Immigrant learns value of citizenship
 |
Nuno Vasconcellos, 41, considered a model citizen, faced deportation after an old kidnapping resurfaced when he tried to return to the United States.
Story Tools
|
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) -- Apart from an old kidnapping charge -- and for some, partly because of it -- Nuno Vasconcellos' neighbors here always considered him a model citizen. But they were wrong.
An exemplary U.S. soldier? Yes. The chief executive of a multimillion dollar business? Yes. The pride of his church and several local charities? Yes.
But a citizen? No.
During the years that he served in the Army, overcame a serious brain injury and built his business, he never got around to applying.
If only he had, that old kidnapping charge -- for holding a thief against his will, a charge the judge practically threw out of court -- would never have come back to haunt him. Instead, the man whose life resembles a Horatio Alger novel found himself fighting for the right to live in his adopted country.
By all rights, Nuno's story should begin on an island in the North Atlantic, but his injured brain holds few boyhood memories. Instead, the story begins in 1985 on a roadside somewhere between Houston and Fort Hood, Texas -- the day Staff Sgt. Nuno Vasconcellos, newly discharged from the U.S. Army, lost his past.
Murky memories
He said he remembers that day in snatches: Pulling wearily into a rest area in the middle of the night. The crunch of brass knuckles against his skull. Someone saying, "Kill him."
Mostly, he remembers the pain-- pain so severe that, weeks later, he considered finishing the job himself. It was months before he was discharged from Brackenridge Hospital in Austin with a skull missing some pieces, $1.3 million in medical bills, and only a vague idea of who he was or where he had lived for the previous 25 years.
For weeks, he had trouble holding onto day-to-day memories, he said; but he does remember some things: Walking the streets of Austin, penniless and hungry, sleeping under a highway overpass, standing in line with day laborers.
On a raw February day in 1986, so cold he still shivers when he thinks about it, he was picked up and taken to a construction site. The boss pointed to a rock-hard mountain of sand and handed him a pickax. It was heavy, he said, and days without food only added to its weight.
When the crew broke for lunch and asked him along, he just shook his head, too embarrassed to say his pockets were as empty as his stomach. How he made it through that first day, he can't say.
One boyhood memory the brass knuckles hadn't shattered was of a hungry boy begging an old woman to buy him shellfish. The boy would have to earn them, the old woman replied. Make a garden, she told him. Tend it and watch it grow, and then come back and ask again. It would be years before he discovered the old woman in the dreamlike memory was his grandmother.
At end of the first day atop the frozen mountain of sand, Nuno could buy food to eat.
Romance and riches
Not long after, he met Angela Lester and began a courtship made awkward by his poverty and shame. If he didn't have the money to go to the movies, they didn't go. He wouldn't take a penny from her, no matter how much she insisted; and for reasons she did not understand, he never talked about his family. Mostly, said Angela, "we just walked and walked."
"He was always so respectful," she said. "I was beginning to wonder if he really liked me. And he was too embarrassed to show me where he lived."
Within six months, Nuno was made superintendent at the work site, earning enough to move out of a bunkhouse where he had been living with other day laborers.
Eventually Nuno and Angela moved in together. They had no furniture, not even a bed, but it was a start. The garden was planted, Angela became pregnant and the man with no past spent 18-hour days tending to their future.
As grateful as he was to Vaughn Faulkner for giving him his start, Nuno turned down another promotion at the construction company. Instead, he took a job at Odyssey Mobile Car Wash, traveling from lot to lot in Austin washing new cars.
Two months later, the owner offered to sell the car wash business to Nuno. All he had to do was pay off $1,800 in equipment over several months. Nuno jumped at the chance to be his own boss.
Within weeks, the business went from $3,000 to $40,000 gross a month, he said, and within a year, he had built the self-proclaimed "biggest car wash in Texas," with branches in Austin, Houston, San Antonio and Dallas.
By 1990, Angela was driving a Mercedes -- not a new one, but a Mercedes nonetheless, and it needed tires.
"Did you pick up the tires?" Angela asked when he came home one night. "Yeah," he told her, "and I bought the tire shop too."
To catch a thief
To make the shop more efficient, Nuno plowed his savings into equipment. But before long, it disappeared. An employee came forward and told Nuno a former employee had sold it to feed his cocaine habit.
Angry, Nuno lured the former employee to the shop on a pretext, tied him up and strong-armed him into confessing. Then he called the police.
Police arrested the former employee, but they arrested Nuno, too. The charge: aggravated kidnapping for holding the alleged thief against his will.
Don't worry, Nuno's lawyer advised, no Texas judge will send you jail for this. He was right.
After Nuno promised never to take the law into his own hands again, Judge Jon Wisser placed him on probation for 10 years "without an adjudication of guilt."
About that time, Angela decided Nuno needed to ease up -- to take some time to find out who he was.
