UNPUBLISHED

UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS

FOR THE FOURTH CIRCUIT

No. 09-5051

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,

Plaintiff - Appellee,

v.

ALEXIS STARKES,

Defendant – Appellant.

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Eastern 

District of Virginia, at Norfolk. Jerome B. Friedman, District 

Judge. (2:09-cr-00077-JBF-FBS-1)

Submitted: September 30, 2010 Decided: November 3, 2010

Before MOTZ, DUNCAN, and AGEE, Circuit Judges.

Affirmed by unpublished per curiam opinion.

Steven P. Hanna, Richmond, Virginia, for Appellant. Neil H. 

MacBride, United States Attorney, Joseph E. DePadilla, Assistant 

United States Attorney, Daniel F. Izzo, Third Year Law Student, 

Norfolk, Virginia, for Appellee.

Unpublished opinions are not binding precedent in this circuit.
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PER CURIAM:

Alexis Starkes appeals the district court’s order 

imposing a special condition on her three-year probation 

prohibiting her from employment in the human resources industry 

or in any other position involving contact with labor contracts. 

We affirm.

Starkes served as the human resources manager for the 

Crowne Plaza Williamsburg (Virginia). In her role, Starkes was 

familiar with the H2-B visa program for foreign workers and 

previously had applied for such visas to secure temporary 

workers for the Crowne Plaza. 

In Fall 2007, Starkes became acquainted with Dzmitry 

Krasautsau, a member of a criminal organization. Krasautsau 

discussed having Starkes submit fraudulent H2-B visas to help 

foreign workers enter the United States. For the program to 

operate effectively, Krasautsau required labor service contracts 

with hotels that inflated the number of temporary workers the 

hotels required. To aid in this scheme, Starkes signed two 

fraudulent labor service agreements with Krasautsau’s companies. 

The first provided that the Crowne Plaza needed 45 temporary 

workers supplied by Valet Services from April 1, 2008, to 

January 10, 2009. The second contract stated that the Crowne

Plaza needed 40 temporary workers supplied by Janitorial 

Solutions from November 1, 2008, to September 1, 2009. 
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Because the Crowne Plaza preferred to hire temporary 

workers through multiple vendors, Starkes aided Krasautsau in 

creating a fictional company to “bid” against Krasautsau’s two 

real companies. Krasautsau eventually mailed the H2-B visa 

materials and the labor services contracts to a co-conspirator 

in Florida. 

In exchange for aiding Krasautsau, Starkes received a 

$200 gift card. She was scheduled to receive between 10-15 

cents per man hour for each Krasautsau employee working at the 

Crowne Plaza, but the scheme was discovered before Starkes 

profited from this arrangement. 

Based on the foregoing, a criminal information was 

filed against Starkes in the Eastern District of Virginia, 

charging her with one count of mail fraud, in violation of 18 

U.S.C. § 1341 (2006) and 18 U.S.C. § 2 (2006). Starkes waived 

her right to an indictment, agreed to a statement of facts, and 

pleaded guilty without benefit of a plea agreement. The 

district court accepted Starkes’s plea and conducted a 

sentencing hearing. 

At sentencing, the district court adopted the 

Presentence Report, which found that Starkes’s offense level was 

5 and her criminal history category I, yielding an advisory 

guidelines range of zero to six months’ imprisonment. The 

district court sentenced Starkes to a term of probation for 
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three years with the special condition that she was “prohibited 

from engaging in any aspect of the human resources business or 

any similar occupation where [she] would have access to labor 

contracts.”*

We review the imposition of a special condition of 

probation or supervised release for abuse of discretion. United 

States v. Dotson, 324 F.3d 256, 259-60 (4th Cir. 2003). 

Starkes, however, failed to object to the condition at 

sentencing, so our review is for plain error. In order to 

satisfy the plain error standard, Starkes must show: (1) an 

error was made; (2) the error is plain; and (3) the error 

affects substantial rights. See United States v. Olano, 507 

U.S. 725, 732 (1993). The decision to correct the error lies 

within our discretion, and we exercises that discretion only if 

the error “seriously affects the fairness, integrity or public 

reputation of judicial proceedings.” Id. at 732 (citations, 

alterations, and internal quotation marks omitted). Starkes

bears the burden of satisfying each element of the plain error 

standard. United States v. Vonn, 535 U.S. 55, 59 (2002).

