All good things come at a price. As expected, the fall of the Iron Curtain bore not only sweet but bitter fruit.

Previously [during the Cold War years], immigrants from the Soviet Union were automatically qualified to enter the United States as political refugees; now that the Iron Curtain has fallen, they are on par with citizens from most countries and must prove that they are eligible to be granted asylum in America.

Because attaining asylum is a complicated but not impossible process, a multitude of offices offering assistance, for a price, popped up all across America. However, their worthy services can be interpreted by U.S. authorities in a variety of ways.

Take Steven and Helen Mahoney, a married couple who previously worked in the field of immigration, and who were recently arraigned and sentenced. The federal prosecutor did not like that the couple, who in their previous life were known as Sergei Timofeev and Yelena Guryeva, advised their clients to identify themselves as gays and Jews, in order to request asylum in the United States, under the pretense that they were subject to harassment and even torture in their abandoned homeland.

Suggesting this to suffering homosexuals, Jews or Lamaists [reformed Tibetan Buddhists] is not prohibited, but the Mahoneys (who separated in 2007, but had not divorced) instructed their clients to pretend to be members of same-sex relationships or persecuted believers.

I am writing this without the use of "supposedly" or "allegedly" because Timofeev and Guryeva pled guilty and began to cooperate with the investigators immediately after their arrest.

The authorities do not usually make a show of such cooperation. Perhaps this is why a portion of the court documents are classified at the request of the prosecution and are not available in an open database of the Federal Court of the Western District of Washington State. When I come across the word "SEALED," that is "classified," on someone's dossier, I conclude that the defendant most likely cooperated with the authorities. This is often the case.

Based on other documents, it appears that the couple voluntarily helped investigators sort through 37 boxes of seized immigration papers and separate false requests for asylum from legitimate ones. It became apparent that Steven Mahoney had helped a minimum of 99 people file false requests for asylum. His office, Mahoney and Associates, took anywhere from $1,000 to $4,000 from each client.

Thanks to the couple's cooperation, prosecutors saved hundreds of man-hours, something which was taken into account when the court sentenced the two. It is unclear if their help led to the arrest of individuals who were granted asylum after lying about their sexual orientation. It is also unclear how the prosecution came upon our heroes. Were they accused by an envious party? Or did the prosecution decide to verify someone's sexual orientation?

The court documents do not name the countries where the fraudulent gays and other sufferers were subject to repression; they only mention that the incidents described took place in Eastern European countries; as well, the documents do not contain the applicants' last names. For example, in a two-page indictment one of their names was encoded as Z.T. Another, who posed as homosexual and claimed that a return to his homeland would "result in [his] being attacked or crippled," is disguised as G.V.

In October of last year, Barry Flegenheimer, Yelena's public defender, sent the judge a 24-page petition asking him not to sentence the native of Bashkiria to jail time and to limit her sentence to two years of probation and 180 days of house arrest. The petition was accompanied by letters from the defendant's relatives and boyfriend. The lawyer asked the judge to take into account that she merely played a secondary role in the scheme; that is, she was not involved in her husband's office organization, having come to the office only in its third year of operation and almost never dealt with clients. According to Flegenheimer, Yelena played a mostly secretarial role.

In defense of the Mahoneys, their lawyer argued that they had stopped all activity by 2007. It was exactly then that Yelena left her husband and started to earn a living by sewing and doing honest work for her previous employer, Buck & Buck. She continued to sew clothes for almshouses and wedding dresses in her garage. Yelena's lawyer mentioned that she puts in 16 hours a day at work; her husband does not pay her alimony and she has to support her son, her 62-year-old father, who can't find work because he doesn't speak English, her grandmother and her mother who, to add insult to injury, is undergoing rehabilitation.

The judge did not take the defense into account and sentenced Yelena to 6 months in prison – substantially less time than what she could have gotten – while 41-year-old Sergei received one-and-a-half years and is incarcerated in Lompoc, the infamous California prison. He should be released on the 21st of April of 2011.