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Post by almagata on Jun 2, 2017 20:01:29 GMT
I watched the doc film I Am Jane Doe tonight on NF. It details the accounts of some children who were forced in to the sex trafficking business. They were found by their picture appearing on Backpage. It then details the fight to stop Backpage from allowing this advertising. There were some very good points made in the film, and some that could be applied to the LISK cases. It was interesting that the pimps term for the practice of getting the prostitutes addicted to drugs was using the "leash". They also interview another pimp and he tells the viewers the lies he used, the victims he sought, and his use of fear to control the victims. The film primarily focused on the children being sold, but I think the arguments should be applied to the adults as well. The show is well worth watching. How timely. I just saw a presentation on human trafficking this week. I think my mouth was agape for half of it. Not my best look. :-) Anyway, they showed video that two human traffickers in New York self produced documenting the process they go through to identify and and hook young girls about 12 years old into "The Life". These guys are smooth and manipulative. They essentially have an interview process that that use to id girls that are susceptible to their methods. They are usually girls that are looking to fill a hole in their lives and are looking to be cared for. Many of them come from abusive or dysfunctional homes. Some but not all are runaways. The guys often initially act like they are in love with the young girls and are their first sexual experience. Once they have had sex with them, then the guys will ask them things like "would you do anything for me?" and manipulate the girls by saying that they can have more fun together if she earns money selling her body. Once she prostitutes herself then they call her a whore and tell her she can't go back. They also showed some of the questions that a jailed human trafficker had made as notes to himself as "interview" questions that he used to screen girls. Some of the questions were: Do you come from an abusive home? Have you ever runway? Are you computer literate? Have you ever had sex? Do you love yourself? Some pimps, at least here, brand their girls with tattoos that they use on all their girls. Many of the tattoos have something to do with royalty(crown or lady, queen, etc. ) or money and the pimps name. Once the girls have these tattoos it makes it harder for them to leave "The Life" because the people on the street know what they mean and they would have to explain them to their families. I'll see if I can't watch the video tonight. I had no idea these guys were that smooth. I makes me want to hunt these guys down and beat them. FYI: I said girls but it also goes for young men too and pimps can be women. |
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Post by almagata on Jun 3, 2017 7:00:40 GMT
I just finished watching I Am Jane Doe. I just get the feeling that Congress is talking the talk but we will see if these elected officials can withstand the onslaught of lobbying pressure that the tech companies will bring. I see the free speech angle. I see the freedom of the internet angle. Honestly, if I had to choose either freedom of speech and allowing these ads and suppressing free speech and prohibiting the ads, I would vote for protecting free speech.
The reality is, that so long as there is demand, someone will find a way to market these girls. With the internet, they don't even have to be in the U.S.
I am Jane Doe interviewed that one pimp and you got the flavor of the manipulation and recruiting that goes on. I think we would be better to develop an education program so that kids are aware of the methods and are trained to spot them. We also need to have better support networks for kids that fit that mold that these guys are looking for. If a bunch of pimps can find it, so can the rest of society if we look and we can develop programs and give these kids mentors to get them safely into adulthood.
I have no expectation that men who seek anonymous sex for money is going away anytime soon. I think the best we can hope for is to keep kids from being victimized.
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Post by albion on Jun 3, 2017 16:41:46 GMT
One benefit of having the Backpages website being the conduit for advertising is that LE should be able to monitor it more closely. It seems counter intuitive to allow Backpages to continue. And yet Backpages isnt responsible for the underage prostitution, that would be going on regardless, but I guess it helps to maximize the profit for it. Even if the adverts were taken off of Backpages, or the internet, the supply and demand would create a market for it somehow, and then LE would have to go and find it again.
Personally I wouldnt want to legalize prostitution. But the system isnt working as it is right now. Neither is the prison system. Many of the people I have met that went through the system arent rehabilitated, they just are that much more careful about not getting caught. And the laws of this great country really only apply to those who are caught and then proven guilty. Applying that to murders, where the clearance rate is 60%, and the conviction rate is even less, or to the number of transactions(?) a prostitute has before she is caught, it is no wonder that these crimes are so prevalent. And if we allowed prostitution for adults to be legal, wouldnt there still be a black market for children?
Youth is wasted on the young and freedom is wasted on the ignorant. According to my limited research, most of the content being shown on the internet is biased news stories, videos of cats, and porn. I often wonder that many of the people on the proboards site are more interested in reading about the crimes and looking at the pictures than they are about helping to spread awareness of the case.
I have been wondering about those instances where the family receives calls on birthdays or such. It seems as if the victims might have been forced into some type of sex trafficking.
The combination of fear, drugs, peer pressure, and low self esteem seems very strong. If women in their 20's and 30's cant break the cycle, I dont see how we can expect a young girl to do it.