 Starkes noted a timely appeal.

 * The Government misinterprets the district court’s order as 

applying only to human resources positions that involve contact

with labor contracts. The district court’s order, however, 

makes clear that Starkes is prohibited from any human resources 

job as well as any other job that permits her access to labor 

contracts. 
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The relevant sentencing statute provides that a 

district court may impose as a special condition a requirement 

that the defendant:

refrain, in the case of an individual, from engaging 

in a specified occupation, business, or profession 

bearing a reasonably direct relationship to the 

conduct constituting the offense, or engage in such a 

specified occupation, business, or profession only to 

a stated degree or under stated circumstances.

18 U.S.C. § 3563(b)(5) (2006). United States Sentencing 

Guidelines Manual § 5F1.5 implements this statutory 

authorization by directing that such a condition is appropriate 

only if the district court determines: 

(1) a reasonably direct relationship existed between 

the defendant’s occupation, business, or profession 

and the conduct relevant to the offense of conviction; 

and

(2) imposition of such a restriction is reasonably 

necessary to protect the public because there is 

reason to believe that, absent such restriction, the 

defendant will continue to engage in unlawful conduct 

similar to that for which the defendant was convicted.

If these standards are satisfied, the district court 

is further instructed to impose the condition “for the minimum 

time and to the minimum extent necessary to protect the public.” 

USSG § 5F1.5(b). 

In this case, the district court did not commit plain 

error by imposing the special condition of probation prohibiting 

Starkes from employment in the field of human resources or in 

any other position allowing access to labor contracts. First, 
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there is a reasonable relationship between the occupation and 

the offense — it was Starkes’s role as a human resources manager 

that enabled her to commit the offense. In addition, courts 

routinely uphold employment restrictions, including those 

covering an industry, when the employment and the underlying 

criminal offense are closely tied. See United States v. Smith, 

445 F.3d 713, 717-19 (3d Cir. 2006) (upholding employment 

restriction barring defendant from working for a law firm or 

legal entity given lengthy history of preparing fraudulent 

documents); United States v. Carlson, 406 F.3d 529, 532 (8th 

Cir. 2005) (affirming restriction on defendant working in the 

medical field after defendant used his position as a physician’s 

assistant to obtain fraudulent prescriptions on hundreds of 

occasions); United States v. Choate, 101 F.3d 562 (8th Cir.

1996) (affirming restriction on self-employment for defendant 

who ran a series of sham businesses and “demonstrated that he is 

given to excesses of salesmanship that tend to creep up in 

business after business”). 

In this case, it was Starkes’s position as an HR 

manager that permitted and indeed facilitated the fraud. The 

district court thus did not plainly err in limiting Starkes’s 

ability to seek employment in the field of human resources 

during her probation. See also United States v. Cardine, 192 

Fed. App’x 241 (4th Cir. 2006) (unpublished) (approving district 
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court’s imposition of condition barring defendant from seeking 

employment in the equestrian industry when defendant’s prior 

“employment in the equestrian industry allowed him to accomplish 

his crime”). Although the district court “might well have 

spelled out in greater detail the findings that are implicit in 

its imposition of the occupation restriction, its failure to 

make such findings does not invalidate the restriction” because 

the condition imposed otherwise satisfies the requirements of 

§ 3563(b)(5). Carlson, 406 F.3d at 632. Cf. United States v. 

Smith, 332 F.3d 455, 461 (7th Cir. 2003) (the reasonably direct

relationship between defendant’s occupation as a commercial 

truck driver and his crime of theft of interstate freight “is so 

obvious that we will not comment on it further”).

Accordingly, we affirm the district court’s judgment. 

We dispense with oral argument because the facts and legal 

contentions are adequately presented in the materials before the 

court and argument would not aid the decisional process.

AFFIRMED