Wrist Slap for Top Alien Smuggler?

Confessed Criminals Still Championed by Press

The expanded, 87-count indictment of the man that Mother Jones magazine once called “America’s top alien smuggler” and his top two lieutenants looked like a fearsome storm cloud on the horizon for Stan Eury and his ongoing criminal enterprise. Continuing the metaphor, the plea agreement reached between Eury and the federal prosecutors on June 23 looks like nothing so much as a culminating gust of wind or two and a few drops of rain. “The defendant, CRAIG STANFORD EURY, JR.,” it says, “will enter a voluntary plea of guilty to section ii of object one of Count One and object four of Count Eleven of the Superseding Indictment herein.”

To get some idea of what that means we must turn to the superseding indictment, itself, for their “Conspiracy to defraud the United States.” Section ii of object one appears at the top of page 13 and it describes merely an objective, “To defraud the United States by impeding, impairing and obstructing the lawful government function of USCIS [U.S. Customs and Immigration Service] to administer, regulate and enforce violations, regulations and laws relating to the hiring, employment and presence of aliens in the United States.”

Count eleven begins at the bottom of page 44 and nothing under it is specifically called “object four.” Rather, we find numbered points and we must assume that what is being referred to is no. 4, a “further part of the scheme and artifice to defraud” in which the co-defendants “directed that NCGA [North Carolina Growers Association] pay an $80.00 recruiting fee to CSI without revealing that [the three co-defendants] directly benefitted [sic] from these payments in violation of their duty of good faith to NCGA and its members.”

That is to say, Eury et al. set up their own shell company in Mexico named Consular Services, Inc. [CSI] that billed the non-profit farmers organization that Eury heads up for bogus services, and Eury is apparently admitting to that.

The plea agreement speaks of a maximum imprisonment of five years “as to each count” and what appears to be a rather hefty maximum fine until one realizes how truly lucrative Eury’s alien smuggling scheme has been through the years. Presumably, the judge could order Eury to be locked up for 10 years, or more, depending upon what “each count” means, but he is under absolutely no pressure to do so, quite the contrary, in fact. You see, just as the mainstream press completely blacked out the news of the expanded indictment and almost blacked out the news of the initial indictment, they have reported nothing about the guilty plea. In fact, the one major newspaper to break the news of the initial indictment, The Washington Post, with a story submitted by a North Carolina freelancer, has now taken that article down from its web site and it can only be found on the obscure web page of the National Guestworker Alliance. *

Worse yet, for agreeing to give what seems to be unneeded testimony against his co-conspirators, the fair-haired boy of the U.S. Department of Labor, Wicker, has apparently been allowed to go free to continue to render services that—outrage of outrages—the Raleigh News and Observer told us with a June 27 article are still vitally needed. That brazen article prompted me to send the following email on June 29 to the journalist who penned it, Mary Katherine Wildeman:

Hi Mary Katherine,

I thought I had seen it all, but I was completely flabbergasted to see you quote Stan Eury and Lee Wicker in your recent article as though they were reliable authorities on the pressing need for more of the H-2A workers that they have flooded North Carolina and the country with through the years. Were you not aware that theirs is a thoroughly criminal operation and that they are awaiting sentencing for their activities? I suppose that that is possible because your newspaper, in a display of the grossest journalistic irresponsibility, has managed to report absolutely nothing about either the federal case against them for visa fraud, money laundering, and old-fashioned swindling, or their guilty pleas. Had you bothered to have done the most cursory Net search you would have found that yours truly has had to fill the news breach with "Has Obama Gone Bulworth on Alien Smuggling?", "H2-A Kingpin Stumbles on H-2B," "AP Gives Alien Smugglers 'Infomercial'", "Video of Labor Goon Slugging Labor Organizer," "Feds Pile New Charges on Top Alien Smuggler," "The Great Suppression of 2014," and "USDOL Embraces Major Alien Smuggler."

If you were unaware of any of Eury and Wicker's criminal activities, then it looks like the people at your place of work have hung you out to dry. If you knew about them and went ahead and quoted them anyway without fulfilling the most basic journalistic responsibility of cluing your readers in to their crimes, then you have probably found the ideal job for a person of such questionable ethics.

To the best of my knowledge no one in the mainstream press has yet reported on the guilty pleas of Eury, Wicker, and Ken White, so it looks like I'm going to have to do it. You have now made yourself part of the story.

Dave

Not surprisingly, Ms. Wildeman has not replied.

I might have been a touch off base to say that Wicker has entered a guilty plea, but, in effect, except to him, he might as well have, and the case of the minor actor White still seems to be pending. What stands is the gross journalistic malpractice of Wildeman and her newspaper, and that of all of the other news organs around the country. We are witnessing corruption of the highest order, and like so much of the rottenness in the country, our national news media are right in the heart of it.

I hope I am wrong, but the way things look to me now, in spite of the findings of a multi-year, multi-agency investigation, the NCGA will be allowed to continue to flood the country with illegal immigrants, and corrupt authorities in the federal government and particularly in the government of the state of North Carolina will continue to let them do it. Strangely, all the while, putative anti-immigration organizations and politicians seem to be silent about Eury’s massive criminal operation as well.

David Martin

July 2, 2015

* We don’t know if it is in response to this article or because there was only a temporary glitch at the time I wrote it, but as of September 29, 2015, the Washington Post article is back up at the original site. The Post, though, has had no follow-up of any kind, in spite of all that has since transpired in the case, including the news on September 24, 2015, that Eury was given only a 13-month sentence.

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