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USA - LATINO BROTHELS - ENSLAVED IN
AMERICA - MSNBC
By
Richard Lui Correspondent
NBC News NBC News
3/26/2011
Over the past four months, NBC News
Investigations has explored a world many of us thought was extinct. Women, even
girls, brought here under false pretense and held as slaves, stripped of their
dignity, rights and liberty. The trail took us to brothels set up in the
plainest houses or apartments, hiding the abuse of people in ways few have
seen. It has been a story where the more we learned, the more we realized what
we didn’t know. In our editorial meetings, it was common for my editor to
simply stare at me and say he did not believe what I was saying.
What’s in a name?
The nonprofit Polaris
Project has been studying various aspects of human trafficking for
nine years. Its workers have seen it all. But when this latest version of the
brothel surfaced, Polaris Project Executive Director Bradley Myles said it
surprised even him. It also inspired him to research and codify the
phenomenon—and to put a name to it.
His findings led him to coin a new term,
“Latino Residential Brothels” or “LRBs,” to describe the brothels set up in
average residential neighborhoods and catering specifically to Hispanic men,
where women and girls are forced to have sex up to 50 times a day.
There’s no general term yet for these brothels because the phenomenon is still
relatively new to law enforcement. Just giving it a name helps to bring
together efforts to fight it, says Myles. “We need to build
more resources and more momentum to really go after it on that national scale,”
he said.
Whatever the name, police on the street
know what they’re looking at when they find apartments set up for this
business: small rooms, makeshift wooden walls defining the cells where women
are kept, the sacks of condoms indicating the extreme number of times women and
children are forced to have sex. They’re looking at a “business model” that is
spreading across the nation: forced labor, untaxed cash flow, and millions of
dollars in revenue.
Depite that, I’ve found very little wide
reaching understanding or awareness of this phenomenon among law enforcement
officers. Maybe it’s a communications issue, or perhaps it’s because budgets
are being cut and many departments don’t have the resources to focus on the
problem – if they even detect it.
It Can’t Be True
Authorities are often shocked when they find out what is
going on in these brothels.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Susan Coppedge told
me she surprised herself when she swore during her closing statement because
she was so upset. Judge Richard Story in the case called the scheme
“outrageous” conduct and said he was scared what acts the perpetrators had
performed that he didn’t know about.
I’ve reported on human trafficking in several countries
over the past five years, spoken on the subject and volunteered with
anti-trafficking organizations to try to understand modern slavery. But
when I heard about these brothels, I was shocked. It is the kind of story that,
anytime you tell someone about it, they are amazed by the depravity, what one
human can do to another.
Given how little has been written about
these networks or done to stamp them out, you might assume they are new. But
they aren’t. We have found reports going back almost a quarter century
and covering at least half the country.
Connecting the Dots
One question that keeps coming up: Who’s running this, if
anyone? If this is organized crime, how organized is it? There is
evidence it exists in regions, such as the
Another way to look at these loose
confederations of brothels and stash houses is as franchises. Fast food
chains have a common product and common method of selling that product, but
each franchise has a different owner. Yet consistently they are able to
provide a similar experience. These brothels are able to do the
same. In franchise systems there is somebody at the top, but the extent
to which there is a central office for these sex operations is not known.
Is this just a family affair? We were
told that Amador Cortes Meza, who was sentenced March 24, 2011, for charges
related to running such a brothel, may have learned the business from his
father, because his father and grandfather also ran brothels like this.
Detectives told me that Yolanda Aparicio in
It’s possible these owners and pimps are
just entrepreneurial; responding to demand and using tools already in use. One
slave handler talks to others, learns their methods and starts his business —
basically learning by word of mouth. In the Cortes Meza case, for example,
ringleader Amador worked with an acquaintance, Edison Wagner Rosa Tort, who ran
his own brothel, to get girls and connections for his operation.
One other theory says this is just criminal
opportunism, that brothel bosses, seeing the tough laws and sizable government
resources mustered to fight drug trafficking, are simply picking an
easier business model. Trafficked girls are “products” that generate cash flow
over an extended period, whereas drugs are just a one-time transaction.
Experts say these Latino brothels are also harder for law enforcement to spot,
and harder to prosecute – given the closed-network keeps them within a
community.
In the
If that estimate is accurate, there are
more slaves now than at any other time in the history of the world. Given
U.S. history, it is tough to hear survivors of such brothels in the U.S. like
“Angelica,” a victim of Cortes Meza, tell me that all she wants is to feel
“libre”— or free.
Here
are the 10 steps common to most Latino residential brothels, according to sex
trafficking and law enforcement experts. (Images:
After identifying qualified customers (typically
Spanish-speaking males), advertisers pass out "tarjetas" — business
cards with ads in Spanish for phony products and services like men's cologne or
house-call manicures. "Johns" know the ads are for sex.
"Squares" likely never give the cards a second thought.
Some "tarjetas" will have codes - like wings
indicating a brothel that delivers. Sometimes a call has to be placed to
get the location of a brothel; other times the address is right on the card.
The
"ticketero" gives the "john" a token (a playing card, a
marble, a poker chip or a glass bead). Girls keep the tokens to keep
track of how many "johns" they see at the brothel. Even though
they keep a count, many girls are not paid.
Depending
on the brothel, a "john" can select a girl. Often there are as few as
two girls servicing as many as 50 men each in a night, so there are not always
options. Ledgers are used to keep track of visits.
"Johns"
follow girls to a room. Often large rooms are divided up by nothing more
than hanging sheets. There is rarely anything other than a sparse bed,
and products like sanitizer, lubricant, condoms and paper towels within.
The
"john" gives the girl the token, and the 15 minutes begin — sometimes
with the turn of an egg timer.