• Jon Entine, No Crime But Prejudice: Fischer Homes, the Immigration Fiasco, and Extra-Judicial Prosecution, Ashland, Ohio: TFG Books, 2009, 197 pages, $12.95

This is a revenge book. Americans who are victimized by government officials rarely obtain anything resembling justice. They almost never are compensated for the great personal and financial losses they suffer when compelled to defend themselves against crimes they did not commit. All they can do is to speak out, telling others the shocking truth that our legal system has become a Sword of Damocles poised over the head of peaceful Americans.

No Crime But Prejudice is the only revenge that businessman Henry Fischer and his employees will get for the thuggish treatment they endured at the hands of federal authorities who targeted his homebuilding company for its alleged violations of the federal law against employing “undocumented workers.” Against long odds and a legal deck stacked in favor of the government, Fischer Homes managed to survive a harrowing persecution that could easily have destroyed the firm — an attack launched just to show that the Bush administration was “getting tough” on businesses that employed illegal aliens.

The book’s author, Jon Entine (a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute), effectively tells the ugly story and readers may want to have a punching bag around as he digs into the nasty details. They’ll probably get mad enough to want to hit something.

The great housing bubble was still expanding in 2006 and Fischer Homes was very busy building houses and condominiums in northern Kentucky. The firm used many subcontractors for various elements of the construction work. Under federal law, those subcontractors were obligated to employ only “legal” workers. Individuals who produced credible documentation regarding their “right” to work in the United States could not be interrogated further by employers about their immigration status.

Fischer’s subcontractors affirmed that they employed only “legal” workers. Quite a few of those workers looked as though they might be from Mexico or Central America, but that also could be said about many U.S. citizens. Fischer had done all it could legitimately to protect itself against possible charges of violating the law.

Nevertheless, the decision was made inside the bowels of the federal government to go after Fischer. Entine credibly speculates that officials in the Bush administration targeted the company because it was large enough to enable the government to say that it seriously was cracking down on the supposed “illegal worker crisis” but not so large that it might put up a vigorous defense. That is one of the book’s most important insights: Government officials abuse the justice system in order to score points with easily manipulated voters.

The first step in the attack was a piece of rank deception. Posing as local law enforcement officers, Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel went to several Fischer construction sites in January 2006, pretending to be searching for a murder suspect named Raul Rodriguez, who was rumored to be doing construction work in the area. That was the cover for the operation, which was to get one or more Fischer supervisors to say (for a hidden microphone) anything that could be construed as showing that they knew that some of the workers were illegal. All they got was some joking banter about the possibility that some of the workers were illegal, but that was sufficient.

Rather than calmly investigate, the feds’ next move was a vicious, military-style raid in which four Fischer supervisors were arrested early in the morning, led away to black SUVs in chains in front of their terrified families. Oh yes — also in front of TV cameras. The media had, of course, been tipped off. ICE wanted maximum exposure and favorable commentary on its “toughness.” The company’s headquarters also was raided.

Federal prosecutors subsequently informed Henry Fischer that unless he agreed to admit wrongdoing and pay a large fine, they would ruin him. They figured that he’d cave in and give them the publicity victory they craved. Instead, he hired a lawyer who dug into the government’s case and found it remarkably shaky, including evidence that the feds had doctored the recorded conversations.

As Fischer refused to concede, prosecutors resorted to increasingly despicable tactics, such as telling the supervisors that unless they agreed to tell the right “story” in court — lie to take down the company but save their own skin — they’d be in prison for a long time. But neither Fischer nor his employees broke, and rather than face defeat in court, prosecutors moved for a dismissal of the charges.

Entine doesn’t take on the big question that underlies this and so many similar cases: Should the government have power to criminalize contracts between employers and “illegal” workers? He didn’t, so I will. In a free society, people may contract with others as they see fit. Criminalizing contracts, to say nothing of Gestapo-like raids, means we no longer have a free society.