Paul S
04-21-2005, 09:33 PM
Listening to the local sports talk radio today on the way home (I'm more a lurker than a poster now as my new job doesn't like us to post at work) but as I'm driving home the local talking head is talking about a new team that was originally slated to play in Providence RI. Well the INS just started removal proceedings against the "owner" of the team.
Ya, the guy was from Croatia and had "a dubious background" and was being sought by various war crimes tribunals, NATO and a Hungarian bankruptcy court. They said it was an immigration scam that he figured out online in message boards to buy a pro basketball team in America. He had applied for some visa that allows immigrants to move to the USA if they will invest a set amount of money in a business that hires a certain amount of Americans. Well he got arrested at JFK and had a onward ticket to Chicago and then planned to visit "an undisclosed location in Indiana".
I guess he was arrested after they searched his stuff and found different passports in different names from different countries and a story about buying a basketball team. Originally he was interviewed in broken Englsih and told authorities he was going to buy the Boston Celtics then amended his story to say he was going to buy the Providence Celtics, then when an interpreter showed up they figured out the amount of money he was going to buy the Providence Celtics for (now this is where the already rising level of hilarity in my SUV was starting to turn into a howl) didn't fit the minimum amount of money to qualify for the investor type visa.
Does sound like any basketball league we know. They didn't say which league but I know where I'd be focusing if I was the INS.
Ya, the guy was from Croatia and had "a dubious background" and was being sought by various war crimes tribunals, NATO and a Hungarian bankruptcy court. They said it was an immigration scam that he figured out online in message boards to buy a pro basketball team in America. He had applied for some visa that allows immigrants to move to the USA if they will invest a set amount of money in a business that hires a certain amount of Americans. Well he got arrested at JFK and had a onward ticket to Chicago and then planned to visit "an undisclosed location in Indiana".
I guess he was arrested after they searched his stuff and found different passports in different names from different countries and a story about buying a basketball team. Originally he was interviewed in broken Englsih and told authorities he was going to buy the Boston Celtics then amended his story to say he was going to buy the Providence Celtics, then when an interpreter showed up they figured out the amount of money he was going to buy the Providence Celtics for (now this is where the already rising level of hilarity in my SUV was starting to turn into a howl) didn't fit the minimum amount of money to qualify for the investor type visa.
Does sound like any basketball league we know. They didn't say which league but I know where I'd be focusing if I was the INS.