Marine Guilty in Citizenship Fraud Case
Detroit Free Press | December 05, 2007
DETROIT - Since arriving in the United States from war-torn Lebanon in 1989, Samar Spinelli pursued the American Dream.
She got a college degree.
She joined the military and rose to the rank of captain.
She married, had children and served the United States with two tours of duty in Iraq.
But her life was built on lies.
On Dec. 4, the truth caught up with the 39-year-old Marine captain when she pleaded guilty in Detroit to conspiracy to commit marriage, immigration, citizenship and passport fraud.
"Yes sir," Spinelli said repeatedly as U.S. District Judge Avern Cohn questioned her about the charges and a plea agreement that could cause her to spend nine months in prison and possibly lose her citizenship and be deported to Lebanon. She also agreed to resign from the Marines.
Spinelli, who was on track to become a major and was within five years of retirement, will lose her Marine pension, her lawyer said.
"This is an absolute tragedy," her lawyer, Christopher Andreoff of Detroit, said as Spinelli was processed by U.S. marshals after pleading guilty.
"Here you have someone who has given 15 years of her life, did two tours of duty in Iraq and was of tremendous use to the Marine Corps."
Assistant U.S. Attorney Kenneth Chadwell said in court documents that Spinelli conspired with two former roommates - also Lebanese immigrants - in the 1990s to hire U.S. citizens to marry them, after they overstayed their visas, so they could remain in the United States and become citizens.
They never lived with the men nor consummated the marriages. They forged their husbands' names on immigration documents and vouched for each other to get citizenship and jobs. Later they divorced the men.
The other two women are:
-Nada Nadim Prouty, 37, of Vienna, Va., a former FBI agent and CIA operative, who pleaded guilty three weeks ago to similar charges plus illegally accessing an FBI computer system to find out if family members were being investigated and to learn details of a Detroit-based terrorism probe.
-Elfar El Aouar, 40, of Plymouth, Mich., Prouty's sister and the wife of fugitive La Shish restaurant owner Talal Chahine. She pleaded guilty to similar charges last week. She is serving 18 months in prison for helping Chahine avoid $6.9 million in federal taxes from 2001 to 2005 on his restaurant chain. He fled to Lebanon in 2005 to avoid prosecution.
A third sister, Dr. Rula Nadim El Aouar, 36, of Dearborn Heights, Mich., was charged in May with naturalization fraud for allegedly arranging a sham marriage. Negotiations are under way to enable her to avoid criminal charges, but surrender her citizenship.
Andreoff said Spinelli joined the Marines in the early 1990s, married a fellow Marine who became a captain and had two children, now 5 and 11. They live in Okinawa, Japan.
She was pulled out of Iraq, where she helped train Iraqi police, after investigators learned of the earlier fraudulent marriage.
