PHIL BRONSTEIN: I was duped by Jose Vargas, illegal immigrant

San Francisco Chronicle ^ | 6/23/11 | Chronicle's Editor at Large Phil Bronstein

[SmithL]

I was duped. I once hired an illegal immigrant to be a reporter for the Chronicle.

"I don't think I'm a criminal," Jose Antonio Vargas told me when we met last week, right before he announced his status to the world. "Don't make me seem guiltier than I am."

Jose lied to me and everyone else he worked for, and that's not kosher, especially in a profession where facts and, more elusively, the truth are considered valuable commodities. In 2003 he wrote a story for us about illegals getting fake drivers' licenses in the Mission when he'd used phony documents to get his own. He told me last week that he decided then that was a serious conflict of interest and wouldn't cover immigration any more. But he later wrote on the topic for the Post.

Even though I didn't know he was a lawbreaker when he worked for me, and he left the paper in 2004, his story lands me a little more directly in the atrociously rudderless but vicious debate on immigration reform.

After Jose's essay was published on the New York Times website yesterday, detailing his deception in getting heady jobs here, at the Washington Post and the Huffington Post - and snagging exclusive access to Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg for a New Yorker profile - I have to wonder:

Am I a dupe? A felon - at least according to a tough new Alabama law that might find me guilty of "harboring" Jose when he was in my office the other day (I also bought him coffee)? Or have I unwittingly supported a potentially powerful new movement in the push for immigration reform?

[Paladin2]

"...facts and, more elusively, the truth are considered valuable commodities...."

LOL

[Ann Archy]

Phil needs another bite from a Komodo dragon to get some sense into his liberal airhead.

[RJL]

PHIL BRONSTEIN: I was duped by Jose Vargas, illegal immigrant

I call BS.

If Bronstein knew Jose was an illegal, Bronstein would have kissed him.

[Liz]

Hey, Phil---how many identities does your guy have?

Illegal Jose Madrigal, the Washington state rapist, had some 30 identities.

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REFERENCE Hayward, California woman charged in mass thefts of IDs
Henry K. Lee / Copyright San Francisco Chronicle. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Oakland Police Dept Mug Shot: Mishel Caviness, Hayward, accused of
running a large-scale operation devoted to stealing people's identities.

HAYWARD, CALIFORNIA -- A Hayward woman has been charged with numerous felony counts for allegedly running an identity-theft operation that created fake Social Security and California identification cards, checks and credit cards. Mishel Caviness, 40, was arrested after an investigation by Oakland police and the U.S. Secret Service.

The probe began when an Oakland city employee reported in January that someone was fraudulently cashing her checks, according to police Officer Ryan Goodfellow and court records. Caviness was identified with the help of surveillance-camera footage from Bay Area stores, police said.

A search of her apartment on the 21000 block of Foothill Boulevard in Hayward last week uncovered a printing operation capable of making fake checks and credit cards, police said. Also found were 900 blank credit cards, personal information belonging to as many as 1,000 people, blank checks and computers, police said.

Alameda County prosecutors charged Caviness with forgery, identity theft, forgery of a driver's license and grand theft. She has a previous conviction for welfare fraud and told police that she is disabled and unemployed. She is being held at Santa Rita Jail in Dublin in lieu of $325,000 bail.

SOURCE http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/05/16/BAPP1JGPTT.DTL#ixzz1MotxGM5R Page C - 3 of the San Francisco Chronicle