http://www.sptimes.com/2006/07/01/Tampa ... traf.shtml

A house of human trafficking
The case of a Clearwater house that police say was a brothel has produced leads in targeting the No. 2 criminal industry.


JACOB H. FRIES
Published July 1, 2006

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CLEARWATER — To look at the small tan house with orange trim and a scraggly tree in the front yard, one might never suspect it was a brothel.

But for several years up to 40 men a day slipped into the neighborhood unnoticed, many of them parking in a Sears lot across the street, police say.

They paid a doorman $25 and took a seat in the living room to wait their turn. On a television played pornographic videos while on the wall hung a calendar, the name of a different woman written across each week.

On the evening in May when police raided the house on Camellia Drive, officers found a 32-year-old woman named Mareielli, six customers and the doorman in charge, police say. They also discovered signs of something even more sinister.

“Human trafficking is alive and well in Clearwater,” deputy police Chief Dewey Williams told the St. Petersburg Times recently. “We now know that for a fact.”

The woman found at the house, detectives later learned, was not held against her will. But evidence and testimony from the doorman suggested that other prostitutes brought there had been lured from Mexico and forced into the sex industry, police say.

A clear signal, they say, is how the women were never seen outside and how the doorman, when he stepped out for a moment, always secured the door behind him.

This is not the first time Clearwater police think they have encountered a tentacle of human trafficking. In 2003, they shut down a prostitution operation at an apartment near Drew Street and U.S. 19 — similar to the one on Camellia Drive — but investigators couldn’t tie it to a trafficking network.

Now, with leads produced from the most recent case, investigators have begun to watch another location in the city.
“It’s here if we look for it,” Williams said. “But it’s going to take a dedicated effort to find it.”

Clearwater police are trying to get some help. In April, the department, along with a victim services organization, submitted a federal grant application for $900,000 to create the Clearwater Area Task Force on Human Trafficking.

With the funds, two full-time officers would be assigned to investigate human trafficking cases.

“Without the money, we will continue to struggle with the resources we have,” Williams said.

Trafficking in people is not the same as smuggling them.

Human smugglers are typically paid to take people illegally across international borders, leaving them alone once they do so.

Traffickers, meanwhile, may transport people across borders, but they generate their profits through exploitation, coercing their victims into slavery, involuntary servitude or the commercial sex industry.

Each year, officials estimate, about 18,000 human trafficking victims are smuggled into the United States, with 2-million in the country at any time. After drug dealing, it is tied with illegal arms sales as the second largest criminal industry in the world, according to the Health and Human Services Department.

Florida ranks as the second most common destination for trafficking victims, behind California, with both states being home to large immigrant populations, says the Florida Coalition Against Human Trafficking.

But until recent years, Florida police and sheriff’s deputies didn’t give it much attention, officials say. Most agencies across the Tampa Bay area, from Pinellas to Hillsborough and Pasco counties, have now trained at least a few investigators how to spot signs of human trafficking.

“It’s always been there, but like domestic violence was in 1970s, it has stayed in the shadows,” said Shawn Ramsey, a detective at the Lee County Sheriff’s Office. “As law enforcement, we’ve really been behind the curve on this.”

The Lee County agency, however, created a specialized unit at the end of 2005 and then received the same federal grant that Clearwater police are now pursuing. Ramsey said detectives have now identified 15 brothels and helped to rescue seven women they believe to be victims.

“It’s really too early to determine how widespread human trafficking is,” Ramsey said.

Ramsey and others in law enforcement say investigating such cases present unique problems. The organizers are adept at blending into communities. They also intimidate their victims, threatening them or their families back home, and convincing them police are corrupt. The result is many victims hide themselves from officials and lie when discovered.

“The slave is not going to come to you,” Ramsey said. “You have to find them.”

To do that, officials need the public’s help, he said. Authorities do not have enough resources to infiltrate all these networks without tips from residents living nearby.

Delivery driver Richard Wright, who has lived in the Skycrest neighborhood for six years, said he hadn’t noticed anything strange until he saw squad cars surrounding 2095 Camellia Drive.

“I had no idea whatsoever,” said Wright, 73, who had seen people often entering and leaving the home but didn’t considered it unusual. “I really don’t want to know.”

The brothel had taken many precautions to avoid detection, in addition to having many customers park in the Sears lot, Clearwater police say. For example, the doorman, identified as 45-year-old Daniel Varela Rodriguez, regularly patrolled the neighborhood on foot or by bicycle, looking out for police, and changed his clothing each time. He also went to the office of the property owner, who was unaware of the brothel, to pay rent.

Rodriguez, who has been charged with deriving funds from prostitution, remains at the Pinellas County Jail in connection to his immigration status and could not be reached for comment. He does not face any charges of human trafficking, but police say he acknowledged knowing men who recruited women in Mexico, promising them jobs as nannies, only to force them to become prostitutes.

Once in Florida, the women, either freely or by coercion, would typically rotate each week among a network of brothels across the state, police say. This makes tracking the women difficult.

“These operations don’t sit still,” said Williams, the Clearwater deputy police chief. “They’re here today and in Fort Myers tomorrow.”

When officers raided the home on May 16, they found birth certificates, W-2 forms, receipts, bus tickets and other documents that detectives continue to sort through, police say. They also recovered a stash of playing cards that were distributed to customers when they paid and then left with the woman after sex.

The woman would return the cards, receiving a portion of the proceeds from the doorman, Williams said.

If Clearwater police and their partner nonprofit agency, World Relief, get the federal grant, half of the task force’s money will be earmarked for rescued victims, he said. Without friends or family, the victims need temporary visas, housing and other support as the cases wind through the court system.

“It’s horrible,” Williams said. “These women are not only physically abused, but psychologically abused as well. They may be saved one day, but they may never be the same.”