Open border with Mexico traffic highway for human souls!
The Girls
Next Door
by Peter Landesman
January 25th, 2004
THE NEW YORK TIMES
The house at 1212 1/2
West Front Street in Plainfield,
N.J., is a conventional midcentury
home with slate-gray siding,
white trim and Victorian lines.
When I stood in front of it
on a breezy day in October,
I could hear the cries of children
from the playground of an
elementary school
around the corner.
American flags fluttered
from porches and windows.
The neighborhood is a leafy,
middle-class Anytown.
The house is set
back off the street,
near two convenience
stores and a gift shop.
On the door of Superior
Supermarket was pasted a sign
issued by the Plainfield police:
“Safe neighborhoods save lives.”
The store’s manager,
who refused to tell me his name,
said he never noticed anything
unusual about the house,
and never heard anything.
But David Miranda,
the young man behind the
counter of Westside Convenience,
told me he saw girls from the
house roughly once a week.
”They came in to
buy candy and soda,
then went back to the house,”
he said.
The same girls rarely came twice,
and they were all very young,
Miranda said.
They never asked for
anything beyond what
they were purchasing;
they certainly never
asked for help.
Cars drove up to
the house all day;
nice cars,
all kinds of cars.
Dozens of men
came and went. ‘
‘But no one here knew
what was really going on,”
Miranda said.
And no one ever asked.
On a tip,
the Plainfield police raided
the house in February 2002,
expecting to find illegal aliens
working an
underground brothel.
What the police found
were four girls between the
ages of 14 and 17.
They were all Mexican nationals
without documentation.
But they weren’t prostitutes;
they were sex slaves.
The distinction is important:
these girls weren’t working
for profit or a paycheck.
They were captives to the
traffickers and keepers who
controlled their every move.
”I consider myself hardened,”
Mark J. Kelly,
now a special agent with
Immigration and Customs
Enforcement
(the largest investigative arm
of the Department of
Homeland Security),
told me recently.
”I spent time in the Marine Corps.
But seeing some of the stuff I saw,
then heard about,
from those girls was a difficult,
eye-opening experience.”
The police found a squalid,
land-based equivalent of a
19th-century slave ship,
with rancid, doorless bathrooms;
bare, putrid mattresses;
and a stash of penicillin,
”morning after” pills
and misoprostol,
an antiulcer medication
that can induce abortion.
The girls were pale,
exhausted and malnourished.
It turned out that 1212 1/2
West Front Street was one
of what law-enforcement
officials say are dozens of
active stash houses and
apartments in the New York metropolitan area —
mirroring hundreds more
in other major cities like
Los Angeles,
Atlanta and Chicago —
where under-age girls and
young women from dozens
of countries are trafficked
and held captive.
Most of them —
whether they started out
in Eastern Europe or
Latin America —
are taken to the United States
through Mexico.
Some of them have been baited
by promises of legitimate jobs
and a better life in America;
many have been abducted;
others have been bought from
or abandoned by their
impoverished families.
Because of the porousness
of the U.S.-Mexico border and
the criminal networks that
traverse it,
the towns and cities along
that border have become the
main staging area in an illicit
and barbaric industry,
whose ”products” are
women and girls.
On both sides of the border,
they are rented out for sex
for as little as 15 minutes
at a time,
dozens of times a day.
Sometimes they are sold
outright to other traffickers
and sex rings,
victims and experts say.
These sex slaves earn no money,
there is nothing voluntary about
what they do and if they try to
escape they are often beaten
and sometimes killed.
.
Last September,
in a speech before the United
Nations General Assembly,
President Bush named sex
trafficking as ”a special evil,”
a multibillion-dollar
”underground of brutality
and lonely fear,”
a global scourge alongside
the AIDS epidemic.
Influenced by a coalition
of religious organizations,
the Bush administration has
pushed international action
on the global sex trade.
The president declared
at the U.N. that
”those who create these victims
and profit from their suffering
must be severely punished”
and that
”those who patronize this
industry debase themselves
and deepen the misery
of others.
And governments that
tolerate this trade are
tolerating a form of slavery.”
Under the Trafficking Victims
Protection Act of 2000 —
the first U.S. law to recognize
that people trafficked against
their will are victims of a crime,
not illegal aliens —
the U.S. government rates
other countries’ records on
human trafficking and can
apply economic sanctions on
those that aren’t making
efforts to improve them.