And when that pimp looked at the camera and spoke about how he told the girls not to mess with his money. There was a twinkle in his eye that seemed to say that at that moment it was the reason he was put here on this earth.
It gets difficult to watch these documentaries, and read the crimes that we do and stay optimistic that anything is going to change for the better.
I watched another film called the Seven Five, about some corrupt cops in NYC. It is on NF too. Imagine that those cops were also being bribed to watch over a prostitution ring. Something similar to the LISK murders. Independent prostitutes are abducted and brought into the brothels and given drugs, and told that if they dont comply they will be killed and their family will be hurt. And the ones that dont comply are disposed of like waste from a business. Once they are in the system, no one is going to want to come forward and report anything. Not the pimps, not the johns, and not the LE who were being bribed to protect them. Its a question of how ruthless a person or system is.
I went on to backpages to see what was going on around my area. And it is just the same as described in the docs. And there were the girls that had the tattoos just like you said. The diamonds, money signs, and various names. And there were girls who did not look 18 in their pictures.
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Post by albion on Jul 27, 2017 18:49:11 GMT
Here is a story I found. It is 10 years old but still true in my opinion. I think this is what happened in the LISK case. The only difference is that the pimps in the LISK case had LE/political connections.
Shauna's Story of Slavery
by Mari S. Krueger
Panhandle top place in Florida for human trafficking
The room was dark when Shauna Newell, 17, woke up, her clothes torn from her, a man over her, raping her. Her hands were tied, crossed, behind her head. She yelled for them to stop, to leave her alone. She looked into the faces of the four men watching, looked to her friend Jana, looking for a sign that one of them would help her. Instead, she got a gun pressed to her head.
"Do you want to see your brains all over that wall?" one man asked. She was quiet.
Then she blacked out again. She woke up to the same horrifying nightmare again and again. But it was real. The pain told her it was happening.
As she faded in and out she heard, "He isn't ready yet…We have to stall longer...$300,000 in cash…Man in Texas."
Shauna is a real person. Shauna is her real name. She's 18 now, and she's lived in Pensacola as long as she can remember. She's white, middle-class. All her family is here. This all happened just over a year ago. She was held against her will for four days from April 29 to May 2, 2006.
Shauna is a victim of sex trafficking. Forced commercial sex and labor are called human trafficking, a form of modern-day slavery. Human trafficking is very real across the United States, especially in Florida, California, New York and Texas. And it's very real in Pensacola.
Sex trafficking means a commercial sex act has been induced by force, fraud or coercion, or the person induced to perform the act is under age 18, reports the National Human Trafficking Resource Center. Many times traffickers target young, female runaways, sweet talk them, earn their trust, then rape them and shame them into prostitution, saying things like, "You can't go home now. Your family will never take you back. I'm the only one who will watch out for you now. You're worthless."
Sex traffickers also bring in women from other countries, often from Central and South America, with promises of marriage, better jobs, a new life.
NO. 2 CRIME INDUSTRY
After drug dealing, trafficking of humans is tied with arms dealing as the second largest criminal industry in the world and is the fastest growing, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services says. Many victims are forced to be prostitutes or strippers, but trafficking includes people forced or tricked into domestic servitude, construction work, restaurant work, janitorial work, sweatshop factory work and migrant agricultural work.
The Panhandle saw 33 rescued victims in the past month—plus 10 this week alone for a total of 43—and has 10 open cases involving 300 potential victims, says Anna Rodriguez, head of the Florida Coalition Against Human Trafficking. That's more than Miami or Orlando.
Brad Dennis of the KlaasKids foundation started helping human trafficking victims after Shauna's case. The Florida Coalition contacted him about her case, and he started working with them on other cases along the Gulf Coast. That grew into the Gulf Coast Coalition Against Human Trafficking, which he oversees.
"That doesn't happen in Pensacola." "She must have deserved it." "She asked for it." "That doesn't happen to girls who don't want it." "That's too unbelievable."
Shauna hears all those comments. And she'll be the first to tell you, she never thought it could happen either.
"I went to that house of my own free will," she says softly, "but I was not held there on my own free will. I told them plenty of times, 'Just let me go home!'
"I was aware stuff like that happens, but I never thought it'd happen to me," she adds. "I thought I could trust her."
BETRAYED AND RESCUED
She was betrayed by a friend, Jana, a girl she met at night school, a girl she thought was trustworthy. Shauna was two days away from earning her GED. Her stepdad had promised her a new car when she got it—she never did.
Shauna's friend Jana invited her to hang out at her dad's home, a house in Shauna's neighborhood, four blocks from her own home and less than a mile from the sheriff's office headquarters. It's a neighborhood where she always felt safe. She sees cops patrolling all the time.
