Thursday, March 18, 2010 / 11:22 AM


Inside the Hidden World of Sex Trafficking on L.I.

Pounds of flesh
By Timothy Bolger on Mar 18th, 2010


Rosa* was about to cross the United States-Mexico border when her coyote, or human smuggler, ordered the 22-year-old to have sex with him and told her that the promise of a job in computers or modeling in New York was a trick to force her into prostitution. Tracy*, 18, a product of the Boston foster care system, had been sold from one pimp to another until she was arrested for prostitution on Long Island; she told her story to investigators and was admitted to a shelter for human trafficking victims.

Rosa is staying in a group home where authorities hope that she will one day get to testify against her traffickers.

Tracy checked herself out of the shelter three days later and hasn’t been seen since.

The two are but a glimpse of the untold number of victims swept up in the global and domestic sex trafficking trade—mostly women under 25, one-third of them minors—who have been forced, coerced or duped into a life of selling sex. Up to 200,000 are reportedly U.S. citizens, in addition to more than 17,000 Hispanic, Asian and Eastern European immigrants, but experts say such statistical estimates are virtually impossible to verify. The approximately $9.5 billion human trafficking trade is among the top three criminal markets worldwide alongside illegal drug and arms dealing, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

Sex trafficking cases are among more than 80 percent of reported human trafficking incidents, DOJ estimates show. The rest are exploited in the equally shadowy and traumatizing world of labor trafficking, such as two Indonesian housekeepers found physically abused and severely underpaid for five years in a 2007 slave case in Muttontown. While the conviction of two multi-millionaire slave masters highlighted the hidden-in-plain-sight nature of those crimes, federal prosecutors similarly lifted the veil on a local sex slave ring, charging three Suffolk County suspects with recruiting women from Latin America to work at LI bars where they were allegedly forced to have sex with patrons for money.

Those two federal trafficking cases are among the first to be tried on LI since investigations into this form of modern-day slavery became possible under the U.S. Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000. On the local level, the first sex trafficker to be convicted under a 2007 New York State (NYS) anti-trafficking law aimed at smaller, more localized cases was a Queens man sentenced in January to 25 years in prison. In neighboring Nassau County, however, prosecutors say the state law doesn’t go far enough and needs to be amended in order to be effective. As Tracy’s story illustrates, getting a distressed victim to cooperate is not an easy task, further complicating an inherently complex initiative.

“A lot of people don’t believe that this is going on, [that] it’s only in the movies,â€