Press, Justice System Hit New Low on Alien Smuggling

News of kingpin’s meager sentence blacked out

My last article about the one person most responsible for the flood of illegal Hispanic immigrants into the country, Stan Eury of Vass, NC, had a title with a question mark at the end, “Wrist Slap for Top Alien Smuggler?” As of Friday, September 24, the question mark can be removed. Federal Judge James A. Beaty, Jr. of the Middle District of North Carolina has handed down a 13-month jail sentence, after the plea bargain that reduced the 87-count indictment for visa fraud, various self-dealing schemes, and money laundering to just two counts, to which Eury, the head of the North Carolina Growers Association (NCGA), pleaded guilty. They are for one count of visa fraud and one count of the self-dealing. He could have been locked up for a maximum of 10 years on those remaining two charges.

To put the sentence of “America’s top alien smuggler,” in the words of Mother Jones magazine, in perspective, last year Stanley Porter, the man at the very bottom end of Eury’s guest-worker-importing system, who set up a company to use a mere 150 workers brought into the country fraudulently, pleaded guilty and turned state’s evidence against Eury and his operation.* For that he was given a one-year sentence. The principal target of the multiple-agency, multiple-year investigation had to be given a longer sentence than this minor cooperating witness, and he was, a one month longer sentence. Meanwhile, Eury’s daughter, Sarah Elizabeth Farrell, who headed up the company that supplied Porter with his “workers,” had been sentenced only to probation when she turned state’s evidence—evidence that proved not to be needed. It might have happened before, but this giveaway of prosecutorial bargaining chips for a truly piddling sentence looks unprecedented. At the very least it gives a whole new meaning to the term “plea bargain.” One is very much tempted to suggest that as sentences go, Eury got one heck of a bargain for his money, plea or no plea.

Now this is the sort of miscarriage of justice—or justice for sale—that one might expect to see our fine press railing against with outraged editorials and perhaps even TV specials. Unfortunately, the press, itself, is right in the thick of the corruption. Hardly ever have we seen a better example of the first of the Seventeen Techniques for Truth Suppression in action, “Dummy up. If it’s not reported, if it’s not news, it didn’t happen.”

Before they write editorials denouncing it they would have to tell you it happened, and that’s what, amazingly enough, they haven’t done. At the time I published my “Wrist Slap” article, which was ten days after the outrageous plea bargain was arrived at, no news outlet, to my knowledge, had reported it. As it happens, on that same day I put up my report, the Fayetteville Observer, located in the nearest city to Eury’s Vass, NC, headquarters, finally had a story about it.

That article revealed that Eury’s sentencing would take place on September 24. I had heard what the sentence was from one of my informants in North Carolina. I confirmed it by calling the federal court in Greensboro a few days later. After receiving the informant’s cryptic notification the next thing I did was to check out the Fayetteville Observer of September 25 online, but they had nothing about it. One would think they had an obligation to follow up after they had alerted their readers to the upcoming event. So I sent the reporter, Steve DeVane, the following email:

The grapevine tells me that Stan Eury got only 13 months.  Surely this can't be true considering all that he did?  We'll never get any kind of a handle on the immigration problem if we let people get by with the sorts of things that Eury has done for years.

Your paper seems to be the only one that reported his ridiculous plea bargain. I figured for sure that you'd have a report on the sentence, which you said was scheduled for yesterday, but I can't find it anywhere online.  What gives?  If it is true, I should also expect an editorial denouncing such a travesty of justice.

DeVane responded within minutes: “Thanks for your note. I have it on my schedule today to find out what happened with this case.”

For all I know he did find out, but as of today, five days later, neither he nor anyone at his newspaper has written anything about it. Maybe he and the little news organ that he works for have decided, as we used to say in the Army, to “get with the program.” Maybe the word came down from higher up in our propaganda system or maybe they looked around and figured that, as in the case of so many other covered-up stories, there must be a reason why the rest of the press was silent. After all, the state’s two dominant newspapers, the Raleigh News and Observer and the Charlotte Observer have dummied up about the Eury prosecution, saying not one word about the 41-count indictment when it came down, the expanded 87-count indictment, or the plea bargain. “If it’s not reported, if it’s not news, it didn’t happen.” Rather, for its part the News and Observer as late as June of this year, just after Eury’s guilty plea, was still quoting him as a reliable authority on the guest-worker situation, without breathing a word to us about his confessed crimes or the massive charges against him that had been mostly plea-bargained away.

