Luisa Medrano, the accused smuggler of immigrants who worked at her three bars in Union City and Guttenberg, received a sentence a week ago Thursday of three years probation and no jail time. It is widely believed that she got out of the possible 24 to 30 months in prison by testifying against small-town Guttenberg Mayor David Delle Donna and his wife Anna, with whom Medrano was friends. Medrano said she gave the couple gifts and cash. Putting the Delle Donnas in jail added another politician to former U.S. Attorney Christopher Christie’s list of convictions of corrupt officials in New Jersey.
However, some believe the price in this case was too high, and that Medrano’s relatively light sentence can be used as a campaign issue when Christie runs for governor this year. The 2006 indictment against Medrano alleges that she conspired with others “to provide and obtain the labor and services of persons by threats of serious harm to and physical restraint to those persons and other persons” and “to recruit and smuggle into the United States young Honduran females; to force these females to work in the bars in the Hudson County, New Jersey area; and to profit from the labor and services rendered by these females as they attempted to satisfy smuggling debts owed to the defendants and their co-conspirators.”
In the New York Daily News in 2006, Christie was quoted as saying, “One 15-year-old was beaten so badly blood vessels were broken in her eyes and a 14-year-old was beaten with a belt that raised welts all over her body.”
In this weekend’s North Bergen and Hoboken editions of the Reporter newspapers, the new mayor of Guttenberg, as well as the Delle Donnas’ son and David Delle Donna’s mother, express their disgust with Medrano’s sentencing.
“She pleaded guilty to harboring illegal aliens … and my parents are sitting in jail for receiving a dog and bottles of Grand Marnier from a friend,” says the Delle Donnas’ son.
Check out the story HERE starting this Sunday.
For more information, read Medrano’s indictment HERE and the Delle Donna indictment HERE.