The former head of the city public defender's office is charged with arranging a sham marriage between a female subordinate and his Peruvian boyfriend to keep the boyfriend in the U.S., federal prosecutors said Friday.

Eric Affholter, 40, and live-in boyfriend Pedro Cerna-Rojas, 31, "recruited" Affholter's employee, Assistant Public Defender Collette Lewis, to marry Cerna-Rojas in a Las Vegas wedding chapel, a marriage fraud indictment against both men says.

Prosecutors said Cerna-Rojas' visa was expired at the time.

The three, along with Lewis' live-in boyfriend, Assistant Circuit Attorney Timothy J. O'Leary, flew to Las Vegas in December 2004 for the wedding, prosecutors said.

Affholter and O'Leary were witnesses, and O'Leary had been recruited to supply "false, fictitious and fraudulent affidavits in support" of the immigration applications if necessary, the indictment said.

Upon their return, Lewis and Cerna-Rojas went back to living with their respective partners and did not act like a married couple, U.S. Attorney Catherine Hanaway said Friday.

The relationships between Lewis, 33, and O'Leary, 36, and between Affholter and Cerna-Rojas were widely known among friends and colleagues, but Hanaway said the marriage may not have been.

The four were friends, prosecutors said.

Affholter, Lewis and O'Leary all resigned from their public jobs within days of one another, beginning May 16.

Affholter turned himself in Friday morning. The man who once defended those too poor to hire their own lawyers found himself on the other end of the defense table, shackled with an ankle chain and led out of the courtroom in handcuffs.