The year before, the Associated Press had “gotten with the program” by distributing around the country what I called an “Infomercial” for Eury’s operation, and that was after the initial 41-count indictment had come down, an indictment, like the subsequent one (and everything since), the AP had ignored.

Government Also “With the Program”

As refreshing as it had been to see at least that one newspaper, the Fayetteville Observer, report on the guilty pleas of Eury and two of his top lieutenants, Lee Wicker and Ken White, it was disappointing to see what a misimpression DeVane left with his concluding sentence. “The U.S. Department of Labor issued an order in August barring the company from participating in foreign labor certification programs.”

One would think that the government had shut down the operation in which Eury and company brought up thousands of Hispanic workers every year under largely false pretenses, with the majority of them remaining in the country as illegal aliens. The company he’s talking about, though, is only the relatively insignificant International Labor Management Company (ILMC) for H-2B (non-agricultural) workers that Farrell nominally headed up. For Eury’s NCGA, which through the years has accounted for almost all the tens of thousands of eventual illegal immigrants for which Eury is responsible, it has been business as usual. No, let’s correct that. Unbelievable as it may seem, his outfit’s business has been better than ever.

This year, with the 87-count indictment hanging over their heads, not only was the NCGA not banned, but its business was the best ever. Even though the biggest remaining labor-using crop, tobacco, has experienced a steady loss in acreage planted, NCGA visa request approvals by the North Carolina Employment Security Commission (NCESC), at some 17.6 thousand according to my sources, were at an all-time high. That was some 23 percent higher than NCGA approvals the year before. My sources tell me that the guys down at the level at which farmers’ worker requests are evaluated are encouraged to give tough scrutiny only to Eury’s smaller competitors. This criminal operation would never have been able to flourish for as long as it has, since the latter years of the first Bush administration, without the complicity of the government at many levels.

The U.S. Department of Labor (USDOL) showed where it stood when it put up a film on YouTube last year that featured Lee Wicker intoning about the virtues of the guest-worker program and kept it there, even after Wicker’s indictment.

An email I received from one of my informants who had supplied information to federal investigators building the case indicates just how bad things are. He is talking about his reaction to news of the original indictments:

When I spoke to the Department of Justice guy I said, "So what about the workers at DOL and USCIS and the NCESC that let all these applications go through? Will they be charged with co-conspiracy charges? Will they be reprimanded, lose their jobs? Aren't they the keepers of the keys? Shouldn't they be as culpable for allowing this to go on for years and years and years?"  All I got was dead air on the other end of the phone! Not a response, not an acknowledgement, nothing. I had to ask "Are you still there?" before he cleared his throat and said, "Uh ah yeah, yeah I am here....

The problem is that the government at every level is “with the program,” and the program, whatever the law might be and whatever the politicians might say, is to flood the country with immigrants, legal or illegal. You can tell that is the case by observing our press, which consistently, across the board, pushes the more-the-merrier line when it comes to immigration. Why wouldn’t they like him, coddle and even celebrate him, major criminal though he might be, as I concluded in an earlier article, when Craig Stanford Eury, Jr. has done a better job than anyone of furthering “the agenda of the powers that be to break down the country’s cultural solidarity and to drive real wages down?

* Further perspective is provided by noting that in 2012 in a case of payroll tax fraud, with the same two prosecutors and the same judge, the perpetrator received a 12-year sentence. Judge Beaty and prosecutors Frank Chut and Ripley Rand are clearly not just softhearted and lenient by nature. Furthermore, they were proud enough of that earlier sentence that, as we can see, they sent out a press release. Don’t hold your breath waiting for a press release about Eury’s 13-month award. Then again, why should they bother when the press would ignore it anyway?

David Martin

October 1, 2015

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