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Title: Officials Say Phony-Marriage Scheme Recruited in Casinos - (Gamblers in debt bribed for fake nuptials with asians)
Source:
The Los Angeles Times
URL Source: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/l ... 6.story?coll=la-home-headlines
Published: Dec 3, 2005
Author: Mai Tran, Times Staff Writer
Post Date: 2005-12-03 10:51:25 by robin
Keywords: Phony-Marriage, Officials, Recruited
Views: 53
Comments: 4
Officials Say Phony-Marriage Scheme Recruited in Casinos
Gamblers in debt were sought for fake nuptials with foreign nationals, U.S. agency alleges.
By Mai Tran
Times Staff Writer
December 3, 2005
The organizers of a phony-marriage scheme that targeted Asians seeking U.S. citizenship went after people with large gambling debts in their quest to find men and women willing to fill the role of husband or wife, federal authorities said Friday.
Those involved, who allegedly targeted Southern California casinos, would offer to erase gambling debts in exchange for the debtors' willingness to marry Vietnamese and Chinese nationals, authorities said.
"They were able to find people who were on a losing streak who would be willing to do something illegal for the right price," said Virginia Kice, spokeswoman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The Commerce Casino, Morongo Casino and Resort in Cabazon and the Bicycle Casino in Bell Gardens were recruiting hot spots, officials said.
After a three-year investigation, authorities this week arrested 11 of the 44 men and women from Orange and Los Angeles counties and the Bay Area suspected of operating or participating in the phony-marriage scheme.
Most of the others had already been charged.
On Friday, one of the suspected ring leaders, Marian Therese Thai, 53, of Westminster, turned herself in to authorities and made her first court appearance at U.S. District Court in Santa Ana.
She faces federal charges of conspiracy, fraud and misuse of visas, harboring aliens, marriage fraud, and aiding and abetting.
Thai did not turn herself in earlier because she was out of town on her honeymoon, officials said. She addressed the judge in Vietnamese through a court translator, and retained a private attorney.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Marc L. Goldman set bail at $25,000 and ordered Thai to surrender her U.S. passport.
Officials said the ring, dubbed Operation Newlywed Game, was unusually sophisticated. Leaders charged Chinese and Vietnamese nationals as much as $60,000 to marry American citizens to obtain green cards. Thai operated the ring mostly from her now-defunct MT Travel agency in Westminster, officials said. She produced fake wedding pictures, joint tax returns and love letters, officials said.
Authorities caught up with the scam after immigration agency employees discovered U.S. citizens who were petitioning for more than one spouse to receive green cards.
In one case, officials said, Thai arranged for Jasmine Loan Vo to marry three men from China between 2000 and 2002.
Officials said one recruiter, Alex Pham, after gathering a group of willing spouses in Houston, had them flown to China to pose for phony honeymoon photos.
After expenses, recruiters made as much as $50,000 for each marriage.
Authorities said some of the U.S. citizens were paid as much as $5,000 to marry foreign nationals. Some of those arrested worked as professional gamblers. Many lived flamboyant lifestyles, traveling often and driving luxury cars, and were heavily involved in identity theft and credit-card fraud to support their gambling habit, federal agents said. They also had connections to Asian gangs in Orange County, officials said.
For the foreign nationals, the scheme provided an opportunity to seek better lives. Relatives would contribute money to support one person who would enter the U.S. to work and gain citizenship, then sponsor other family members to follow.
They all could now be arrested and deported, officials said, while the convicted schemers could face jail sentences.
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#1. To: robin (#0)
Good grief. Is this a great country, or what?
Is this a great country, or what? It's become one unbelievably stupid and foolish country: FBI Sees Big Threat from Chinese Spies; Businesses Wonder CHINA REVOLUTIONIZES INTERNATIONAL ESPIONAGE FBI spy chief asks private sector for help Max Boot looks at Unrestricted Warfare: In 1998, an official People's Liberation Army publishing house brought out a treatise called Unrestricted Warfare, written by two senior army colonels, Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui. This book, which is available in English translation, is well known to the U.S. national-security establishment but remains practically unheard of among the public. Unrestricted Warfare recognizes that it is practically impossible to challenge the U.S. on its own terms. No one else can afford to build mega-expensive weapons systems such as the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which will cost more than $200 billion to develop. "The way to extricate oneself from this predicament," the authors write, "is to develop a different approach." Their different approaches include financial warfare (subverting banking systems and stock markets), drug warfare (attacking the fabric of society by flooding it with illicit drugs), psychological and media warfare (manipulating perceptions to break down enemy will), international-law warfare (blocking enemy actions using multinational organizations), resource warfare (seizing control of vital natural resources), even ecological warfare (creating man-made earthquakes or other natural disasters). The two write approvingly of al-Qaeda, Colombian drug lords and computer hackers who operate outside the "bandwidths understood by the American military." They envision a scenario in which a "network attack against the enemy" would be carried out "so that the civilian electricity network, traffic dispatching network, financial transaction network, telephone communications network and mass media network are completely paralyzed." Only then would conventional military force be deployed "until the enemy is forced to sign a dishonorable peace treaty."
Death has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war. – Donald Rumsfeld
Another degree to Jack Abamoff? I vonder who owns the casinos...
you're right Robin.
#2. To: lodwick, Eoghan, Itisa1mosttoolate, RickyJ, Red Jones (#1)
Good grief.
#3. To: robin (#0)
“kol Yisrael areivim zeh b’zeh"
#4. To: robin (#2)
It's become one unbelievably stupid and foolish country:
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