The Lost Girls
For the thousands of women who have been trafficked into Houston and forced to work as prostitutes in the city’s underground sex trade, escaping from captivity may be the easiest part of the nearly impossible road to recovery.
Left: A bathhouse listed on a Web site of erotic massage parlors in Houston. Right: Women at a spa hide their faces during a February 19 inspection by the Harris County precinct 4 constable’s office.
Photographs by Van Ditthavong
Kimberly McCall says: Dear Editors and Book Reviewers: While Mexican Cartels have been active in drug and human trafficking for many years on this side of the Mexico/Texas border, they are often shielded by “legitimate†businesses. While author Ernie Hunt’s riveting new novel Terror on the Border is fiction, it depicts more than an element of truth in its vivid illustration of how narcotics and human trafficking go hand-in-hand in the real life dramas that take place across our borders. Please read the following press release and let me know if we may schedule an interview with this gifted writer, or if you would like to receive a copy of his latest book for a review. Thank you. Kimberly McCall Ascot Media Group, Inc. Post Office Box 133032 The Woodlands, TX 77393 kmccall@ascotmediagroupcom Direct: (713) 679-9708 Office: (281) 333-3507 www.ascotmediagroup.com FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE True Life Mixes With Fiction As Five Heroes Help The Oppressed In A Battle Against Drugs And Human Slavery Dallas, TX, May 26, 2011 - Dave Cunningham, author of Travel Within: The 7 Steps to Wisdom and Inner Peace says it all with: “Terror on the Border is a gripping story. The last 120 pages will take you on a breathless ride.†With stories of Mexican drug cartels and the devastation they wreak taking center stage in daily news reports, the realism in Ernie Hunt’s latest novel, Terror on the Border (Unrivaled Books), will have readers gripped by fear and unable to put the book down! Ernie Hunt knows how to capture the attention of readers. Fans of his pulse-pounding, epic adventures will be thrilled to learn that Jack Cassidy, the fearless ex-sniper from previous novels, is back – and he wants justice! Now married to Juanita Delgado, herself a victim of human trafficking, readers share his heart-stopping journey as the pair set out to heroically fight a malicious cartel led by egotistical Hernan Cortez and his evil enforcer Manuela, in an attempt to help the poor citizens of San Miguel, Mexico, a town ravaged by violence inflicted by the Los Lobos gang. Trouble looms when Juanita’s cousin Orlando, an American Border Patrol Officer, is kidnapped by the notorious Lobos while he is on duty. He and Juanita, who was also taken hostage, manage to escape the torture chamber where they were being held for ransom by Cortez who hoped to make their rich uncle pay for their release. After their daring escape, they reunite with Jack and two private detectives from Dallas as they try to warn their uncle of the impending danger from Cortez. The action escalates in bloody confrontations near the border and the unexpected twists and turns of this thrilling novel grab the reader’s attention and hold it all the way to the explosive ending! Ernie Hunt’s gripping novel might be fiction, but unfortunately narcotics and human trafficking are only too real. The story pinpoints real-life drug cartels - and one in particular that is born of Mexican Army Special Forces deserters whose members include corrupt former federal, state and local police officers. Sadly, the human slave trade in Mexico is a $20 billion a year enterprise, second only to drug trafficking that is estimated to bring drug cartels around $64 billion a year from sales to users in the United States. Ernie Hunt has lived a very diverse life in places like California, Texas, Missouri, New York and even Paris, France. He is the author of five dynamic novels whose stories embrace a similar goal – to promote a common sense of human decency amongst practitioners of all faiths worldwide. For more information on this very creative writer, please visit his website at www.eehunt.com . ### (May 26th, 2011 at 3:42pm)
UPDATE: Thanks to the tireless efforts of anti-trafficking expert Dottie Laster and David Walding, an attorney with the Bernardo Kohler Center, the woman called Kiki featured in this story was released, after about a year of incarceration, from the La Salle Detention Facility in Jena, Louisiana, on July 20, and is awaiting receipt of her T-Visa. After a brief stop in Houston for Thai food, she has moved to a safe place with a specially trained staff who assist victims of human trafficking. There, Kiki will get therapy as well as help finding a job and creating a new life for herself. She was beaming and beautiful, and when I asked her how she felt, she said, “Excellent!” (If you are interested in following Kiki's progress, please contact Dottie Laster at info@lasterglobal.com.) —July 23, 2010
There are things that Kamchana doesn’t remember. This would include the period, six or so years ago, when she arrived in this country from Thailand and was moved from city to city so often she could not keep the names straight, much less spell or pronounce them. In “Boustons,” “Atanda,” “Mayarmei,” and other cities, the places she worked all looked the same inside and out, with the words “spa” or “massage” in the name and the neon Open signs always on. The front windows were usually blacked out, and there was often an ATM in the tiny lobby, which was furnished with cheap, overstuffed sofas where the women sat, their arms and legs crossed, dressed in lingerie or bikinis, waiting for customers. When the men arrived, their pick for the hour would walk them down a darkened hallway to a dim room with a massage table and soft music playing. In other rooms they’d wash them with warm, soapy water on a table. They’d finish with some variation of a “happy ending,” the massage parlor euphemism for intercourse, oral sex, a hand job, or whatever else the customer might ask for. Kamchana was then in her late thirties, but she looked younger, a fleshy woman with a persuasive smile and, even in the worst of times, an irresistible warmth. Her boss christened her “Kiki,” because her Thai name was too hard for Americans to remember.