For Angela, from a churchgoing line of Southern landowners, "church and family are everything." Besides, she was dying to find out what had made her husband "such a treasure -- such a loving and devoted husband and father."
"To tell the truth," Nuno said, "I really wasn't all that interested." Perhaps he sensed that there things about his family he just didn't want to know.
But Angela began some detective work.
Finding family
Her starting point was Nuno's vague memory of having lived near the water in Massachusetts. She handed him an atlas and told him to concentrate. As he traced the Massachusetts shoreline, his finger stopped at Fall River.
Angela found a telephone directory for Fall River at an Austin library and started calling everyone named Vasconcellos. Eventually, this led her to Nuno's father, John.
Over the phone, he sounded wary. What did his son want? he asked, making it clear there had been a falling out. To discover her husband's past, Angela decided, they were better off starting elsewhere.
Soon, she found John Vasconcellos's mother in Fall River. She, in turn, led them to relatives in the Azores. Among them was his maternal grandmother, now 95 -- the woman who had long ago taught him value of patience and hard work.
It would take many trips to Fall River and the Azores before the shards of Nuno's memory coalesced into anything resembling a past. Gradually, bits of his childhood came back, along with stronger memories of life in Fall River after he emigrated in 1975 at the age of 14.
The memories are far from idyllic: an unforgiving father, retarded or mentally ill siblings, an abandoned mother.
One recovered memory: His father sending his younger sister back to the Azores after catching her putting on mascara, and then disowning his own mother for speaking up for the child.
As it turned out, Nuno had been disowned, too. His offense: refusing to send his Army paychecks to his father's bank account in Fall River.
"His attitude," Nuno said, "was that the Army was feeding me, that it was housing me, so I had no reason to keep all that money."
"Finally we went over to see him, and it was tense, very tense," Angela said. "His father was saying things in Portuguese and just banging and banging on the table."
Nuno told his father, "I'm not a kid anymore. You don't threaten me."
With that, the banging stopped and the tension slid away -- the beginning of a rapprochement they are still trying to build.
Although the past was not pretty, Nuno found it instructive.
|
YOUR E-MAIL ALERTS
|
Follow the news that matters to you. Create your own alert to be notified on topics you're interested in.
Or, visit Popular Alerts for suggestions.
|
|
"I don't believe in divorces because of what my father did," he said. "I don't believe in beating the hell out of my kids because of what my father did. I don't believe in being so tight with my money because of what my father did. So maybe I'm a better man because of it."
Today, Nuno owns six tire shops as well as a restaurant and bar in Austin -- businesses that employ more than 60 people. He is active in his parish and a mentor to several inner city children.
"On paper at least," the businesses are worth several million dollars, he says, "so I guess I've been pretty lucky."
But his luck turned bad on August 6, when his failure to become a citizen caught up with him.
Detention and deportation
Nuno, Angela and their two children were passing through immigration at Logan Airport in Boston after another visit to the Azores. As an anti-terrorism measure, immigration computers recently had been linked to criminal data bases. When the name "Nuno Vasconcellos" was punched in, the old kidnapping charge popped up.
Nuno was shackled and taken to Boston's Suffolk County Jail.
"At first I thought it was a joke -- that after a day or two I'd be released," he said, figuring "it would all be straightened out once they knew what happened."
But immigration officials began deportation proceedings against him.
"It was so distressful," Angela said. "There were the six shops and the restaurant and lounge to tend to, and I wasn't sure what to do or what would happen next."
Under federal law, Nuno could not be deported as a criminal alien. Such deportations are for non-citizens who have been sentenced to at least a year in prison. Nuno had never even been convicted, let alone sentenced.
But when non-citizens leave the country and then return, the rules are different. They are technically reapplying for admission and can be excluded for any instance of "moral turpitude," regardless of whether a sentence was imposed.
The Bureau of Customs and Immigration Enforcement said it does not know how often this happens, but some immigration lawyers say they are now handling more exclusion cases than traditional deportations.
Nuno's lawyer, Frederick Watt of New Bedford, Massachusetts, said the backlog is so large that those denied re-entry are likely to remain in jail for six months before their cases go to trial.
Watt felt that Nuno's military commendations, supporting letters from his church, business associates and charities, and the circumstances surrounding the kidnapping charge, made the case "a slam dunk -- a no-brainer." He asked for an immediate hearing, promising the busy judge that he could present his case in no more than 30 minutes.
By the time Watt finished his presentation on August 28, Angela said, "even the judge looked to be near tears."
Judge Paul Gagnon ordered Vasconcellos released and allowed him to return to his home in Austin.
Although the experience was terrifying, they are not bitter, Angela said. Her husband loves America, she said.
Immigration officials have not said whether they will appeal Judge Gagnon's decision.
On August 15, while still in jail, Nuno Vasconcellos applied for U.S. citizenship.
Copyright 2003 The
Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
