I can't even remember the last time I saw something Brazilian in my Boston Globe.
Looks like the Globe contracted a caterer for the affair:
"A marriage of a dream and a scheme; Holyoke woman arranged dozens of sham weddings for illegal immigrants" by Stephen Kurkjian and Callum Borchers, Northeastern University Initiative For Investigative Reporting / September 18, 2011
BRATTLEBORO, Vt. - Maria-Helena Knoller, it turned out, was a matchmaker of a special kind. For fees as high as $12,000, she would pair illegal immigrants from Brazil with Americans, arrange their marriages - and, in some cases, their subsequent divorces - after they received status as “lawful permanent residents’’ of the United States.
She pleaded guilty in February to federal charges of marriage fraud and concealing and shielding illegal immigrants for 32 of those marriages. But her prosecution is an exception, and Knoller’s case is a vivid example of how easy it is for illegal immigrants to dodge US immigration laws by getting married....
Taking her clients to Vermont for their nuptials made Knoller’s scam easier....
Even when cases are discovered, investigations can be painfully slow, and prosecutions are rare. Authorities in the Knoller case received repeated alerts from Annette Cappy, the Brattleboro town clerk, but still it took three years to shut the operation down.
And then, in a double-standard that often marks such cases, the immigrants who purchased Knoller’s services are facing deportation, but none of the US citizens involved - collecting fees up to $6,000 to act as spouses - face any legal consequences.
Knoller, who is free on a $100,000 bond and working in a Chicopee doughnut shop while awaiting sentencing in January, declined to comment for this article. But court papers and interviews depict an efficient operation she made little effort to hide, and one that appeared to provide a comfortable living for her. In 2006, a year after she began her operation, she and her second husband, put down $57,000 in cash to buy a single-family home in Holyoke. They own two rental properties in Chicopee.
Considering the millions being spent by banking and government thieves that really seems like small potatoes.
A Brazilian immigrant herself, Knoller had come to the United States in 1990 and gained legal status when she married Herbert Knoller, a German here on a valid work permit. The two eventually split in an acrimonious divorce, and she remarried. For a time, she worked for a Springfield lawyer whose practice included immigration law. Then, early in 2005, she began arranging marriages, according to records seized by authorities from her home.
She held parties at her house, inviting Americans from Puerto Rico who lived in the area and Brazilians, according to friends and family members. Many of her marriages matched Puerto Rican US citizens with Brazilians, usually those who had come to the United States on tourist visas and illegally remained.
Her offers of an easy, if expensive, path to legal residency probably fell on eager ears, said Natalicia Tracy, executive director of the Brazilian Immigrant Center in Boston.
“I can tell you the people who come here are very vulnerable and very naive,’’ she said. “If you tell them, ‘This is something you can do to stay,’ they’re going to do it because even working 60, 80 hours a week here is better than what they came from in Brazil.’’
Then globalist and government systems have failed -- unless that was their actual intention.
--more--"
Related: Brazilian Killer Strips Boston Bare
