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**Paige** · 11-06-2007, 04:40 PM

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**Paige** · 11-06-2007, 04:47 PM

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/200 ... reme_N.htm

Criminals go to extremes to hide identities
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Enlarge By Spencer Platt, Getty Images

A man is fingerprinted after he was caught illegally crossing the U.S. border from Mexico in June 2006. Such checks are prompting some people to turn to sophisticated methods of altering their fingerprints.

Enlarge U.S. Border Patrol

Mateo Cruz-Cruz, 25, arrested last month near Douglas, Ariz., had burned his fingertips

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It was after dark when Border Patrol agents in Douglas, Ariz., nabbed Mateo Cruz-Cruz allegedly jumping the fence from Mexico. So they didn't notice anything unusual about his fingers.
When they got him to the station to take his fingerprints, special operations supervisor Ulysses Duronslet says, the agents made a gruesome discovery: The tips of the 25-year-old man's fingers were blackened and burned.

Cruz-Cruz had been deported in March 2004 and had a prior conviction for sexual assault of a minor in Iowa.

Cruz-Cruz, arrested last month, is only one example of what the U.S. Border Patrol says is a disturbing phenomenon along the nation's borders: criminals and illegal immigrants going to extremes to try to conceal their identities.

"This is a result of our biometric and technological capabilities," Border Patrol Chief David Aguilar says.

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As the government expands efforts to catch and identify people trying to get into the country illegally, Aguilar says he and his agents expect to come across more physical disfigurement.

"Whenever we do something, there's always a counteraction to try to beat it," says Manuel Padilla, chief agent in New Orleans. "We are getting more cases where they try to hide their identity."

Efforts to alter or erase fingerprints go back many decades. In the 1930s, infamous gangster and bank robber John Dillinger tried to burn his prints off with corrosive acid.

Today, government agents say more people are taking similar steps to try to get into the country — a response to post-9/11 efforts to tighten security along the borders.

In addition to installing cameras and sensors and hiring more agents, the Homeland Security Department has been collecting and storing images of all 10 fingerprints from virtually everyone they catch coming across the border since 2004.

The prints are checked against the FBI's criminal database and terrorist watch list.

Agents say those checks are prompting some people to turn to more sophisticated methods than burning their prints to avoid detection — including plastic surgery.

Padilla says agents in Baton Rouge picked up a woman at a bus station in June after she became nervous and evasive when an officer approached her. When they brought her to the station, agents found that "the quality of her fingerprints was very poor," he says.

Under questioning, Yissel Sosa Nunez of the Dominican Republic said she had paid a plastic surgeon $2,000 to cut and overlap her prints to create new prints — "like a tummy tuck" on her fingers, Padilla says.

He says Nunez told agents she did it because she was desperate to be with her child, who lived in New York City with her mother.

The surgery left a faint scar down the middle of each print.

"This was one of the better ones we've seen," Padilla says, "not one of the 'Super Glue specials,' " where people try to cover their prints.

In most cases, agents say, those who try to surgically alter their prints are serious criminals.

In May 2006, a Jamaican man facing money-laundering charges was sentenced to 13 months in prison after trying to get into the USA through the border crossing in Nogales, N.M. Agents noticed Marc Terrance George's fingerprints; they were still healing from surgery he'd had to try to replace them with skin from his feet. And he was limping.

"This case demonstrates what extraordinary and drastic measures people will take to enter our country illegally," then-U.S. attorney Paul Charlton said after George's sentencing. "It proves as well that our fingerprint identification systems have gained a significant reputation in the criminal world."

Last week, George's surgeon, Jose Covarrubias, pleaded guilty in Harrisburg, Pa., to federal charges of harboring and concealing a fugitive.

The charges stemmed from his involvement with a drug ring that included George.

The Border Patrol doesn't keep statistics on how many people have tried to alter their fingerprints in recent years, but "we've noticed this trend," Duronslet says. "They're trying to cheat the system."