CHICAGO (WBBM NEWSRADIO) — Tudor Deaconu, the owner of Lincolnwood-based TDA Construction, has been accused of conspiring to smuggle Romanian citizens into the United States, in order to hire them at the construction firm.
Federal prosecutors said Deaconu worked with Luigi Popescu, known as “The Godfather,” to illegally bring four Romanians across the Canadian border in 2018 and 2019 after they traveled from Romania to Montreal.
Deaconu, a Romanian national and a naturalized U.S. citizen who allegedly went by the name “Caras,” was accused of paying thousands of dollars in smuggling fees to Popescu and Visan Rostas, a Romanian national based in Canada. The trio communicated via WhatsApp and Facebook, according to the indictment.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Fitzpatrick, of the Northern District of Illinois, said Deaconu pleaded not guilty to the charges on Wednesday.
In the indictment, officials wrote that a married couple and their child were among the four people who were smuggled into the country.
After attempting to enter the U.S. near Lake Champlain in April 2019, prosecutors said two of the four individuals successfully made it into the country in May 2019 near Derby Line, Vt.
In 2020, Popescu was extradited from Romania to San Diego, Calif. to face charges of running an international ring that smuggled thousands of Romanians into the United States. He was accused of bringing Romanians into the United States across the northern and southern borders for nearly seven years and charging $10,000 to $25,000 in fees for each person.
Prosecutors said Popescu coordinated a network of guides, drivers and stash houses. Several people were smuggled on rafts across the Rio Grande River from Mexico to Texas, federal authorities said.
Popescu pleaded guilty to human smuggling and was sentenced in December 2021 to the period he’d already served in jail since his 2020 arrest, court records show. In his plea, he admitted to smuggling more than 100 undocumented Romanian nationals into the United States.
(The Sun-Times Media Wire contributed to this report.)
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