Photo: Courtesy / Courtesy
For: Manuel Ocaño / Special for Real America News Updated 10 May 2022, 0: 12 am EDT
Now a former Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) officer, Felix Cisneros pleaded guilty in Los Angeles to 20 serious charges of corruption, including repeatedly allowing members of organized crime to re-enter the country, corruption and even tax evasion.
Murrieta’s former resident agent, 48 years old, is scheduled to an appointment in federal court in Los Angeles for the first of August to learn his sentence, which he hopes to reduce by pleading guilty, however, the charges he accepted carry a sentence of about 30 years in prison.
The charges were formulated based on inquiries from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and the Office of the Inspector General, an internal affairs division of the Department of Homeland Security.
In court it was reported that over a period of 18 months that began in September of 2015, Cisneros accepted cash, checks, private jet travel, luxury hotel stays, meals, and other items of value as bribes.
The bribes were given to the agent by a person identified in court documents as “Individual 1”, who was associated with a criminal organization . Cisneros received approximately $100,000 on checks and gifts from that individual at 2015 and 2016.
Cisneros accepted the cash and other bribes while working as a special agent at HSI, and, in exchange, Cisneros performed a series of official acts requested by Individual 1.
For example, he agreed to a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) database for information on a German citizen identified as WR and then confirmed to Individual 1 that he removed a “hit” on WR, “indicating derogatory information was removed”;
He also placed an alert in a law enforcement database for an address associated with an illegal marijuana grow operation so that Cisneros can know the interest of law enforcement and warn Individual 1;
He got a ca Official DHS letter signed by an HSI Assistant Special Agent in Charge to parole Individual 1’s brother-in-law to the United States from Mexico, and then provide updates on the brother-in-law’s asylum claim.
In addition Gathered information about an associate of Individual 1 whose house had been searched by the police and then provided Individual 1 with information about the investigation.
Other than receiving bribes in cash, checks, and alleged gifts, Cisneros also underreported his total income on federal income tax returns by at least $12,000 for the year 2015 and at least $73,404 For the year 2016, according to court documents.
Cisneros grew up in La Puente and in the nineties he served four years in the army.
Upon returning from serving in the armed forces, Félix Cisneros signed up as a border patrol agent, where he worked for approximately ten years, and then went on to being an HSI special agent.
It was as a federal DHS agent that Cisneros began changing databases to help members of Armenian organized crime and their relatives.
According to information in court, a lawyer of Armenian origin from Los Angeles was the intermediary between the federal official and the foreign persons or immigrants from Armenia who benefited from the acts of Cisneros.
The lawyer of Armenian origin approached Cisneros when the agent was indebted in credit cards and mortgage payments, he began to cover the cards and monthly payments that he owed the official and, at least in one year, covered more than $93,000 dollars.
When the lawyer of Armenian origin was arrested for corruption, both he and Cisneros had agreed to declare that the money with which the agent’s debts were paid were personal loans, which the agent was going to pay off when his financial situation improved.
However, the Armenian-born lawyer later told the FBI that they were payments he had given as part of the bribes to the officer.
During cutoff, revealed that the bribes were not just in cash, but, for example, in a private jet flight from Los Angeles to Las Vegas to see a Manny Pacquiao boxing performance in the front row.
It was also mentioned that the bribes of the lawyer of Armenian origin could not have been limited to corrupting Félix Cisneros, but also an FBI official assigned do to the city of San Francisco.