Husband John Yai to go on trial this summer
The wife of a former Santa Monica snack shop owner who is accused of secretly being an agent for North Korea officially pleaded guilty on Tuesday to illegally bringing more than $18,000 into the United States.
Susan Youngja Yai, 51, is scheduled to be sentenced Sept. 15 by U.S. District Judge George H. King at the United States Courthouse in downtown Los Angeles.
As part of her plea, prosecutors agreed to drop two other charges facing Yai, including making false statements and conspiring to make false statements to U.S. Customs officials.
Instead, she pleaded guilty to one count of failing to inform U.S. Customs that she and her husband transported more than $10,000 into the country.
By pleading to the single offense, Yai, wife of John Joungwoong Yai, 59, will avoid the charge’s maximum sentence of five years in prison, three years of supervised release and a $250,000 fine.
Both Thom Mrozek, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s office, and Paul Loh, Susan Yai’s attorney, said that though she faces up to six months in prison, she is not likely to be jailed. Instead she will face a fine of roughly $5,000, in addition to probation.
Loh said that thousands of people enter the U.S. each year with large amounts of cash they fail to report to customs officials.
Usually the money is confiscated and no criminal charges are filed, he said. But because John Yai is suspected of working illegally for the North Korean government, Loh said Susan Yai was pursued.
“She pleaded guilty because she’s a stand-up person,” Loh said. “She made a mistake and she’ll pay for it.”
Susan Yai was charged after she and her husband brought roughly $18,000 into Los Angeles International Airport on a return flight from Zurich, Switzerland, where they spent their wedding anniversary in April 2000.
The couple said they did not list the money because, when split between the two, it fell under $10,000, which is the maximum amount of cash allowed to be imported into the U.S. without a customs declaration.
The Yais told customs officials they had taken the money with them to buy jewelry for their children but decided to bring it back because the prices and selection were no better in Switzerland than in the U.S.
They later reneged on that explanation after the FBI produced taped telephone conversations between the Yais that allegedly detailed a string of conversations aimed at fabricating their story.
The Yais won’t say where the money came from, Loh said, adding that the information was not important or relevant.
However, Mrozek said John Yai was allegedly paid by North Korea to recruit spies in the U.S.
John Yai, who pleaded innocent earlier this year to working as an agent for the North Korean government and to the same three charges faced by his wife, posted $400,000 bail in April and is expected to go on trial this summer. Until recently, he owned the Bon Appetit snack shop on Wilshire Boulevard near 18th Street.
The FBI monitored John Yai for eight years. He was arrested in February at his Santa Monica home and, if convicted, faces up to 15 years in jail.
Though John Yai, a native of South Korea, allegedly provided information that was already public from newspaper articles and the Internet, North Korean government officials allegedly instructed him in 1998 to obtain classified information.
He was not charged with espionage because no evidence emerged that he ever obtained such information, prosecutors have said.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on June 4, 2003. Read the original PDF.