Shauna had just talked to her mom on the phone. She'd be home by 10 p.m. But when they got to the house, Jana's "dad" turned out to be her pimp. He was out on an errand. Instead, Shauna found five men. She felt uncomfortable and asked for some water. She drank it. Then she blacked out.
She woke up in a pool of vomit in the bathroom. One of the men told her to take the pill he offered her. It'd make her feel better. Shauna doesn't know if she took it or not, because she blacked out again. The next time she regained consciousness was in the dark, during one of the rapes. Those went on for days.
When she was rescued after four days of rape, abuse, starvation and water deprivation, Shauna had lethal amounts of cocaine, crystal meth, marijuana, the date rape drug and ecstasy in her system, so much she had to take Life Flight to West Florida Hospital. No one thought she'd survive.
Shauna was rescued thanks to her mom, the Escambia County Sheriff's Department and the KlaasKids Foundation—that's where Dennis joined the hunt. The sheriff's office asked for Dennis' help, and he organized search parties, posted flyers and asked questions. He finally got a name of someone who knew who Shauna was with.
Repeated calls to Shauna's attackers—and Jana—led them to prop Shauna up between two men in the backseat of a car and start driving.
That's when Jana asked Shauna, "Did the water I gave you taste funny?" Jana told her she'd drugged her first glass of water with the date rape drug. Jana had been present almost constantly during the entire ordeal.
"She wasn't acting like she didn't want to be there," Shauna says flatly. "When I saw her running around, I was so mad. She set me up."
She didn't know where they were going, but she didn't have the strength to argue.
"My body was so low on energy I couldn't fight anymore," she says. "I couldn't if I wanted to. I could barely hold my head up. I know I definitely would've been sold, and I'd be someone's whore."
Ultimately, she was left in the parking lot of a convenience store in Perdido Key with a final threat: "If you say our names or what happened to you, we'll kill you and the rest of your family."
TERROR CONTINUES
That's why she hesitated to tell her story at first. But one of her friends held her hand and walked her through it. She told her mom what happened, then Dennis, who convinced her to talk to the police.
But to make her case, she had to sit alone with a detective and recall the horrifying four days. She couldn't even be alone in a room with her dad, but her mom wasn't allowed to sit through the interview with her, and a female detective wasn't available. So her case was closed, and many called her a liar then and now.
The medical evidence tells the truth on her behalf: internal bleeding that went on for days, ripping in the muscles up around her bladder. And she had a sexually transmitted disease called trichomonas from all the tearing in her vagina.
Shauna can't even estimate how many times she was raped—all she knows is what she has endured since then, emotionally and physically.
"They said it had to be a large number for all the bruising and the tearing," she says. "There were only five guys, and five guys couldn't do that much damage just doing it once or twice."
Shauna is tiny with shiny, shoulder-length brown hair. She did child modeling for 10 years. She used to want to be a nurse, but now she's just trying to keep up with daily life with her boyfriend and their new baby son. She is somber, honest and direct when she discusses her captivity, but lights up with smiles and laughter when she talks about her son.
For months, Shauna suffered nightmares and night terrors. She's still afraid of the dark. She can't be alone at night in places she doesn't know well. She always is more careful than she used to be.
She panicked when her brother walked into the room one day, because he was wearing the same cologne as one of the men who raped her. She had to move out of the state for a while. She moved to a different neighborhood.
She recognized one of her attackers in a car behind her in traffic a few months after her ordeal and panicked.
"One of the guys followed us, and my mom called and said, 'Don't come home—there're guys sitting out in front of the house.'" She and her boyfriend fled to his parents' house, where they now live. It's a quiet neighborhood away from where her ordeal happened. She feels safer—a little anyway.
"It might be old people, but we still have neighborhood watch!" Shauna says.
"I wouldn't exactly say I'm weak," Shauna explains. "I like to make new friends. I welcome you with open arms. And it got me in trouble."
ENDING SLAVERY?
That kind of "trouble" is not new. There are 2 million human trafficking victims in the United States, and Florida ranks second behind California in the highest percentage of those victims, the U.S. Department of Justice reports.
About 800,000 people are trafficked across international borders annually, with 14,000 to 20,000 people—of all nationalities—trafficked across U.S. borders annually, estimates the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Those are probably underestimates, Rodriguez says. She's been involved in the Florida Coalition since 1999, but really noticed an increase in awareness after the first international conference on human trafficking in 2004 in Florida. Since then, more research, funding and victims have come her way.
"As we've started getting people to come forward and rescuing people, almost on a daily basis, we're getting calls from people wanting to come forward," she says.
Many victims are scared, threatened and may not speak English. But the more word gets out, the more people they're able to help.
"Every 10 seconds there is a new victim of human trafficking," Rodriguez says.
Forty to 50 percent of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. are at risk of human trafficking by force or coercion, people from the Americas, Europe and Asia. But alarmingly, the Panhandle is seeing a lot of U.S. human trafficking victims.
