A California Restaurant Is Under Fire For Hiring Fake Priest To Question Employees

Sacramento, California taco chain Taqueria Garibaldi must pay more than $140,000 in back pay to its employees for committing an elaborate act of wage theft that involved a faux priest ordering staff confessions. The U.S. Department of Labor had begun investigating the restaurant in May 2021 under complaints that management was withholding overtime wages. Speaking with employees, agents discovered that a priest had visited the taqueria in order to ask workers invasive questions concerning their employment "in order to get the sins out."

According to the interviewees, the priest assessed employee loyalty by inquiring if any of them had stolen money or had any "bad intentions" about owner Che Garibaldi and owners/operators Eduardo Hernandez, Hector Manual Martinez Galindo, and Alejandro Rodriguez. According to former employee Maria Parra's sworn declaration, "The priest mostly had work-related questions, which I thought was strange." Neither the Labor Department nor the Diocese of Sacramento were able to identify the priest, although employees allege that they recognized him as the friend of Eduardo Hernandez.

The fake priest scheme was one tactic in a line of workplace corruption abuses that the Department of Labor has called "shameless" and "despicable." The owners of Taqueria Garibaldi, who operate two locations in the Sacramento metro area, used intimidation and manipulation to interfere with the federal investigation. Labor's Wage and Hour Division discovered that Garibaldi, Hernandez, and the other operators tried convincing their employees that investigators would threaten their immigration status and had fired an employee who they believed opened the investigation.

The Division discovered that Taqueria Garibaldi had, in fact, violated the Fair Labor Standards Act when the restaurant chain's owners failed to pay wages for those working more than 40 hours a week. Court documents state that Hernandez asked his employees to tell federal agents that they worked five days a week when, according to an employee declaration, staff members only got a single day off. Hernandez also tried to convince his employees to change the timecard evidence. Besides the $140,000 owed to their 35 employees, Taqueria Garibaldi's owners will also have to pay $5,000 in civil penalties for their attempts "to retaliate against employees" and "obstruct an investigation and prevent the recovery of unpaid wages," in the words of San Francisco Regional Solicitor of Labor Marc Pilotin.