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  1. #1
    Senior Member JohnDoe2's Avatar
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    6 Charged in Human Trafficking, Exploit of 400 Thai workers

    Department of Justice
    Office of Public Affairs
    FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
    Thursday, September 2, 2010

    Six People Charged in Human Trafficking Conspiracy for Exploiting 400 Thai Farm Workers

    WASHINGTON – The Justice Department announced that a federal grand jury in Honolulu indicted Mordechai Orian, an Israeli national; Pranee Tubchumpol, Shane Germann and Sam Wongsesanit of Global Horizons Manpower Inc., located in Los Angeles; and Thai labor recruiters Ratawan Chunharutai and Podjanee Sinchai for engaging in a conspiracy to commit forced labor and document servitude. The charges arise from the defendants’ alleged scheme to coerce the labor and services of approximately 400 Thai nationals brought by the defendants to the United States from Thailand from May 2004 through September 2005 to work on farms across the country under the U.S. federal agricultural guest worker program. Orian, Tubchumpol and Chunharutai are also charged with three substantive counts of compelling the labor of three Thai guest workers.

    If convicted, Orian and Tubchumpol each face maximum sentences of 70 years in prison, Chunharutai faces a maximum sentence of 65 years in prison, Germann and Wongsesanit each face a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison, and Sinchai, who was recently charged in Thailand with multiple counts of recruitment fraud, faces a maximum sentence of five years in prison if convicted in the United States.

    The indictment alleges that the defendants conspired and devised a scheme to obtain the labor of approximately 400 Thai nationals by enticing them to come to the United States with false promises of lucrative jobs, and then maintaining their labor at farms in Washington and Hawaii through threats of serious economic harm. The defendants arranged for the Thai workers to pay high recruitment fees, which were financed by debts secured with the workers’ family property and homes. Significant portions of these fees went to the defendants themselves. After arrival in the United States, the defendants confiscated the Thai nationals’ passports and failed to honor the employment contracts. The defendants maintained the Thai nationals’ labor by threatening to send them back to Thailand, knowing they would face serious economic harms created by the debts.

    The indictment also alleges that the defendants confined a group of Thai guest workers at Maui Pineapple Farm and demanded an additional fee of $3,750 to keep their jobs with Global Horizons. Those workers who refused to pay the additional fee were sent back home to Thailand with unpaid debts, subjecting them to the high risk of losing their family homes and land.

    This case has been investigated by the Honolulu Division of the FBI. This case is being prosecuted by trial attorneys Susan French and Kevonne Small of the Criminal Section of the Civil Rights Division and Susan Cushman of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the District of Hawaii. Services to victims have been provided by the Thai Community Development Center in Los Angeles.

    The charges, in a five-count indictment, are merely accusations, and the defendants are presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty.

    10-999 Civil Rights Division

    http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2010/Sept ... t-999.html
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    Senior Member JohnDoe2's Avatar
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    L.A. firm at center of huge human-smuggling case

    http://www.alipac.us/ftopict-211233.html
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    Senior Member JohnDoe2's Avatar
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    Six indicted for alleged human trafficking of Thai workers to USA

    01:01 PM

    The FBI says it has cracked the nation's biggest human-trafficking operation with the indictment of six recruiters for allegedly luring 400 Thai laborers to the United States, taking their passports and forcing them to work.

    The FBI charges that the operation was orchestrated by four employees of the labor recruiting company Global Horizons Manpower Inc. and two Thai-based recruiters, the Associated Press reports.

    The indictment charges that recruiters lured workers with false promises of high-paying jobs, confiscated their passports, failed to honor the contracts and threatened to deport them.

    If convicted the six could be sentenced from five to 70 years in prisons.

    The AP says Global Horizon's Los Angeles office refused to take a message seeking comment.

    Attorneys say the laborers were forced to work in more than a dozen states, including Hawaii, Washington, California, Colorado, Florida, Kentucky, Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Utah.
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    http://content.usatoday.com/communities ... s-to-usa/1
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    Senior Member JohnDoe2's Avatar
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    . . . And other investigations are likely, he indicated.

    "There are more people living in forced labor today than when President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation," he said.

    "As long as this is true, the FBI will continue to pursue organizations and individuals involved in human trafficking."

    http://www.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/09/03/haw ... gletoolbar
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  5. #5
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    Federal grand jury indicts associates of Beverly Hills firm in human-trafficking case

    In a 'mind-boggling case,' the owner and four employees of Global Horizons Manpower Inc. are indicted on charges of engaging in a conspiracy to coerce the labor of hundreds of Thai nationals.