"I can tell you in Pensacola we have a lot of cases of underage U.S. citizens being used for sexual exploitation," Rodriguez says.
She admits it surprised her to see so many girls being recruited for human trafficking, because she expected the new Gulf Coast Coalition office to be her quietest.
But of all the offices across the state, the Gulf Coast Coalition Against Human Trafficking—run by Dennis after he helped rescue Shauna—is seeing the most victims. That's because Interstate 10, a major trafficking corridor, sends victims right through the Florida Panhandle. And picks them up there, too.
"(Dennis) has been finding a lot of U.S. citizens and that is scary," Rodriguez says, pointing out that trafficking affects citizens as much as immigrants. "We have been slammed. This is our office where we have the most victims right now in the state of Florida, so it is scary."
When Dennis encounters someone who may be a human trafficking victim, he gets them physical, emotional and legal help. After identifying them as a victim, he works to get them certified, which enables the government to help stabilize their immigration status, rebuild their life in the United States, and receive federally funded benefits like a refugee.
"We're trying to build an underground railroad just like in the days of slavery," Dennis says. "This is modern day slavery."
THE CIRCUIT
People are surprised to hear slavery still exists and some try to criminalize young runaways, who have been pressured into prostitution.
"That's not the case," Dennis says firmly. "They're victims."
He encounters girls who suffer beatings, rape, gang rape and punishments for not earning enough money. If a pimp tells his victim she must make $500 one day and she doesn't, she could be locked in a car trunk, room or closet, not allowed to shower or have clean clothes. Dennis says some women are forced to have sex up to 30 times a day.
Even more frightening, the average age of sex victims across the country is lowering because johns, men who use prostitutes, are afraid of catching sexually transmitted diseases and AIDS from women who've been in the business a long time. So pimps recruit younger and younger girls.
One case Dennis worked recently involved four girls between 13 and 16 years old, who were brought to Tallahassee from Illinois to work the South Florida circuit for their pimp.
Pimps bring girls they've recruited from bus stops, the mall and MySpace to New York or Atlanta and take them on a circuit: Atlanta—Jacksonville—Miami—Tampa—Orlando—Tallahassee—Panama City Beach—Pensacola—Mobile—New Orleans and back to Atlanta. Then after a break, it starts again.
"That's a pretty well-known circuit for all of this," Dennis says. "They can get more money from these kids than working them somewhere else."
People flock to the South for conventions, vacation and prostitutes, so it's an easy way for pimps to make more money than in their hometowns.
That's also why trafficking is on the rise, passing the illegal arms trade for most profitable crimes. Trafficking profits come in second only to the drug trade.
"Drugs you can only use once, but a human being you can use time and time again," Dennis says.
SAVING YOUNG GIRLS
The biggest challenge he faces in Pensacola? "Overcoming the opinion that they are criminals, not victims," Dennis says.
It's impossible to get help if no one thinks the Shaunas of the world are victims. But the 13- and 14-year-old girls he encounters have been stripped of their childhoods. "They were put into adulthood overnight." And they need help.
The Gulf Coast Coalition Against Human Trafficking works with local law enforcement, social services, community- and faith-based groups to provide that help.
A Child Abduction Response Team, or CARE, combines efforts of law enforcement agencies in Escambia, Santa Rosa, Okaloosa and Walton counties to get to missing or runaway children before traffickers do.
"A lot of times they do come hand in hand," says Investigator Troy Brown of the Escambia County Sheriff's Office Missing Persons Unit. "She'll not have anywhere to go and she'll be hungry and a friend will refer them to a pimp, if you want to call them that. They'll be sweet to them for a few days, then basically force them into sexual slavery. So it's important to us to stay on top of it."
Brown first got involved with human trafficking on a local case he worked more than a year ago. He received a call about an underage girl in a car who might be a prostitute.
"They determined it was not a prostitution thing, but because of her being a minor, they started digging deeper," Brown says.
The girl was actually a victim of a major trafficking ring based in Ohio. Her recruiters had gone to bus stops and truck stops looking for down-and-out, young women working for minimum wage.
"They kind of showered them with gifts and praise, then when they get them in a certain point they say, 'You're going to be a prostitute or we're gonna kill you.'"
From there, the victims were put on the circuit through the major tourist cities. It was two women doing the recruiting for the Ohio human trafficking ring. The man leading the ring was arrested and sentenced to 40 years in prison as part of the FBI's Operation Innocence Lost.
Brown says stopping traffickers requires being alert during patrols.
As for the 17-year-old girl, Brown guesses she probably would've ended up dead. Instead, she was reunited with her father.
"I'm a father. I have kids. If my kids run away, I'm gonna want somebody to go look for them, so I'm going to treat it the way I'd want someone to look for mine," he says.
