Jackson: Tarunkumar and Sachin Patel wanted to find a way so that more of their friends and business associates from India could get permanent legal status to remain in the US. But they have admitted on Monday that their plans were federal crimes.
Now they and up to 17 others face prison time.
The men said that in 2011 they arranged four sham marriages between their friends and American women the two Patels had met. The two are business acquaintances.
Then in 2014, Tarunkumar Patel said he began bribing a Mississippi police officer to create false crime reports in an effort to immigration authorities to grant them special visas for victims of certain types of crimes.
The Patels, former Jackson officer Ivory Harris and lawyer Simpson Goodman pleaded guilty yesterday in federal court in Jackson to conspiracy charges, as did two of the men who benefited from the fake police reports. The Patels and Goodman face up to 10 years in prison, having pleaded guilty to both marriage fraud and the police report fraud.
A seventh defendant pleaded guilty on Friday, and more guilty pleas from others in the scheme are scheduled this month. 19 people were indicted in two linked cases in April.
The 50-year-old Tarunkumar Patel, who operates a store in a poor area of Jackson, said he arranged the first marriage when a friend came down from Massachusetts. That friend, Virenda Rajput, met a woman who was a frequent customer of the store.
"My friend told me, 'I want to marry her,'" Tarunkumar Patel told US District Judge Henry T Wingate.
And they did. The woman took Rajput's name, becoming Javona Shanice Rajput. But Virenda Rajput returned to his own job in Massachusetts, coming back to Jackson only once every two or three months.
"They were married just for the convenience of getting the citizenship," said Patel's lawyer, Ross Barnett Jr. "That was the No. 1 purpose."
Sachin Patel persuaded another woman with whom he had worked at an Indian restaurant to marry a friend in 2013, and two more marriages were arranged in 2014.
The Patels said they paid the women money on behalf of their friends, although not very large sums. Tarunkumar Patel said the most he ever gave Javona Rajput at one time was USD 300. Tarunkumar Patel was also the prime mover in the fake police reports, approaching Harris, who visited the store often as part of his beat.
Harris said Patel paid him USD 500 per report at first.
"Then one time, when I had questions about it, he told me, 'Don't worry about it,' and gave me USD 1,000," Harris said.
He the reports usually claimed the people had been assaulted or robbed at gunpoint.
"In fact, these noncitizen Indians were not victims of crime in Jackson, Mississippi," Assistant US Attorney David Fulcher said.
