3 Imprisoned for Hiring Illegal Immigrants for Cleaning Firm
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A West Palm Beach man was sentenced Monday to more than four years in prison and ordered to pay $16 million in unpaid taxes for his role in a nationwide tax scheme that employed illegal immigrants as janitors to clean for restaurant chains like Hard Rock Cafe, Dave & Busters and Yardhouse.
Scott Cunningham, 44, the former vice president of Rosenbaum-Cunningham International (RCI), was sentenced to four years and three months by U.S. District Court Judge Paul Maloney in Grand Rapids, Mich.
Along with Cunningham, the company’s former president, Richard M. Rosenbaum, 61, of Longwood, was sentenced to 10 years and ordered to pay $16.9 million. A third defendant, Christina A. Flocken, 60, who once served as RCI’s controller, was sentenced to 2 1/2 and ordered to pay $15.7 million.
Maloney also ordered the three to forfeit bank accounts, life insurance policies and cash totaling more than $3 million that prosecutors said was derived from their illegal activities. Cunningham is expected to forfeit a home in the gated community of Ibis Golf and Country Club.
In handing down the sentence, Maloney said the crimes involved a “massive tax scheme involving illegal aliens.”
Assistant Secretary for Homeland Security Julie L. Meyers said, “For too long, unscrupulous employers like those who owned and operated RCI have been able to undercut their competition by building their work force with illegal labor.”
Myers added that “targeting employers who profit from illegal hiring is a key component to stopping illegal immigration.”
{snip}
Just before the indictment was handed down, more than 200 undocumented workers from Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala and Haiti were rounded up in a raid on 63 RCI job sites across the country, according to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. They were detained pending deportation proceedings.
{snip}
(Posted on March 6, 2008)
Comments
I hope this is true, but what I don’t get is this…why do they detain them prior to deportation…they should be taken right away…at the expense of the owners …to mexico and the ones from central America should be dropped in mexico to find their way back where they came from…bet they won’t come back…if they don’t get a free ride to the doorstep they came from….
Posted by lydia at 12:10 AM on March 7
I don’t know what to make of this story. It is almost too surreal to be true based on the reported scale, the utter simplicity of the business model employed by the perps, and the monetary/penal size of the judgements/prison sentences. There’s got to be thousands of businesses employing this model across the country. What did these guys do to ingratiate themselves with the Bush Administration?
Posted by underdog at 12:22 AM on March 7
Millions of illegals are walking in each year and the governemt rounds up a few hundred each month.
Posted by the Soviet Republic of New Jersey at 12:28 AM on March 7
The reason they are detained pending deportation is due to the action being a judicial as opposed to an administrative action. In Mexico it’s all handled as an administrative action and it moves much quicker.
The illegal alien has far fewer rights that way. The administrator needs to determine only if the person is legal or illegal and then send them on thier way back to country of origin as appropriate.
Posted by at 7:36 AM on March 7
Meanwhile, the Bush administration is slapping economic sanctions on Belarus, because their media is not controlled by a band of criminals favorable to the neoconservative global agenda (i.e. multiracial border-less plantations) Imagine having a government that instead of meddling in the affairs of countries around the world, simply enforced our laws here at home? Most Americans aren’t bad people, but their government is truly a force of evil.
Posted by Tim at 12:48 PM on March 7
There are computers that could have caught these people in a nano second if the E-Verify system was made mandatory for every employee, no exceptions.
Posted by Rex the Toad at 5:39 PM on March 7
Considering how completely disingenuous the Feds have been about illegal immigration, I would have to assume this is one of those war on (drugs/terror) style press-release/photo-op arrests.
Posted by at 8:59 PM on March 7
Seems it wasn’t the fact they were using illegals, but that they weren’t paying taxes. That’s what they got nailed for, non payment of taxes. The Gov doesn’t care if you screw American workers and hire massive numbers of third world illegals, it only cares if you try to screw Gov our of money.
Lesson to the rest of the corps (especially agriculture and construction) using illegals on a massive scale? Pay your taxes and we’ll leave you alone.
Posted by at 5:19 PM on March 8
This is nothing more than window dressing to appease the WHites in this country, and to continue the charade that we still have national borders on this continent. Are we supposed to celebrate this “round up” of 200 illegals, when 500 times that number freely enter this country?
Any law enforcement agency would be - should be - embarrassed with such an utterly lousy enforcement record, unless of course, the reults “achieved” by the Dept. of Homeland Security, i.e. a dissolution of America’s borders and an overwhelming number of non-Whites swamping this country, are DHS’s expected and intended results. There can be no other logical explanation.
Posted by Legal Eagle at 3:47 PM on March 10