DENVER (AP) – The FBI’s Rocky Mountain Innocence Lost Task Force rescued 59 teen prostitutes from flesh peddlers in Colorado this year, up from 49 in 2012.
In July, Operation Cross Country, a nationwide sweep that targeted victims of underage prostitution and their pimps, recovered 105 juveniles and bagged 150 pimps in 76 cities.
Denver ranked fourth in the number of teens rescued, with nine juveniles, fewer than only San Francisco, Milwaukee and Detroit.
These are chilling statistics that indicate modern-day slavers continue to ply their trade in Colorado.
“It’s not that this is a brand-new problem,” FBI spokesman Dave Joly said. “However, because we are focusing resources, we are addressing the problem directly and are finding more of it.”
The market for forced labor isn’t confined to the sex trade, and the Internet has made it easier to ensnare unwary workers anywhere in the world. Trafficked workers, many of them immigrants with little command of English, can be found laboring even in health care and other legitimate jobs.
Human trafficking – for sex or labor – involves servitude, force, coercion or fear, and it is difficult to prove, said FBI Special Agent Stephanie Benitez, who investigates labor-trafficking cases.
“People think whips, chains, but they don’t need that,” Benitez said. “They can say, ‘We know where your family is, and if you leave, they are going to get hurt.’”
Under U.S. and international law, anyone younger than 18 found in the sex trade is considered a victim of trafficking, whether or not coercion is present, according to the Polaris Project, which advocates for victims and lobbies for legislation to fight the problem.
Kids snared by traffickers often are runaways spotted soon after they hit the street, said Kendall Rames, deputy director of Urban Peak, a Denver nonprofit that provides services to homeless kids.
“These folks are experts at focusing on young people who are vulnerable,” Rames said. “They will find a vulnerable young person who has just arrived in Denver. Within 48 hours they are contacted by someone for the sex trade.”
One 17-year-old girl who spoke to the Post was 14 when an older girl turned her over to a 41-year-old pimp as payment for crack cocaine. She is not being named because she is the victim of a sex crime.
“I had ran away from home that night because my grandma said I can’t go to this party, and I said, ‘Whatever.’ I got completely drunk, and I guess I ended up in their hands. When they asked me where I lived, I said ‘I’m on the run,’” she said.
The pimp, who had three other girls turning tricks for him, offered her a place to stay. He bought her clothes and kept her intoxicated with sedatives commonly used in date rape, marijuana and other drugs, the girl said.
Young people trapped in prostitution see little or no cash for their participation, and a combination of fear and the brainwashing they are subject to leaves them loath to turn in their abusers, Rames said.
The girl said her pimp was selling drugs, and they moved from motel to motel, leaving after a few days to avoid the attention a string of men coming was sure to bring.
It was the drug sales that brought the operation to a close.
An undercover FBI agent came to buy drugs at a room where she was staying. “They were like, there is a really young girl in there, she is with all these men, and all they see around me is drugs,” the girl said.
The man and several women who helped run the operation had planned to take the prostitutes on a road trip to Mississippi.
The girl told a cousin she was leaving the state. “She ended up calling my Nanna.”
After talking to police, the girl’s grandmother contacted her. She told the girl her mom – who was awaiting release from prison for theft – was at a halfway house and wanted to see her.
The girl grabbed her packed bags and ran down the street.
Cops were waiting. They arrested her and then busted the other members of the ring.
After the arrest, the girl spent time in juvenile detention and then a rehab facility before moving back with her grandmother.
She was back on the street again last year after she and some friends went partying with men they met at a liquor store.
At the end of the night, the friends told her to go with the older men, and the strangers took her home to her grandmother’s. Before she got out of the car, they said, “It was fun, let’s kick it again.”
When she met them the next day, she said, they told her that she was going to help make money.
The Crips-affiliated ring knew where her grandmother lived and told her if she didn’t sell her body, they would harm her family.
Eight people involved in that ring were busted in December 2012, along with four johns.
Angela Jeanine Ryan, 43, a minor player, on Dec. 5 received a four-year suspended prison sentence with four years of intensive supervised probation, followed by three years of parole. Other prosecutions are still underway, Colorado Attorney General spokeswoman Carolyn Tyler said.
Trafficking in children for the sex trade is increasingly the domain of street gangs, said Sgt. Daniel Steele, a Denver police officer who heads the FBI task force for the Front Range.
Sixty-three percent of those arrested for trafficking and pimping offenses by the task force since January 2012 are documented gang members or associates.
“We are starting to see a larger influx of gang members,” Steele said. “A lot of guys are getting out of jail saying there is a lot less risk in trafficking than slinging drugs.”
The girl has since earned her general equivalency diploma and plans to go to college and study criminology.
“I want to help get nasty, perverted, not only men, but women,” she said. “I want to help young girls out of that.”
In July, a U.S. District Court jury in Denver convicted Highlands Ranch businessman, Kizzy Kalu, on 89 counts of human trafficking for luring Filipino nurses here with promises of high-paying jobs.
Kalu’s Internet ads said Adam University – a school in name only – needed nursing instructor/supervisors. Unlike visas for other businesses, which are limited in number, there is no cap on the number granted to institutes of higher education.
The ads included pictures of Teikyo Loretto Heights University – which has a large foreign-student population – and claimed they were photos of the fictional Adam University.
He arranged for 25 foreign nationals to receive H-1B visas, charging them $6,500 each for obtaining them.
Kalu promised the women jobs as nurse instructors/supervisors, then sent them to work for much less, as nurses in long-term care facilities.
The facilities paid the nurses, but Kalu took $1,200 per month from each of them, threatening to send a letter to the Department of Homeland Security that would cause them to lose their visas.
The metro area is both a destination and a jumping-off point for traffickers, said Emily Lafferrandre, director of education and advocacy for Praxus, a Denver-based nonprofit that works to end domestic human trafficking.
Some of the traffickers head traveling crews made up of young, generally not underage, people who sell magazines and products.
“They are told that they get paid to travel the country and earn money and meet people,” Lafferrandre said. “They are not told they have to pay food and rent and that they will have to pay off either real or inflated debt to their boss.”
Some of the sales-crew bosses are legitimate operators who treat their employees well. And those who head magazine sales crews that operate at the edge of the law are difficult to identify as human traffickers, Benitez said.
The crews crowd into one or two hotel rooms, Lafferrandre said. “Sometimes they have them sign a contract that says they will front you the cost of a bus ticket to get you to a starting point.”
The sales people receive a pittance for the long hours they spend pounding the pavement, said Earlene Williams, director of Parent Watch, nonprofit clearinghouse for information on child and youth labor abuse.
“A lot of them don’t question this,” Williams said. “If they get $150 for a seven-day period and work 60, 70 hours a week, you would think some of them would walk away. But they don’t, because they are scared or have a boyfriend or girlfriend on the crew.”
