Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, who has railed against loose borders and lax immigration policies during his four years as the state’s top lawman, went into business in 2017 with a Houston labor broker named Marco Pesquera, who had become rich by helping his clients defraud the immigration system to import more than 1,000 Mexican laborers to the Gulf South.

They set out to make millions by winning federal approval to bring in hundreds of skilled Mexican construction workers to help build a massive liquefied natural gas terminal in Cameron Parish.

The effort involved three firms with ties to the attorney general: two firms owned by Jeff Landry, and one owned by his brother, Benjamin Landry, and a business associate, documents and emails show.

+2 H-2B guest worker visas criticized from the left and right; employers clamor for foreign workers American employers have for years relied on the H-2B visa program to temporarily import seasonal laborers for any number of jobs. Migrant labo…

The companies won federal approval to bring in more than 300 welders and pipe fitters from Mexico, based on applications that included several dubious claims and documents that were misleading at best and flat-out bogus at worst, according to records provided by Pesquera.

Pesquera, 46, pleaded guilty last year to a conspiracy charge for years of visa fraud unrelated to his work with the Landry companies. There’s no evidence that either Landry brother or their associates knew that Pesquera was under criminal investigation when they contracted with him, and neither of the Landry brothers nor their associates have been charged in the case.

Before beginning a three-year federal prison sentence in December, Pesquera shared hundreds of pages of visa applications, internal email exchanges and other records with The Times-Picayune and The Advocate.

Visa fraudster Marco Pesquera was in federal crosshairs amid deal with Jeff Landry companies Marco Pesquera’s world, which was built on lying to the U.S. government, had begun to unravel by summer 2015, two years before he partnered wi…

Details revealed in the cache of documents either match or align with publicly available government records, contracts and agreements filed in subsequent legal disputes among players in the Cameron LNG project.

Though the Cameron project did not figure into the charges against Pesquera, he says he used the same playbook with the trio of firms that he had employed for years: feigning a temporary need for foreign labor, and using shell companies and invented work orders to better the odds of federal approval. The documents show that the companies manipulated the guest-worker visa program in a plan Pesquera says was predicated on not hiring American welders or pipe fitters.

Their product was skilled Mexican labor, federally approved. Their profit derived from the savings the industrial contractors stood to reap by paying far less for Mexican welders than they would have had to pay Americans. Another benefit: The Mexican workers were tied to the job under H-2B visa rules, meaning they could not quit for a better deal. Pesquera pegged the group’s expected profits from the nine-month work contract at several million dollars.

Timeline of key events in the Landry brothers' business dealings with Marco Pesquera Jeff Landry has been an elected official for most of the last decade. He has also owned several businesses during that time. Here are some of …

The federal Department of Labor declined to answer detailed questions about the companies’ applications and the validity of the underlying documents, saying, “The department has referred this matter” to its Office of the Inspector General.

A $17 million deal

The deal Pesquera and the Landry brothers landed with CB&I, the prime contractor, was worth $17 million at one point, documents provided by Pesquera show, though it’s not clear how much of that would have been profit.

Pesquera, with contacts in several Mexican towns, would help find the welders and pipe fitters. The three companies owned by the Landry brothers would furnish them visas, pay their way to the Gulf Coast and cut their paychecks.

The builder, Cameron LNG, signed a contract with Pesquera’s company for the labor; the three companies were his subcontractors. The deal largely succeeded, though it would be Pesquera’s last.

He is now housed at a low-security federal prison in Oakdale.

Pesquera shared the documents, and his account of the arrangement, with reporters in hopes that federal authorities in Louisiana will make a case against Jeff Landry — and reduce Pesquera's prison term as a reward.

His attorney, Chip Lewis, of Houston, said he presented details of Pesquera’s dealings with the Landrys to federal prosecutors in Texas. The lead prosecutor, William Hagen, told the newspaper he declined to offer Pesquera a cooperation agreement on account of his rich history of making or encouraging false statements to authorities.

The documents reveal numerous steps Jeff Landry and his associates took to conceal ties among the three companies they deployed; to keep Pesquera and his company in the shadows; and to inflate their claims of having the “temporary” need for foreign labor that federal labor regulations require.

