YEREVAN MUNICIPALITY LEVIS 6.5 MILLION DRAMS PENALTIES ON TRADE OUTLETS
Armenpress
YEREVAN, JULY 17, ARMENPRESS: Authorities in Yerevan have detected
breaches in 205 food and services catering outlets out of 285 which
they examined and levied as a result 5.6 million Drams in penalties.
Deputy Yerevan mayor Arman Sahakian told a news conference today that
the bulk of these breaches were in two Yerevan districts of Kentron
and Arabkir.
Sahakian said the ban on mobile sale of liquefied gas remains in force
and attention is paid to undertakers who are forbidden to advertise
their services.
Sahakian said the municipality in cooperation with the health ministry
have stepped up control of a ban on preparation and sale of food and
drinks on streets.
He said all trade and service outlets were registered and all
illegaly ones will be dismantled.

Russia ready to become guarantor of accords on Nagorno-Karabakh
TREND, Azerbaijan
July 16, 2006
(Itar-Tass) – Russia is ready to become a guarantor of implementing
agreements on Nagorno Karabakh by Armenia and Azerbaijan, Russian
President Vladimir Putin told a news conference on Sunday.
“The two countries should reach a compromise and Russia together
with its partners is ready to become a guarantor of implementing the
agreements,” he said.
Putin recalled that “most G8 countries try to help settle the
Nagorno-Karabakh conflict to a certain degree,” he said. French
President Jacques Chirac and U.S. President George W. Bush are actively
engaged in this process, he said.
“We want Armenia and Azerbaijan find a reasonable decision. We will
not impose our decision on them,” he said.

Putin promised to discuss Nagorno Karabakh issue at G8 summit
Regnum, Russia
July 16 2006
“We will most probably touch upon the Nagorno Karabakh issue at the
summit, especially since the G8 is trying to help with resolving the
conflict,” President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin said
at a G8 summit news briefing in Strelnya, St. Petersburg following
the first day of the summit, REGNUM correspondent reported.
“It is desirable that Armenia and Azerbaijan find an acceptable
decision,” the Russian President said. “I can confirm our position:
Russia will not force a decision neither on Armenia nor on
Azerbaijan. The compromise has to be reached by the peoples of these
countries,” Putin underlined. He added that Russia is ready to become
a guarantor of carrying out these agreements.
The G8 summit convened in St. Petersburg on July 15. In the coming
days, leaders of Russia, USA, Japan, Great Britain, Germany, Italy,
France, and Canada, as well as the Chairman of the European Commission
Jose Manuel Barroso and heads of invited states will hold a number
of sessions and bilateral meetings.

Putin: “Russia won’t impose Karabakh settlement on Azerbaijan, Armenia”
Today, Azerbaijan
July 16 2006
Russia will not impose any pattern of settling the Karabakh problem
on Azerbaijan and Armenia, Russian President Vladimir Putin said.
But Russia is prepared to act as guarantor to a compromise the parties
would achieve, Putin said, Interfax informs.
“This problem will be definitely raised at the Group of Eight summit –
the more so, since most of its participants are involved in settling
the Karabakh conflict,” Putin said at a press conference in Strelna
on Sunday.
“Presidents Chirac and Bush, and others are involved in the process and
want Armenia and Azerbaijan to find a mutually acceptable solution,”
Putin said.
URL:

ARMENIA AND AZERBAIJAN ARE FAR AWAY FROM THE AGREEMENT, PRESIDENT ILHAM ALIYEV
AzerTag, Azerbaijan
July 16 2006
In an interview to Turkey’s newspaper Cumhuriyet, President of
Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev said international mediators – Russia, France
and the United States of America – work to settle Armenia-Azerbaijan,
Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and assist us in reaching any kind of
agreement.
According the President, the Minsk group has recently made a statement
with some details of their proposals made public. He said, “We have
not come to agreement. Armenia and Azerbaijan are far away from the
agreement. We did not raise our objection to the proposals put forward
by the Minsk Group”
“We never wanted the talks be held in the dark. We have nothing to
hide. Considering the other side’s suggestion, we also agreed to hold
secret negotiations. As Minsk group has decided to go public about
the details of the peace talks, thus, we have to make some things
clear too”, said the Head of State.

To Armenia from Australia via Edmonton: Isolation prompts painter
Lara Chauvin to explore her ancestral roots
Edmonton Journal (Alberta) Canada
July 16, 2006 Sunday
Final Edition
by Gilbert A. Bouchard, Special to The Journal
EDMONTON – Australian-born painter Lara Chauvin had to move to Edmonton
to artistically get back in touch with her Armenian cultural roots.