HERE TO HELP
Sue Dees is a member of the Eden Fellowship Church in Pensacola where Dennis is pastor. She and other church members are joining the fight against trafficking by helping Dennis post flyers for missing people, talking to prostitutes about unusual or underage activity and opening their homes to rescued victims. They're committed to providing them safety, shelter, food, clothes—whatever they need.
"We weren't aware of the in-depth situations that are here in our environment, our community," Dees says. "It hits close to home. We're just doing our part to help these people get out from oppression. As a Christian, that's what we're supposed to do—love our neighbors and help them. Everybody wants a comfort zone…It would be easier to just close my eyes and look the other way, but people are suffering and hurting and this is the least I can do to help."
Human trafficking is at the same place awareness of domestic violence was 20 years ago, Dennis explains. Then it was people's dirty little secret they tried to hide from the neighbors and family, not the unacceptable behavior it is today with services available to victims. Trafficking is right at the same cusp and Dennis says he wants to raise awareness so trafficking victims can get help, too.
"It's just starting to come out," he says. "At a level where we're trying to spread the word, people are starting to take notice."
Trafficking victims could be the people mowing your lawn, the teenager standing alone on the street corner, the woman at the Laundromat. But it can hit even closer to home.
Law enforcement called Dennis recently to get his help on a case. When they told him the name of the missing girl, it was someone Dennis knew. It was a girl from his own neighborhood.
"If it's happening in my community, how dare I not do anything about it? For me, that's enough," Dennis says. "I know that my calling in life is to stand by these kids."
His dedication to standing by her may have saved Shauna's life. And now she wants to help save other girls, too.
"I've already been called a liar," as well as a drug addict and a runaway, Shauna says. "People think it doesn't happen because it doesn't happen to someone they know. If you say it's just another girl from Pensacola, people will say it didn't happen. But if you say, 'Shauna Newell was raped,' people will say, 'Hey, I know that girl. I see her at Starbucks. I went to school with her.'"
Nothing will stop her from telling her story as long as she can help one girl, one woman, one person.
"It gets easier every time," she says. "Now that I know I'm actually helping people, it helps me."
TRAFFICKING IN TEXAS, TOO
Monitoring the police scanner on the nighttime cop beat for the Corpus Christi (Texas) Caller-Times left little time to research stories I really wanted to write.
So, I surfed the 'Net on my 9 p.m. dinner break for ideas. I found stories about women and children being sold into slavery in the cold, impersonal wastelands of Eastern Europe.
I learned a lot about human trafficking and conditions that attract traffickers. Borders between very poor and very rich countries—borders people will do nearly anything to cross—are at risk.
The Corpus Christi newsroom is 150 miles from the border with Mexico and my brain got to ticking. But stuff like that doesn't happen in the U.S., right? RIGHT?
I started reporting this story when I met my first human trafficking victim a few days later on Jan. 11, 2006 at a protest of the proposed border wall between Texas and Mexico.
She took 40 days to walk from Honduras into Mexico. When she got there, Norma Morales was raped and beaten so badly she had to be taken to the hospital because her arm was broken and she couldn't walk.
During her recovery, doctors said she was pregnant from the rape. Less than a year later, Norma waded with her six-week-old infant through the Rio Grande and stopped in Corpus Christi.
Eight years later, Norma is now a documented immigrant. She goes to Laundromats and places in the city and looks for signs of abuse and fear in women's faces. She brings the women to the Coastal Bend Immigration Council in South Texas.
"These women, they won't even look us in the eye," says Santa Gonzales, director of the organization. She says Mexican, South American and Asian women are captives in Corpus Christi and South Texas.
I asked the two women if they knew anyone who was forced to stay in an abusive relationship with threats of deportation.
Norma covered her face with her hands. Tears dripped down her cheeks and onto the table. She had heard those threats before herself. And she knew others.
I asked if they knew anyone who was smuggled across the border, promised one job and then forced into prostitution, domestic work or other slave labor.
They looked at each other knowingly and Gonzales says, "We could tell you so many stories. Yes, we know those women."
Veterinarian Michael Vickers had just been named Texas State Director of the Minutemen Civil Defense Corps—the sometimes-controversial eyes and ears of Border Patrol, which is now a separate group called Texas Border Volunteers—when I spoke with him in March 2006.
He has personal reasons for getting involved with border issues. He lives about 100 miles north of Mexico and his South Texas ranch has seen 60 deaths within 10 miles of his home. Vickers even found a dead woman's nude body less than 300 yards from his front door in September 2005. All those cases are reported to Border Patrol or local law enforcement for investigation.
"We know bad things are happening out there," Vickers says.
But he sees more than just human trafficking. He finds children as young as 8 wandering around lost, thirsty and starving. He finds women abandoned by the so-called coyotes who often charge a small fortune to smuggle people across the border, then leave them for dead. He found an African woman beaten and robbed.
