The owner of a Brooklyn tortilla factory where a worker died after falling into a mixing machine has been arrested on charges of underpaying employees, falsifying business records and violating workers? compensation and unemployment insurance laws, the authorities said on Wednesday.
The owner, Erasmo Ponce, faces 26 felony counts and 23 misdemeanor counts, according to a complaint filed in Brooklyn Criminal Court by Eric T. Schneiderman, the state?s attorney general. Mr. Ponce surrendered to the authorities on Tuesday and was arraigned and released without bail, his lawyer said.
Mr. Ponce, a Mexican immigrant, declined to comment on the charges, but his lawyer, Manuel Portela, said he did not think the case merited criminal prosecution.
?We?ve been trying to resolve this case on an administrative level,? Mr. Portela said, adding that his client ?wants to resolve it and move forward in a way that is fair and equitable.?
Mr. Ponce?s company, Tortilleria Chinantla, has been operating under the investigative glare of state and federal officials since Jan. 24, 2011, when Juan Baten, a Guatemalan worker at his tortilla factory in Bushwick, died after falling into a large machine used to mix tortilla dough. Mr. Baten was crushed in the machine?s churning mechanism.
Several days later, state officials shut down the factory after discovering that the company had been operating without workers? compensation insurance for nearly a year.
The state eventually allowed the factory to reopen, but in July 2011, the federal government cited the company for workplace safety violations carrying fines of more than $62,000. The most serious violation, deemed ?willful,? involved the failure of the company to install a barrier on the mixer to prevent employees from coming into contact with its fast-moving machinery.
Ted Fitzgerald, a spokesman for the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which conducted that investigation, said Wednesday that the tortilla company had contested the citations and penalties and that the case was still pending.
Mr. Baten?s death and the ensuing investigations have darkened the reputation of Mr. Ponce, whose life had followed the classic trajectory of the striving, up-by-the-bootstraps immigrant.
Mr. Ponce was poor when he moved to the United States from Mexico in 1989 and, after a few years of doing manual labor and saving money, he started a small tortilla-making vending business in New York. Within a decade the company grew into a national enterprise with revenue of several million dollars a year.
His success made him one of the wealthiest and most influential members of the city?s growing Mexican diaspora, and he burnished his reputation by donating to various social and political causes in the New York region and in Mexico.
While he declined to speak on Wednesday about the new set of charges against him, Mr. Ponce chatted enthusiastically about a ceremony he was hosting on Saturday to christen a new mural on his factory?s facade. It depicts a workers laboring in a cornfield, he said, and has been popular with the neighbors.
?I am working well with the community,? he said.
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