    By Teresa Watanabe, Los Angeles Times

    September 4, 2010


    In 2003, a farmworker showed up in the Hollywood offices of a Thai community organization with a harrowing tale.

    The Thai national described being lured to the United States with promises of a three-year contract and $1,900 in monthly pay to harvest pineapples in Maui — nearly twice as much as the average annual income in Thailand for most impoverished workers like himself.

    Instead, he alleged, associates of a Beverly Hills labor recruiting firm forced him and fellow Thai farmworkers into virtual slave labor with substandard wages, inadequate food and housing and threats of deportation and physical violence if they tried to escape.

    Now, in what authorities call the largest human-trafficking case in U.S. history, a federal grand jury in Honolulu this week indicted the owner and four employees of Global Horizons Manpower Inc., along with two Thai labor recruiters, on charges of engaging in a conspiracy to coerce the labor of those workers and about 400 other Thai nationals.

    "The case is mind-boggling," said Chanchanit Martorell, executive director of the Thai Community Development Center, which has worked on the case for seven years and played a pivotal role in half a dozen other human-trafficking cases involving Thai workers. "It is by far the largest and most protracted case we've ever worked on."

    Global Horizons President Mordechai Orian, an Israeli national, turned himself in to the FBI on Friday in Honolulu and was to appear in court that afternoon. All other defendants have been arrested or accounted for, according to FBI spokesman Tom Simon in Honolulu.

    A receptionist answering the phone at Global Horizons said no one was available for comment. The company's website said its labor contracting network spanned 15 countries and recruited workers on four continents from such countries as Thailand, India, Nepal and Israel, as well as from Eastern and Western Europe.

    The indictment alleges that Orian and his associates conspired to lure the victims here from May 2004 to September 2005 to work on farms across the country under a federal agricultural guest worker program. The indictment alleges the workers were lured with false promises of lucrative jobs, kept in line with threats of serious economic harm and charged recruitment fees as high as $21,000, which were financed by debts secured with family property in Thailand.

    After arriving in the United States, the indictment alleges, the defendants confiscated the workers' passports.

    Named in the indictment are Orian, Pranee Tubchumpol, Shane Germann and Sam Wongsesanit, all of Global Horizons Manpower. Thai labor recruiters Ratawan Chunharutai and Podjanee Sinchai were also charged with engaging in conspiracy to commit forced labor, the FBI said.

    If convicted, Orian and Tubchumpol each face maximum prison sentences of 70 years.

    Although the indictment alleges about 400 victims, Martorell said more than 1,100 agricultural worker visas were issued to Global Horizons for Thai laborers. To aid the workers, the center has so far secured hundreds of T visas, which give trafficking victims who cooperate with law enforcement a temporary visa that can lead to a green card.

    Martorell said the case illustrates the changing face of forced labor. The Thai center's most famous slave labor case involved 72 workers illegally smuggled into the United States, forcibly confined at an El Monte sweatshop and rescued in a dramatic predawn raid by state and federal agents in 1995. But the Global Horizon case, and other recent ones she has handled, involve workers legally brought into the United States under the H-2A foreign agricultural worker program.

    "On the surface, it looks like the workers were legally contracted," she said. "But on closer inspection, it's slavery. Their passports were confiscated … and threats were made if any of them dared to try to escape. The guest worker program can be legalized slavery if you don't constantly monitor it."

    Martorell said the workers were brought to farms throughout the United States, including ones in Washington, Hawaii, Florida, Colorado, Utah, Virginia, the Carolinas, the Dakotas, Kentucky, New York and California. Workers were housed in flophouses with no running water or electricity, she said. Some had to survive eating leaves from plants in Hawaii or by river fishing in Florida.

    The Thai center is also pursuing civil charges against Global Horizons through the U.S. Labor Department and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Martorell said.

    "It's been so long, but we've persisted and we've fought and we've finally achieved a major, major victory," she said.

    www.latimes.com
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  6. #6
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    Sep 4, 2:45 PM EDT

    Farms being prosecuted for importing Thai workers

    By MARK NIESSE
    Associated Press Writer

    HONOLULU (AP) -- Two prominent, popular brothers who operate the second-largest vegetable farm in Hawaii will be sentenced in federal court this week on human trafficking charges - they pleaded guilty - but two former state governors, community groups, fellow farmers and other supporters are trying to keep them out of prison.

    The brothers were convicted of shipping 44 laborers from Thailand and forcing them to work on their farm, part of a pipeline to the United States that allegedly cornered foreign field hands into low-paying jobs with few rights.