People of all nationalities come across the Texas border desperate for work and safety. That's why they're at risk of human trafficking, even if they make it to U.S. soil on their own volition.
"These poor people are exploited beyond the scope of your wildest imagination," Vickers says. "This is just a way of life down here. I guess, you could say that's one of the reasons I'm a Minuteman. I just can't sit back and watch this human exploitation anymore."
This story never went to press a year ago at the Corpus Christi newspaper.
But it led me to Shauna's story of her horrifying experience in Pensacola and the threat of being sold into slavery to a man in Texas for $300,000.
Nowhere seems beyond the web of human trafficking.
GET INVOLVED
For info on how to help or items to include in a care package, call the local Coalition Against Human Trafficking: 525-4807
Send your tax-deductible donations to the Florida Coalition Against Human Trafficking to: 9260 Cove Ave., Pensacola, Fla., 32514
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Post by albion on Jul 28, 2017 18:21:02 GMT
These people need to serve a long time in jail. I cant help wondering, if one of the girls were to have been a threat to runaway or cause problems, and if she knew all the details about the ring, how would these three have handled it? Its not like they have a HR dept! I really get the feeling they would have killed the girl, and either taken her out to the desert or did it in a fashion that would have scared the crap out of the other girls. And say they do this three, four, or five times, I get the feeling that the profilers would start looking for a serial killer, rather than a prostitution ring.
I think the LE needs to reassess some of its cases and realize that the public display of some these girls may have been a message to other girls in the prostitution ring. "Do what we say or you will end up like Jane Doe." There are a number of these cases in Vegas. And if you look at many of the girls going missing, they do seem to be young and/or petite.
I was reading on facebook, a woman claimed that she had been abducted at an early age, and then was rescued. But they were planning on taking her across the border into Mexico.
"LOS ANGELES (KABC) --
A human trafficking ring operating in California, Nevada and Texas was busted, and some of the victims being sold for sex were only 15 years old.
Two people were arrested in the case, and authorities are looking for one more.
"Certainly, any of these cases where we rescue young people who are being held in this form of slavery is a major case for us, a major success to be able to get them on the right track, to get them back to their family," said Los Angeles County Sheriff Jim McDonnell during a press conference.
Quinton Brown III, 30, of Highland, is charged with 41 felony counts ranging from human trafficking of minors to pimping. Gerald Lavell Turner, 32, of Fresno, is facing six similar counts. Both men are being held in a Tulare County jail.
Investigators are still looking for Mia Maree McNeil, a 32-year-old woman from Los Angeles. She's facing 12 felony counts including identity theft. She's accused of renting apartments where the girls would have sex with customers, and she also allegedly stole IDs to lease high-end cars, including two Maseratis and a Porsche. The cars were allegedly used to take the girls from place to place up and down the state.
According to investigators, the suspects are part of a human trafficking and sex ring that pimped young girls for sex from Central and Northern California to the San Fernando Valley, Burbank and West Hollywood.
There were 13 female victims, and eight of them were juveniles, McDonnell said.
"They're as young as 15 years old, bought and sold for commercial sex," he said.
All of the victims in this case are from Central California. According to investigators, predators are able to lure young girls into the sex trade by using the internet and phone apps. Investigators say while most of the girls rescued from the sex trade come from broken homes, many do not.
The Tulare County Sheriff Mike Boudreaux had this strong warning for parents when it comes to your children's internet usage: "Be vigilant. Pay attention to what your children are doing online. Ask those very difficult questions. Who are you speaking with? Who are you talking to? Be that protective parent."
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Post by albion on Jul 29, 2017 20:54:08 GMT
Here is another article about the problem. I keep finding these articles, and I keep thinking this is what LISK is about. Not a psychopath serial killer, but a psychopath pimp.
DALLAS – For "Taylor," it all began outside a bus station in downtown Dallas three years ago. She was 15 at the time, and running away from home.
She'd never heard the term "sex trafficking," and thought forced prostitution was something that "happened on TV shows."
While many perceive most sex trafficking victims as foreigners brought into the United States illegally, as many as 100,000 children are victims of sex trafficking in this country each year, according to some estimates.
It is — for the most part — home-grown forced prostitution, perpetrated by pimps, and fueled by people who pay for sex.
The entry age for sex trafficking in the United States is between 13 and 15, according to federal prosecutors.
"He asked me what my name was and what I was doing, and I told him," she said. "I told him I was a runaway. I told him there was probably nobody looking for me. I told him how old I was."
A photo of Taylor at the time reveals an innocent blonde teenager from the Dallas suburbs.
Pimps can spot vulnerable kids at malls, train stations, and on Facebook, where teens post transparent comments about what's going on in their lives.
