![]() ![]() “How often do you think they flip the water in community pools? You're much safer coming in here.” “I flip the water every day, and if people want me to flip it again before they get in-I will, no problem,” he says. Though he's not surprised the public at large is skeptical of the business, he addresses it without prompting. Maddox is now left with a demolished room that must be rebuilt, shaken-up friends and a loss of business due to customer backlash from the raid. individuals found on the premises, on the date of inspection, were in fact employees.” “Well, that's not a confession!” Jackson responded, threw out the case against Neptune's Lagoon, and wiped away Maddox's fines, later writing in a decision that Sima “failed to provide sufficient evidence of witnesses to conclude that the. Yet when asked for the signed confessions, Sima said he didn't have them because the buddies never signed anything. Jackson that Maddox's friends admitted to him that they were employees. Agent Sammy Sima told hearing officer James W. At a hearing before the state Department of Industrial Relations' Division of Labor Standards Enforcement, officers couldn't offer definitive proof that Maddox illegally employed his friends. Not one of the business owners was ever charged with a crime. The worst part of it? The destructive show was all for naught. It wasn't until later that they said they were looking for victims of human trafficking. At each place, the phalanx of uniformed officers neglected to tell owners why they were disrupting their businesses. Maddox didn't know it then, but the Anaheim Police Department, Code Enforcement and Labor Standards placed four massage parlors in Anaheim under the same lockdown and sweep that day. Maddox was fined $13,676, and a demolition order the city executed three weeks ago left an awkward hole in his business. Code enforcement found two small storage rooms built inside the original foundation that were not up to code and demanded he knock them down. Four of Maddox's friends who were hanging out in a back storage building were handcuffed and detained after labor standards officers determined-without any proof-they were employees paid under the table. They said they were simply here to support code enforcement.”Īfter that brief introduction, the officials proceeded to ransack the Lagoon. “They told me they didn't have a warrant and that this was not a criminal investigation. “The first thing I asked them when they came in was if they have a warrant,” Maddox recalls. But on April 3, it wasn't early-bird customers who greeted him, but more than 20 code-enforcement officers, officials with California's labor-standards enforcement, and undercover police in tactical uniforms and ski masks. Maddox usually opens the doors of Neptune's Lagoon, his by-the-hour Jacuzzi-rental business in Anaheim, around noon every day to little fanfare.
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