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Entrepreneur Lyjha Wilton took advantage of a pair of Mexican immigrants and their U.S.-born daughter, using the immigrants' undocumented status as a lever to take over La Casa, a popular South Wedge eatery that succeeded largely by dint of their labor, the trio maintains in a lawsuit.
Filed last week in U.S. District Court in Rochester, the court action accuses Wilton of fraud and labor law violations.
A real estate developer and owner of Boulder Coffee Co. Inc., Wilton is praised by some as a savior of the city's South Wedge neighborhood and reviled by others as an impossibly bad landlord.
Maria Bocanegra, Omar Ramos and their daughter Leila Bocanegra cast Wilton as a deceiver who "strung them along," inducing them to invest more than $49,000 in La Casa and put in thousands of hours of free labor at the restaurant because of a never-fulfilled promise to turn over the restaurant to them.
Offering the undocumented immigrants "a chance at the American Dream," Wilton in the end manipulated and exploited them, claimed the plaintiffs' attorney, David Irving, a lawyer in the Rochester office of the Worker Justice Center of New York Inc., in a written statement.
Wilton and Joseph Taddeo Jr., an attorney mentioned in the court filing as the recipient of a transfer of restaurant cash arranged by Wilton, did not respond to requests for comment. Taddeo is not a target of the action.
According to the lawsuit, Wilton, seemingly impressed...