By Brian Anderson
Valley Times

May 25, 2001

OAKLAND - Hoping to boost the bottom line, a rogue band of security agents for Longs Drug Stores used heavy-handed tactics to hold, threaten then fire young store employees wrongfully accused of breaking company policies, a lawyer told jurors Thursday.

In early 1997, nine former employees were separately summoned to what officials said would be innocuous meetings with store security, attorney Mary Shea told an Alameda County jury in closing arguments of a civil suit against Longs. But after entering offices to be interviewed, they were locked in and subjected to a barrage of questions and persuaded to sign false statements dictated by security guards, Shea said.

"Each and every plaintiff was detained and felt they could not leave," she said in a two-hour presentation in a courtroom packed with plaintiffs and their supporters. "Each one of them went into the room, thinking they were just going to be asked questions about the business. It becomes wrong when they threaten, intimidate and deprive people of their due process rights."

The allegations were inflammatory and plainly not true, said Longs' attorney Robert Eassa of Oakland during his two-hour closing argument to jurors.

Confessions were not forced, statements were not dictated, employees were not falsely imprisoned, he said. Quite simply, there was no evidence showing loss prevention investigators acted in any way other than proper, he said.

"They want you to ignore undisputed facts," he told jurors. "If they are not held against their will, they cannot be falsely imprisoned. The evidence is unequivocal that they were there of their own free will."

Workers from two Alameda Longs' stores contend in a lawsuit filed in August 1998 that officials with Longs loss prevention division made physical threats and put "extreme and inhumane pressure" on employees to force them out. They were traumatized, the suit claims, after security guards pounded their fists on tables, stabbed a tissue box with a pen and refused to allow calls to store managers or parents during "interrogations."

Lead plaintiff Marlena Palacio, who operated the cash register, stocked shelves and performed other duties in her three years at one store, said outside the courtroom that her statement was essentially that of a security official.

"It was dictated to me word for word," said Palacio, now 25. "At one point I said I wasn't going to sign it, but they said all we have to do is pick up the phone and make one call (to police). It was very intimidating."

The motivation was money, Shea said Thursday, accusing Longs head of loss prevention, Dennis Miller, of working to meet a termination and loss recovery quota to grow profit margins.

But Eassa said that was nonsense.

"Evidence of a quota system, evidence that loss prevention gets points for terminations?" he asked rhetorically before jurors. "That is ridiculous."

Jurors will begin deliberating Tuesday.