New York Woman Found Guilty of Employing Illegal Immigrant

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But because the jury didn’t find George guilty of keeping Mathai for financial gain, the original charge, George will not be liable for the wages, AP reported.

George reportedly used Mathai as a domestic, cook and babysitter by the family for up to 17 hours a day, seven days a week from October 2005 through May 2011. The government claimed her agreed-upon salary was $1,000 per month. Her late husband, Mathai George, was a native of India who built a hotel and real estate development business and was killed along with their 11-year-old son and another man when their private plane crashed after takeoff.

Earlier on March 7, jurors asked Judge Sharpe to re-hear testimony in which George possibly referred to Valsamma Mathai as “the maid,” Albany Times Union reported. Mathai had testified that she slept in a closet, worked long days without vacation, days off or sick time and wasn’t allowed to leave the palatial stone mansion on a cliff overlooking the Mohawk River.

The Troy Record reported that on the witness stand, George told the court she never gave servant duties to Mathai, saying her family took the woman in as a favor to a pastor they knew.

The pastor asked the family if they would help out a woman living in a shelter who had split from a romantic situation. “Whatever she did, she did on her own,” the paper quoted George as saying. “There were no assignments. I never gave her a list. I treated her like family.”

George said she never asked Mathai about her passport or visa in the 6-1/2 years she worked for the family and also denied that there was ever an agreement by anyone in the family to pay Mathai $1,000 per month. The AP reported that the case surfaced when one of Mathai’s sons in India, Shiju Mathai, called the National Human Trafficking Resources Center in 2011.

But during the trail, George told the court that a tape recording of a phone call between a woman and Shiju Mathai, which prosecutors played March 6, wasn’t her voice, but did not say who she thought the voice belonged to. On the call, the woman warns Shiju Mathai there could be dire consequences, even jail time, for his mother if she were to tell authorities about working in the United States.

George testified that she was left in desperate financial straits when her husband died in 2009. She said she knew nothing of his business dealings, including the arrangement to have Valsamma Mathai live with them, because he required her to stick to her duties as his wife and mother of their six children and severely punished her if she tried to make any decisions in the home.

But Assistant U.S. Attorney Rick Belliss said Annie George was an intelligent woman with a graduate degree in pharmacy who, even if she didn’t directly know Valsamma Mathai’s immigration status, was smart enough to figure it out, AP said.

After the verdict, Defense Attorney Mark Sacco told the Saratogian that his client was devastated by the verdict. He said George was focused on taking care of her five children and feels somewhat vindicated from the charge she was mistreating someone. “We’re disappointed,” Sacco told the paper.

Valsamma Mathai, who was not in court on March 8, came to the United States legally on a visa and stayed with another family after her husband died of cancer, leaving her the sole provider for her two sons and ailing mother. When she left that family her status was illegal because it violated the terms of the visa, the AP report quoted Belliss as saying.