Caribbean (113 page)

“Who are you?” Ranjit asked when the knife was withdrawn, and the man said: “José Lopez, Nicaraguan. I got a good job, plenty money. And I want her back.”

Terrified by the complexity of the jungle in which he was entrapped and convinced that his assailant meant it when he threatened death, Ranjit tried to warn Molly during the silent walk home: “He had a knife,” but she said scornfully: “Oh, that one,” and she would say no more, but when they reached the Hudak house, Ranjit warned Gunter: “Molly’s real husband, the Nicaraguan, is making threats,” and the mastermind of deception said: “We’d better move you out of here as fast as possible,” so next morning Molly filed for divorce in the Miami courts on the grounds of cruelty.

His colleagues in the Miami office of the United States Immigration Service said of Larry Schwartz: “He may not be the brightest guy on our staff, but he does have that fantastic stomach.” They referred to the exceptional skill Larry had in evaluating the paperwork in a marriage suspected of being a fraudulent attempt to bring an alien into the country: “I’ve seen him do it a dozen times. He studies the papers, spots the fraud, and looks up at me and says: ‘Oooh! My stomach is as tight as a knot.’ And nineteen times out of twenty, when he goes to work on the case he proves that it’s … How does he phrase it? ‘As phony as a Nevada mining certificate.’ ”

As Larry worked, he kept on his desk, facing him, a cardboard sign with three big numerals outlined in red: 31-323-41, and he used them to indoctrinate new agents assigned to the Miami office: “Whenever you’re investigating a marriage that looks fraudulent, remember
that thirty-one is the average number of other aliens he will be legally entitled to bring in once you let him in. So if he’s illegal, do your country some good. Keep him out. The three twenty-three? That’s the worst case in this office, and I was responsible. I had to give the green light to a guy who’d contracted a fake marriage. I knew it but I couldn’t prove it. And that’s how many he succeeded in slipping past us as he brought in his brothers and sisters and their wives and children till he had three hundred and twenty-three, an entire village.”

But it was the last number, the 41, that caused the real knots in his stomach: “In this office, when we got our computer working, we identified eight women scattered around south Florida who had among them an average—an average, mind you—of forty-one fake marriages.”

“How do you define
fake
?” agent-in-training Joe Anderson asked, and Larry said: “Anytime an American woman who is a legal citizen of our country marries an alien man solely for the purpose of enabling him to get his Resident Alien Card, and without any intention of establishing an honest husband-wife relationship … we label that a fake and take action.”

“Why does she do it?” and Larry said: “Money. Going rate seems to be somewhere between five hundred dollars and five thousand dollars.”

So when the clerk who had first spotted the probable fraud delivered to Schwartz the rather fat dossier on the Ranjit Banarjee-Molly Hudak marriage and pending divorce, Larry turned the papers with a practiced thumb and felt his stomach definitely tightening at several facts: “She’s older than he is, and that’s always a flag. But my God! She’s nine years older. They’re not only different religions, but she’s a Catholic and he’s a Hindu, and you can’t get much further apart than that. Also, whenever you have a graduate student switching his major three times … What were his grades as an undergraduate? Almost straight A’s? But of course it was probably one of those Mickey Mouse universities in the Caribbean. But you can be almost certain he’s switching majors to
avoid
getting his Ph.D. How long’s he been in graduate school—1973 through 1986? That’s not an education, it’s a career.”

On and on he went through the papers until his stomach was so knotted that he marched in to his superior’s office, tossed the dossier on the desk, and said: “Sam, it’s as phony as a Nevada mining certificate.”
After a cursory look at the signals that Schwartz had marked, Sam said: “Go for it,” and the probe was on.

Special agents on the trail of what they had good reason to suspect was a fraudulent marriage followed one of two traditional procedures, as Larry explained to newcomer Anderson: “Some prefer to drag the couple in, interrogate them, throw the fear of God into them, and trap them into disclosing the fraud. Not bad. Often works. But I prefer the second route. Leave the couple alone, but quietly check their behavior, their work habits, their religious attendance, the comments of their friends, everything. And you’d be surprised at the canvas you begin to paint with those individual brush strokes. By the time you’re through, the word
Fraud
is written two feet high across your painting. Then you bring them in.”