“When I lived in Sydney, I was part of this large Armenian community
and was surrounded by the language and the culture, which I took for
granted,” says the 29-year-old artist. “In fact, in my teen years I
went through a phase where I rebelled and rejected my ancestral roots.”
That all changed in the spring of 2003. Having met and married a
Canadian of non-Armenian origins while still in Australia, the newly
minted couple moved to Edmonton for his work.
Once in Alberta’s capital, Chauvin found herself in a city that
had virtually no Armenian community compared to the expat Armenian
presence in Australia.
“There were 40,000 Armenians in Sydney, but maybe only 200 or so
here. All of a sudden I found myself in a city where I was getting
together with other people of Armenian descent only very rarely and
felt even more displaced.
“I started thinking more deeply about what my Armenian roots meant
and started painting images of Armenian women from various cultural
settings around the world,” she says. “You might say that I’m painting
the push-pull of an identity crisis.”
Chauvin has a debut showing of paintings at the Lando Gallery, 11130
105th Ave., as part of the It’s Summer group until July 30.
Chauvin’s figures are proudly non-photo-
realistic, painted with diverse media and boast postmodern touches like
subtle deployment of Armenian text in the paintings’ backgrounds. Her
training as a fashion designer at the Australian White House Institute
of Design in Sydney is also more than evident in her obvious love of
fabric and model-like poses in her colourful images.
Q: How did you come about with the images and compositions we see in
this show?
I’ve travelled extensively in the Middle East and Europe and found so
many other women of Armenian descent who were fascinated with my story
and the fact that I was raised in Australia. That’s what started me
noticing how different Armenians were in all these different countries
and how their cultural and moral views differed as the mores and
reality of these other places rub off on the (Armenian) diaspora.
Those differences were particularly evident in the Middle East where
you had very restrictive cultures as compared to the liberal upbringing
I had in Australia.
This idea really started to come together when I found myself here
and isolated from Armenian culture altogether and these memories
bubbled back up.
I started painting these images to explore the common ground all
these women would have which would be the push and pull struggle to
fit into a new country.
Q: You mentioned to me a bit earlier that symbols where important in
your work. Can you tell me about some of the symbolism that we can
see in these paintings?
You see a lot of pomegranates in the work because they are the national
fruit of Armenia. You also see a lot of red, Prussian blue and black
in my work, which relates back to a palate of colours used for years
by Armenian artists. These colours refer back to the colours of the
Armenian flag.
I also personally like to paint fabric and shadows which relates back
to 19th-century Armenian artists who used stark blackness and sheets
of fabric to starkly shift to a darker palate rather than use more
subtle changes of colour. I’m quite fond of using contrast in that way.
Q: What’s up next for you?
I’m going to Armenia this year for the first time and I’m really
wondering what I’ll be feeling and seeing when I’m there.
I’m assuming I’ll be doing a lot of photo-documenting during my trip
and will end up painting about that when I get back.
GRAPHIC: Photo: Shaughn Butts, the Journal; Lara Chauvin and her
painting, Onward into the past at the Lando Gallery.

The Fugitive’s Tale
The New York Times
July 16, 2006 Sunday
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Traditionally, our best excuse for inaction in the face of genocide
was that we didn’t fully know what was going on — until too late.
During the Holocaust, reports trickled out of Nazi areas of atrocities
and extermination camps, but they encountered widespread skepticism. “I
don’t believe you,” Felix Frankfurter, the Supreme Court justice,
told Jan Karski, a Polish Catholic who at extraordinary risk had
visited a Nazi death camp as well as the Warsaw Ghetto and finally
escaped with hundreds of documents.
Likewise, the Turks mostly barred access to the scene as they
industriously killed off Armenians (a pattern of denial that persists
in Turkey today). Cambodia sealed itself off during Pol Pot’s rule.
And when Westerners evacuated from Rwanda in 1994 (the French airlifted
out their embassy dog, while leaving behind local employees to be
butchered), few witnesses were left to chronicle the savagery day
by day.
That’s what makes Darfur so unusual in the history of genocide: the
savagery is unfolding in plain view, and yet as world leaders gather
in Russia for the Group of 8 summit meeting, the basic international
response is to look the other way.
No genocide has ever been publicly chronicled so extensively as
this one. We have satellite images of the burned villages, and
detailed reports from groups like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty
International. Aid workers interact daily with the two million
displaced people, and we can watch as Sudan spreads instability into
neighboring countries.
