By RALPH BLUMENTHAL


If anyone seemed to embody the American dream, it was Simon Nget.

Reaching New York’s shores in 1981 as an uneducated 18-year-old Chinese refugee from Cambodia, where he said relatives had starved to death under the Khmer Rouge, Mr.Nget learned the alphabet in high school in New York City, as he recounted, the homework sometimes taking him 10 hours a night.

But he graduated and went on to college, packing delivery orders of Chinese food, waiting tables and cleaning offices until he saved up enough to marry and buy a coffee shop. From there, it was a Vietnamese restaurant on Broadway. Then there was a second Manhattan restaurant, and a third, all grossing, by 2006, a total of $7 million a year.

“I come to this country, what I do is work, work hard, learn hard, and you learn something; you work hard, you save money,”he testified in a federal court case.“Save money, work hard making money, save money, that’s very important.”

Maybe too important, if the accusations against him are proved. On December 3, Mr.Nget, 45, and his wife, Michelle, 51, mother of their two children, were arrested on 242 state criminal charges each of cheating the food deliverers for their Saigon Grill restaurants out of millions of dollars in minimum wages, falsifying business records, taking kickbacks and defrauding the state’s unemployment insurance system.

The Ngets, who pleaded not guilty, were released on bond and continue to operate their two remaining restaurants.

In a separate federal lawsuit, Magistrate Judge Michael H.Dolinger ruled against the Ngets in October, finding their testimony about their business practices“incredible”and“manifestly false”and ordering them to pay $4.6 million in back pay and damages to 36 delivery workers, mainstays of their operation.

The Ngets did not respond to repeated telephone messages .

The federal trial transcript and sworn depositions of the Ngets and fired workers encapsulate a stark narrative, a tale of immigrants accused of victimizing people much like they had once been.

“I got here owning nothing, you know,”Mr.Nget told Judge Dolinger.

Arriving in New York on June 12, 1981, Mr.Nget was sponsored by a cousin whose parents died in the Khmer Rouge genocide.“I have a family who should be die in Cambodia, but we survive and we got a life in the United States, like in heaven,”he testified.“We love our life.”

His success, evidence suggested, came at a steep and illegal cost to delivery workers, mostly illegal immigrants from Fujian Province in China who testified they were paid $500 to $600 a month for working 70 to 80 hours a week, often less than $2 an hour. They usually made several thousand dollars a month in tips, but that did not relieve the Ngets of their wage obligations under the law.

Yu Guan Ke, 36, who began delivering for the Ngets in 1988 and became the lead plaintiff against them, said in an interview that “in the beginning, the boss and boss lady treated workers pretty fairly.”But as the restaurants started making money, Mr.Ke said, conditions became harsher. He said he was twice robbed during deliveries and had to repay the Ngets.

To create false payroll records, the workers testified, the Ngets paid them with checks for larger amounts that they had to cash and pay back to receive their real - lower - pay.

And when they sought to organize in protest, Mr.Nget ended up firing them all. In February the National Labor Relations Board ordered their rehiring, but whether the Ngets have complied is disputed.

Mr.Nget said he thought he had paid minimum wages. But he acknowledged,“I don’t keep any record.”“I’m a simple man, a good man,”he told the court.