So in the summer of 1986, Larry Schwartz, thirty-four years old, and his assistant Joe Anderson, twenty-seven, began spending many hours in the vicinity of the university, Dixie Highway and the area in which Mr. and Mrs. Ranjit Banarjee claimed they were living. They were careful not to speak directly to any university officials lest they inadvertently alert Banarjee, who after all, was not really the target.

“It’s not even the woman,” Schwartz kept reminding Anderson, “even though she’s probably pulled the trick three, four times.” Clenching his fist, he hammered his desk: “It’s the miserable pimp who arranges these deals. I want to get that swine.” Then he relaxed and laughed: “As soon as I nail down for sure that it is that bastard Hudak …”

When from a distance he checked the Hudak house, a plain affair a few blocks from the university, he saw that the Indian did come and go, but Larry was more interested in another youngish man who seemed to have the run of the place, and he quietly checked with some of the neighbors: “I’m the census taker. How many live in your house? And in that house over there?”

“You mean where the Indian married the daughter? Five. Him, her, the parents and their son Gunt.”

“Does Gunt have a steady job?”

“Never seems to keep one long.”

When he and Anderson had made more than a dozen checks, finding no glaring discrepancies between the facts as he observed them and the documents which were supposed to support the marriage, Schwartz started dropping in at the Burger King where Molly worked, and the more he saw of her, the easier it was to believe the
Indian’s claim that he had fallen in love with her while taking his supper at the fast-food place, for although her birth certificate proved that she was thirty-eight, she was an attractive, slim woman who could not have weighed more than a hundred and twelve. Besides, her green uniform and cocky little hat seemed to have been designed just to make her look attractive. She’s no dog, Larry thought as he finished his hamburger and shake without looking at her again.

Larry Schwartz had been born in Boston and had worked the northern Immigration beats before winning an assignment to Florida, and he was so grateful for the hot weather and so fed up with the cold that he customarily wore a lightweight seersucker jacket, white shirt and no tie. This made him conspicuous in the Florida summer, but he was not comfortable without the coat, so when he had eaten at the Burger King three or four times, he failed to notice that while he was shadowing Molly, someone off to the side was shadowing him. It was Gunter Hudak, who had been alerted by his sister, who was far more clever than the men around her assumed. “Gunt, there’s this guy in a seersucker jacket keeps coming in at night.”

“Lots of people come in at night.”

“But he’s different.”

However, when Gunter studied the stranger he concluded that he was just another customer who had no wife and frequented the Burger King because the salad bar was copious and inexpensive, and he convinced his sister to stop worrying about him.

Then, one evening when Schwartz and Gunter happened to be in the restaurant at the same time, a tall, good-looking Hispanic came in, ordered a hamburger, kept his eye on Molly, and waited till her stint ended. Then, as she came out in street clothes, he moved close, took her arm, and encouraged her to snuggle up, betraying in a dozen different gestures that they were lovers. Her brother had become alarmed the minute he saw José Lopez, the Nicaraguan to whom his sister was legally married, and immediately notified his gang, who had given Lopez strict orders, and a few dollars, to stay away from his wife until she received her divorce from the Hindu, and this bold intrusion imperiled their plans. But what had worried Hudak even more was what he saw happening inside the restaurant: the man in the seersucker suit was carefully watching the lovers and making notes. And as Schwartz left the Burger King, he was grabbed by two members of the Hudak gang, who punched him about the head, and one of the men snarled: “Now who in hell are you, mister?”

When he blurted out the answer he always gave: “Insurance adjuster,” one of the thugs rifled his pockets while the other man held him. There was not a single card indicating that Larry was with Immigration, but there were two forms proving he was in insurance, so after giving him several more sound thumps they let him go. That night the same thugs waited till Molly reached home, intercepted her, took her for a drive in their car, and cursed her for having been seen with her husband. “The goddamned Indian’s divorce papers ain’t final yet.”