Indeed, now we have a witness who has come all the way to America:
Hashim Adam Mersal, a young man now living in Pennsylvania with the
help of the Pittsburgh Refugee Center.
Mr. Hashim, who is 26, is a member of the Zaghawa tribe, which has been
particularly targeted for death in Darfur. He grew up in a village
called Tomorna and lived a relatively prosperous life because of his
family’s large herd of 400 cattle and 150 sheep.
Then in August 2003, the Sudanese government sent the janjaweed
militias to attack black African villages in his region. Mr. Hashim
escaped with some of the livestock, but his father and brother (a
24-year-old father of two) were both killed, along with many others —
including eight children in one family. Mr. Hashim isn’t sure what
happened to the rest of his family.
“It was humans and livestock all mixed together, running for
survival,” Mr. Hashim remembers. “Some kids were falling behind,
and we just couldn’t help. We couldn’t do anything for those falling
back. There was lots of crying, but you were too scared to stop and
help anyone. Some were wounded and couldn’t keep up. Some were left
behind and died.”
In that flight, Mr. Hashim passed other villages that had been
burned. “Bodies were scattered everywhere,” he said.
Eventually, Mr. Hashim made his way to the Chadian capital. He used
cash and tribal connections to obtain a fake Chadian passport and,
somehow, a diplomatic visa to the U.S. So Mr. Hashim came to the U.S.
— only to be jailed on immigration charges. He was released on bail
and is fighting deportation back to Sudan; a hearing is scheduled
for October.
Frankly, the best place to put Mr. Hashim isn’t in jail, but in the
White House Rose Garden for a photo-op with President Bush to call
attention to the genocide.
Mr. Hashim studies English into the wee hours in hopes of communicating
better, so as to plead with Americans to help save his people. At
the same time, he is wracked by guilt at having survived when so many
others died. “I am alive and breathing, but I am like a dead man who
walks,” he said. “The rest of my life will be nothing but sorrow.”
In the small community of Darfur-watchers in America, there is
deepening gloom. There has been an outcry at the grass-roots level —
gathered one million signatures demanding a greater
response — but the genocide is still spreading. John Prendergast
of the International Crisis Group, just back from the region, warns
that “the international community is actually missing the potential
enormity of the crisis as it metastasizes to Chad and the Central
African Republic.”
A conference of donors on Tuesday in Brussels will be an important
test of whether there is any international resolve to save lives.
But increasingly it appears that even when the world has no excuse
at all for inaction — when it is fully informed about a genocide in
real time — it still cannot be bothered to do much about it.

G8 leaders to discuss CIS trouble spots – Putin
RIA Novosti, Russia
July 16, 2006
STRELNA (near St. Petersburg), July 16 (RIA Novosti)-Leaders of the
Group of Eight industrialized nations will discuss the situation
in the former Soviet Union, particularly troubled areas, Russian
President Vladimir Putin said Sunday.
“I am certain that we will talk about the entire post-Soviet space,
particularly those problem areas that are not yet quiet,” Putin told
a briefing in the early hours of Sunday morning.
He told journalists that he and U.S. President George Bush had talked
about conflicts in territories neighboring Russia earlier in the day.
“We mostly talked about Georgia,” he said.
Talking about the breakaway region of South Ossetia in Georgia, which
has been the source of tension between Moscow and Tbilisi this year,
Putin said it was a concern.
“The situation is tense and is not being defused,” he said.
He called on Georgia to find ways to cooperate with South Ossetia.
Putin also said the G8 leaders would touch upon the problem of
Nagorny-Karabakh, a territory disputed by Armenia and Azerbaijan.
The president said the U.S. and French leaders were particularly
involved in the problem, but added Russia and its partners were ready
to become guarantors of any agreements on the issue.
“We will not foist a decision on either the Azerbaijani nor Armenian
side,” he said.

Theater; Just call it a `Labor’ of love;
Director Simon Abkarian brings his special brand of spatial grace to
the Actors’ Gang production of one of his favorite Shakespeare plays.
Los Angeles Times
July 16, 2006 Sunday
by: Irene Lacher, Special to The Times
THE one thing people always say about Simon Abkarian is that there’s
something in the way he moves. When the noted French Armenian actor
starred in Sally Potter’s 2005 film in verse, “Yes,” movie critic Karen
Durbin exulted in his physical presence, calling it “a visual feast.”
