Hui Qin, a 56-year-old Chinese citizen on the Forbes billionaires list who runs SMI Culture, a Hong Kong-based entertainment entity, will be sentenced on May 9 when he will fill out Form I-407 to relinquish his fraudulently obtained green card status.
On the day of sentencing, Qin will be escorted to the airport by federal agents and immediately and permanently deported. The exact country of repatriation will depend on his valid passport and the country's entry regulations, but the media pointed out that China is not one of them.
Last month, Qin pleaded guilty to a number of crimes, including making campaign donations in the name of others, immigration fraud and fabricating fake identity documents. He has been held at the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in Brooklyn since his arrest on October 2 last year.
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Last week, the prosecution filed a written statement recommending an additional two-year supervised release period after sentencing and asking Qin to cooperate and follow all instructions from immigration authorities and not to return to the United States illegally without permission.
Prosecutors noted that while Qin will be immediately deported, "his repeated fraudulent conduct shows that a two-year supervised release period is necessary to prevent him from attempting to enter the country illegally under false pretexts again." ”
In the six months since his arrest last year, Qin, who has a lot of money, has hired nine lawyers, including Henry E. Mazurek, a well-known lawyer in New York, and James Miskiewicz, a former assistant federal prosecutor, and currently has six lawyers.
Federal Courts on Long Island
The sentencing memorandum submitted by his lawyer details his personal history, including his childhood, the death of his first wife, his business beginnings, his marriage to his second wife, and his move to New York.
In addition to Qin's first marriage, which has been reported by many domestic media, the lawyer also highlighted the story of the second half of his move to the United States.
According to the lawyer's description, after the death of his first wife in 1996, he handed over his toddler daughter to his sister to bring to the United States, and he developed "a business in China, where the scale of the company reached more than 20,000 people before the epidemic, and he was the founder and major shareholder of the company."
The memo mentions that Qin had a close relationship with his first wife's family and had been supporting her elderly parents since her death from a brain aneurysm.
After marrying his second wife in 2010, he moved to Long Island, New York, where his fame and wealth soon led him to many charitable activities in the Long Island community, including his donation of more than $1.5 million to Long Island schools and a large donation to the ColdSpring Harbor Laboratory. According to a 2021 Sing Tao and Overseas Chinese News report, his wife at the time, Liu, was also the only Chinese-American director on the Long Island Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Association Committee and the Green Vale School Board of Trustees.
In February this year, the FBI conducted an investigation into Zheng Qirong, a staff member of New York Mayor Adams, and Liu is a member of his Asian American Affairs Advisory Committee, which also led to the fact that since 2021, Qin has repeatedly made illegal political donations in his personal name to Adams and other politicians.
But his lawyer stressed that he was actually facing huge debts and multiple lawsuits, and that he was only involved in illegal political donations in order to "maintain his appearance": Qin and Liu struggled to maintain their status in society in the midst of economic hardship, so they participated in "straw donations."
In explaining Qin's financial pressure, the lawyer said that his media company had collapsed due to the pandemic, and that he was facing huge financial difficulties, while Liu had previously separated from him for a long time and filed for divorce, and he was now facing civil lawsuits in the British Virgin Islands and other places in addition to New York.
In addition to his financial and emotional difficulties, permanent expulsion from the United States also means his separation from his three children, which is a devastating blow to the parties involved.
In the end, the judge gave him a sentence and deportation one day earlier than originally scheduled for May 10.
In fact, Qin's story can be seen in the Chinese media in the early days and in the Chinese media when he lived in New York later, but behind it is a dirty mess, not to mention that he has already gone bankrupt and has huge debts.
Just like that sentence: I saw him raise the Zhu Tower, watched him feast guests, and saw his building collapse.