Slaves Among Us

*The names of Raúl and Ignació, as well as other victims interviewed for this story, have been changed. According to agencies that are helping them, revealing the identities of victims would place them in physical danger. It's an apt, if ironic, condition for a story about people whose suffering, in the words of Clearwater Police Deputy Chief Dewey Williams, "flies under the radar."

When Pastor Rafael Amengual met Raúl and Ignació* at a Hispanic church in Plant City on the Sunday morning of March 19 this year, one of the first things he noticed was the condition of their hands: burned, cut and bleeding. Their faces glowed red as if they'd been exposed to extreme heat.

Alex Pickett THE TROUBLES HE'S SEEN: Rafael Amengual holds photos of trafficking victims he has helped in New Port Richey. Many of them feared reporting their plight to the police.

Their mental condition was even more desperate. They were deeply depressed, psychologically damaged, says Amengual, a Christian counselor from New Port Richey.

The two men, both Mexicans in their early 20s, had been held captive and made to work up to 20 hours a day in Chinese restaurants throughout Florida. They had crossed into the U.S. illegally a month before, and met two Chinese men at the Florida-Georgia border who offered them work and wages. Instead of good jobs, however, Raul and Ignacio suffered a month of agony: preparing food for long hours without pay; handling hot pans of burning oil without protection for their hands; traveling at night to undisclosed locations where they would only work more; being locked in their rooms; and worst of all, hearing the screams of fellow captives. Others were being held in the house, some of them teenage girls who were being raped by their captors.

"They told me they cannot stop hearing the way [one] girl cried," recalls Amengual. "That was the most terrible situation. When they heard how they raped that girl, crying and crying and crying and screaming. Even the girl said, 'Please kill me.'"

Raúl and Ignació were told if they tried to escape or said anything to anyone that they would be killed. Or the police would be called and they would be thrown in jail, or that immigration would be called and they would be deported because they didn't have papers.

The Mexicans started demanding money. In response, the Chinese drove Raúl and Ignació to the outskirts of Plant City and dumped them on the side of the road like unwanted puppies. They didn't know where they were, and they spoke no English. In dirty clothes, with damaged hands and broken spirits, they walked until they found refuge in a Baptist church. The pastor there phoned Amengual because he knew of his work helping immigrants with their papers and of his recent involvement with World Relief, a national faith-based immigrant aid organization.

What happened to Raúl and Ignació is not uncommon. It's called human trafficking, a crime U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in his first policy address in office labeled "one of the most pernicious evils in the world today ... [which] exists right here, on our shores."

Indeed, it's happening right here in Tampa Bay. And little is being done to stop it.

Defined by the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 as the use of force, fraud or coercion to induce a commercial sex act or forced labor, human trafficking is a multi-billion dollar industry, with revenues estimated from $9 billion to $32 billion annually. It is estimated that up to 17,500 people are trafficked within the United States each year, according to widely used figures from the U.S. State Department.

Florida was ranked as one of the top three states for trafficking in a 2003 report by the Center for the Advancement of Human Rights at Florida State University. When George W. Bush spoke out against human trafficking as "one of the worst offenses against human dignity," he chose to do so before an audience of law enforcement agents and social service providers in Tampa -- at the Marriott Waterside four months before the 2004 presidential elections. That day he announced the government would spend almost $30 million to fight trafficking and help victims at home and abroad.

But in Tampa Bay, law enforcement has not yet found a consistent approach to dealing with or even identifying the crime of human trafficking. Some police departments deny it happens in their jurisdiction. Training initiatives are available, but so far only the Clearwater Police Department has taken substantive steps to combat the problem.

The lack of action is troubling, but not surprising. Human trafficking is in many ways a hidden crime, and without awareness of the crime and communication between law enforcement, social service agencies and churches, it goes unnoticed. The housewife next door who never leaves her house; the woman who does your nails; the dishwasher in the kitchen of your favorite restaurant -- any of these could be a victim of human trafficking, yet unable or unwilling to approach the police.

They're the slaves working among us.

"People are surprised to think that sweet little Clearwater has got a human trafficking problem, but it does," said Clearwater Police Deputy Chief Dewey Williams.

The C.P.D. recognized as early as 2001 that it faced a crime previously unknown to its detectives and officers. It found evidence at the time that some of the immigrant prostitutes it busted in brothel raids were working against their will.

Jack Mccaffee FRIENDS IN NEED: The two Mexican workers "Raúl" and "Ignació" with another former trafficking victim, Cecilia (center), and English teachers at Under His Wings Fellowship church in New Port Richey.

