FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Joel Bauta Lopez earned $7 a month as a bus dispatcher in Cuba. Within a few years of his arrival in the United States, he was driving a Hummer, living in his own condo and vacationing at Caribbean resorts.
Bauta made his riches bilking American insurance companies.
"I had just been here for two years. I needed the money," Bauta, 42, told the Sun Sentinel. "In Cuba, we live in a system where if you don't invent, if you don't rob, you don't eat."
Bauta was part of a Cuban crime wave that's aided by U.S. policy and proliferating. He came to the U.S. without an entry visa, got to stay because of his special status as a Cuban, was arrested twice for fraud, and spent less than two months in jail.
America's open-door policy, intended to give refuge to those fleeing the Castro government, has allowed a thriving underground criminal network to take root and expand its reach from South Florida across the nation, the Sun Sentinel found in the first broad look at organized Cuban crime.
These criminals often operate in rings specializing in lucrative crimes that can yield astonishing sums with little risk of stiff punishment: credit card fraud, auto accidents staged to con insurers, cargo theft, Medicare fraud, indoor marijuana farming.
Bauta made his riches bilking American insurance companies.
"I had just been here for two years. I needed the money," Bauta, 42, told the Sun Sentinel. "In Cuba, we live in a system where if you don't invent, if you don't rob, you don't eat."
Bauta was part of a Cuban crime wave that's aided by U.S. policy and proliferating. He came to the U.S. without an entry visa, got to stay because of his special status as a Cuban, was arrested twice for fraud, and spent less than two months in jail.
America's open-door policy, intended to give refuge to those fleeing the Castro government, has allowed a thriving underground criminal network to take root and expand its reach from South Florida across the nation, the Sun Sentinel found in the first broad look at organized Cuban crime.
These criminals often operate in rings specializing in lucrative crimes that can yield astonishing sums with little risk of stiff punishment: credit card fraud, auto accidents staged to con insurers, cargo theft, Medicare fraud, indoor marijuana farming.
