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HONOLULU - The U.S. government's largest-ever human trafficking case, involving alleged exploitation of about 600 agricultural workers from Thailand, was put in jeopardy after all charges were dismissed in a related prosecution of a Hawaii farm, attorneys said Friday.

Federal authorities have accused Los Angeles-based labor recruiting company Global Horizons Manpower Inc. of manipulating workers placed in U.S. farms across the country, and an FBI spokesman last year compared the company's actions to a form of modern-day slavery. A trial against Global Horizons CEO Mordechai Orian is set for February in Honolulu.

But after U.S. prosecutors on Thursday abruptly dropped similar accusations that owners of Hawaii's Aloun Farms economically entrapped 44 Thai laborers, the fate of the case against Global Horizons became unclear.

"They don't have a case anyway," Orian said in an interview Friday. "Everybody knew that with Aloun Farms, that they had more on them than on me. ... When you see the facts and the reality, it's different from when you go to the media and make somebody look like a monster."

Orian's attorney, Randy Shiner, said the government's failure to prove wrongdoing by Aloun Farms has "significant reverberations" for Global Horizons.

"I'm really hoping they'll look at the disaster they just went through," Shiner said.

Both Global Horizons and Aloun Farms were accused of using the same tactics to keep foreign workers in their service: false promises of lucrative jobs, passports confiscated and threats of deportation. Global Horizons supplied 33 workers to Aloun Farms for six weeks in 2003, before the time when mistreatment was alleged at Aloun.

The workers used their ancestral lands as collateral to get loans of up to $20,000 each that they paid recruiters to land the jobs

MARK NIESSE

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