http://travel.state.gov/travel/cis_pa_tw/pa/pa_1161.html
“Worldwide Caution”
January 17, 2008
SNIPPET: “This Worldwide Caution updates information on the continuing threat of terrorist actions and violence against Americans and interests throughout the world. American citizens are reminded to maintain a high level of vigilance and to take appropriate steps to increase their security awareness.”
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2009045/posts
“Man charged with selling license plates to illegal immigrants”
The Virginian-Pilot ^ | April 30, 2008 | Tim McGlone
Posted on April 30, 2008 4:03:29 AM PDT by csvset
NORFOLK
ARTICLE SNIPPET: “A Guatemalan national made it easy for illegal immigrants on the Eastern Shore to drive, according to the FBI.
The FBI arrested Felipe Jesus Mazariegos-Perez at his home Tuesday on federal charges of buying hundreds of Tennessee and Mississippi license plates and car titles and selling them to immigrants who cannot prove their residency, as Virginia requires.
The FBI raided Mazariegos-Perez’s home in Nelsonia, Accomack County, on Tuesday morning, looking for the out-of-state plates and titles. He was arrested and taken into U.S. District Court that afternoon, where a magistrate ordered him jailed pending a bond hearing Thursday.
Mazariegos-Perez, speaking through an interpreter, told the judge he could not afford to hire his own lawyer. His wife, Elvia Elizabel Soto-Ortiz, also was charged, but she was allowed to turn herself in by Monday.
The FBI has been investigating Felipe Perez, as he is known, for more than a year and a half, and following reports in The Virginian-Pilot in October 2005 of a swell of car crashes, some fatal, involving unlicensed, undocumented Hispanics driving cars with Tennessee plates.
The agents were led to Mazariegos-Perez, who turns 44 today, after breaking up an Eastern Shore prostitution ring that catered to Hispanic migrant workers, an FBI agent said in a court affidavit unsealed Tuesday. Several people convicted in that case as well as other illegal immigrants became cooperating witnesses in the Perez matter, the affidavit says.
In 2003, the Virginia State Police actually caught Mazariegos-Perez with 19 new Tennessee license plates and 31 new vehicle titles but never charged him.
He “claimed it was common knowledge among people in the area that vehicle titles and license plates can be easily obtained in Tennessee,” the agent wrote in the affidavit. The case wasn’t pursued again until fall 2006.
After Tennessee tightened up its requirements for obtaining plates and titles, Mazariegos-Perez switched to Mississippi, where identification requirements are more lax, according to the FBI.
The FBI said it learned through the witnesses that Mazariegos-Perez was charging $300 to $350 per set of license plates, but that his price increased to $450 as of January, the FBI affidavit says.
About twice a month, he would drive to Mississippi to pick up orders delivered to two post office boxes he rented there, the papers say.
The FBI said he typically used phony Social Security numbers and false names.
One witness told the FBI he saw 50 to 100 license plates in Mazariegos-Perez’s trailer one day in 2006, the FBI said. In one deal about a year ago, Mazariegos-Perez sold five sets of license plates and titles to an individual for $1,010, the agent said in the affidavit.”