Bus Line Admits it Smuggled Entrants
Michael Marizco and Tim Steller, Arizona Daily Star, Apr. 3
A bus company accused of smuggling more than 42,000 illegal entrants, and laundering the money it took in as a result, pleaded guilty Friday in Tucson federal court to six felonies.
Golden State Transportation Co. was indicted three years ago on charges of smuggling that number of illegal entrants—nearly twice the population of Marana—from Tucson and Phoenix to Los Angeles in 2000 and 2001.
As part of its plea agreement, Gonzalez Inc., the corporation that oversaw Golden State, was ordered to forfeit its Phoenix bus terminal, valued at about $2 million, said the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
The bus company itself was required to pay $3 million in fines.
“The Golden State Transportation Company was at the heart of this pervasive multimillion-dollar and multistate alien-smuggling conspiracy,” said Paul Charlton, U.S. attorney for Arizona.
Federal prosecutors said Golden State started letting people smugglers use its buses to traffic illegal entrants in the mid-1990s.
In the plea, Golden State admitted it let people smugglers buy blocks of tickets from its Los Angeles terminal for illegal entrants bound for Los Angeles to use at border towns in Arizona.
The company would then let smugglers hide the illegal entrants at the bus terminals before the buses arrived and even moved bus schedules around so illegal entrants could get on the bus at unscheduled times to throw off border agents.
The company also pleaded guilty to providing special charter bus services so smugglers could transport illegal entrants from Tucson, Phoenix and Las Vegas to the East Coast on bus routes that avoided U.S. Border Patrol checkpoints.
As part of its plea, Golden State gave up its bus terminal at 130 N. 35th Ave. in Phoenix. The federal government will also keep $185,282 seized in the prosecution.
The investigation was considered so significant that U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft himself announced the indictment in December 2001, saying the company made Tucson the hub of a smuggling operation.
Golden State and about 30 of its officers and employees were indicted.
But because Golden State filed for bankruptcy in 2002, the guilty plea was “like busting a piece of paper,” and won’t help the government’s case against the people indicted, a criminal defense lawyer in Tucson said.
“It’s like Enron pleading guilty; Enron won’t go to jail. … It’s an empty gesture,” said Mike Piccarreta, who represents the company’s ex-president, Antonio Gonzalez.
Gonzalez was charged with conspiracy to transport people, but Piccarreta says the government has no case because he did nothing wrong.
Earlier this year, a federal judge suppressed evidence from a wiretap of the company’s Los Angeles office, ruling the wiretap was illegal.
That ruling put many of the criminal cases in limbo, and the federal government is appealing the ruling in the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Piccarreta said.
“The government’s case against Tony (Gonzalez) borders on non-existent,” Piccarreta said.
Gonzalez’s father, Francisco Gonzalez, a native of Jalisco, Mexico, started the business in the early 1980s, using his Chevrolet Suburban to shuttle passengers between Los Angeles and Tijuana. By the late 1990s, the company had grown into a regional bus line taking a largely Hispanic clientele throughout the Southwestern United States.
Greyhound Lines was recovering from bankruptcy and an interested Greyhound subsidiary bought a 51 percent stake in Golden State in 1997. It was part of a bold experiment in direct service between U.S. cities such as Tucson and Mexican cities such as Hermosillo, trying to capture the growing Latino cross-border market.
The experiment, which included the Crucero line as well as Golden State, coincided with a surge in illegal border crossings through Arizona.
By April 1999, federal agents suspected that Golden State and Crucero employees were deliberately picking up illegal entrants in Southern Arizona and transporting them to Phoenix.
An investigation was launched that eventually included 20,000 pages of documentation, 367 surveillance videotapes and 1,500 audiotapes of wiretapped conversations.
After the indictment, Greyhound expelled the Gonzalez family from Golden State and installed its own management. Golden State continued operating until August 2002, when Greyhound closed the line.