Coach and agent sentenced to prison for million-dollar MLB player-smuggling racket

Source: www.sott.net --- Friday, November 03, 2017
A Major League Baseball (MLB) coach and a sports agent convicted of smuggling Cuban players to the USA were sentenced to federal prison on Thursday. Julio Estrada and agent Bartolo Hernandez had been convicted in March. The pair were jailed for having organized an illegal international network aimed at bringing Cuban-born players to the US, via Haiti and Mexico, in exchange for a cut of their Baseball contracts. Due to the US embargo of Cuba and immigration laws, players from the Caribbean island first arrived in Haiti or Mexico, where they applied for residency in order to be eligible to sign contracts with the Major League Baseball (MLB) teams. Trial evidence showed that Hernandez and Estrada provided players with fake documents. They thereby deceived the US government into granting visas to players including MLB stars Yasiel Puig of the Los Angeles Dodgers and Yuli Gurriel of the Houston Astros. ...

from Baseball http://ift.tt/2yskZWw