Thai Ginger co-owner accused of paying workers to marry her relatives

The owner of a local chain of popular Thai restaurants pleaded not guilty Tuesday to charges of paying employees thousands of dollars to enter into "sham marriages" with her relatives from Thailand so they could stay in the United States.

Varee Bradford, 43, who operates five Thai Ginger restaurants in Seattle and the Eastside, was ordered released pending trial after appearing in U.S. District Court in Seattle.

She was arrested at her Issaquah home early Tuesday after a grand-jury indictment was unsealed charging her with four counts, including immigration-document fraud and conspiracy to commit immigration fraud. The charges carry a potential prison sentence of 35 years, prosecutors said.

Also named in the indictment is Thai Ginger employee Porramin Tangchaiwanna, 32, also known as "Golf." He is charged with assisting Bradford in arranging a sham marriage with a man who turned out to be an undercover immigration agent.

Tangchaiwanna was ordered held pending trial because of questions about his immigration status.

Both Bradford's attorney and Bradford's husband, Michael, the co-owner of the restaurants, declined to comment as they left the courtroom.

Bradford had been under investigation for about three years after U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) received a tip about her alleged scheme, said a spokeswoman, Lorie Dankers.

The charging documents specify four marriages that Bradford arranged between her employees who are U.S. citizens and Thai relatives between 2001 and 2007.

Both male and female employees were offered $10,000 to $20,000 to marry the Thai immigrants to make it easier for them to obtain permanent resident "green cards" and stay in the country, according to the charges.

Foreigners who marry U.S. citizens are given immediate eligibility to immigrate to the United States, though the marriages must pass scrutiny by agents to make sure they are legitimate, said Sharon Rummery, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in San Francisco.

In February 2008, an ICE agent went undercover and met with Bradford and Tangchaiwanna, the court documents say. Bradford offered the undercover agent $20,000 to marry a woman named Nikki, the prosecutors charge.

Bradford told the agent he should "communicate with Nikki on a frequent basis to get to know her and prepare for the immigration interview."

The agent was to receive $5,000 payments, with the last delivered when Nikki got her green card, the documents charge.

Bradford is also charged with helping to fill out the immigration paperwork that fraudulently claimed the arranged marriages were real.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Jill Otake said Bradford stood to gain financially from the scheme, but she declined to elaborate. Bradford's Thai Ginger restaurants are at Pacific Place in downtown Seattle, Madison Park, Redmond Town Center, Issaquah and Bellevue's Factoria area.

The restaurants generally garner good reviews from local media and have been featured on a Web site called The Top 50 Thai Restaurants.

According to the restaurant's posting on that site, Bradford immigrated from Thailand to Illinois and then moved to Seattle, where she worked in Thai restaurants for two years before she and her husband struck out on their own.

They opened the first Thai Ginger on the Eastside in 1996 and expanded to five restaurants within eight years.

Otake said marriage scams can end up preventing honest spouses of U.S. citizens from immigrating legally.

"The victims in this case are the hundreds of thousands of people around the world who want to come to this country," she said.

Sham-marriage immigration scams are not uncommon, authorities said. Locally, several people have been prosecuted in recent years for similar arrangements.

In one case, a Cambodian woman, Vuthy Sim, was recently convicted by a federal jury in Seattle of several immigration-fraud crimes. According to the documents in that case, Sim paid U.S. citizens about $20,000 each and flew them to Cambodia to pretend to marry would-be immigrants who paid Sim for the service.

Sim faces sentencing in August.

Ian Ith: 206-464-2109 or iith@seattletimes.com