Tarunkumar and Sachin Patel wanted to find a way so that more of their friends and business associates from India could get permanent legal status to remain in the US. But they have admitted their plans were federal crimes.
Now, they and up to 17 others face prison time. The men said that in 2011 they arranged four sham marriages between their friends and American women the two Patels had met. The two are business acquaintances.
Then in 2014, Tarunkumar Patel said he began bribing a Mississippi police officer to create false crime reports in an effort to immigration authorities to grant them special visas for victims of certain types of crimes.
The Patels, former Jackson officer Ivory Harris and lawyer Simpson Goodman pleaded guilty on Monday in federal court in Jackson to conspiracy charges, as did two of the men who benefited from the fake police reports. The Patels and Goodman face up to 10 years in prison, having pleaded guilty to both marriage fraud and the police report fraud.
A seventh defendant pleaded guilty on Friday, and more guilty pleas from others in the scheme are scheduled this month. 19 people were indicted in two linked cases in April.
The 50-year-old Tarunkumar Patel, who operates a store in a poor area of Jackson, said he arranged the first marriage when a friend came down from Massachusetts. That friend, Virenda Rajput, met a woman who was a frequent customer of the store. “My friend told me, ‘I want to marry her,’” Tarunkumar Patel told US District Judge Henry T Wingate.
And they did. The woman took Rajput’s name, becoming Javona Shanice Rajput. But Virenda Rajput returned to his own job in Massachusetts, coming back to Jackson only once every two or three months. “They were married just for the convenience of getting the citizenship,” said Patel’s lawyer, Ross Barnett Jr. “That was the No. 1 purpose.” Sachin Patel persuaded another woman with whom he had worked at an Indian restaurant to marry a friend in 2013, and two more marriages were arranged in 2014.