Now Abkarian is bringing some of his loose-limbed elegance to
the Actors’ Gang new home in Culver City, where he’s directing a
production of “Love’s Labor’s Lost,” which opens Saturday. Physical
grace may not be the first thing people think of when they think
of Shakespeare — and that’s precisely the reason why Actors’ Gang
co-founder and artistic director Tim Robbins thought Abkarian could
helm a stand-out production of the rarely performed comedy.
“One of the things that’s always frustrating for me in watching
Shakespeare is the actors not understanding what they’re saying,
and he’s taking the actors through this in a very specific way,”
Robbins says of Abkarian. “Part of the reason they don’t understand
is they’re not being asked to make large choices emotionally, so
sometimes Shakespeare becomes like a reading. He understands it must
have fire and blood flowing and extreme passion and people in extreme
circumstances doing extraordinary things. Great playwrights don’t
make plays about people who are kind of depressed and kind of happy.
The trap with Shakespeare is the language is so beautiful that you
forget that these are people who are capable of great extremes of
emotion.”
Abkarian’s rehearsals are tantamount to tutorials on the poetry of
the body, only his disciples are actors, not dancers. It may be a
counterintuitive approach to the Bard, who crafted such a dazzling
interplay of words that actors often get lost in them. Abkarian
recalibrates their focus from their brain to their entire body,
providing a counterbalance that teases out the meaning of the words.
In “Love’s Labor’s Lost,” Ferdinand, the king of Navarre, decides that
he and three of his lords must give up women so that they can devote
themselves to the life of the mind. His plan comes undone when the
princess of France and her three ladies come to town and show the
men another key to the meaning of life.
During a recent rehearsal, Abkarian, 44, shepherds the cast through
a scene in which the royals, along with their respective entourages,
make their first tentative contacts with each other. He doesn’t ask
the actors to analyze their characters’ motives or exhume emotions
from personal experiences. Instead, he prods them to become almost
like puppeteers, using their own bodies as the puppets, working from
the outside in rather than the inside out.
“When you’re doing a film, actors’ movement becomes problematic, so
we have 35 shots,” he says. “It’s demanding to walk and talk while
putting the glass on the table. Our art is not only about emotion
and looking the way you look. It’s also about measuring what you do.”
During the rehearsal, he reminds the cast that the male and female
characters are supposed to keep their distance from each other,
“so you have to invent a way to communicate. People communicated with
bread puppets in concentration camps. They didn’t eat it. They used
it to communicate. Communication is forbidden. You have to believe
it’s forbidden.”
The men and women stand at either side of the stage poised to approach
and circle each other in a kind of minuet before returning to their
places. But getting the four couples to move in unison while looking
ahead, not off to the side, is turning out to be tricky. “Try to be
one body, all of you,” Abkarian tells them.
Unlike French theater companies that flourish with the help of
government subsidies, the Actor’s Gang can’t give him six months
to fine-tune the performances, only six weeks before opening night.
Fortunately for all concerned, the timetable shouldn’t be an issue,
given his philosophical approach to the work.
“I’m not seeking perfection,” he tells the group. “Perfection is
boring.”
* Stretching stereotypes
FOR those who find perfectly conventional looks boring, Abkarian’s are
anything but. The rangy actor has the graceful bearing of a leading
man, but his strong nose and heavy brow are hardly the chiseled
features that typically persuade Hollywood casting directors to fill a
romantic part. It may be unsurprising that Abkarian’s swarthy, ethnic
looks have helped him win such roles as the terrorist Dimitrios in the
upcoming James Bond remake, “Casino Royale,” as well as the part of an
Armenian fleeing the Turkish genocide in 1915 in the Paris production
of the play “Beast on the Moon,” which earned him the 2001 Moliere
Award for best actor.
But imaginative directors have also seen in him the lover capable of
entrancing film critics. In Potter’s “Yes,” set in London, he played
a Lebanese doctor turned cook and political immigrant who becomes
romantically involved with the unhappily married Irish American
scientist played by Joan Allen. And after meeting Abkarian through
Robbins, director Jonathan Demme created a role for him as the silent
lover and fellow officer of the female detective in 2003’s “The Truth
About Charlie,” which costarred Robbins.
“I believe an actor should be able to play any kind of part if it’s
well written, well directed and well watched,” Abkarian says.
He cast two women — Angela Berliner and Mary Eileen O’Donnell —
in the male roles of Moth and Holofernes, respectively, in his
“Love’s Labor’s Lost” because, he says, they were the best “men”
for the job, not as any sort of comment on gender roles. Asked why,
he simply smiles. “It’s a mystery,” he says. “I cannot say. In theater,
the imagination’s space is wider.”
