Thread: Danny's Car Wash ex-owner gets 1 year in prison for hiring illegal aliens

Danny's Family Car Wash ex-owner gets 1 year in prison

Jim Walsh, The Republic | azcentral.com6:11 p.m. MST November 21, 2014

A federal judge sentenced the former owner of a Valley car-wash chain to 12 months and one day in prison and 12 months of home detention for illegal hiring.


(Photo: Tom Tingle/The Republic)

A federal judge sentenced the former owner of a Valley car-wash chain to 12 months and one day in prison and 12 months of home detention for his role in an illegal hiring scheme that federal agents shut down last year.

Family members testified on behalf of Danny Hendon, who owned and operated the Danny's Family Car Wash chain in the lengthy hearing Friday afternoon in U.S. District Court in downtown Phoenix, telling Judge Neil V. Wake that Hendon suffers from Parkinson's disease and lost virtually everything in a bankruptcy case.

Hendon was given a self-surrender date of Jan. 20.

Hendon's sentencing culminates one of the largest federal work-site enforcement cases in Arizona. Authorities are hoping his downfall discourages the hiring of undocumented workers. Federal prosecutors recommended a sentence of 18 months in prison for Hendon, 64, followed by 19 months of home confinement, according to a federal sentencing memorandum.

PREVIOUS: Federal agents raid Phoenix-area Danny's Car Wash locations

Hendon, a former Detroit police officer before he built his Valley business empire through the Danny's Family Car Wash chain, pleaded guilty on July 24 in U.S. District Court to conspiracy commit identity theft and agreed to divest himself from the company.

Hendon faced a maximum sentence of five years in prison and a $250,000, but his attorneys were hoping for no prison time, noting that Hendon took responsibility for the scheme in entering the plea agreement.

"In the United States' view, the most important of these considerations are the need to achieve a general deterrence and to promote respect for the law – that is, the need to send a message to the Arizona business community that unlawful hiring practices like Hendon's will be punished severely," the prosecutors' sentencing memorandum said. "Only a sentence of imprisonment can send such a message."

The case against Hendon started when federal authorities with the Homeland Security Investigations unit received tips between 2005 and 2008 that Danny's Family Car Wash hired undocumented workers. An audit in March 2011 revealed 942 employees had not presented sufficient work authorization documents at the time they were hired.

A month after Danny's was notified of the findings, the company told Homeland Security that it had terminated all of those illegal workers.

However, when the illegal workers' replacements proved too expensive or ineffective, Hendon instructed company managers to rehire the undocumented workers, according to court documents.

Hendon pressured managers who initially opposed his order with termination if they failed to carry out his instructions, the court document said.

Some undocumented workers posed as legal relatives or acquaintances to pass through the E-Verify background checks.

Others posed as a legal former employees, using false identities supplied by the company.

Prosecutors said Hendon didn't want to know the details and told managers to get the job done.

"In short, I turned a blind eye toward the hiring of unauthorized aliens that was occurring at DFC,'' Hendon acknowledged in his plea agreement.

Prosecutors said the audit identifying the undocumented workers could have served as a "wake up call'' for Hendon, but instead, he decided to "double down" by hatching the illegal rehiring scheme.

"Hendon formulated and implemented a massive, multi-year, company-wide scheme to employ unauthorized aliens,'' the court document said. "All told, the scheme involved hundreds of instances where documents were falsified, identities were stolen, and false statements were made under penalty of perjury.''

Prosecutors admitted, however, that no victims of identity theft came forward to file complaints.

http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/...abrk/19370181/

RELATED

http://www.alipac.us/f12/federal-age...ons-az-285692/

That's great! But at some point don't we need equal protection under the law? It's a fanciful scheme by federal prosecutors to hound a car wash guy for his illegal hirings while entire industries openly and blatantly do the same thing with the full knowledge of federal prosecutors. Larry Wooten of the North Carolina Farm Bureau told WRAL tonight in an interview that in our state 3 out of 4 farm workers are illegal aliens. I'm sure this is the case throughout the South and certainly in the West. And on Fox News today, Geraldo Rivera openly and blatantly reported that in New York, illegal aliens clean their homes, mow their yards, baby-sit their kids and do farm work. Others on CNN explain how illegal aliens work in the slaughterhouses and poultry business. It seems everyone knows where they work and even who they work for and feel every compunction to discuss this openly on TV, which I'm sure federal agents and prosecutors watch these stations the same as we do, yet there's no effort to deport these illegal aliens or punish these employers. Instead, the federal government through Barack Obama has decided to legalize the whole mess and charge US taxpayers for the cost of it.