The three firms tied to Jeff Landry and his brother were:

Evergreen Contractors LLC, a company Jeff Landry created in late 2011 during his first year as a U.S. congressman. Landry has listed himself as the firm’s sole owner since 2015. A longtime Landry business associate, Juan Castillo, signs paperwork as president or vice president. Benjamin Landry, Jeff Landry's brother, has represented the firm in legal filings. In state ethics filings, Jeff Landry — who is paid $110,000 a year as attorney general — says Evergreen made him a total of somewhere between $125,000 and $255,000 over four years, from 2015 to 2018.

Prime Response LLC, registered by Benjamin Landry in 2015. Jeff Landry listed himself as the sole owner in his state ethics filings from 2015 to 2017. The company is missing from his most recent disclosures, which cover 2018, but Secretary of State's Office records do not show any changes in status. Jeff Landry has never reported any earnings from the company in his ethics filings.

Southern Innovative Services LLC, created in 2005 by Benjamin Landry and Luke Delahoussaye, who are frequent business partners. Delahoussaye lists himself as the company’s vice president. Benjamin Landry owns a stake and has signed legal filings on the firm’s behalf.

Emails make clear that the Landry camp picked those three LLCs because they seemed best positioned on paper to score guest-worker visas from the feds, not because of any experience in industrial construction.

"I am confident that we can work out whatever mixture or characteristics (of companies) are needed to remedy any issues with the visa application process," Benjamin Landry wrote Pesquera on May 30, 2017, a week before the Landry brothers’ companies sent their first round of paperwork to the Department of Labor.

Less than six months later, Evergreen Contractors got the green light to reel in 195 welders and pipe fitters from Mexico; Southern Innovative Services received approval for 113 foreign ironworkers.

Jeff Landry declined to respond to an expansive list of questions from the newspaper over the past few weeks about his foray into the guest-worker program and the relationships among the companies.

He did, however, provide a few emails related to the companies’ eventual breakup with Pesquera, including a message that matched one of many emails the visa fraudster provided to the newspaper.

Castillo and Delahoussaye, who operates Southern Innovative Services alongside Benjamin Landry, also didn’t respond to detailed questions from the newspaper about the project. Nor did Benjamin Landry.

Jeff Landry’s campaign spokesman, Brent Littlefield, acknowledged the business dealings with Pesquera but declined to answer specific questions.

In a statement last month, Littlefield said Evergreen “was asked to help fix a peakload problem inhibiting the progress” of the Cameron LNG project when it sought the guest-worker visas for welders and pipe fitters. He did not say who made the request of Evergreen.

“Evergreen Contractors assisted in that process. Just like workers who assist our Louisiana farmers on a temporary basis during harvest season, these were short-term, peakload, temporary workers to keep the larger economic development on track,” the statement read.

“Jeff supports legal immigration and policies, not illegal immigration; a distinction which is lost by many liberals. The H-2B program required even temporary jobs be advertised and promoted for local workers, that the jobs be available for local workers, which is what happened in this case.”

Pesquera said the Landry-tied companies did not hire a single American for the work and never planned to.

Louisiana Workforce Commission records show 113 local applicants put in for welding or pipe fitting jobs with Evergreen after they were posted on a state-run job board — as required by the feds. But the company never reported whether any were offered work.

Littlefield refused to answer repeated questions about whether Evergreen hired any American welders or pipe fitters.

But Littlefield said companies Jeff Landry owns had created more than 3,500 jobs for U.S. citizens over the past decade. He did not say which companies or what sorts of jobs they were.

In a subsequent statement over the weekend, Jeff Landry defended his involvement in the visa program.

“Any suggestion by anyone, including the editors, reporters, or publishers of this paper, that I or anyone associated with running a business I own would knowfully engage in deceitful or unfair business practices is false,” Landry’s statement read.

“It is evident that the authors of this story have little understanding of business based on the questions submitted or the complex labor needs of our economy which require increased skilled labor. The companies I own, and have owned long before I sought political office, will continue to standby the work and services performed in order to keep our economy moving.”

