Woman Faces New Charges in Adoption Case

Federal prosecutors filed three new fraud charges Wednesday against an Irvine woman who allegedly brought as many as 30 pregnant women here from Hungary so that they could sell their babies to California couples.

The criminal complaint accuses 48-year-old Marianne Gati of failing to report and pay taxes for the last three years on money she earned from her alleged baby-selling business.

In filing the new charges, Assistant U.S. Atty. J. Daniel McCurrie announced in court that the government was dismissing an earlier complaint charging Gati, also known as Maria Rozsa, with one count of mail and wire fraud.

Gati’s attorney, H. Dean Steward, who heads the federal public defender’s office here, said the new charges represented a victory for his client because they carried a shorter prison term.

Steward, who has insisted that his client ran a legitimate adoption business, won another victory Wednesday when U.S. Magistrate Judge Elgin Edwards granted his request to release Gati on bail.

Edwards ordered that Gati be placed under house arrest and wear an electronic monitoring device after she posts $700,000. The prosecutor had vigorously opposed Gati’s request for bail.

On Wednesday, McCurrie filed a sampling from some 15,000 pages of documents seized from Gati’s house by federal agents two weeks ago. The documents, McCurrie said, shed light on Gati’s alleged baby-selling operation.

Among the seized documents were letters that Gati sent to the American Embassy in Budapest, asking the consul to grant two Hungarian women visas to visit the United States. Each time, Gati would identify the woman as “our cousin.”

“My two children and my husband and myself are anxiously waiting her arrival,” she wrote in one letter. “We expect her to stay for approximately one month, as she has a husband and a child in Hungary to care for.”

Another document, mentions a woman identified as Mrs. Kiss who was requesting “some money in advance because [she and her husband] want to rent a flat to stay somewhere for Christmas.”

Another document states that an American couple had agreed to pay $9,000 to Gati “as part of the expenses” toward the adoption of Kiss’ child.

But Steward, the defense attorney, accused McCurrie in court of “taking innocent documents and seeing the most horrible purpose behind them.”

He said Gati’s business “connected woeful babies with good homes.”

“These babies were absolutely unwanted babies,” Stewart told the magistrate. “They would have been aborted, they would have gone to orphanages, or to families who could not have supported them. The [parents] are very, very poor people.

“Mrs. Gati actually saved these babies,” he added.

If convicted, Gati faces about 27 months in prison, Steward said. She was facing almost twice that amount under the initial complaint, he said.

Gati was arrested June 21 by federal agents who accused her of running an international baby-selling operation that arranged for pregnant Hungarian women to obtain U.S. visas illegally, and then allow Gati to sell their babies--sometimes for up to $80,000.

According to federal agents, Gati and a Hungarian associate, identified in court papers Wednesday as Zoltan Merhala, arranged for airline tickets and travel documents for the women to come to Orange County to deliver their babies.

California law prohibits birth parents from receiving any compensation for putting a child up for adoption--except for medical, living and other related expenses.

Gati, a Canadian citizen who is Hungarian-born, housed the women across the street from her own home in Irvine’s Westpark neighborhood, court documents state.

She promised to pay each mother “$1,000 for a baby with dark features and $12,000 for a baby with light features,” according to a complaint filed in U. S. District Court. One previously unnamed source told federal agents that Gati made $20,000 for each adopted baby, according to the same documents.

Authorities arrested Gati last week after she tried to transfer $51,000 from a bank account with a $427,000 balance.