South Los Angeles grocer George Torres largely avoided negative publicity, and serious trouble with the law, for decades despite voluminous civil court files and law enforcement reports that portrayed him as a vicious thug.
The reports named him as a suspect in murders, beatings and drug trafficking. But he was never convicted of anything more serious than possessing a loaded weapon. Then he was mentioned in news accounts about a controversial presidential pardon, sparking the investigation that led to Wednesday's indictment, a federal source said.
Criminal informants had been telling law enforcement for years that Torres was a drug kingpin but, as one former narcotics investigator put it, officers were never able to get close enough to penetrate his organization to confirm it.
In a late-1990s report by the Drug Enforcement Administration, a federal investigator claimed that Torres was transporting cocaine in bulk in tractor-trailer loads of grocery products from Mexico.
The memo identified one of his financial partners as Horacio Vignali. Vignali, with the help of many officials in Los Angeles, including current Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, persuaded President Clinton to commute the 15-year drug-dealing sentence of Vignali's son to five years.
The pardon, issued the day before Clinton left office, also came with the help of Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca, then-U.S. Atty. Alejandro Mayorkas, Reps. Xavier Becerra and Esteban Torres, L.A. County Supervisor Gloria Molina, then-state Sen. Richard Polanco and others who wrote letters on the Vignalis' behalf.
The elder Vignali had been Torres' partner in a number of legitimate business deals. After a congressional committee in 2002 criticized the younger Vignali's pardon, investigators decided to take "a serious look" at Torres, the federal source said. No narcotics turned up, but they said they found evidence of racketeering, murders, thefts, bribery and extortion.
Street informants were telling police as early as 1989 that Torres, a high school dropout who began his grocery business with a fruit truck, was hijacking grocery trucks and smuggling and abusing illegal immigrants whom he employed, according to police reports.
In an incident cited in the indictment, two illegal immigrant employees sued the brothers for allegedly beating them in 1988. They said Torres ordered them to stay late on Christmas 1988, then beat and chased them through the streets to a nearby apartment that he rented to them. While Torres' brother Manuel held them at gunpoint, George Torres and others continued to beat them, they said.