In a way, this production brings Abkarian full circle from his birth
as a theater professional at an acting workshop in Los Angeles where
he met Robbins 22 years ago. The workshop was conducted by Georges
Bigot of Paris’ avant-garde Le Theatre du Soleil as part of the 1984
Olympic Arts Festival. * An actor in training
ABKARIAN hadn’t entertained the idea of becoming an actor until Bigot
and Arianne Mnouchkine, Le Theatre du Soleil’s legendary director
whom he knew in Paris, suggested he take the month of classes that
challenged actors to work within the limitations of commedia dell’
arte masks. When Robbins saw him take the stage in those early days,
he was impressed. “How he expressed emotions through movement was
really extraordinary,” Robbins says.
After Abkarian returned to Paris, he spent eight years acting with Le
Theatre du Soleil. He performed multiple roles in epic productions,
among them “Les Atrides,” a 10-hour compendium of four tragedies by
Aeschylus and Euripides, which made up the company’s acclaimed New
York debut in 1992.
In 1993, the Paris-born Abkarian and his actress-director wife
Catherine Schaub Abkarian left the company to start their own,
T.E.R.A. (Theatre Espace Recherche Acteur). Their first production? A
French translation of “Love’s Labor’s Lost.”
“It has a special place in my heart because it talks about us in
such a witty way, such a light and deep way,” says Abkarian. “It’s
accessible. And the first time I worked with the Gang, I wanted to
work on something they hadn’t done. This is not often shown. It’s
considered a minor work, but I don’t agree with that.”
Bigot’s workshop also ignited Robbins’ lifelong interest in European
theater traditions, which favor larger stories of man’s conflict in
the world, often told with techniques aimed at helping the actor
step outside of himself. Le Theatre du Soleil claimed a cult-like
following with its uncompromising use of masks, music and movement
that incorporate diverse elements of Asian history and theater.
Robbins commissioned a set of commedia masks for the Gang from the
artisan who supplies Le Theatre du Soleil and used them in numerous
productions including “Tartuffe,” “Blood! Love! Madness!” and
“Embedded.” In 2001, he invited Bigot to hold a mask workshop for the
company and direct a production of Chekhov’s “The Seagull.” Abkarian
came to Los Angeles last year to continue the company’s training
in mask work. Now that he too is directing a play for the Gang, the
three sides of the triangle have come together, or as he would say,
“o7Voilaf7.”
“When he comes here,” says Robbins, “he has 60 people who already
know the vocabulary and he can take our training in a different
direction. It’s extraordinary to see, and so good for the company
because he’s doing things I would never imagine and it’s beautiful,
and now we have that as part of our vocabulary.”
* ‘Love’s Labor’s Lost’
Where: Ivy Substation, 9070 Venice Blvd., Culver City
When: 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays.
Ends: Sept. 16
Price: $20 to $25
Contact: (310) 838-4264 or
GRAPHIC: PHOTO: THE PLAY’S THE THING: “It has a special place in
my heart because it talks about us in such a witty way,” Abkarian
says of Shakespeare’s “Lost.” PHOTOGRAPHER: Ricardo DeAratanha Los
Angeles Times PHOTO: A DRY RUN: Abkarian was given only six weeks to
rehearse the cast for the play, but he said that’s sufficient. “I’m
not seeking perfection,” he told the group. “Perfection is boring.”
PHOTOGRAPHER: Ricardo DeAratanha Los Angeles Times

Scheme’s ringleader betrayed Wal-Mart
St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Missouri)
July 16, 2006 Sunday
By Peter Shinkle ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
THE PLOT
Christopher Walters says the retail giant urged him to use shell
companies that hired illegal immigrants to clean stores.
THE FALLOUT
Walters and Wal-Mart agreed to pay millions in fines, but the feds
say Walters still hasn’t paid in full three years later.
—
A local businessman masterminded a scheme in the late 1990s to
bring illegal immigrants to clean floors at Wal-Mart stores across
the country.
Wal-Mart paid at least $82.2 million over three years to shell
companies set up by businessman Christopher Walters, federal agents
discovered. Walters’ companies in turn paid subcontractors who hired
illegal immigrants from countries stretching from Poland to Mongolia.
When investigators dug into the scheme, Walters cut a deal and became
a star cooperating witness in a criminal probe targeting Wal-Mart. He
told investigators that a Wal-Mart executive told him to set up
the shell companies, and he recorded conversations with scores of
Wal-Mart employees.