"They take advantage of people who are at their weakest moments," said Assistant U.S. Attorney Cara Pierce.
She has prosecuted 20 sex-trafficking cases in North Texas, and considers bringing the pimps to justice and rehabilitating their victims as a calling.
Dereck Johnson, 31, seemed friendly when Taylor first started talking to him that
day at the bus station. He had a teardrop tattooed under one eye, but his dark demeanor appealed to the rebellion Taylor was feeling at the time. When she told him she was a runaway, had little money, and that her cell phone wasn't working, Johnson realized she was a "freebie" — ripe for the picking, she now realizes.
"A lot of times," Taylor told News 8, "teenagers just want somebody to listen to their problems, and that's what I was doing. I was telling him my problems."
Once Johnson had Taylor's confidence, he talked her into going around the corner from the bus station and into the car of a friend he had called.
"I didn't realize there was trafficking or anything like that," she said. "I just realized I was scared."
Johnson and his friend took Taylor to a house and sexually assaulted her. Then, Johnson took her to a truck stop outside Dallas.
"In Dereck Johnson's case, he purposely brought our victim to a truck stop knowing there were going to be lots of customers there," Pierce said. "And then he forced her to engage in this, and kept the money from it."
Trucks stops, Pierce said, can be "hotbeds" of prostitution.
"There's a lot of commercial sex that happens at truck stops," she said.
"I had no idea what was really going on until later on," Taylor told News 8. "And then I got scared. And hopeless."
She was hopeless because her cell phone — her only link to the outside world, as she saw it — was out of minutes. She depended on Johnson to take her somewhere where she could call her parents.
The smartphone in the palm of a potential sex customer is also the primary enabler of trafficking. The Internet — specifically an online classified site called Back Page — has given rise to a sex "catalog" where customers can choose a prostitute by city, looks, and location. Although Taylor never ended up on Back Page, many trafficking victims do.
"Traffickers will post photographs of the girls or women in suggestive clothing and post them, basically, as want ads," Cara Pierce said. "They post them like property."
Pimps treat their victims like property, not only to insure their income stream, but to increase their dominance over them. Pimps — who can be women as well as men — are known to punch their initials into their victims' wrists with thumbtacks, or tattoo their names on them.
"Some of them will actually put barcodes on the girls," Pierce said. "We'll see barcodes on the girl's (lower inside) lips."
From Dallas, Dereck Johnson took Taylor to Houston and another truck stop. Mobility is key. Pimps don't want to get caught, so they will cycle from Dallas to Houston to Amarillo and Midland-Odessa in Texas — wherever the economy is good.
Truck stops are only one venue. More common are hotels, both upscale and low-end. The rooms are rented in the girl's name, or the girl goes to the customer's hotel.
"The customer never sees the pimp," Cara Pierce said. "He thinks it's just this girl, or two girls, or however many he's communicating with. And the pimp is out of sight, even on that transaction. But he's around; he's around to take the money."
The cases are difficult to prosecute, Pierce said. "They try to train the victims not to give any information."
Pimps also tell their victims that their families will be targeted.
"He had threatened me — not only me, but my family — that if I were to get away and tell the cops, then he'd come after me," Taylor said. "He'd come after my family."
She has repressed how many men she was forced to have sex with, but she was a victim for several days.
"That whole time I was with him, his goal was to tear me down. And I got out of it," she told us. "And he was hoping I would be torn down enough to where I couldn't go to the cops, that I couldn't cope with it enough to tell. And I could."
Through a minor miracle, Taylor was able to make one phone call and contact her parents, who came and rescued her. Then, she contacted the police.
Taylor is a much different-looking person than she was when it all began, in both looks (her hair is now dyed black) and personality. She knows her debt to Cara Pierce and a team of specialists who've helped put her on the road to recovery.
She warns other teenagers not to run away.
Taylor often thinks of Dereck Johnson, who's now serving a sentence for sex trafficking of a minor child.
