The criminal case against the Compton-based supermarket chain is not over. At least the questions aren’t. While Ralphs the company has pleaded guilty to conspiracy, identity fraud and falsifying and concealing information to the IRS and Social Security Administration, no charges have been filed against any manager or executive at the company. So who was responsible for rehiring locked out Ralphs workers during the bitter 2003-04 labor dispute?

In the December issue of Los Angeles magazine (not available online), I try to piece together who did what and why. Union officials and some government investigators are convinced that the Ralphs conspiracy went well up the ladder. Maybe the whole truth will come out one of these days, maybe not. But with the current contract up in March, the United Food and Commercial Workers are bound to use the Ralphs case in an effort to cut a better deal. Here’s how the piece opens:

Marty Woods has butchered a lot of meat in nearly 30 years of working in supermarkets, but he still remembers the Sunday before Christmas of 2003. More than two months after the management at Ralphs had locked out its workers, Woods turned a corner toward the break room of a store in Seal Beach and found himself face-to-face with the president of the company, John Burgon. Woods knew who it was because Burgon and his wife had been regulars at the Laguna Beach Ralphs where he normally worked. “Hey, John, how are you doing, I’m Marty Woods,” he recalls saying, sticking out his hand and wishing Burgon a Merry Christmas. Burgon returned the good wishes. Thing is, Woods should never have been working at Ralphs that day – labor laws prohibit union members from being rehired during a lockout. Woods was there as a union plant.

Did Burgon recognize Marty Woods, as Woods claims? And if so, why didn’t he ask somebody what Woods was doing at a locked-out store? What Burgon (who did not respond to an interview request) would have discovered went beyond labor law violations. Hundreds of Ralphs workers – perhaps 1,000 or more, although the exact number will never be known – had been rehired during the 141-day dispute using the names and Social Security numbers of their children, spouses, aunts, cousins, and, in some cases, complete strangers. That’s a criminal matter and it finally took the U.S. Attorney to untangle the mess.

What the chains could not have foreseen was the union’s decision two and a half weeks into the strike, on Oct. 31, 2003, to abruptly bring down the lines at Ralphs. Picketing would continue only at Vons and Albertsons. For Ralphs, it was actually too much of a good thing. Shoppers returned in droves, putting pressure on store managers to provide pre-strike service and selection – an impossible goal because the stores were still using temps. “The customer comes in and expects to see their normal Ralphs store, and you’re for the most part running the store with temporary workers,” explains Dave Hirz, who replaced Burgon as the chain’s president. (Burgon was moved to a senior executive post with Kroger several months after the strike and retired in early 2006.)

The pressure is illustrated in the details of a 53-count federal indictment that was handed down against Ralphs in late 2005 – and which led to the chain pleading guilty on five of the counts. In one of the citations, an unnamed store manager asked his district boss how he could expect to reopen the seafood department, given the shortage of employees. “Use your connections. Make some phone calls. I don’t care. Just get it open,” was the response. The store manager took that to mean hiring locked-out union members, according to the indictment.

Soon after the picket lines went down, Frank Simkins, a union rep for Local 324, began hearing rumors of locked-out workers being rehired using phony names and social security numbers. There was something else: Picketers had been disappearing from the lines. After being told about a union member who was working at a Ralphs, he pulled into the parking lot in the middle of the night. “I tapped on the window,” Simkins recalls, “he saw me, waved at me, and kept working.”

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On January 2, the United Food and Commercial Workers filed suit in L.A. Superior Court, alleging that Ralphs had violated California wage and hour laws by rehiring at least 50 to 100 union employees who used fake names and social security numbers. At the time, a Ralphs spokesman denied the charges, noting that, “on rare occasions when somebody may have tried to come back to work with us, those individuals are immediately let go.”

Jeffrey Isaacs, then a special assistant U.S. attorney, had heard about the lawsuit on his car radio and got curious. After just wrapping up a lengthy and complex criminal fraud investigation involving the French banking giant Credit Lyonnais, he was looking for new cases – and the L.A. office was making a special push in the identity theft area. If the union claims were true and phony social security numbers had been used, the suit might be worth checking out. He left a message that weekend with John Webb, an assistant U.S. attorney and a specialist in identity theft. Webb, who also heard about the story, left Isaacs a similar message. “We laughed about it later,” Webb says. “We had both focused on the same thing.”

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The indictment is laced with examples of unnamed vice presidents, district managers, and store managers who were willing to hire union members. In one citation, a district manager tells a store manager that hiring locked-out workers would not jeopardize her job because “when this is over, there’s going to be … an immunity where this will all be kind of washed under [the bridge].” According to the indictment (but not included in the plea agreement), such assumptions stemmed from a Ralphs strike manual that only prohibited store managers from “knowingly” hiring locked-out workers. That, the government maintains, set in motion a kind of “don’t ask-don’t tell” mentality permeating the company.

To this day, executives at Kroger [Ralphs parent company] insist that the law-breaking was low-level and isolated – not that they’re dying to talk about their company being the subject of a criminal conspiracy.