“Walters created these dummy corporations, but he did so at the
direction of Walters, 43, who lives in a mansion on a gated lane
in Chesterfield, declined to comment. Demerath said he expected the
companies to pay the $4 million.
Walters’ pivotal role in the probe has left him persona non grata at
Wal-Mart, which denies it knew of the illegal immigrants working for
Walters’ companies.
“We feel like we were hoodwinked,” said John Simley, Wal-Mart
spokesman.
As for the claims Walters made about the conspiracy and Wal-Mart’s
role, Simley said: “It’s important to note that he was a cooperating
witness. It’s not like he volunteered to do this.”
The St. Louis raid
The scheme began after federal immigration agents raided a Wal-Mart
in the St. Louis area in early 1997.
At that time, the cleaning company Walters inherited from his father,
Intensive Maintenance Care Inc., was cleaning about two-thirds of all
Wal-Mart stores in the country, according to an account by Walters
cited by immigration officials. As a result of the raid, Wal-Mart
fired Walters’ company, according to both Walters and Wal-Mart.
Walters said that Leroy Schuetz, then a vice president in the
operations branch at Wal-Mart headquarters in Bentonville, Ark.,
told him IMC had been fired because of its use of illegal workers.
But the Wal-Mart executive also gave him a very different message,
Walters told agents of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Schuetz “told him to create different companies” so that if one
company was fired for employing illegal immigrants, Walters could
still do business with Wal-Mart through the other companies, according
to Walters.
Wal-Mart denies it recommended setting up the companies.
“There’s nothing in the evidence to indicate that,” said Simley.
What’s more, the employee Walters spoke with was Leroy Schuetts,
not Schuetz, and he was a regional manager, not a vice president,
Simley said. As for the claim that the Wal-Mart employee urged use
of multiple companies, “Schuetts has denied it,” Simley said. He said
Wal-Mart would not make Schuetts available for an interview.
In July 1997, Walters established Express Corporate Services Inc.,
according to records filed with the Missouri Secretary of State. More
than a year later, he established IMC Associates Inc. And on Dec. 14,
1998, seven companies were established on a single day. They had
names such as Comet Floor Care Associates Inc., World Clean Associates
Inc. and Ironman Maintenance Associates. Walters had his employees’
names put on the public filings; his own name seldom appeared on them.
Walters then hired subcontractors, and it was those subcontractors
who hired the illegal workers, said Demerath, Walters’ attorney.
Soon, cash from the world’s largest retailer was gushing into Walters’
companies.
In 1999, Wal-Mart paid Intensive Maintenance Care and six other
Walters companies $18.3 million, agents said. By 2001, that number
had jumped to $37.8 million.
Wal-Mart paid those companies a total of $82.2 million from 1999
through 2001, but that might be only a fraction of the amount
Wal-Mart paid because the six companies do not include a key company,
Express Corporate Services, or several other of Walters’ cleaning
companies. Nor does it include the amounts paid to Walters’ brother,
who also had a company that provided cleaning services for Wal-Mart.
Walters bought a $2.4 million house in Ladue and an apartment complex
in Fenton, also for $2.4 million. Other expenditures agents found
included a $21,763 Rolex watch for Walters’ wife, Jamie.
By then, a Russian had tipped off the feds.
The tip-off
In November 1998, an immigration agent interviewed Vladimir Blinov,
a Russian who worked cleaning the Wal-Mart in Honesdale, Pa. He said
his employer was a man named Stanley Kostek.
Blinov was in the country illegally because he had entered on a tourist
visa and then had overstayed the term of that visa. Blinov had been
told before he left Russia about the job he would get at Wal-Mart,
Blinov told the agent, Julio Santana of the Philadelphia office of
Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
This was the start of what would be a seven-year probe by Santana
and other immigration agents of Wal-Mart’s use of illegal immigrants.
They called it Operation Rollback, a play on the retailer’s ads for
lowering prices.
In early 2000, agent Santana discovered information that quickly
expanded the probe to Wal-Mart operations nationwide.
A probation officer told Santana that the Honesdale Wal-Mart’s
manager identified the company that cleaned the store as Comet Floor
Care and said that he believed the cleaning crew members were all
illegal immigrants, Santana said in an affidavit filed in court in
Pennsylvania. Immigration officials subpoenaed documents from Wal-Mart,
and those documents revealed that Wal-Mart had paid Comet $8 million
in 1999 to clean 82 stores throughout the United States, Santana said.
