Still, what the Sun Sentinel did show is getting noticed. “To say, the paperwork is sitting on Fidel Castro’s desk-‘Here, sign this and we’ll go rip off the U.S. “There are a lot of people who believe that to be true, or believe that it can’t not be true, but we can’t say this has Castro’s fingerprints on it,” said Howard Saltz, the top editor. The team’s original hope, that they’d be able to tie all this crime to the Cuban regime, did not pan out. “They were focused on lucrative crimes that get little jail time if they’re caught.” “First we were looking at Medicare, but then people would tell us, ‘well, you know, the Cubans also dominate cargo theft,’ or ‘You know, the Cubans also dominate marijuana growing,’” O’Matz told me. The paper started out just looking at health care fraud, but the investigation quickly spread to other types of crime. “The back and forth was really surprising.” “The ease with which a lot of these folks were going back and forth, it’s almost like going from Miami to Palm Beach County,” Kestin said. But a dedicated group of criminals have used the freedom of the Cuban American Adjustment Act to jump bond when they are caught. The vast majority of Cubans who immigrate to the United States never commit crimes, of course. The Cuban Adjustment Act, passed 50 years ago, allows Cubans to enter the United States without background checks and even allows them to periodically return to Cuba-something that would compromise political asylum claims for people of other nationalities. The Sun Sentinel also explained how the unique status of Cubans in the United States facilitates organized criminal activity. The latter included restitution information, allowing the paper to estimate that Cuban criminals have stolen more than $2 billion from taxpayers and businesses. The former showed place of birth for individuals arrested on federal charges. The numbers come from two sets of records: booking data of all arrests maintained by the Department of Justice-which, according to the Sun Sentinel, had never before been made public in that form-and federal court information maintained by National Archive of Criminal Justice Data, housed at the University of Michigan’s Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research. “The cops had told us and the prosecutors had told us, but the numbers surprised us.” “We couldn’t believe it,” Maines told me. The scope surprised the Sun Sentinel reporters, even after they had spent months conducting interviews and combing through state and federal records. (I worked at the Herald at the time, though not on that project.) But the Miami paper was never able to nail down the full extent of the problem. The Sun Sentinel rightly noted that the Miami Herald had investigated health care fraud committed by Cuban nationals several years ago. In Florida, for two types of crime, they even far outnumber native-born Americans: Though Cuban-born people make up 4 percent of the state’s population, they represent 72 percent of all federal cargo theft arrests, and 72 percent of all federal healthcare fraud arrests, according to the Sun Sentinel’s analysis. Eaton, a freelancer, tracked down fugitives who had escaped to Cuba.īut the real coup in this investigation is the database work that shows that for certain categories of arrest, Cubans vastly outnumber all other foreign nationals. Kestin and O’Matz pored over court records to find evidence that the men and women running cargo theft rings, health care fraud scams, and networks of marijuana grow houses were from Cuba. The first story, by reporters Sally Kestin, Megan O’Matz, and Tracey Eaton and data editor John Maines, includes lots of the shoe-leather reporting big investigations require. “Cuba has become a bedroom community for criminals who exploit America’s good will,” the Sun Sentinel wrote in an impressive three-part investigation rolled out last week. MIAMI - Last year, reporters at the South Florida Sun Sentinel set out to prove a dirty little secret: Cuban criminals are exploiting the extraordinarily broad immigration privileges that apply to their nation to run elaborate fraud schemes in the US and then escape back to the island.Īfter cracking a pair of key databases, reporters at the paper were finally able to show the rumors were true-even more true, in fact, than they had anticipated.
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