I have been collecting news stories that combine immigration marriage fraud and murder.
Too often marriage fraud is treated lightly by the press, which uses soft terms like "marriage of convenience" or "sham marriage" to describe this crime.
When murder is also involved, the press gets a little more serious, but it often still misses the point.
In the most recent case, the would-be citizen-spouse in the fraud was also charged with murder, after he killed one of his co-conspirators and wounded another. He said he shot the two in self-defense and a jury believed him, springing him from the Canadian jail he had been in for the last two years. All this happened in Port Perry, a town about 50 miles northeast of Toronto.
The underlying story is all too familiar. Danny Nguyen, apparently a Canadian citizen, was involved with two others in a conspiracy in which Nguyen was supposed to go to China and then marry a woman who was going to pay the gang $30,000 for the arrangements. He planned to quickly divorce the alien and use the money to marry his Canadian girlfriend, according to a story in the Toronto Star on March 9.
The all-too-sketchy newspaper account reported "[T]he plan unraveled when immigration officials sniffed out the scam and denied the woman entry to Canada." The reporter, distracted by the murder charge, failed to tell us if the marriage happened, or spell out the government's detection techniques used in this case. It sounds like the woman was stopped at a port of entry by an eagle-eyed inspector.
The article continues:
Nguyen was instructed [by the gang, presumably] to lodge an appeal but backed out, a move he said angered the people he worked for.
Nguyen said he'd been threatened a number of times before the day [the two co-conspirators] tracked him down at a poker table at the Great Blue Heron Casino, seeking to collect on the debt … . Nguyen testified the two men became menacing . . .
He said he pulled out his pistol and began firing in a desperate act of self preservation.
So here we have a marriage fraudster who is an unreliable co-conspirator, who does not pay his debts, and who plays poker, haunts casinos, carries a gun, and shoots people. I wish the Star had put those characterizations into a single sentence, but instead it focused on the jury's verdict. The article did not indicate what, if anything, happened regarding the attempted marriage fraud.
In a 2011 case in Washington, D.C., the phony bride, an American citizen, enlisted her boyfriend and her brother to kill the bribing party (the brother of the alien "groom") when the briber stopped paying the "bride" $500 a week, because she was sleeping with the boyfriend, and not with the groom. In this case, the marriage had taken place, as we reported in an earlier blog.
There was another murder-marriage fraud case, a few months later last year, this time in a Maryland suburb of Washington, D.C. Eerily, the totally innocent victim was a young girl named Jessica Nguyen. She was the daughter of the alien spouse who had paid a citizen, David Hang, $25,000 to marry her. Hang wanted a divorce, but Jessica's mother would not agree to it so, in a fit of rage he killed the girl with a short sword, according to the police. This was also the subject of a CIS blog.
I guess the moral of these stories is: Think thrice before engaging in marriage fraud, someone may die as a result.