Santana also got information from a confidential informer, who set
up recorded phone calls with Kostek. The informer worked for Kostek
at the Honesdale Wal-Mart and lived in a trailer with cleaning crew
members from the former Soviet republic of Georgia.
Armed with this information, immigration agents raided Wal-Mart
stores in Honesdale, Harrisburg and two other cities in Pennsylvania
on March 20, 2001. They arrested 27 illegal immigrants from countries
including Georgia, Russia, Hungary and Ukraine.
They also searched the trailer in Honesdale where the informant said
Kostek housed illegal workers who cleaned the local Wal-Mart.
“The aliens slept on the floor in sleeping bags, and the bathroom
was abnormally dirty,” Santana wrote.
Two days after the raids, the informer called immigration officers
to tell them that Kostek, who owned a company called CMS based in
Queensbury, N.Y., had moved him to Salem, N.H., to clean a different
Wal-Mart, and from there to New Jersey.
Soon, the informer himself was in trouble. By April 2001, other workers
had threatened him physically and suspected him of cooperating with
immigration officials. Also, back in his home country of Georgia,
family members of deported Georgians had threatened his family. He
was taken out of the investigation, Santana said.
Violence reared its head when another man working with Kostek,
Myroslav Dryjak, brought in some Armenians to replace the crew at the
Honesdale store. When one of the Armenians, a man about 60 years old,
complained that he wanted to work in New York, Dryjak and another
man took him outside the trailer and assaulted him, the informant
told immigration officials.
In fall 2001, immigration agents raided Wal-Marts in Pennsylvania, New
York, Ohio and Missouri, arresting 68 illegal workers from countries
including Poland, Lithuania and Mongolia.
At stores in St. Ann and O’Fallon, the agents arrested six Czechs and
a Pole, all employed by a company called National Floor Management.
Illegals at other stores worked for a string of other companies:
Ironman Maintenance Inc., IMC, Comet, Champion, Precision Cleaning
Inc. and Pinnacle Management Inc.
Santana began to scrutinize the companies. The public documents they
filed offered limited information, but they kept leading back to St.
Louis County. Investigators also discovered a pattern: Many of the
companies had the same agent at the same address on South Florissant
Road in Ferguson.
Immigration agents also obtained records from Wal-Mart revealing the
$82.2 million that Wal-Mart paid the seven Walters companies. And from
Normandy Bank in St. Louis County, Santana obtained records showing
a web of payments linking the Walters companies to each other and
to subcontractors.
On April 10, 2002, agents raided the offices of Intensive Maintenance
Care in Ferguson, CMS in Queensbury and one other subcontractor. The
agents seized financial accounts holding $3 million in cash. They also
filed forfeiture cases in federal court in Pennsylvania seeking to take
control of the Walters’ Ladue home and the Fenton apartment complex,
claiming both had been bought with the proceeds of an illicit scheme
to launder money and employ illegal immigrants.
Walters maintained that he never knew the subcontractors were hiring
illegal immigrants, said Demerath, his attorney. But making that case
stand up in court might be tough, Demerath acknowledged.
“We knew it was dangerous to go to trial on that because he probably
did look the other way,” Demerath said.
The deal
In July 2002, three months after his office was raided, Walters
agreed to talk with the federal investigators — with his attorney
present. It was then that Walters acknowledged that he had first
learned of illegal workers used by his subcontractors as early as
1994, Santana said in his affidavit. He also told the story of how
the 1997 raid led him to set up multiple companies.
But Walters did more than recount history to help the agents —
much more. After the April 2002 raids, he had two of his employees
call Wal-Mart stores and inform them that he was shutting down and
going out of business. The employees recorded the calls. In July,
Walters turned over the recordings to Immigration.
Demerath and prosecutors negotiated an agreement in which Walters’
12 companies would plead guilty to conspiracy to transport illegal
workers into the country and would forfeit $4 million. In return,
U.S. attorney Thomas Marino of Harrisburg, Pa., agreed not to pursue
any charges against Walters, his wife, his father or his employees.
“It was a good deal for him,” Demerath said.
Walters signed the agreement in January 2003, but it would remain
secret for more than two years. In that period, Walters cooperated
with the federal probe extensively, recording more than 100 phone
calls and arranging secretly recorded meetings with Wal-Mart employees.
On April 23, 2003, Walters wore a wire to a meeting with Steve
Bertschy, whom immigration agents identified as a Wal-Mart vice
president over store maintenance.
Walters said he wanted to help Wal-Mart replace illegal immigrants in
its stores with legal workers, but Bertschy did not accept the offer,
Santana said in an affidavit later filed in federal court in Arkansas.