Posted by khou.com
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Post by albion on Jul 29, 2017 21:11:31 GMT
Another mention of Backpages. Is not a questionable circumstance, that somehow the massage parlor closed an hour early the day LE was going to raid it?  ?? "An Odessa massage parlor is shut down after police raided the business on suspicion of prostitution. Investigators say an undercover agent was offered sexual favors at Accu Therapy at the West Village Shopping Center off West County Road Wednesday night. So far no arrests have been made. CBS 7 News made several attempts to identify who owns the business, but the shopping center refuses to release the information and our calls to city hall were not immediately returned. However, our news partners at the Odessa American say the owner is Oscar Barrera, a man from El Paso. Barreras told the newspaper he had no idea illegal activity was taking place inside the massage parlor. In fact, Barreras said he knew nothing about Wednesday night’s raid and is on his way to Odessa to “check what’s going on.” The business owner also told the OA that he left the upkeep of Accu Therapy Massage in the hands of two women who he only recalled as “Lisa” and “Jessica.” He says he made it clear to them that he didn’t want any “hanky panky” or prostitution taking place at the business. Detectives are currently in the process of reaching out to Barreras for questioning. Investigations like this are common in Odessa and Ector County, according to the lead undercover sergeant on the case. In fact there's one website in particular that detectives use to help spot these types of illegal businesses -- it's called Backpage. Backpage can be best described as a classified advertising website much like Craigslist. But in the eyes of undercover detectives they view this website as a tool that often leads them to prostitutes, pimps and even human trafficking. Prostitution has always existed in Odessa. Detectives say they see it come and go in waves depending on the economy. But what hasn't always existed is Backpage. "When we used to do prostitution investigations we used to just drive around and look for actual people, or known prostitutes standing on a corner somewhere,” said the undercover sergeant. Now this under cover sergeant is having to sit behind a computer screen and scroll through ads posted in the "body rubs" section of Backpage. Several local businesses and people are using this website to gain new clients and by clients we mean people who are looking to pay for sexual favors. Police say this is exactly what Accu Therapy Massage was doing. The business opened back in February and began posting sexually appealing ads of women under the name of A-1 Spa. They promised clients that their time there will always be “super good.” "It's not saying anything in words as far as sexual offers, or anything like that, but the pictures are indicating there's some kind of sexual activity going on," the undercover sergeant said. After spending a couple of weeks watching the massage parlor, a detective went undercover as a client Wednesday night and quickly experienced for himself a massage therapist offering to perform a sexual act on him in exchange for money. That verbal exchange was enough to get a search warrant for the business, but oddly enough they closed an hour early and are now nowhere to be found.
Detectives are quick to shut down these types of operations, because they've found in most cases these women are being trafficked and actually live inside the businesses.It is unclear whether or not that's the case here, but detectives did say they saw beds and evidence that makes them believe the massage therapists were living inside Accu Therapy Massage. You can read Odessa American's full interview with the massage parlor's owner by visiting their website below: www.oaoa.com/news/crime_justice/law_enforcement/article_be5a5638-fd19-11e5-a52c-331fe2ed6d05.html |
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Post by albion on Jul 29, 2017 21:31:22 GMT
Here is a highschool coach caught up in it. People are people, some good and some bad. In terms of LISK, those were some nice neighborhoods way out there on Long Island. Even priests do despicable acts, and yet LE always seems to get so upset when ever they are mentioned as possibly involved. How does a massage parlor close down just before LE arrives to raid it without a tip from someone in LE? ?? Like the coffee shop that always has cops around because they give free coffee or meals to the officers, do massage parlors get that special tip because they give special favors to LE? ?And when a problem arises with a girl or a john, who steps in to separate it from the massage parlor? ? Or in the LISK case, the brothel that was in Queens? ? If a prostitute OD's in one of these parlors, they cant just call the cops, they have to take care of it themselves. If a john gets too violent, they cant just arrest him on charges. And you cant tell me this doesnt happen. Even in the small little out of the way county I live in, the Ex-sheriff was alleged to have been involved in similar activity. But the johns arent going to talk, the pimps arent going to talk, the other prostitutes will be scared to death to talk, and any LE who is complicit or engaged in protection for the brothels or parlors arent going to talk, and they even might try and steer the investigations away from the parlors and brothels. This is what happened in LISK imo. "WACO, Texas (KWTX) - McLennan County sheriff’s deputies, after a month-long sting operation, announced Tuesday they have arrested 46 suspects in an investigation of prostitution and human trafficking and have warrants for four more. Sheriff Parnell McNamara said the sting, operated by detectives Brad Bond and Joseph Scaramucci, resulted in arrests of prostitutes, pimps and Johns that were involved in the sex trade and in human trafficking for prostitution. Some of those arrested specifically were looking for sexual encounters with minors or children, McNamara said. McNamara said during the investigation detectives were able to identify a prostitution and trafficking ring that was operating out of the Killeen area.
McNamara has not yet provided a list of names of those arrested but he did say that one of the suspects in a high school coach in the Ranger Independent School District and a professional baseball umpire with the Round Rock minor league baseball team.
The sting resulted in filing of 48 misdemeanor charges and 31 felony charges and netted about $3,000 in cash.
Over the past 15 months deputies have arrested 138 suspects in related sexually oriented business stings resulting in106 felony charges and 96 misdemeanor charges, McNamara said.The sheriff’s office partnered with the Unbound organization in the investigation. McNamara said Unbound has provided assistance and services for about 10 women who were caught up in the sting. “We will continue to carry out stings targeting these,” McNamara said. “I have given the detectives the authority to carry out any necessary activity at any time to help combat this behavior, as we will not tolerate it in McLennan County.” |
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