Posted on 06/27/2004 7:34:11 AM PDT by television is just wrong
Angelina Jolie's adoption agent admits fraud
SEATTLE - A Hawaii woman who helped Oscar-winning actress Angelina Jolie adopt a Cambodian boy pleaded guilty on Wednesday (Thursday in Manila) to visa fraud and money laundering as part of a ring that paid poor women as little as $100 for their children, her attorney said.
Lauryn Galindo, 53, and her sister in Seattle, Lynn Devin, received fees of $10,000 or more to arrange adoptions by U.S. residents of children described as orphans, even though many still had parents, according to the documents.
Devin, who pleaded guilty in December, but has not yet been sentenced, and Galindo have agreed to surrender all property associated with the crimes, including a home in Hawaii and a Jaguar automobile.
Galindo's public defender attorney, Jay Stansell, declined to comment further.
The sisters operated an agency called Seattle International Adoptions, which paired hundreds of children from Cambodia with adoptive parents from 1997 to 2001, when suspicious U.S. immigration authorities halted adoptions from the impoverished Southeast Asian country.
In one instance, Galindo faxed Devin documents with a notation saying "Father dead -- mother very poor -- Kampong Speu," referring to a 4-year-old girl who was with her birth mother in Cambodia, court documents show.
Devin and Galindo then directed the adoptive parents to pay $100 to the birth mother and paid $3,500 to the Kampong Speu orphanage, described as "Cambodian ministry clerks, employees or officials" in the plea agreement.
The adoption ring received a total of $93,700 for the adoptions cited in the case.
Describing children as "abandoned" and misidentifying many of them brought the charges of visa fraud, while financial charges stemmed from efforts to hide the profits in Cambodia and avoid financial reporting of the transactions at a bank in Hawaii.
Galindo could face up to 20 years in prison at a sentencing hearing set for September.
Prosecutors have said that the investigation will not change the status of children adopted through the Seattle adoption agency.
Jolie, who won a best supporting actress Academy Award in 2000 for her role in Girl, Interrupted and more recently starred in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider and Life or Something Like It, adopted her Cambodian-born son, Maddox, last year after meeting him in an orphanage in November 2001.
Please don't. The ick factor while revealing such is too much.
If I do, it'll be with the biggest bottle of Pepto you EVER saw.
Call it "six degrees of fornication".
Jolie like the others doesn't care. She will continue to feign compasssion for the underdog. As long as these people travel in style to see the other side and the rules don't apply to them; they will live out their fantacies. I say rock their boats until reality hits them smack in the face.
Apparently she's totally devoted to this child. Hey ... Look...she's giving this child an opportunity for a life beyond his wildest, hell..ANYONE's wildest dreams.
Absolutely. I shudder to think that there are people on this board who actually believe this little boy would be better off as an orphan in Cambodia than with Angelie Jolie as his Mother. Please.
I sure hope so.
We can only hope, can't we? Few of them seem to have more than two brain molecules to rub together.
Yeah, you may come up with a name I KNOW.
Laura Croft, Toom Raider and Sex Symbol. Geez, Hollywood is sure inhabited by highly paid misfits. I wonder what she thinks about he war in Iraq.
Maybe she can star in the making of the Abu Garab movie as the torturess.
I don't know --- do they drink human blood and participate in incest in the orphanage? Having a blood drinking mother even though she's very wealthy can't be all that healthy. Money isn't everything.
Actually I think you are right --- I remember now reading some really weird S&M stuff about Jolie --- the bizarre things she's into. Unless all that was just hype to enhance her career, she's looney as they come.
I don't even have the energy to respond to such a stupid comment. I've spent all day debating idiots over at IMDB about George Bush and the war on Terror. They are insane. It's so insane that it's scary. I'm just going to let your stupid statement speak for itself.
I don't think his statement is stupid at all. Bringing a child into an evil environment/home ~IS~ stupid.
I keep thinking of that Bible verse that says what good is it if a [baby] gain the whole world and lose his soul.
Give me a break. You only know what the press wants you to know about her. You tell me with a straight face that you think this baby would have been better off as an orphan in Cambodia. I dare you.
We're alumni of New Hope too!! Beautiful baby daughter in 2000.
Are you guys in Seattle somewhere?
To dare ME is funny. I always tried everything 4 times whether I liked it or not. LOL
Seriously though, that really is a tough question ... whether to be with evil perverts or in Cambodia. Taking the bottom line into consideration, I would have to choose the latter.
My rationale is based on the Christian premise that children will go to Heaven. Should that baby had died from starvation/illness in Cambodia, he would have gone to Heaven. If he grows into an adult in that evil household, that assurance is in question.
Not only that, he would probably have grown up to be a liberal/democrat, only knowning what his parents and their friends taught him. And we can't have that, now, can we? :0)
Near Covington. Going to the picnic?
My daughter's godparents live there.
We aren't. We went the year after Sarah was born and it felt sort of creepy. I can't tell you why, but it did. The way some of the kids got dressed up and squired around by parents, it felt more like a Saturn picnic than an event for kids.
Now I've got another boy (Donor Egg) and yet another boy (natural), so the last time we got together with a large group of adoptive parents, we felt sort of pariah, because we had had two quasi-naturally.
Are you going?
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