Here's the first few paragraphs;
In November 2009, seven men got off a bus in Monterrey, Mexico, and made their way through the crowded and chaotic downtown to the concrete box that housed the United States Consulate.
Inside, the men told a consular officer that they had been invited to work as janitors at the Sugar Mountain ski resort in Banner Elk, North Carolina. They had gone the previous season and were returning; all they needed were their new guest worker visas, which had already been approved, and they would be on their way north.
The Monterrey consulate is one of the world’s busiest, processing more than 400,000 visas each year, and it’s the single largest issuer of the kind the men were awaiting: H-2 visas, given to unskilled “guest workers” for temporary jobs in everything from tobacco farms to landscaping to shellfish peeling. The consulate cranks out an average of nearly 300 every single day.
But on this day, the State Department employee hesitated, then placed a call to the ski resort. It had been a warmer autumn than usual, and Sugar Mountain wasn’t yet open to the public; the consular officer was told that the resort needed snowmakers, not janitors. Stranger still was that the guest worker visa application, filed by a year-old company called Winterscapes, proposed sending nearly 250 Mexican janitors to two small ski resorts in the Blue Ridge Mountains that winter.
Something wasn’t right.
The visas were denied. And the consular official dashed off an urgent cable raising serious doubts about Winterscapes. Two months later, federal agents launched Operation Hammerlock, a criminal investigation that quickly grew, spreading over multiple states and encompassing several federal law enforcement agencies as its focus shifted to the country boy in North Carolina who helped line up the visas.
That man, a former state employee by the name of Stan Eury, is widely credited as the largest importer of H-2 guest workers in American history: a legal coyote who saw in the complicated crenellations of federal immigration law a way to expand a little-known program into a giant. He lobbied Washington, worked the courts, and negotiated the underworld of Mexican recruiters in order to provide customers across the country the cheap foreign labor they wanted — and in the process build himself a vast and lucrative empire.
