Orange County's Kathleen Luong must have thought she'd outwitted federal immigration officials with a 2009 passport photo fraud scheme to help Vietnamese nationals illegally enter the United States.
But she was mistaken.
In late November, officials arrested Luong following a two-count, federal grand jury indictment and freed her from custody on $20,000 bail.
This month, she signed a guilty plea admitting that in February 2009 she completed a passport application with her biographical details but supplied a photograph of a Vietnamese woman who wanted to trick her way into this country.
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About two weeks later that same month, Luong–who was born in 1970, 1973 or 1974–federal records bizarrely list all three conflicting years–completed a passport
application with the biographical details of her son but supplied a
photograph of a Vietnamese boy.
She originally faced a maximum punishment of one year in prison plus a $100,000 fine, but her post-arrest admissions prompted prosecutors to reduce her crimes to misdemeanor status.
She is scheduled today to formally announce her guilt to U.S. District Court Judge David O. Carter inside the Ronald Reagan Federal Courthouse in Santa Ana.
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CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.