"We have seen a number of brothels pop up in the city that we investigated and determined that they were the '21 clubs,'" said Williams. Mostly patronized by Hispanic immigrant populations, the "21 clubs" charged $20 for sex and $1 for a condom. "Now typically the fee is $25," said DC Williams.

FBI Special Agent James Roncinske described how 21 clubs work in an affidavit on August 15, 2005, in connection with a trafficking case in Fort Myers:

"The Latin American girls are smuggled into the United States by 'coyotes' who eventually bring the girls to prostitution houses in Southwest Florida. Some of the girls know that they will be prostitutes when they are smuggled into the United States. The ones who do not know are told of their fate when they are brought to one of the prostitution houses. The girls are informed that they have to work as prostitutes to pay their smuggling debt. The customers go to these houses in Southwest Florida and pay $21 for 15 minutes with one of the girls. The customers pay a doorman the money who in turn provides the customers with a ticket [or playing card] which the customer gives to the girl ... The Latin American females who are brought into the United States to work as prostitutes are usually in their teens ... The 'coyotes' do not charge the females anything who are smuggled into the United States. The 'coyotes' then sell the females to Iris [the madam in this case] who in turn makes the females work in one of her houses as prostitutes to pay off their smuggling debt. Iris operates several houses of prostitution in Southwest Florida."

Roncinske states that within an hour he observed 11 men enter the house, all leaving within 15 minutes. The brothel was open on average of eight and a half hours a day. If this is a common number of customers per hour, then the operators grossed almost $2,000 per day per house.

Sex trafficking is rated second to the drug trade in terms of money made from illegal activity. The Cadena-Sosa ring, a trafficking-prostitution operation that ran brothels throughout Florida (including Tampa) and South Carolina until being broken up in 1997, is estimated to have made $2.5 million in two years.

The C.P.D. raided a brothel at 2095 Camellia Drive in May. In a June 15 interview with the Weekly Planet, DC Williams likened these types of prostitution investigations to narcotics cases.

"We seized a substantial quantity of evidence in terms of financial records, primarily financial records," he said. "It is frequently operated by low-level operatives at the street level and that money is funneled back through various channels to higher level organizers. Eventually in most cases it will lead you overseas -- in this case to Mexico."

Not all forms of human trafficking involve "coyotes" and immigrant smuggling. While it's true that most victims are immigrants, and that many of them are in the U.S. without documentation, some live here legally. But almost all trafficking crimes affect non-white ethnic populations, living in areas of the U.S. where there is a need for cheap labor.

The Clearwater office of Gulf Coast Jewish Family Services' Florida Center for Survivors of Torture is working on three local cases involving Asian-run nail salons it believes make money from the forced labor of the Asian women working there. "We're quite certain it's trafficking, but we can't get opportunities with them to get them to talk to us enough to find out," director Niki Kelly told attendees at the May 18 meeting of World Relief's Network of Emergency Trafficking Services at a church in Oldsmar. NETS is a federally funded coalition of local agencies that provide relief and support for trafficking victims.

A Tampa Bay police officer discovered an incident of human trafficking in her favorite Asian restaurant. The officer, who wishes to remain anonymous to protect the family she helped, learned that one of the Asian female workers she befriended did not work there willingly. The woman and her two school-age sons, who were always at the restaurant, had been invited by neighbors from her home country to work in their restaurant in Florida. She traveled to Florida hoping to make a fresh start after a divorce. But once she arrived, the woman, who was an engineer by trade, was forced into servitude, responsible for all the housework in her employers' home, where they all lived together, as well as working long hours in the restaurant. She got three or four hours of sleep a night, and received no pay. She lived like this for almost a year.

When the officer became aware of the situation, she orchestrated an escape and took care of the family in her own home for six months until she could no longer afford it. The family has since moved to another part of the country where, according to the lieutenant, they are "thriving," albeit illegally. The officer has been trying to get some sort of immigration relief for the family of three for over a year but has not been successful.

Another form of human trafficking that illustrates the difficulty in uncovering victims is the abuse of mail-order brides. When Mia* arrived in Clearwater she thought she was leaving behind poverty and the lack of opportunity she faced in Malaysia, her home country.

A Chinese woman in her early 20s, she thought she would become a U.S. citizen. That's what her American fiancé promised her after they met through an international marriage broker, an agency that trades in mail-order brides. She moved here and married the fiancé. And then Mia, who had legal documentation to be in the States, found out her husband had no intention of getting her citizenship.

