Ringleader in Immigration Fraud Is Sentenced to 10 Years

The leader of an immigration fraud ring who posed as a retired federal judge and staged phony citizenship ceremonies for her victims was sentenced Tuesday to 10 years and a month in prison.

In handing down the sentence, U.S. District Judge Stephen V. Wilson assailed Elzbieta Malgorzata Bugajska, 52, of Los Angeles as “literally incorrigible.”

Referring to several previous immigration-related cases against her dating to the 1980s, Wilson said the Polish-born Bugajska “appears to have an insatiable appetite to commit crimes of this character.”

Bugajska, a legal permanent resident of the United States, was also ordered to pay $349,065 restitution to 25 to 30 victims of what was described by a prosecutor as her most elaborate and sophisticated scam to date.

Assistant U.S. Atty. Andrew Cowan said most of the victims were Korean and Filipino nationals who had paid as much as $25,000 each after being promised that their immigration applications would receive fast-track processing.

Bugajska, who used a number of aliases, told the immigrants that, as a retired federal judge, she had authority to bypass normal bureaucratic procedures and grant them full American citizenship.

Victims interviewed by investigators described a swearing-in ceremony in October 2000 in which one of Bugajska’s cohorts, John Patrick Bradley, 57, had donned a judge’s black robe and conferred “citizenship” on 14 people.

While reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, they said, Bradley forgot some words and had to be assisted by one of the immigrants. Bradley, who lives in Los Angeles, was sentenced in February to six months of home detention and ordered to pay $46,550 restitution.

As part of the scheme, Bugajska fraudulently obtained genuine Social Security cards and numbers for her victims, with the help of a career employee at the Los Angeles office of the Social Security Administration. The employee, Lorena Velasquez Garcia, 39, of South Gate was sentenced in September 2003 to two months in prison and two months of home detention.

A fourth member of the ring, Yolanda Miel Lubiano, 62, of Sun Valley was sentenced in December 2002 to two years’ probation. Lubiano recruited Filipino immigrants for Bugajska and provided her home as a venue for the bogus naturalization ceremony. All four entered guilty pleas before trial

Cowan said after Tuesday’s court hearing that the number of Bugajska’s victims probably far exceeded the 25 to 30 to whom she had been ordered to pay restitution. Records found at her home indicated at least three times that number of victims, he said. An investigator from the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement said many of those people had not been located.

According to the prosecutor, Bugajska was convicted in Los Angeles federal court in 1980 and again in 1989 on charges of selling fraudulent immigration documents but served no prison time for either offense. As an outgrowth of the 1989 case, he said, a U.S. Tax Court judge found that Bugajska had failed to report $1.1 million in income from that scam and related ones, including arranging bogus marriages, smuggling illegal immigrants and trying to steal from the estate of a recently deceased ex-husband.

Bugajska, who has been in custody since her arrest two years ago, maintained her innocence Tuesday during a rambling personal appeal for leniency before she was sentenced.