    Aloun Farms may be too important to fail in an island state that once relied on pineapples and sugar cane but grows less than 15 percent of the food it consumes, according to supporters of defendants Alec and Mike Sou.

    "The incarceration of Alec and Mike Sou would threaten our food security and could endanger our future sustainability on Oahu," wrote Kioni Dudley, president of the community group Friends of Makakilo, in a letter asking U.S. District Judge Susan Oki Mollway for leniency. "Find some method of punishment which allows them to stay in their positions at Aloun Farms."

    The Sou brothers are asking for a light sentence with little or no jail time based in part on the idea that their farm is too valuable to the islands' food supply to let it go untended. The plea deal they agreed to in January called for up to five years imprisonment.

    Prosecutors accuse them of manipulating the Thai workers by promising at least a year's employment at pay of $9.42 an hour, but instead delivering only a few months of work for little pay.

    If the workers complained, Mike Sou threatened to send them home without any way to repay recruitment fees exceeding $30,000 that they borrowed from Thai money lenders to pay for their jobs, federal authorities claim.

    The workers were trapped on the farm, forced to choose between long hours with low wages and an unpromising future in Thailand, said former farm worker Somporn Khanja, who arrived at the farm in 2004.

    "I'd been lied to, but I couldn't do anything about it," the 45-year-old Khanja said through his wife, acting as an interpreter. "I hope justice is being done. I believe in American law. It takes so long, but it's good. In America, we have to wait."

    In about 120 letters to the judge supporting the Sou brothers, community members praise their importance to Hawaii's agriculture industry, their ability to provide up to 200 jobs at a time and their character.

    Former Democratic Gov. Ben Cayetano called the Sou family's immigration from Laos and creation of a farm a "remarkable success story." Former Democratic Gov. John Waihee commended the Sous' skill in transforming sugar fields into diversified farming.

    Others who offered support to the brothers include the former head of the state Land Board, the state Department of Agriculture, the Hawaii Foodbank, competing farms, two banks who are owed money from the farms and former Aloun employees.

    The Kapolei-based company grows a variety of foods including cantaloupe, lettuce, zucchini, apples, bananas, parsley, onions, watermelon, beans, eggplant, cabbage and pumpkin. Alec Sou is the farm's president and general manager, and Mike Sou is its vice president and operations manager.

    Human trafficking opponents say they deserve more than a slap on the wrist for enticing foreign workers with pledges of steady work and then revoking that offer after the laborers were already indebted and flown to the United States.

    Federal authorities and some of the workers also have said they were housed in cramped mobile storage containers, told not to leave the farm after work and denied any pay at all for months. The Sous contested those allegations.

    "This is America, and that kind of thing should not be allowable," said Kathryn Xian, spokeswoman for the Pacific Alliance to Stop Slavery in Honolulu. "They're basically ripping off the American way of life and exploiting it to the ultimate worst."

    The brothers acknowledge they failed to pay for the workers' airfare as required by the U.S. agricultural guest worker program, and that employment contracts called for employment exceeding allowable time granted to foreign workers, according to court documents.

    But they deny refusing to return passports, telling employees their contracts "were just a piece of paper used to deceive the federal government" and threatening deportation.

    "Our people got caught up in something which they admit to. They wish they hadn't done this, and they're sorry for getting involved," said defense attorney Eric Seitz, who represents Mike Sou. "Nobody was tortured, nobody was abused, nobody was physically threatened in any manner."

    Crackdowns on labor importation crimes are growing, as shown by last week's federal indictment against employees of Los Angeles-based labor recruiting company Global Horizons Manpower Inc., which the FBI says is the largest human trafficking case ever charged in U.S. history.

    Global Horizons is accused of enticing 400 workers from Thailand to U.S. farms based on false promises of lucrative jobs. Instead, recruiters allegedly confiscated the workers' passports, disregarded employment contracts and threatened deportation - claims similar to those in the Aloun Farms case.

    Nationwide, between 14,500 and 17,500 people are trafficked to the United States annually, according to an estimate by HumanTrafficking.org, which is managed by the Washington-based Academy for Educational Development, which works to improve global education, health and social and economic development.

    The brothers have steadily grown in prominence since their parents started the farm in 1977. After starting with a small 5-acre plot of land, the Sous have since extended their growing capacity and crops.

    Today, the farm's 3,000 acres are the most productive in the islands. In Hawaii's mild climate, they grow crops year-round.

    The Sou family also has made political contributions, and Alec Sou sits on boards for homeless advocates and for the University of Hawaii's College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources.

    http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/ ... TE=DEFAULT
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