In fact, records show Jeff Landry formed two of the three companies that applied for the guest-worker visas after he first took public office. Landry went on to praise his brother, saying he had “helped expose a fraudulent business and end their attempt to injure businesses in Louisiana.”

Benjamin Landry broadcast a claim that he had exposed Pesquera as a fraud in a 10-minute video that Jeff Landry posted Wednesday afternoon on Facebook and Twitter accounts. The attorney general’s brother said “officials of the U.S. government” approached him with concerns about Pesquera after their business deal went south.

Jeff Landry and his brother attack story before publication in unusual pre-emptive strike In an unusual pre-emptive move, state Attorney General Jeff Landry posted a video Wednesday that sought to rebut an investigation into his bus…

But Hagen, the lead prosecutor in Pesquera’s case, said he’d never spoken to Benjamin Landry or heard from him regarding the Texas prosecution.

Facing the camera in the preemptive video, Benjamin Landry insisted that his brother “has relied on others to manage his businesses and has had minimal personal involvement” while in public office. He cast aspersions on the reporting methods of The Times-Picayune and The Advocate, also alleging a political motive behind them.

“The Advocate newspaper is on a crusade against my brother — my guess is, for no other reason than because he is a conservative,” Benjamin Landry said in the video, which says it’s paid for by Jeff Landry’s campaign.

As Louisiana’s top law enforcement officer, Jeff Landry has been an outspoken critic of local policies that he views as soft on immigrants in the country illegally. He has denounced so-called “sanctuary cities,” calling out policies in both New Orleans and Lafayette Parish on national TV while portraying loose borders as a dangerous scourge.

Benjamin Landry has refused several attempts to contact him by phone, email and in person, ignoring questions sent to him about the partnership with Pesquera and the documents he provided.

Visas hard to get

So-called H-2B visas, designed for nonagricultural jobs, are highly sought after; the U.S. government caps their number at 66,000 annually. Employers seeking the visas have to jump through a series of hoops, beginning with demonstrating they have a temporary need that can’t be filled by American workers.

Under the program, the Labor Department determines the local prevailing wage for different occupations and requires employers to pay foreign workers the same rate. But critics say the federal calculation is too low, so employers can save money by bringing in foreign nationals.

Records show at least four separate episodes in which one or more of the Jeff Landry-owned firms submitted misleading or false paperwork in support of their visa applications:

• To show they had a short-term need for more welders, Evergreen and Southern Innovative Services separately sent federal immigration and labor officials supposed contracts they had signed with a Texas company called Meridian Industrial Contractors Inc. The agreements said they would provide Meridian “fabrication and construction services, and technical assistance” at Cameron LNG job sites.

But Meridian was a fake, Pesquera said — a shell company he created months earlier. The company had no business in the Cameron project site in Hackberry — or anywhere else. Its contracts with Evergreen and Southern Innovative Services were shams, Pesquera said. Texas business filings list Pesquera as Meridian’s president.

“Michael Aragon,” identified as Meridian’s vice president in signed contracts with Evergreen and Southern Innovative Services, also was fictitious. It was an alias Pesquera said he dreamt up, signing the name himself on the contracts with the two firms.

There were reasons for the fakery, Pesquera said. Federal authorities treat staffing services differently from construction firms when it comes to temporary worker visas, limiting the kinds of jobs they can fill under the H-2B program.

The Meridian contract allowed Evergreen and Southern to present themselves to federal authorities as construction contractors needing a boost of foreign labor, while their real, legally binding contract, with Pesquera-owned Pangea Enterprises, covered only “temporary employee staffing services.” It also kept Pesquera, who was by then under federal investigation, out of sight.

The contracts signed by CB&I, the corporate construction firm handling the overall project, were likewise with Pangea, for “labor supply,” the company said.

The Landry team did not respond to questions about Meridian or any agreements they had with it.

• Documents show federal authorities repeatedly returned the visa requests to the Landry brothers’ firms because the companies had failed to show their need for foreign workers was genuine or temporary.

Evergreen had failed to satisfy the feds both that it “regularly employs” welders and pipe fitters, and that it needed hundreds of foreign workers only to “supplement its permanent staff ... due to a seasonal or short-term demand.” They asked for Evergreen’s contracts from the previous year, among other records.