The customers rarely seemed to grasp that the women were captives. They didn’t see the other rooms: the kitchen in the back with the overflowing ashtrays, the overloaded electrical outlets for the rice cookers and frying pans, the washer-dryers and the security cameras. These so-called spas were as tightly run as maximum-security prisons: Without permission, no one got in—or out. Kamchana (her name and nickname have been changed to protect her identity) shared cramped, windowless bedrooms with women from Korea, China, and Thailand, all her belongings crammed into one small rolling suitcase. Every two weeks she was loaded up and moved to another city, another spa, another room that looked just like the one before it. Like so many of the women on the circuit, she was being held until she paid off the debt of tens of thousands of dollars that she had taken on in exchange for passage to the U.S. They had told her she would be working it off in a restaurant, but the job description had changed once she arrived. “It is like sleeping with your husband, that’s all,” Kamchana’s first boss told her. She mostly worked 12-hour shifts, sold by the hour to men of different colors and creeds, rich and poor, grandfathers, husbands, fathers, sons. Sometimes her shifts lasted 24 hours.
Most people who are aware of the existence of human trafficking think that it happens in faraway places, like war-torn countries in the former Soviet Union, Southeast Asia, or Eastern Europe. Few can imagine that slaves are brought into the U.S. to work in restaurants, factories, and sexually oriented businesses (SOBs to those in the know). In fact, across the country, tens of thousands of people are being held captive today. Depending on whom you ask, Houston is either the leading trafficking site in the U.S. or very near the top, along with Los Angeles, Atlanta, New Orleans, and New York City. There are obvious reasons for this dubious accolade: Houston sits at the center of major highways between Los Angeles and Miami and between the U.S. and Latin America. It has a sprawling international airport and a major international port. It is diverse in a way that allows immigrants to disappear into neighborhoods that are barely policed. It’s also a place with an enormous appetite for and tolerance of commercial sex: From the days of the first oil boom, the city has drawn single men who’ve left smaller towns and poorer countries in search of work and then quick and easy companionship.
It is impossible to know exactly how many women are currently sex slaves in Houston. There is, of course, no census of prostitutes, let alone prostitutes who are here illegally and being held against their will. Terry O’Rourke, the first assistant Harris County attorney, estimates that on any given day, the number is about 1,000, but it could be higher. A 2008 Department of Justice report figured that between 14,500 and 17,500 people were being trafficked into the country every year. A 2004 report estimated that one quarter of all trafficking victims in the U.S. end up in Texas. According to Linda Geffin, the chief of special prosecutions with the Harris County attorney’s office, about 70 percent of trafficking victims end up working in the sex trade.
In Houston brothels can be found near the Ship Channel and in the north and southwest Hispanic neighborhoods, where special cantinas advertise “chicas” and have jerry-built, windowless additions out back and tall wooden fences around their perimeters. Up Interstate 45 and in Precinct 4 along FM 1960 to the north, not too far from some of Harris County’s poshest suburbs, are the massage parlors, most of them run by Asians (since February 2009, 127 citations have been issued against unlicensed massage parlors in Precinct 4). They also ring River Oaks, on Shepherd Drive to the north and south and on Richmond stretching to the Galleria and beyond. You see them in strip malls, where absentee owners don’t care that they sit adjacent to ice cream parlors and storefront churches. Around the fancy “gentlemen’s clubs” near the intersection of Loop 610 and the Southwest Freeway, one short block on Star Lane has at least three places that offer some form of commercial sex. Most of them accept credit cards.
In recent years there have been several high-profile arrests and prosecutions in Harris County, which has some of the toughest anti-trafficking laws in the country and one of the country’s most innovative anti-trafficking task forces. In 2005 police brought down Maximino “El Chimino” Mondragon, who ran one of the nation’s largest sex-trafficking rings, in which young women from Honduras, Nicaragua, and Mondragon’s native El Salvador were forced to work as prostitutes. That same year, a sixty-year-old man named Evan Lowenstein was arrested for operating at least a dozen brothels stocked with women from Eastern Europe who had been brought into the U.S. with promises of legitimate work. He got probation and disappeared. In 2009 a man named David Salazar and his mother, Gregoria Vasquez Salgado, were charged with harboring illegal immigrants in what came to be known as the El Gallo case. In their scheme, another man, Gerardo “El Gallo” Salazar, would entice young girls from Mexican towns to come to Houston on promises of romance and then enslave them in cantinas run by David Salazar and Salgado. The pair was busted after a customer, in a fit of conscience, gave a sixteen-year-old victim his cell phone to call the police. (David Salazar and his mother both pleaded guilty in 2009 and were sent to prison; El Gallo was apprehended last month in Mexico.)
But each time a case is made, the business simply morphs and grows in a new way. Case in point: When officers in the FM 1960 area set up a task force and began shutting down massage parlors that did not have legitimate licenses to operate, the traffickers began circumventing state regulations by reclassifying their operations as “tea parlors” and, in a novel twist, “art galleries.” “We could have fifty people doing this 24/7 and still not have enough manpower,” says Skip Oliver, a captain in the Harris County Constable’s Department in Precinct 4. “You can punch a button here and get a girl from Thailand in the pipeline. We’re nibbling at a piece of the problem. We don’t even see the whole picture.”
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