A Catalina Island business owner has handed over a $1.5 million check to cover nearly two decades of stolen wages owed to dozens of restaurant and hotel employees in Avalon. Yueh Mei Tucey, also known as Nora Tucey, was ordered to pay the sum after a Los Angeles County wage theft case that stretched from an initial 2023 arrest through a no-contest plea this fall.
Tucey delivered the $1.5 million restitution as a check during proceedings in Los Angeles County, according to the CBS News Los Angeles report on the case. The payment covers dozens of employees who worked for Tucey between 2008 and 2022, and she was separately ordered to pay $96,000 to the California Employment Development Department for underreporting workers’ wages, according to KTLA.
L.A. County District Attorney Nathan J. Hochman said the restitution represented hundreds of hours of unpaid labor and that vulnerable immigrant victims were underpaid for years, per CBS News Los Angeles. Hochman said many of the victims had waited nearly two decades to be paid, and his office plans to work with partners to disburse the funds to victims.
How the Scheme Allegedly Worked
Yueh Mei Tucey and her husband, Jack Tucey, owned eight hotels and restaurants on Catalina Island along with several apartments, and many of their employees were also their tenants, per the same CBS News Los Angeles account. Prosecutors said the Tuceys operated three restaurants and a hotel in Avalon, according to the Los Angeles Times. Tucey maintained a policy requiring workers to vacate their rentals if their employment ended, the station’s report adds, a practice KTLA also noted prosecutors flagged as requiring workers to leave rentals tied to their jobs.
The California Labor Commissioner’s Office found that the Tuceys used aliases on payroll to hide overtime hours and spread employee shifts across multiple businesses on the same day, per the CBS report. KTLA separately reported that investigators found workdays stretching up to 18 hours as employees bounced between businesses, while CBS News Los Angeles cited a former employee who described days of up to 16 hours in 2024. The Los Angeles Times reported that the labor commissioner’s audit of 18 interviewed workers found they were owed more than $1 million in unpaid wages from 2008 to 2022.
Charges, a Death, and a Plea
Jack Tucey was charged in November 2023 in connection with failing to pay employees overtime and filing fraudulent statements, and he died the following month, one month after being charged, according to MyNewsLA. The Los Angeles Times reported that Jack Tucey had previously been sued twice over alleged failures to pay wages. At the time of the couple’s 2023 arrest, the California Department of Industrial Relations said Jack and Yueh Mei Tucey were arraigned on felony charges of grand labor and wage theft, conspiracy to commit grand labor theft and unemployment insurance fraud.
Yueh Mei Tucey ultimately pleaded no contest in September 2025 to seven felony counts of filing false and fraudulent returns, six felony counts of failure to pay taxes and one felony count of conspiracy to commit wage theft, MyNewsLA reported.
State Officials Point to a Broader Pattern
California Labor Commissioner Lilia García-Brower said workers’ reports helped make the $1.5 million recovery possible, and said workers deserve to be paid for every hour they work, according to the CBS News Los Angeles account. Her office said it will continue using available tools to protect workers’ rights and recover owed wages.
The case lands amid broader state enforcement efforts. The Labor Commissioner’s Office recovered more than $43.7 million in stolen wages, penalties and interest from employers between January 2022 and August 2025, per the California Department of Industrial Relations. In Santa Clara County, officials said hundreds of employers failed to settle $23.3 million in wage judgments between 2013 and 2024, according to KQED, which also cited a 2024 Rutgers University study estimating minimum-wage violations cost workers in the San José, San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego metro areas more than $2.3 billion annually. In one comparable Santa Clara County case, KQED reported the owners of a Cupertino Taiwanese restaurant could be liable for more than $800,000 after failing to pay wage-theft judgments affecting seven cooks and kitchen employees who were allegedly required to work 12-hour days with minimal breaks.
