Prosecutors Score Victory After Ex-Tenants Testify Against Unlicensed Operator

Margaret McClay Garnett and some of her former tenants were face to face again. This time it wasn’t under the leaky roof of a rundown illegal board-and-care home but in the staid confines of Courtroom 47.

Five alleged victims of Garnett--one of Los Angeles’ best known unlicensed board-and-care operators--were summoned to Los Angeles Municipal Court last week to testify against her during a probation violation hearing.

They were no ordinary witnesses--one of them half-blind, three of them schizophrenics. And this was no ordinary day in court. Prosecutors rarely call victims of unlicensed board-and-cares to the stand because their physical and mental impairments can compromise their effectiveness as witnesses. Prosecutors rolled the dice this time because of the stakes: a rare opportunity to usher an unlicensed board-and-care operator into a cell.

After hearing the testimony, an angry Municipal Judge Keith L. Schwartz ordered that Garnett be cuffed and taken to jail. He called her a “danger to public safety.”

For nearly three years, authorities had been receiving allegations that Garnett was using agents to poach homeless people off the streets, then shut them up in an unlicensed home, taking all or most of their government subsistence checks. In September, she was placed on three years probation for operating an unlicensed and dilapidated board-and-care on Arlington Street in Los Angeles, where one resident had died.

She was brought into court because state investigators heard claims that she had opened a new and equally bad facility one day after she was ordered to shut down the other, a violation of her probation.

One by one, the witnesses, who were living in the new home, shuffled to the stand, sometimes requiring assistance. Clearly frightened by the formal milieu, they did their best to describe what happened to them and to identify Garnett as the perpetrator.

At times, they had trouble with details such as dates, a shortcoming for which some of them apologized. “My memory’s gone short on me,” James Pierce lamented.

Gordon Nelson’s face twitched uncontrollably, revealing a smile that was missing a few teeth, but he calmly and explicitly recounted Garnett’s role at the house.

At least two of the witnesses expressed a child-like forgiveness for Garnett, saying they were sorry to see her get in trouble--a display Schwartz found all the more poignant given that they had been subjected to, in his words, prison-like living conditions.

“You can sort of relate it to a World War II situation, like a stalag,” Schwartz said as Garnett sat impassively.

Garnett’s attorney, deputy alternate public defender Tommy Lee, argued that the new home was operated by Garnett’s brother and that she only helped. But the judge was unconvinced, saying he would sentence Garnett on Jan. 8.

Afterward, Schwartz lashed out at the system for failing to act sooner. “The court is baffled . . . that authorities . . . could not stop Miss Garnett. She really did it with impunity.

“Where,” he asked, “are the authorities?”