Instead he beat and raped her and kept her confined to the house -- that is, when he wasn't forcing her to work in a dry cleaners, keeping her income while he remained unemployed.

"She was brought to this country and she ended up being pretty much a sex slave to her husband," says Chris Warwick, director of outreach at The Haven, a women's refuge in Clearwater where Mia ended up after seven months of enslavement to her husband. Staff at The Haven eventually realized that Mia wasn't the first woman from Malaysia Mia's husband had abused; the domestic violence center had previously sheltered a woman with a similar story who had been married to the same man.

Warwick says that over the past two years The Haven harbored at least a dozen people who had been trafficked, and probably some that were not recognized as victims. As a domestic violence shelter, The Haven is not allowed to reveal to anyone, not even law enforcement, who is staying there. The center only alerts police if that is the express will of the victim, so many of these cases have gone unreported.

Clearwater Police Department TRAFFIC'S COP: Clearwater P.D.'s Williams says there's a "serious lack of awareness" of human trafficking among the general public.

CASA women's shelter in St. Petersburg has helped mail-order brides in the past, as well as former prostitutes who seemed to have been trafficking victims. The Spring in Tampa also reports it has helped at least one abused mail-order bride.

The Gulf Coast Jewish Family Services' Center for Survivors of Torture also has experience with abused mail-order brides. "We have worked with women who have entered the U.S. as mail-order brides, and once they arrived they were in fact held captive, beaten, raped for years," said program administrator Stacie Blake. "In effect this was servitude. They were so vulnerable because they didn't have friends -- some of them didn't speak English when they arrived and they weren't certain of their immigration status because the man who was holding them captive had kept all of their paperwork and so forth. That's a scenario that is not uncommon."

The isolation of human trafficking victims is typical. Used as a tool by traffickers to coerce and intimidate, it also leads to a serious information gap.

"Many people are incredibly fearful of law enforcement in their own countries and so that will translate into being fearful of law enforcement here in the United States," says Immigration lawyer Kathlyn Mackovjak of Gulfcoast Legal Services, a legal aid organization in Pinellas County. "As well as the fact that the United States has increasingly more enforcement on illegal immigrants or undocumented persons and people are scared because of that."

"Plus," says The Haven's Warwick, "they're here with no support system; they don't speak the language; they don't know the customs; they don't have any opportunity to get out and find out that they have rights in this country."

Ida Lopez is the bilingual human trafficking specialist at World Relief in New Port Richey, which two years ago was awarded federal grant money to start NETS.

"You have to interview the victims to find out if they're real trafficking [victims]," says Lopez. "Sometimes in the beginning, they're very afraid -- that's the problem. They don't want to go to the police. There's a part of this field when we have to have the police prosecute, and the victims are afraid that the police are going to send them back to their countries, or something will happen to their family because they have been told [by the traffickers] that if they say something their family will be harmed."

Because many victims are undocumented immigrants, C.P.D.'s Deputy Chief Williams points out, they are not "going to run out the door and throw their arms around you and say thank you."

Accordingly, he adds, "There's a serious lack of awareness in the general public about human trafficking and the fact that it's even here."

This serious lack of awareness is not confined to the general public. With victims afraid to come forward, authorities remain in the dark about the crime.

During a campaign speech on May 9, Florida state Senator Skip Campbell, who is running for state attorney general, told a Tiger Bay Club audience at the Feather Sound Country Club that before he and others introduced a new, tougher bill on human trafficking to be voted into the state lawbooks, most legislators did not know about the seriousness of the crime. He said: "Believe it or not, if you went to the legislature before the beginning of the session, I would be willing to wager out of 160, probably 20 were aware of how significant this problem was."

Agents at the Tampa division of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which is responsible for deportation and criminal investigations, do not know the basic legal certifications and visas available for victims of trafficking, despite being one of the key agencies with responsibility for authorizing a victim's application for these documents, and despite these visas having been available for the past six years. (See sidebar.) "Keep in mind that we are legacy customs officials," ICE spokeswoman Pam McCullough told the Planet.

Most local law enforcement agencies don't know what human trafficking is or deny it happens in their jurisdictions. When asked whether the St. Petersburg Police Department had come across any such cases, its spokesman Bill Proffitt replied: "I don't know what you mean by 'human trafficking.'"

