Years after immigration agent and Fairfax resident Robert Schofield was disciplined for having an affair with an Asian prostitute who was working as a government informant, he was given senior responsibility for handing out visas and citizenship documents in the Washington area.
The day after he started his new job, law enforcement sources and colleagues say, a line of beautiful Asian women formed outside his new office.
So it came as little surprise to insiders this summer when Schofield, 57, was arrested and charged with taking more than $8.1 million in bribes to sell phony green cards and citizenships to more than 200 immigrants, mostly from China and Thailand.
“That guy should have gone to jail a long time ago,” said Jim Goldman, a former INS director in Miami.
Federal agents uncovered a tawdry bag of evidence in their raid: lists of women Schofield traveled to Asia to pay thousands of dollars to have sex with, a cache of Asian pornography — including videos of Schofield with young Asian women at his Virginia home — and detailed records of the illegal operation, court documents say.
Schofield goes on trial next week in U.S. District Court in Alexandria. His alleged accomplice, Qiming Ye, a Chinese citzen who federal authorities say acted as Schofield’s broker, pleaded guilty in October. He is now cooperating with the investigation.
But it’s not clear how far the investigation will go.
“It’s a Pandora’s box,” said Michael Maxwell, a former internal investigator at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services who has turned whistle-blower.
Maxwell said that Schofield’s case is one example of widespread waste, fraud and abuse in the immigration system.
But the Schofield case is particularly troubling because a visa and citizenship ring would certainly attract underworld figures and spies, Maxwell said.
“If you do any digging on Chinese intelligence, you know how pervasive they are,” Maxwell said.
Maxwell was an expert on Chinese espionage for another government agency.
Even before Schofield’s arrest, it was known that he had a weak spot for Asian women — often using binoculars to watch them from his office window. In the early 1990s, The Examiner’s sources said he was demoted after his affair with the prostitute came to light, a relationship that derailed a major federal investigation.
He later absconded to Bangkok and ran up tens of thousands of dollars on his government credit cards. It was only an apparent fluke at a San Francisco airport that led authorities to take concerted action against Schofield, court records and internal documents show. A phony visa was spotted, a suspect blurted Schofield’s name and private numbers and a full decade of alleged wrongdoing unraveled.
Critics say the case demonstrates that five years after the attacks of Sept. 11, the agency responsible for screening foreign visitors is still beset by fraud, waste and abuse.
In March, the Government Accountability Office released a report on immigration. The report found that about 5,200 immigrants who are risks to national security pass through the system without prosecution.
Worse, the report found that the Department of Homeland Security, which was formed after the Sept. 11 attacks in part to overhaul the nation’s immigration system, lacked “a clear and comprehensive strategy for imposing sanctions or evaluating their effectiveness,” the GAO found.
“DHS has had nearly three years to address the rampant fraud among the lawyers and immigration case facilitators, and has done little or nothing in terms of real prosecutions of the violators who are getting rich exploiting the lack of scrutiny of these cases,” U.S. Rep. John Hostettler, R-Ind., said at the time of the GAO report.
The Schofield case, experts say, is a microcosm of the United States’ bent immigration system.
Some immigration agents say that Schofield knowingly profited from the brutal human smuggling rings run by international organized crime rings.
National security experts say Schofield could have been easily compromised by foreign agents and it’s unlikely that his alleged visa factory in Northern Virginia or his frequent trips to Asia went unnoticed by Chinese intelligence.
Schofield’s lawyers refused comment for these stories.
