A significant revelation surfaced, however, when Securacorp CFO Lisa Sugg joined Westbrooks on the line. After looking through company records, she told us, “We show no records for Chris Munoz. He never clocked in or out at any time.”
Despite Munoz’ account of having waited in a three-hour registration line, according to their files he had never been employed by Securacorp. Neither had Salazar, even though his phone number appearing on the Instagram post suggests that he had acted as a recruiter for the company.
Hill’s own Securacorp employee records made for even more of an anomaly. The company files reflected that they had hired him – but as a regular employee as opposed to a manager. Munoz recalled Salazar telling everyone on the bus that he was in charge, and Hill himself told us that his duties had included “general management.” In addition, according to their records he only worked for one day and then got terminated “for using street drugs,” which Westbrooks thought he might have remembered to have been “either crack or meth.”
Following our initial conversation, Westbrooks and Sugg seemed eager to maintain a dialogue with us, but a few days later – presumably after they had spoken with their legal council – they told us to stop contacting them.
Of all the Securacorp staff, Salazar talked the most – but said little of substance. He told us that he was an employee of Staff Pro themselves – not Securacorp or any other Staff Pro subcontractor – and denied any involvement whatsoever in either company’s recruiting process.
Even though his phone number was plainly visible in the Instagram post that led Munoz to contact him in the first place, Salazar claimed that the account from which it originated did not belong to him. Predictably, he also claimed that he didn’t recognize the names Chris Munoz and Ron Hill.
He went on to argue that he spent the vast majority of his time at Coachella on the actual festival grounds, and justified his hesitation to comment on the employee campground conditions with the awkward line of reasoning, “The only time I did spend on the employee campgrounds, I was probably sleeping.” Contrary to Munoz’ testimonial, Salazar also said that he and the other employees were allowed to venture out and enjoy the entertainment on their time off, going as far as to say that he had been able to check an item off his bucket list and attend Coachella.
Only an in-depth investigation of phone, email and purchase records would furnish the evidence necessary to implicate one or more of the Securacorp staff members in Munoz’ story for hiring fraud, but it still makes more sense than any other explanation. If, for instance, Securacorp’s owners had offered too low of a first-time bid to Staff Pro and needed to cut corners – or simply wanted to take a bigger cut of the company’s profits for themselves – misrepresenting employment opportunities to generate free labor would make for a convenient means to either end.
In any event, even though the information available isn’t enough to validate Munoz’ story over Westbrooks’ or vice-versa, both Salazar and Hill each explicitly lied on the record – the former about his Instagram post, and the latter about his position and nature of termination. Each of them obviously conspired for one reason or another, but neither would have had any clear-cut motive to put off-the-books employees to work unless somebody like Westbrooks, Lester or even a stakeholder of a different subcontractor made it worth their while.
The only factor that the theory doesn’t account for (albeit a significant factor) is Munoz’ and Varga’s damning depictions of their respective employee campgrounds. If either Securacorp or TOTL had indeed been cutting costs by scamming their temp employees out of wages, it stands to reason that those inhabiting the premises would be afforded more comforts – not less.
After several more of what came across as painfully obvious attempts to elude questions about his involvement with Securacorp, Salazar suddenly changed the topic to what might be Coachella 2016’s most notable instance of security hiring fraud.
Salazar said:
“I know for a fact that if you’re trying to look for something suspicious, Global Shield would be your first objective to target. They did a lot of hiring fraud, and the supposed owner or co-owner left with a lot of money.”
Global Shield was a security staffer subcontracted by Staff Pro for Coachella 2016. This year’s edition of the festival was the company’s trial run – and after the fact, the only common thread between all the stories circulating about it is that it won’t be returning anytime soon.
“Global Shield was the first big thing during the first week there that everybody knew was fraud,” Salazar said. According to rumors, the owner of what he described as a “fake company” arranged for approximately 150 people to arrive for work at the Empire Polo Club, then disappeared with the money he was supposed to pay them.
Salazar said that because so many of those taken advantage of by Global Shield’s owner were displaced with nowhere to go, they joined Staff Pro and its subcontractors. Some of them were welcomed, but others resorted to sneaking into whatever staffer’s campsite they could find. The unexpected population influx translated into the unruly mobs that rendered the campsites nearly unlivable.
In addition, the tragic death of Michala Freeland was rumored to have been tied to the Global Shield. “From the stories that were going around in the campground, Michala was supposedly in Global Shield as well,” Salazar said. “The whole commotion after that happened was such that the next morning the whole staff of Global Shield were getting ready to be kicked out.”
Since the controversies surrounding its Coachella debut, Global Shield has since been rebranded as Unified Protective Services. Spokespeople on behalf of the company declined comment when we reached out to them. When we brought up the Global Shield rumors to Cory Merideth, his reactions demonstrated how oblivious he was to the problems at the ground floor of the company – especially considering that he’s its founder and president. “Believe me, if [150 people] didn’t get paid they’d be calling us – they’d be calling everybody,” he insisted, not taking into account that labor fraud victims like Munoz did not receive materials in which the Staff Pro hotline would be printed.
In fact, Merideth even suspected that his competition, Contemporary Services Management (CSC), went to drastic lengths to concoct the story as a means of giving him bad press. “My competitor, he was fired up, don’t fall for their bullshit,” he said.
When asked, Merideth summed up the issues with Global Shield far more simply than Salazar had, remarking that “they didn’t know the difference between security and event security.” To make the situation even more absurd, even though he denied that any security staff had been displaced as a result of the business turning out to be a scam, he practically mentioned the crowd influx in the same breath, pointing out, “A lot of people showed up out there that never worked for anyone. They just showed up. I don’t know why. It was like the gold rush.”
Out of touch or otherwise, Merideth did eventually demonstrate a genuine concern for his employees. When we finally convinced Merideth that our stories weren’t fabricated by CSC and told him about the sorts of things that had happened to Munoz and others, he grew emotional, saying:
“We want nothing more than to get people paid properly. If Mr. Munoz somehow did not get paid he needs to call us, and we’ll do the research and get him paid. Not a problem…I’m just responsible for my men, and I take care of people. I started from the bottom; I started in 1973 at the Forum and I worked my way up, and I got treated like shit a lot. I know how it feels, and I always want to take care of people.”
At a time during which so many tectonic shifts are taking place in the music world, 2016 might as well also be the year that festival culture adopts a more self-aware ethos. Goldenvoice’s longstanding relationship with Staff Pro may be built on a historic bond, but if the latter company’s oversights result in vetting decisions so poor that they affect its employees as dramatically as they have, the promoter is also to blame.
In any event, Staff Pro’s leadership appear to have learned their lesson from Coachella 2016, and will be more selective in their future endeavors.
“We actually cut back on quite a few of our subs for this desert party coming up [called EDC Las Vegas],” Merideth said. “We do keep an eye on our subs and if we feel they haven’t been running things properly, we don’t use them ever again.”
In light of Munoz’ testimonials, if Staff Pro is truly invested in its employees’ welfare, then the company ought to drop Securacorp as a subcontractor in the days leading up to EDC.
If you’ve worked for Staff Pro or any of its subcontractors at Coachella Valley Music And Arts Festival and would like to share your own firsthand account, comment below or email us at [email protected].
Also, special thanks to investigator Steven Lee for his assistance with this piece.
