A New Bedford manufacturer awarded almost $230 million in contracts over the past five years pled guilty today along with its president to various charges alleging that they hired illegal aliens, helped to shield them from detection, failed to pay them full overtime, and fraudulently misled the government, all in an effort to maximize profits on a series of lucrative military contracts.

United States Attorney Michael J. Sullivan and Bruce M. Foucart, special agent in charge for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's office of investigations in Boston, working in close partnership with the Insurance Fraud Bureau of Massachusetts, U.S. Department of Labor's Office of Inspector General and Wage and Hour Division, U.S. Postal Inspection Service, Office of Inspector General, Social Security Administration, Office of Investigations - Boston Field Division and the Department of Defense's Criminal Investigative Service, announced today that Michael Bianco, Inc. (MBI), and its president and principal shareholder Francesco Insolia, 51, of Pembroke, Massachusetts, pled guilty to several charges contained in a Superseding Information.

MBI pled guilty to: Eighteen specific counts of knowingly hiring illegal aliens on various dates from between early 2004 and late 2006, a time during which the company grew from less than a hundred to more than six hundred employees; helping to harbor and shield illegal aliens from detection from authorities from 2004 to 2007; fraudulently misrepresenting social security numbers and committing mail fraud when it submitted social security numbers to the IRS and Social Security Administration knowing that many of the numbers had to be false given that many of the company's employees were illegal aliens and; failing to pay many employees overtime from 2005 to 2007.