In response, Evergreen sent federal regulators copies of two 2016 letters with customers, on Evergreen letterhead, laying out rates for welders and pipe fitters. The would-be client in both cases was yet another Jeff Landry-owned company, Prime Support Services.

In other words, one company entirely owned by Jeff Landry sought to show that it employed welders in the previous year by producing a rate sheet for another company entirely owned by Jeff Landry.

• For years, the three firms that applied for the foreign workers in concert had all shared the same Broussard address — a spare, two-story brickface building on St. Nazaire Road.

But that all changed on the same day — June 7, 2017 — when Evergreen, Southern Innovative Services and Prime Response all amended their corporate records with the Louisiana Secretary of State's Office, changing their addresses and in some cases their principals.

Since that date, Castillo has been listed as Evergreen’s president, and his home address in New Iberia has been listed as the LLC’s domicile. Delahoussaye’s home in an upscale Youngsville subdivision became the new headquarters for Southern Innovative Services LLC, while Benjamin Landry listed his home on a quiet St. Martinville road as Prime Response LLC’s business address.

In this case, Pesquera said he didn’t orchestrate the paper shuffle, but he said he had advised Benjamin Landry to make the companies appear unrelated.

It had already been a busy week for the Landrys and Pesquera. The day before the address changes, all three companies had fired off a flurry of requests to the Department of Labor for so-called prevailing wage determinations, department records show. It’s the first step toward applying for H-2B visas. In each case, the three companies listed the new, distinct addresses.

“One Fedex package will be used for each company’s application,” Benjamin Landry told Pesquera, in an email Pesquera provided. “Each package will be paid by cash in three separate transactions.”

Benjamin Landry also assured Pesquera in the same email that each of the three companies would use “separate physical locations for the businesses to receive individuals wanting to apply for work.”

Over the next few months, the Landry brothers’ firms presented to federal regulators as three distinct construction contractors, each claiming its own short-term crunch for ironworkers to vie for a limited number of H-2B visas.

• The documents show the companies straining to portray themselves as construction firms facing a temporary surge in demand in their submissions to federal authorities.

Evergreen Contractors “operates year round providing a range of industrial and commercial construction services,” the company told the Department of Labor after federal officials had twice questioned its application. ”Amongst the services provided, are refurbishments, fabrications and metal framing, preconstruction, structural steel construction, pre-site preparations, and contract construction.”

Yet Evergreen had never completed a basic step that any construction firm doing more than $50,000 in work is required to do in Louisiana: Register with the Louisiana State Licensing Board for Contractors — until Jeff Landry himself received a contractor’s license as the qualifying individual representing Evergreen in June 2018.

By then, the visas were nearing expiration and Evergreen’s work on the Cameron LNG project was winding down. Records in a federal civil suit brought by Pesquera’s creditors show checks totaling $4.7 million to Evergreen, representing only a portion of its receipts for the work on the plant.

“The entity who is contracted to supply labor in this amount would require licensure,” said Brad Hassert, compliance director for the Louisiana contractor board, after reviewing Department of Labor documents detailing Evergreen’s work. Operating as a contractor without a state license in Louisiana is a misdemeanor punishable by fines of up to $500 per day and up to three months in jail.

The two other firms never registered with the Louisiana board before or since seeking the H-2B visas. Neither Jeff Landry, his spokesman nor his business partners responded to questions about their status with respect to state contracting licenses.

’More tickets into the lottery’

The Department of Labor’s review of the applications included a pair of deficiency notices to Evergreen, listing its shortcomings in proving its temporary need for guest workers. But the department eventually relented.

Greg Schell, a lawyer in Florida who has worked extensively on temporary visas, said employees at the federal agency are typically too overworked to sort through a complicated web of business entities to root out any possible chicanery. Regulators are “simply unable to probe questionable applications sufficiently to catch the games businesses are playing,” Schell said.

Pesquera said he routinely exploited that weakness, inventing employers with temporary needs and fudging elaborate contracts to get Mexican nationals into the country with work papers. The program requires workers to report to a single employer for the duration of the visa. Pesquera said he often sent them elsewhere, to do other things.