She promised never to take such a chance again until the Immigration paperwork was completed, but two days later Mr. and Mrs. Ranjit Banarjee received a registered letter requiring them to report to the office of Investigator Larry Schwartz at Immigration headquarters, and that night Gunter Hudak began his intensive coaching.

“This is deadly serious,” he said to the divorcing couple, and with the assistance of a member of his gang who had handled such situations in the past, he laid out his instructions: “You have filed for divorce, and that’s what alerted the Feds. Our job is to prove that even though you’re splitting now, you did enter into a legal marriage last year.” His accomplice, an evil-looking man from the Gainesville area who had supervised numerous fake marriages for alien students at the University of Florida, warned: “You’ve got to make it sound real, and we’re here to teach you how. Molly’s been through this before, but you”—and he stared contemptuously at Ranjit—“can screw it up if you don’t learn your lines.” And from a grease-stained portfolio he produced a well-thumbed xerox of Title 8 of the Federal Criminal Code, Section 1325 (b), brutal in its clarity and threat:

When Ranjit realized he might be subject to a quarter-of-a-million-dollar fine, he cried pathetically: “Why did I ever get mixed up …?” but he was not allowed to finish, for Gunter struck him across the lips and growled: “Shut up, you damned fool. You asked to do this. You paid me money to arrange it.”

When Ranjit tried to claim ignorance of the law, Gunter hit him again and said: “You have to protect yourself, but you also have to protect your wife. Even more, you have to protect me. And if you
make one mistake, you filthy Hindu, you are dead, because my neck is on the line.”

Satisfied that Ranjit was properly impressed by the gravity of the situation, he became conciliatory: “We’re going to be all right. We’ve been through this before and we know all the cons to beat the rap.” He told them that Schwartz, whoever he was and “ten to one he’s the guy in the seersucker,” would interrogate them separately, Molly in one room, Ranjit in the other, “and we’ve learned just about what questions he’ll ask to trap you. So memorize these answers.” And from a paper his gang had used when preparing for past interrogations, he hammered into their heads the answers they must both give when describing their happy marriage.

“Did you sleep in the same bed?… Yes.”

“Who slept on the right-hand side, looking down from the headboard?… You,” and he indicated Ranjit.

“Who went to bed first?” Again Ranjit.

“Did you use the same bathroom?… Yes. And I want Ranjit’s toothbrush and shaving things in there tonight.”

“How many people had dinner at the table, most nights? Five. Because he probably knows I live here.”

“How many went to church on Sunday? Where?”

He drilled them on about sixty questions with which interrogators tried to trick couples they suspected of fraud, and when he felt that his sister and her Indian had their answers pat, he turned to the matter of the money.

“Did you give her any money?” he roared at Ranjit, who fumbled. “Listen, damn you! This Schwartz could be very rough. He’s got a million tricks. Now, did you give her any money? The answer is No! No! No!”

“Did you give her a wedding ring? Yes! Yes! Yes! Where is it now? And you both say that she hocked it when we needed money for a suit for you—you damned dumb Indian.” And he gave his sister a pawnbroker’s receipt with an appropriate date. “It’s effective if you cry when you say it, Molly, and you must look very ashamed, Hindu.”

When he felt they could defend themselves he allowed them to go into Miami to face their ordeal with this Schwartz, whoever he was, and as soon as Molly entered his office she noticed the seersucker coat hanging on a rack, and Schwartz noticed that she noticed, so they started even, but not quite, because he did not separate them for the traditional private grilling her brother had anticipated. Instead,
he sat them in comfortable chairs, then called out for Joe Anderson to come in.

“This is my man Joe. Now, Joe, I want you to tell these good people what you did this morning the minute you were sure that these two and her brother Gunter had left the house at 2119 San Diego in Coral Gables, not far from the university.”

Joe, a hefty fellow who looked capable of defending himself if he stumbled into trouble, said: “I went to the front door, knocked, and showed the woman who answered the door this court order.” He showed them the document, a search-and-seize order covering the premises at 2119 San Diego.

“And then what?” Schwartz asked, and Joe said: “I searched the place, as you directed.”