The owners of a dozen 7-Eleven stores on Long Island maintained a “modern-day plantation system” of illegal immigrants to provide cheap labor for their Slurpee empire, federal authorities charged yesterday.
A wealthy immigrant who has hobnobbed with former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf was among those busted in the operation, which allegedly included stores on Long Island and in Virginia.
Farrukh Baig, 57, allegedly masterminded a long-running scheme that forced dozens of illegal aliens to kick back most of their pay and live in dismal Suffolk County boarding houses in exchange for jobs selling Big Gulps in ritzy towns, including Sag Harbor and Greenport.
The workers, mostly from Pakistan and the Philippines, routinely clocked 100 hours a week behind the counter, for which they were paid only $350 to $500 in cash — about one-quarter of what they had earned, according to the feds.
The scam helped generate more than $180 million in receipts at 14 stores run by Baig, his wife and seven others indicted yesterday, with the profits paying for fancy homes and cars, court papers charge.
New York Homeland Security Investigations Special Agent-in-Charge James T. Hayes Jr. said the defendants “repeatedly and without remorse exploited the very employees who toiled for long hours to make their franchises profitable.”
To cover up the operation, Baig and the others allegedly used the stolen IDs of American citizens — including three dead people, an 8-year-old child and a US Coast Guard cadet — to fraudulently process their payrolls through 7-Eleven’s computerized system.
”Inside of this familiar red-, green- and orange- striped facade — beside the coffee and the Big Gulps — [a] decidedly un-American practice was going on,” Brooklyn US Attorney Loretta Lynch said.
Seven of those indicted yesterday are members of Baig’s family, including his wife, Bushra, with whom he shares a palatial, contemporary-style house in swanky Head of the Harbor on Long Island’s North Shore.
Court papers say most of the relatives are naturalized citizens but “maintain strong family ties” to Pakistan, where they travel regularly and have “participated in social events” with Musharraf, the former army chief and president who’s facing charges related to the 2007 assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.
In a statement, 7-Eleven said it “has cooperated with the government’s investigation” and “will take aggressive actions to audit the employment status of all its franchisees’ employees.”