'Who's Minding the Store?'

America, what a country. Where else could you go from being an international fugitive to security guard at a maximum security prison? Who said the American dream was dead?

A simple Google search of Michal Preclik's name turns up an Interpol wanted poster from his native Czech Republic. So where was he arrested? In an American maximum-security prison, where he was not an inmate, but a guard.

Preclik had worked at the prison in the central U.S. state of Nebraska for a year and his arrest came just two months after officials at Tecumseh State Correctional Institution promoted the 32-year-old to corporal. Prison officials learned last month that he was wanted on suspicion of drug and fraud crimes.

The electronic wanted poster, which shows his mug shot, went up on Interpol's Web site exactly a year before his arrest. The poster is the first Web link that appears when Googling Preclik's name.

"This is just unbelievable that the state of Nebraska is hiring international criminals," said state Sen. Heath Mello. "Who's minding the store?"

The Department of Correctional Services is reviewing its hiring practices, spokeswoman Dawn Renee Smith said.

"Obviously, it's a concern whenever we have anyone working at the facility ... who has any type of outstanding warrants," Smith said.

The situation is reminiscent of a 2005 incident that led to a Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services policy that Google searches of job candidates be conducted. The department offered a job to Wayne Richard McGuire, but rescinded the offer after The Associated Press reported that he had been convicted in absentia in Rwanda of the 1985 murder of Dian Fossey, whose research was the subject of the movie "Gorillas in the Mist."

Preclik (pronounced PRESS'-lik) wound up in Nebraska in 2002 when he got a job at a hog farm through a company that recruited Eastern Europeans as laborers in violation of their tourist visas. The hog farm is about 30 miles (50 kilometers) from the Tecumseh prison.