13th Streets, although they no longer deliver from the downtown location.
In a separate federal lawsuit brought pro bono by lawyers from Davis, Polk & Wardwell, Magistrate Judge Michael H. Dolinger ruled against the Ngets in October, finding their testimony about their business practices “incredible” and “manifestly false” and ordering them to pay $4.6 million in back pay and damages to 36 delivery workers, mainstays of their operation.
“Because he was exploited in the past is not a reason to exploit others in the future,” said Josephine Lee, the coordinator for Justice Will Be Served, a labor organizing campaign that championed Mr. Nget’s aggrieved workers. If anything, she said, it made the actions of the Ngets “all the more inexcusable.”
The lawyer for the couple, S. Michael Weisberg, insisted that the Ngets were blameless. “Their workers are liars,” he said at their arraignment.
The Ngets, who live with other family members in a cluster of 12 apartments in College Point, Queens, did not respond to repeated telephone messages and workers at the restaurants said they were not there.
But the federal trial transcript and sworn depositions of the Ngets and fired workers encapsulate a stark narrative, a rags-to-rags tale of immigrants accused of victimizing people much like they had once been.
“I got here owning nothing, you know,” Mr. Nget told Judge Dolinger.
Arriving in New York on June 12, 1981 — “very important date, I know,” Mr. Nget testified — he was sponsored by a cousin whose parents died in the Khmer Rouge genocide. Other family members joined him, including his parents; his elder brother, Richard; and his elder sister, Leana, who would later help him in the restaurants.
“I have a family who should be die in Cambodia, but we survive and we got a life in the United States, like in heaven,” he testified. “We love our life.”
He supported himself by packing orders in a Chinese restaurant. He said that he never considered himself exploited and gave little heed to wage laws. “I paid not much, but I make a very good living,” he said. “I have no complaint.”
He spent a semester at City College and two semesters at Polytechnic Institute of New York University before dropping out because, he said, “I find food is much easier.”
By 1986, he had saved enough to marry and pay about $50,000 for a coffee shop in Astoria, Queens.
In 1996, he and a Chinese cook became partners in the first Saigon Grill, on Broadway at 87th Street.
“I take risk, you know,” he testified. “He cook,” he said, referring to his partner, “but it doesn’t taste good.” After a year, Mr. Nget said, he and his sister took over the cooking and he bought out the partner.
“I was the first two year busy like a dog,” he recalled in his deposition. “I sleep in there two year on the chair.”
But in just another year, according to trial testimony, the family’s fortunes had swelled enough for Mrs. Nget and partners to buy a building on Second Avenue and 88th Street for a second Saigon Grill. In 2002, they closed and moved the Broadway restaurant to Amsterdam Avenue. And in 2006, they closed on Second Avenue and opened on University Place.
But the success, evidence suggested, came at a steep and illegal cost to delivery workers, mostly illegal immigrants from Fujian Province in China who testified they were paid $500 to $600 a month for working 70 to 80 hours a week, often less than $2 an hour. They usually made several thousand dollars a month in tips, but that did not relieve the Ngets of their wage obligations under the law.
Yu Guan Ke, 36, who began delivering for the Ngets in 1988 and became the lead plaintiff against them, said in an interview that “in the beginning, the boss and boss lady treated workers pretty fairly.” But as the restaurants started making money, Mr. Ke said, conditions became “harsher and harsher.” He said he once asked Mrs. Nget why. “She just kind of laughed and walked away,” he said.
He said he was twice robbed during deliveries and had to repay the Ngets.
To create false payroll records, the workers testified, the Ngets paid them with checks for larger amounts that they had to cash and pay back to receive their real — lower — pay. They also had to provide and service their own bikes and were fined $200 by Mrs. Nget for forgetting items in a food order.
And when they sought to organize in protest, Mr. Nget ended up firing them all. In February the National Labor Relations Board ordered their rehiring, but whether the Ngets have complied is disputed.
In her testimony, Mrs. Nget denied that she had ever hired or instructed any workers or knew anything about their pay beyond handing out the envelopes. “I have no idea what’s inside,” she said.
Mr. Nget said he thought he had paid minimum wages. But he acknowledged, “I don’t keep any record.”
No comments:
Post a Comment