A friend of mine and I had a little hearty debate over who is responsible, the illegal alien or the employer. He felt the employers were responsible because they are the lure and profit from it, whereas I feel the illegal alien and the employer are both responsible because the presence of illegal aliens in our country clamoring for jobs is what lures the employers into hiring them. So my friend agreed with that and asked which one is the most responsible and I believe the illegal alien is most responsible because they broke the law first by entering the country, and continue to break our laws every day they are here, plus they profit from it in ways that cost taxpayers money, whereas most employers don't cost us any money, they cost us jobs and wages, but they don't sign up their whole family on welfare for life whereas illegal aliens do.

It's time to hold the foreign person in our country illegally responsible for their actions. These are persons of equal accountability for their actions. The media and their advocates treat them as if they're pets of some sort, to be looked after, to be taken care of, like you would treat pets or livestock, who aren't responsible for their own actions. It's time to respect these people for what they are, equal individuals as responsible for their actions the same as any American citizen would be. When the law says clearly in a zillion different ways that if you are in our country illegally you are to be deported, then the game ends there with your deportation including your minor offspring. Sure, your offspring are innocent of crimes you committed but that doesn't entitle them to live in a separate country from their parent (s), so when the parents go, the children go with them, Period. Any other view makes no sense and only crazy people would think that just because they're here they get to stay here without their parents. No, they go home to the country of their parents citizenship.

What if 20 million poor Americans decided Switzerland was a nice country and they could build a better life there? How well do you think that would go over with the Swiss when Americans sneaked into the country, had a slew of kids and signed them up for welfare in Switzerland, which by the way is a better welfare system than the one we have here, all the while stealing jobs from the Swiss by undercutting their wages? How long do you think it would take before the Swiss took it to the UN and used UN troops to haul their asses out of there?

The truth is our US Department of Homeland Security is a hybrid between a joke and a fanciful fraud. They want a pat on the back for arresting an American and convicting him of hiring 942 illegal aliens in his bankrupt car wash business. No pat on the back from this corner, because there was no prosecution of the 942 illegal aliens he hired who took his money, ran his business into the ground, and I'm sure are living well on taxpayer funded welfare. Are these 942 illegal aliens going to receive Obama Amnesty? Well, if not them, then who? So how can we be a nation that touts equal protection under the law when the US citizen is convicted of illegal hiring when the 942 illegal aliens are not only not prosecuted and deported, they're given a work permit and social security number to stay in the United States? The reason it's illegal to hire illegal aliens is because those jobs belong to US citizens. How does convicting Danny while giving the illegal aliens stealing our jobs work permits protect the jobs for citizens which is the whole purpose of the law to begin with?

Like I said in another post, these government hacks are sociopathic mutants when it comes to immigration.

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If anything will even slow down the hiring of illegals, it's incarceration. Bravo!
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Americans first in this magnificent country

American jobs for American workers

Fair trade, not free trade

Originally Posted by Judy

A friend of mine and I had a little hearty debate over who is responsible, the illegal alien or the employer. He felt the employers were responsible because they are the lure and profit from it, whereas I feel the illegal alien and the employer are both responsible because the presence of illegal aliens in our country clamoring for jobs is what lures the employers into hiring them. So my friend agreed with that and asked which one is the most responsible and I believe the illegal alien is most responsible because they broke the law first by entering the country, and continue to break our laws every day they are here, plus they profit from it in ways that cost taxpayers money, whereas most employers don't cost us any money, they cost us jobs and wages, but they don't sign up their whole family on welfare for life whereas illegal aliens do.

To which I would add only that both Demos and some Repubs are eager to give both sides of the illegal employment movement exactly what they want. Demos are selling out Americans, to get the votes of those Undoucmented Democrats; some Repubs are selling out Americans, to give their big money donors the surplus labor that they covet.

That's what makes Universal E-Verify so appealing. By shutting off the jobs magnet, it would eliminate the reason why most illegals sneak into our coutry or overstay their visas. A five year phase in was part of the Senate's immigration bill. I don't know what's happening now.
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Americans first in this magnificent country

American jobs for American workers

Fair trade, not free trade