Angela-Martin-Muli who was sentenced to 41 months in jail
The Carmelite nuns in Pewaukee were planning to use their health fund to remodel the monastery’s infirmary, fitting it to be wheelchair accessible for the order’s elderly members.
Instead, the cloistered order gave $815,000 to what the nuns thought were a down-and-out brother and sister from Africa who said they had fled political oppression.
The pair really were a married couple who made $55,000 a year and rented a pair of apartments in Illinois, including one on Chicago’s swank Gold Coast. They took the nuns’ money and about $300,000 from other religious groups, blowing most of the cash in casinos, according to records.
The couple also damaged the trust the nuns, priests and others will have for those who next knock on their doors looking for help, according to the federal judge who sentenced Angela Martin-Mulu on Thursday.
“You have undercut the trust of each of your victims,” U.S. District Judge Charles Clevert said, “all for the fleeting pleasure of gambling and enjoying the bright lights, noise and commotion of casinos.”
Clevert sentenced Martin-Mulu to 41 months in prison.
Martin-Mulu, 36, and her husband, Edward Bosire, 40, have agreed to pay $981,000 in restitution. Bosire will be sentenced in February.
Martin-Mulu and Bosire came to the U.S. in 1999 under temporary visas and were granted asylum in 2007. They targeted monasteries, churches and other religious groups, saying they were homeless siblings who would be killed if they were deported to Kenya.
On Christmas 2004, the couple visited a Pewaukee monastery of the Discalced Carmelite nuns. A month later, they visited again, asking for money to pay rent, medical bills, tuition and an “international fine,” according to documents.
A head nun asked to make payments directly to medical providers, but Martin-Mulu said the doctors would not provide bills because the two were in the country illegally.
Martin-Mulu said their father was a government official in Kenya who had been assassinated along with two bodyguards, which was untrue.
The couple also scammed a dozen other groups, said Assistant U.S. Attorney Gordon Giampietro.
“Given an opportunity for a new life, she cynically took advantage of the faithful,” he said.
Giampietro presented a letter from a priest in Kenya who said Martin-Mulu ran a scam there. He also read from a letter of a religious leader here who said his 11-year-old daughter had taken money from her piggy bank to give to the fraudsters.
Martin-Mulu’s attorney, Susan Karaskiewicz, said her client suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder. She was born into privilege, but her father repeatedly had to protect his daughter from his tribe’s brutal ritual of female genital mutilation. Martin-Mulu was kidnapped, beaten and tortured, Karaskiewicz said.
After her father died, Karaskiewicz said, Martin-Mulu grew desperate and found comfort in gambling.
Martin-Mulu told Clevert “the walls collapsed” on her and her husband in the U.S. as they struggled, waiting for naturalization. She apologized.
“I have done things that are not proper for a human being to do,” she said.
Martin-Mulu may be deported after prison, but her crime does not mandate removal.
Source-The Milwaukee Sentinel
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