"It's right in front of people, but they don't recognize it," said Steve Cole of the U.S. Attorney's Office in Tampa. Perhaps that's why the Tampa Police Department has no active human trafficking cases, despite evidence it occurs in the city: ICE's Victim Assistance Witness Program provided emergency housing, food and incidentals to a Mexican victim of sex trafficking in Tampa.

Or why the St. Petersburg Police Department told the Planet that human trafficking is "not a problem in St. Petersburg," although a 2003 article in the St. Petersburg Times quotes two of its officers admitting to human trafficking occurring within the city.

Or why the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office asked the Planet for advice on where it could receive training in human trafficking, after the paper asked how many of its deputies had undergone such training.

Without awareness, law enforcement and ICE overlook victims -- either sending them to jail or deporting them instead of providing relief and lodging criminal complaints that could lead to prosecutions. That could explain why, even though the government knows the frequency and volume of trafficking and victims, so few cases make it to the investigation stage and then onto court.

Last year, the FBI opened only 146 trafficking cases nationally. To get an idea of how small a figure that is, if all those FBI cases were evenly distributed between each state, the total comes to less than three cases per state. Of the 95 defendants charged with trafficking offenses, only 34 were convicted. The average sentence length for trafficking criminals last year was 8.6 years. Compare that to the average 9.8 years' sentence for trafficking crack cocaine, according to a 2002 report by the U.S. Sentencing Commission, and it is hard to believe that "the fight against human trafficking is one of our highest priorities for ensuring justice in the United States," as the Attorney General's office stated in its report published last month.

Of the short list of human trafficking cases within the system of the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Middle District of Florida -- which runs in rough diagonal from Naples to Jacksonville and which the Bay area falls within -- none are from Tampa Bay. Out of eight cases under investigation by the FBI in the 18-county middle district, only one is from Tampa.

This is where training becomes vital. If police officers respond to a domestic violence call or raid a brothel, or if ICE agents raid a restaurant looking for undocumented immigrants, are they trained to recognize a potential human trafficking victim? Or will that person end up in jail or deported?

The Florida Regional Community Policing Institute (RCPI) at St. Petersburg College, which offers free training to law enforcement agencies, is the organization charged with the responsibility of training police in trafficking. This past March it received funding specifically to target human trafficking training in six cities -- Tampa, Miami, Orlando, Fort Myers, West Palm Beach and Jacksonville -- not just for police but government agencies as well.

Unfortunately, says RCPI director Eileen LaHaie, "law officers have a lot of training demands on their time," and this impacts what does and doesn't get taken up. For instance, the Pasco County Sheriff's Office has suspended training in all areas for a few months because it's short of manpower and it can't afford having deputies off for training, said Lt. Sandy Reed.

"We're doing the training, but the problem with that is you have to find time to do the training. At the very least it's an eight-hour course," Lt. Reed said. The department's next round of in-service training will include a human trafficking component, and so all its deputies will have received instruction in this area.

But there is hope. This past April the Clearwater Police Department applied for federal grant money on offer from the U.S. Department of Justice. If its bid is successful, the money will fund two detectives dedicated to investigating human trafficking while establishing a multi-agency coalition of other law enforcement agencies, the U.S. Attorney's Office, and social support and legal services. Pasco County Sheriff's Office intends to apply for this grant next year.

Another constructive route would be to open up more communication among the many different agencies that discover victims. Many, like Raúl and Ignació, may go to a church, where the main concern is providing food and clothing. Or victims like Mia the mail-order bride may seek help at a domestic violence shelter, where the priority, again, is the victim's physical and emotional needs.

Pastor Rafael Amengual says he has come into contact with more than 50 victims of human trafficking in New Port Richey alone, but that they fear the police. "One time when I spoke with a girl about this, she told me she was afraid to meet the police," he said. "So I think the police has to do something to illegal people so they can trust them. If not, it will not work."

When Raúl and Ignació came to Amengual's office before he handed them over to World Relief, "they were so afraid they didn't allow me to close the door," he recalled. "They were so afraid, we had to keep the door open all the time."

He said the two Mexicans were "psychologically destroyed" by their experience in Florida. Despite getting help from World Relief, which gave them clothing, housing and money to live, after a month they decided to go back to Mexico. Until now, their story went unreported.

"I think the police departments have a problem," said Amengual. "They have to let all the people know that 'We are your friends.'"

As we use the services of trafficked people every day, or unknowingly live next door to them, human trafficking implicates all who live here, Mackovjak believes.

"We have to think as a society how do we want to conduct ourselves as a society?" she asked. "If we know this is going on, how are we going to respond to it?"