Updated: 3:54 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 7, 2014 | Posted: 2:24 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 7, 2014
By Mark Gokavi
Dayton Daily News

DAYTON —

Gregory Oldiges, the owner of Williams Brothers Roofing and Siding Co., pleaded guilty Tuesday in a plea bargain to a case where he was accused in U.S. District Court documents of a years-long conspiracy of recruiting, transporting and using illegal immigrant workers from Mexico, falsifying documents and wire fraud.

Oldiges will get between 24 to 57 months if the judge accepts the plea deal in the human trafficking case. He also will forfeit more than $2 million in cash, a $500,000 house and his pickup.

The prosecutor called it a greedy scheme that goes way beyond just hiring undocumented workers. Prosecutors allege that between 2009 and 2012, Williams Brothers charged its customers about $11.75 million for roofing-related work performed by its illegal immigrant subcontractors, for which Williams Brothers paid the illegal immigrants about $1.7 million, according to court documents.

Prosecutors also claim Williams Brothers encouraged and transported illegal immigrant workers into the country and defrauded insurance providers with "dummy" or duplicate invoices.

Prosecutors also allege: Between 2004 and 2013, Williams Brothers entered into at least 39 purported subcontracts with illegal immigrants, some of whom used false names with the knowledge of Oldiges or other employees. Between 2004 and 2012, Williams Brothers employees prepared and submitted to the IRS approximately 20 materially false 1099 forms that identified the illegal immigrant subcontractors with known false names. The forms also noted payments to the subcontractors of about $1.1 million.

In April 2007, a Williams Brothers employee - authorized and paid for by Oldiges - drove to Texas to pick up an illegal alien subcontractor and his crew and drove them back to the Dayton area. That same month, Oldiges authorized $9,000 to be paid to human smugglers ("coyotes") who brought the crew from Mexico to Texas. The cost for each illegal worker was $1,000 per immigrant. Oldiges then recouped that money by withholding a portion of the amount paid to the crew during that roofing season.

Other alleged schemes were carried out in 2008 and 2011.

For example, in November 2010, Oldiges paid an illegal worker crew $3,706 while charging the customer $18,869. The $15,163 difference represented Williams Brothers' materials cost and gross profit, according to court documents.

The government seized property and money from Oldiges and his wife, Linda, after it claimed in an April lawsuit that the couple had generated millions of dollars of profit on the backs of Mexican workers they conspired to bring to the United States.

In the lawsuit, the government claimed that Williams Brothers, founded in 1937, made between $3 million to $4.5 million in 2012 during a time in which the company paid one worker $1 per hour to pick up nails at job sites as he recovered from injuries he sustained when he fell off a roof.

http://www.daytondailynews.com/news/...ng-case/ncfMN/