Adoption facilitator sentenced to 18 months for defrauding families

By Maureen O'Hagan
Seattle Times staff reporter

Lauryn Galindo

E-mail this article Print this article Search archive Most read articles Most e-mailed articles

Was Lauryn Galindo a saint whose mission was to save Cambodian children from lives of prostitution and despair?

Or was she a greedy manipulator who exploited that country's poverty to put babies in the arms of American families?

That's what U.S. District Judge Thomas Zilly pondered yesterday as he contemplated a sentence for the woman who pioneered Cambodian adoptions and had clients that included actress Angelina Jolie.

Maybe, Zilly said, the story of Lauryn Galindo is a little bit of both.

Yesterday, Zilly sentenced Galindo to 18 months in prison, and ordered her to pay more than $60,000 in restitution to families she defrauded.

Galindo, who ran Seattle International Adoptions with her sister, had pleaded guilty to money laundering, visa fraud and currency structuring in connection with the adoption operation. Her sister, Lynn Devin, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit visa fraud and will be sentenced next month.

In the early 1990s, when Galindo first visited Cambodia, children were languishing and dying in orphanages. Families were selling their daughters into prostitution because they were unable to feed them. Scarred from years of genocide and poverty, the country was in need of outside help. There were no organized means of adopting its struggling children.

Galindo, according to her defense, was the perfect person for the job. Highly intelligent, driven and charming, she could make things happen. And as a victim of physical abuse herself, she suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and thus identified with a country plagued by that same psychological ailment, her lawyer said.

"Some people turn to alcohol and drugs," psychiatrist Teri Hastings testified yesterday. Galindo, however, "was emotionally driven to compensate for her psychological problems by saving children. It became an overriding force."

She was quite successful, placing 700 to 800 children. Scores of families wrote letters of support, asking the judge for leniency. Other supporters told the judge about her extensive charitable work.
 
"She had become a beloved person to many people in Cambodia," said defense lawyer Jay Stansell.

The prosecution didn't deny the good but argued "the money started rolling in and then she became motivated in large part by money," said Assistant U.S. Attorney Jim Lord. Investigators estimated she took in about $9 million. She bought a house worth $1.4 million on the Hawaiian waterfront and funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars to offshore accounts, creating a shell corporation named for the Hindu goddess of wealth.

She was convicted of earning this through fraud: by falsifying immigration documents to make it appear that children had been abandoned by their families, when in fact, some had literally been taken from their mother's arms for a small fee. She and her associates bribed Cambodian officials to make sure there were no delays. And she charged American families a hefty fee to bring home babies they thought were orphans.

She caused psychological trauma to children who were taken from their families, and to their American parents who thought they were doing good, only to learn that they had essentially bought a child, according to court documents.

On the immigration forms, the children were listed as abandoned, their biological families unknown, so in years to come, the children will have no way of learning their true history.

"These children have been robbed in many instances of their identity," Zilly said. "The end does not justify the means."

Deborah Ware, one of the victims, traveled from Virginia to watch Galindo be sentenced. Ware and her husband had lost a child of their own and in 1997 went to Cambodia to adopt through Galindo. They held the child in their arms, then gave him back to Galindo, sensing that something was wrong with the way Galindo was operating. "I smelled a rat," Ware said.

It was devastating.

As she sat in the courtroom, she scribbled a phrase she heard Galindo's psychiatrist say: post-traumatic stress disorder. That was Galindo's diagnosis, she said, and now it's hers, as well.

Maureen O'Hagan: 206-464-2562