Another piece of legislation,
the Protect Act, which Bush
signed into law last year,
makes it a crime for any
person to enter the U.S., or for
any citizen to travel abroad,
for the purpose of sex tourism
involving children.
The sentences are severe:
up to 30 years’ imprisonment
for each offense.
The thrust of the president’s
U.N. speech and the scope
of the laws passed here to
address the sex-trafficking
epidemic might suggest that
this is a global problem but
not particularly
an American one.
In reality,
little has been done to
document sex trafficking
in this country.
In dozens of interviews
I conducted with former
sex slaves,
madams, government and
law-enforcement officials
and anti-sex-trade activists
for more than four months
in Eastern Europe,
Mexico and the United States,
the details and breadth of this
sordid trade in the U.S.
came to light.
In fact,
the United States has become
a major importer of sex slaves.
Last year, the C.I.A. estimated
that between 18,000 and
20,000 people are trafficked
annually into the United States.
The government has not studied
how many of these are victims
of sex traffickers,
but Kevin Bales,
president of Free the Slaves,
America’s largest anti-slavery organization,
says that the number is at
least 10,000 a year.
John Miller,
the State Department’s director
of the Office to Monitor and
Combat Trafficking in Persons,
conceded:
”That figure could be low.
What we know is that the
number is huge.”
Bales estimates that there
are 30,000 to 50,000 sex slaves
in captivity in the United States
at any given time.
Laura Lederer, a senior State Department adviser on trafficking,
told me,
”We’re not finding victims in
the United States because we’re
not looking for them.”
ABDUCTION In Eastern European
capitals like Kiev and Moscow,
dozens of sex-trafficking rings
advertise nanny positions in
the United States in local
newspapers;
others claim to be scouting
for models and actresses.
In Chisinau, the capital of
the former Soviet republic
of Moldova —
the poorest country in Europe
and the one experts say is
most heavily culled by
traffickers for young women —
I saw a billboard with
a fresh-faced,
smiling young woman beckoning
girls to waitress positions
in Paris.
But of course there are
no waitress positions and
no ”Paris.”
Some of these young women
are actually tricked into paying
their own travel expenses —
typically around $3,000 —
as a down payment on what
they expect to be bright,
prosperous futures,
only to find themselves
kept prisoner in Mexico
before being moved to
the United States and sold
into sexual bondage there.
The Eastern European
trafficking operations,
from entrapment to transport,
tend to be well-oiled
monoethnic machines.
One notorious Ukrainian ring,
which has since been
broken up,
was run by Tetyana Komisaruk
and Serge Mezheritsky.
One of their last transactions,
according to Daniel Saunders,
an assistant U.S. attorney in
Los Angeles,
took place in late June
2000 at the Hard Rock Cafe
in Tijuana.
Around dinnertime,
a buyer named
Gordey Vinitsky walked in.
He was followed shortly after
by Komisaruk’s husband,
Valery,
who led Vinitsky out to
the parking lot and to a
waiting van.
Inside the van were six
Ukrainian women in their
late teens and early 20’s.
They had been promised
jobs as models and baby
sitters in the glamorous
United States,
and they probably had no
idea why they were sitting
in a van in a backwater like
Tijuana in the early evening.
Vinitsky pointed into the van
at two of the women and said
he’d take them for
$10,000 each.
Valery drove the young women
to a gated villa 20 minutes
away in Rosarito,
a Mexican honky-tonk tourist
trap in Baja California.
They were kept there until July 4,
when they were delivered to
San Diego by boat and
distributed to their buyers,
including Vinitsky,
who claimed his two ”purchases.”
The Komisaruks,
Mezheritsky and Vinitsky
were caught in May 2001
and are serving long sentences
in U.S. federal prison.
In October,
I met Nicole,
a young Russian woman who
had been trafficked into Mexico
by a different network.
”I wanted to get out of Moscow,
and they told me the Mexican
border was like a freeway,”
said Nicole,
who is now 25.
We were sitting at a cafe on
the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles,
and she was telling me the
story of her narrow escape
from sex slavery —
she was taken by immigration
officers when her traffickers
were trying to smuggle her
over the border from Tijuana.
She still seemed fearful of being
discovered by the trafficking
ring and didn’t want even her
initials to appear in print.
(Nicole is a name she adopted
after coming to the U.S.)
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