Pitfalls for Parents
International adoption has become big business, but regulation still lags
The dispute with West and the other defendants in the lawsuit is not the only source of contention involving Latrace. In 1995, a South Carolina adoption agency filed a criminal complaint against her. The local police department incident report says that the owner of the adoption agency accused Latrace of hoarding "clothes, shoes, medicine, etc." that were supposed to have been delivered to an orphanage in Vietnam. A judge ordered Latrace to complete 40 hours of community service; she did so, and the charges against her were dropped. Latrace blames the incident on a custody dispute with her husband, and says she always intended to deliver the items to Vietnam.
There were other issues as well, and like many in the often-confusing world of international adoptions, they are tangled. Tedi Hedstrom, the owner of Tedi Bear Adoptions, worked with Latrace during the period in which West was attempting to adopt. Hedstrom voluntarily relinquished her license to Florida authorities in March 2003 after the state found several violations, including having personnel files that lacked proof that workers had been screened or met training requirements. But Hedstrom, who now works in Georgia, blames Latrace. "My agency had only one registered complaint in seven years; we had an excellent reputation," she says. "After I began working with Mai-Ly, we had approximately 30 complaints all directly related to her within a very short period, a couple of months. I believe that choosing to work with Mai-Ly Latrace was the worst business decision I have ever made in my entire life." Latrace says Hedstrom caused her own difficulties and points out that the state's complaint never mentions her.
Adopting a child from overseas is anything but simple. Federal agents who investigated a Seattle adoption agency run by two sisters, for instance, documented evidence of visa fraud and money laundering. The agents spent more than two years tracking international money flows and searching Cambodia for witnesses and found that children were being bought from their Cambodian parents and brought to the United States with fraudulent identification documents. Some Cambodians thought they were sending their children to an orphanage school and could always pick them up. "There were huge amounts of money being made, being promised to orphanages in Cambodia, that was instead being diverted for bribes and for luxury items," says Michael Barr, the lead prosecutor. In the course of the investigation, agents found that "facilitators would line up several different groups of parents for a child," says Bill Strassberger, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, which now handles immigration crimes.
Happy clients. In the Florida lawsuit, West says, she spoke out because of similar issues. She says she stuck her neck out "and sometimes you get it cut off. I'm paying tens of thousands of dollars to say what is true." Thuy, the child she had initially been set to adopt, is living today in Saipan with Judi Mosley who is also named in Latrace's lawsuit. West says that several months after Thuy had been adopted by Mosley, Latrace wrote West, stating that Thuy and her sister were now living with a social worker and that "Thuy is still receiving medical care." Latrace maintains that she conducted her relationship with West properly and that she relied on a Vietnamese social worker for the information she conveyed to West.
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