A senior attorney with Immigration and Customs Enforcement who illegally profited from the hopes and dreams of immigrants has been dealt what U.S. Attorney Andre Birotte Jr. of the Central District of California called “one of the longest sentences ever seen in a public corruption case,” almost 18 years in prison.
Constantine Peter Kallas, 40, of Alta Loma, Calif., received the 212-month sentence from U.S. District Judge Terry J. Hatter Jr. in Los Angeles. The judge also ordered Kallas to pay $296,865 in restitution.
Prosecutors said Kallas and his wife, Maria, made a small fortune from immigrants after persuading them that they could help them remain in the United States and arrange benefits for them. In a sentencing memorandum, prosecutors called Kallas’s actions “an epic display of a public official’s greed.
“Prosecutors said that when the Kallas residence was searched in 2008, investigators found a hidden floor safe that contained more than $177,000 in cash and two dozen official immigration files,” according to an account by Samuel Rubenfeld on the Wall Street Journal’s Corruption Currents blog. About $950,000 had been deposited into the couple’s bank accounts in the past decade.
Birotte said in a statement that “Mr. Kallas took in hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes – money he obtained by exploiting his knowledge of the immigration system.” His crimes “were a wholesale violation of the public trust,” Birotte said.
Birotte noted that a jury convicted Kallas last year of dozens of felonies, including “conspiracy, six counts of bribery, two counts of obstruction of justice, seven counts of fraud and misuse of entry documents, three counts of aggravated identity theft, nine counts of making false statements to the Department of Labor, four counts of making false statements to obtain federal employee compensation, and four counts of tax evasion.”
The defendant’s wife, 41, had pleaded guilty to conspiracy, bribery and conspiracy to commit money laundering. U.S. District Judge Robert J. Timlin is scheduled to sentence her on May 2.
