On Saturday 30th May at 2pm, a new series of the multi-award-winning Documentary on One kicks off on RTÉ Radio 1. The first documentary to be broadcast in the new series, Documentary on One: The Loophole, brings listeners on a transatlantic journey between Ireland and America to investigate the details of one of the biggest green card scams of recent times.
In 2005, word quickly spread through Irish communities in America that a visiting professor and attorney at Yale Law School called Ralph Cucciniello had found a loophole in the immigration system that would make it attainable for the undocumented to get a green card. For some 50,000 Irish living in America illegally, this was huge. This was what they had been waiting for.
At the time, there had been little progress for those lobbying for immigration reform since the Donnelly visa program in the late 1980s, which bestowed green cards on several thousand Irish, and the Morrison scheme, which legalised some 48,000 Irish during its 1991 – 1994 existence.
Living in the shadows, avoiding the law, many of the undocumented Irish in America at the time had arrived on J1 or holiday visas and overstayed. They had built lives there – jobs, partners, friends, sometimes children – but they could never let their guard down and they couldn’t return home to Ireland. Now, here was a chance for them to obtain legal status.
The process seemed straightforward. Clients would meet Ralph Cucciniello in Yale’s world-renowned Law Library, where he would explain everything. All that had to be done was file some paperwork, attend a medical exam, have your fingerprints taken… and hand over $5,000.
A lot of money, yes, but this loophole meant that they would be able to emerge from the shadows and live legally and openly in America. They could go back to Ireland to visit family and friends. They could pay taxes and access health care. And this scheme was being run by the Immigration Clinic at the prestigious Yale Law School… there was nothing to worry about, was there?
Except for one thing. Ralph Cucciniello is not a lawyer. Nor is he a professor at Yale Law School. He is a con artist with a rap sheet dating back as far as the 1970s, when he ran a scam on his own family. He came to serve as a volunteer research assistant for one of Yale’s actual professors, saw his opportunity, and seized it.
Ralph Cucciniello collected millions of dollars in ‘fees’ from hundreds of illegal immigrants who came to Yale to meet him over a two year period between 2005 and 2007, many of them Irish.
Documentary on One: The Loophole tells the story of this cataclysmic scam through the stories of those who were closest to it: the victims whose dreams were shattered, the Irish-American private investigator who sunk her teeth into it and the inspector at the State Attorney’s office whose own grandfather’s plight as an illegal Irish alien spurred him on to go after Cucciniello with every resource he had.
During the making of Documentary on One: The Loophole, documentary maker Sheena Madden accompanies the woman whose bravery and quick-thinking helped to put Cucciniello behind bars on a journey back to Yale Law School for the first time since it all came crashing down around her.
This is not just a story about money. This is a story about people; about how their dreams can be so easily shattered and how they can find the strength to pick up the pieces and start again.
Narrated and produced by Sheena Madden
Production supervision by Ciaran Cassidy
Sound supervision by Mark McGrath
RTÉ Radio 1, Saturday 30 May,2pm