Getting them here in numbers required tinkering with the odds, Pesquera said.

The plan “was organized to avoid the least amount of 'common denominators,’ ” Pesquera said of keeping the Landry brothers’ companies separate — and distanced from his Pangea Enterprises — in the eyes of federal regulators. “The less relationship, the easier it would be for any of them or all of them to get approved.”

Schell said carefully separating the companies could also have allowed the owners to cycle the workers through each of them once their initial nine-month contracts ran out. Foreign workers can jump from one temporary visa to the next for up to three years.

“They want more tickets into the lottery, but they may also want to work these employees year-round,” said Schell. “They’ll bring them in and they’ll transfer them from one company to another.”

Dozens of the welders and pipe fitters hired by Evergreen and Southern, in fact, had already been employed by other subcontractors on the Cameron LNG project, saving the firms thousands of dollars in training, recruitment and travel costs, and consular fees, according to emails provided by Pesquera.

Cameron LNG seeking 6-year extension on proposed southwest Louisiana expansion Cameron LNG has asked federal regulators for a six-year extension to complete the construction of a proposed expansion at its Hackberry liquef…

Rotating workers through a web of shell companies to keep them on a job for years at a time was precisely the plan Pesquera said he’d cooked up with the Landry brothers’ firms, until their relationship soured months into the Cameron job.

But the first round of applications didn’t go completely according to plan. Prime Response had its applications rejected for 300 foreign welders to work at Freeport LNG, another huge liquefied natural gas plant, across the state line in Brazoria County, Texas.

Southern Innovative Services also suffered a setback. After it won federal approval for 113 workers, officials at the U.S. Consulate in Monterrey, Mexico, noticed apparent red flags with the company and moved to revoke its visa authorizations.

In the end, Evergreen was the only one of the three companies to import the Mexican laborers it’d sought.

But by spring 2018, Benjamin Landry was accusing Pesquera of bad faith over a late payment, emails provided by Pesquera show. Jeff Landry orchestrated a meeting for May 2, 2018 at the Cameron LNG job site to settle the dispute. Officials from the corporate builders leading the project were also there, according to separate sets of emails provided by both Pesquera and Jeff Landry’s spokesman.

“Benjamin Landry (via his brother the LA AG) is communicating with CLNG Chief Legal Counsel about this matter and expects a meeting to occur” among the parties the next day, Joe Elkin, an official at CB&I, wrote in an email to Pesquera on May 1.

It was at that meeting that Pesquera said he was squeezed out; the new arrangement called for the builder to pay the Landry companies directly for the Mexican labor.

Contemporaneous emails provided to the newspaper by Littlefield, Jeff Landry’s political spokesman, confirm that sequence of events.

Pesquera would soon have bigger problems: In September 2018, he was indicted and arrested.

Lewis, Pesquera’s attorney, said he presented prosecutors with a summary report of Pesquera’s dealings with the Landrys before and after his guilty plea last year on the conspiracy charge, asking for leniency as a cooperator. Lewis said he offered the same documents that he gave to the newspaper but said Hagen, the prosecutor, passed.

According to Lewis, Hagen said he knew of the Landry deal and didn’t want Pesquera’s help.

“It became clear to me that they were not interested in utilizing Marco. It is my conclusion they didn’t want him to get any reward for it,” Lewis said.

Pesquera sought cooperator status “and we refused to use him because he had credibility issues,” Hagen confirmed. He declined to discuss what he knows about Pesquera’s dealings with the Landrys.

Lewis reiterated his client’s criminality as he described Pesquera’s role in defrauding the H-2B market. But, Lewis added, he didn’t do it alone.

“Much bigger players than Marco, who are folks similarly situated as the Landrys, took advantage of this fraud,” he said. “They utilized Marco to be a buffer. And they have not been brought to justice ever.”

They “were fully in the loop,” he added.

Lewis said he didn’t want to minimize Pesquera’s role, describing his client as a mastermind, “the guy that put all this together. He’s the guy that perfected it, and everybody along the Gulf Coast that needed these specific laborers took advantage of it.”

Staff writer Ramon Antonio Vargas contributed reporting to this story.