Walters told Bertschy that he knew of as many as 1,000 illegal
immigrants working at Wal-Mart stores.
“We’re trying to address that issue because people don’t know exactly
if there are illegal workers in our stores,” Bertschy responded.
At another point, Walters said, “I know of at least 400 stores that
had illegal aliens in them.” Santana said Bertschy replied: “Don’t
repeat that.”
Wal-Mart spokesman Simley acknowledged that Bertschy had made the
comments attributed to him, but he said they were “out of context.”
Simley also denied that Bertschy was a vice president. His title was
“manager, floor maintenance program,” Simley said.
Later in 2003, Walters made recorded phone calls to 118 Wal-Mart stores
to discover whether they employed contractors for cleaning services.
Armed with the recordings and other information provided by Walters,
immigration agents obtained search warrants. On Oct. 23, 2003,
agents raided the offices of Bertschy and other employees at Wal-Mart
headquarters, taking away computer and e-mail data and 13 boxes of
files and other papers. On the same day, agents arrested about 245
illegal immigrants employed at 61 stores in 21 states from New York
to Arizona.
The settlement
On March 18, 2005, Wal-Mart agreed to pay $11 million to settle
allegations of hiring illegal immigrants, but the company denied
any wrongdoing.
Walters’ 12 companies agreed to a guilty plea and the $4 million
forfeiture.
The settlement documents also pointed out that after the October 2003
raids, Wal-Mart notified the government that it intended to take
action to ensure that independent contractors working for Wal-Mart
comply with laws on employment of illegal immigrants.
Wal-Mart also agreed to a court order requiring it to train its
managers on preventing the hiring of illegal immigrants, and to verify
that its independent contractors are complying with immigration laws.
Walters and the Wal-Mart executives avoided any criminal charges,
but prosecutors came down on others linked to the scheme. Three months
after the settlement was announced, Walter Truszkowski, the owner of
Deluxe Cleaning, pleaded guilty in federal court in Chicago of money
laundering and conspiracy to conceal illegal immigrants.
Truszkowski admitted with his guilty plea that, through Walters’
company Intensive Maintenance Care, he got “criminal proceeds in the
form of Wal-Mart’s payments.” Last month, Truszkowski was sentenced
to three years in prison and ordered to pay a $60,000 fine.
Truszkowski, of McHenry, Ill., admitted that he paid $247,319 as part
of the conspiracy to an illegal immigrant from Lithuania, Algimantas
Kondratavicius.
Kondratavicius, who was arrested in 2000 at a Wal-Mart in Valparaiso,
Ind., pleaded guilty of importing illegal immigrants, admitting he
obtained his workers from “alien smugglers” in Moscow and Tomsk,
Russia. In 2004, he was sentenced to a year in prison.
Meanwhile, two other subcontracting firms, DJR Cleaning and CMS of
Queensbury, got deals like Walters’. DJR owner Vincent W. Romano was
not charged with a crime, but DJR itself pleaded guilty of conspiracy
to transport aliens into the country and agreed to forfeit $200,000.
Charges against CMS owner Stanley Kostek were dropped, but CMS pleaded
guilty and forfeited $10,000.
Dryjak, who allegedly assaulted the Armenian while moving crews of
illegal workers for CMS in the Northeast, pleaded guilty of conspiracy
and was sentenced to probation.
Meanwhile, Walters’ companies have yet to forfeit the full $4 million.
Last September, federal prosecutors dropped their efforts to force
Walters to forfeit the home in Ladue and the apartment complex
in Fenton.
Marty Carlson, first assistant U.S. attorney for the middle district
of Pennsylvania, which investigated Walters, declined to discuss why
the full forfeiture had not taken place.
“We intend to move forward until we’ve secured the full $4 million,”
he said.
Amid all the Operation Rollback cases, what remains obscured is the
fate of the hundreds of illegal immigrants arrested at Wal-Marts
nationwide. Immigration officials have said many were deported,
but it is unclear how many. Some disappeared during the investigation.
Some former Wal-Mart janitors have filed a lawsuit claiming Wal-Mart
committed racketeering offenses in its failure to pay the minimum wage
and Social Security taxes to janitors, including illegal immigrants.
James Linsey, an attorney who is seeking to make the case a class
action on behalf of many Wal-Mart janitors, said immigrant janitors
were “were working seven nights a week, 364 days a year,” and in some
cases were locked inside stores while they worked overnight.
Wal-Mart has denied the claims and has asked a federal judge in New
Jersey to dismiss the case.