Thread: DMV worker pleads guilty in illegal-immigrant scam

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.c ... ss.bayarea

12-15) 13:00 PST OAKLAND -- A state Department of Motor Vehicles employee in Oakland pleaded guilty today to a federal conspiracy charge for processing documents for illegal immigrants as part of a scam in which DMV workers accepted cash bribes.

The guilty plea is the latest in a scandal that saw DMV employees accept bribes of as much as $4,500 per bogus document and issue more than 200 fraudulent driver licenses and IDs between November 2003 and July 2005.

At a hearing today before U.S. District Judge D. Lowell Jensen in Oakland, DMV employee Marla Robinson, 25, of Oakland pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit honest services mail fraud. An indictment unsealed in March accused Robinson of accepting bribes of unspecified amounts in June and July 2005 to process fraudulent driver licenses for people who paid $1,000 to $1,500 to "broker" Jose Ramirez, 23, of Oakland, who was not a DMV employee.

Ramirez also appeared in court today; his case is pending.

Four other DMV workers were implicated in the scheme.

The charges are the result of a 20-month investigation in which agents secretly followed employees, dug through one suspect's trash and spied on the busy Oakland DMV office at 5300 Claremont Ave., where all five DMV employees worked.

There, undercover FBI agents acting as clients bypassed the DMV's notoriously long lines with the help of brokers who directed them to specific windows where a bribed DMV worker was waiting to process them, authorities said.

E-mail Henry K. Lee at hlee@sfchronicle.com.

Who is to say how many people were affected or even murdered because of these people being here illegally? If there were any deaths associated with the people who received false id's, the DMV person should be an accesory to that crime, and should serve time for it. What is it going to take before we get justice in this country?