Thread: TX-Bars that were bases for sex ring still open for business

Bars that were bases for sex ring still open for business

By LISE OLSEN
Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle
Sept. 7, 2008, 11:20AM
152Comments 17Recommend 1 2 3 4

STEVE UECKERT CHRONICLE
A 16-year-old called police for help from this house in Jacinto City, saying she was being held captive somewhere but didn't know the address. She was found in March.

Inside the Maria Bonita Cantina, plus undercover video Speak out
Blog: Immigration watch Graphics
Graphic: Locations of new border checkpoints More
Complete coverage of immigration issues For years, Gerardo Salazar played the Romeo in dusty Mexican villages, trolling town squares and schoolyards for women and girls he could seduce with declarations of love and, ultimately, sell in seedy Houston cantinas.

Salazar, who called himself El Gallo — the Rooster — could have been arrested three years ago after a federal indictment named him leader of an international human trafficking ring. Instead, he escaped to Mexico, where his hometown is a notorious center for kidnapping.

But the cantina sex trade Salazar helped build in Houston continues to flourish.

Despite enforcement efforts, human traffickers and prostitution operators have constructed resilient and lucrative networks of organized crime that have a franchise-like ability to persist and prosper, a Houston Chronicle investigation has found.

Two associates of Salazar's, bar owners who escaped prosecution in 2005, were arrested only recently after police rescued a teenager allegedly held captive and sold as their sex slave.

Houston's sex-for-hire scenario has played out for years in dimly lit bars, some specifically constructed to conceal sexual slavery with secret doors, hidden gates and camouflaged brothels, records show.


The Maria Bonita
One of Salazar's favorite haunts was the Maria Bonita.

Since 2004, the lavender-colored bar with its backyard concealed behind a high fence in the 7900 block of industrial Clinton Drive has repeatedly been targeted for prostitution, underage drinking and human trafficking.

Even today, the bar is open for business.

Though investigators tried to shut it down in 2005, women refused to testify against its owner, David Salazar, a U.S. citizen, or his mother, Gregoria Salgado Vazquez, an illegal immigrant and convicted prostitute known as "Doña Blanca."

Both operated the bar, liquor license records show, which was used for human trafficking by fugitive Gerardo Salazar.

The pair was arrested earlier this year after a teenage girl called 911 on a borrowed cell phone.

The girl told police she had been held captive in a house but never knew the address.

The story she told — of being romanced in Mexico, betrayed and then sold in a Houston bar — was strikingly similar to the statements of Gerardo Salazar's victims three years earlier.


Seduced then betrayed
Shown in a snapshot as a striking man of about 40 with intense dark eyes, Gerardo Salazar branded the girls he liked most with a special tattoo: A rooster, after his own nickname.

He and his accomplices often hit rural Mexican pueblos with full wallets and tricked-out-trucks aiming for town plazas, municipal fiestas, schoolyards or anywhere they might find vulnerable women or girls, investigators said.

He offered them his love and hints of marriage. Once in Houston, he introduced them to a life of abuse and forced prostitution.

By day, Gerardo Salazar and his cohorts warehoused women in an apartment complex near the Gulfgate shopping center.

The victims, according to records, were alternately sweet-talked, dressed up, threatened, raped and beaten.

For years, his cocktail of romance and brutality paid off.

Night after night, Gerardo Salazar and others ferried victims to cantinas and sold them to customers many times in the same night — pocketing about $50 for each transaction.

His business model was forged in his home state of Tlaxcala. There, family-run organized crime operations known as lenones have long honed the art of human trafficking.

Considered specialists in kidnapping, coercing and prostituting primarily poor and uneducated girls, lenones are known for exporting their victims to countries hungry for cheap, no-questions-asked sex, like the United States and Japan, according to Mexican authorities.

Other criminals from Gerardo Salazar's hometown of San Miguel Tenancingo have been connected to major sex trafficking rings in New York and New Jersey, according to federal court records and an interview with a U.S. Department of Justice official.

In Houston, Gerardo Salazar operated undetected in cantinas on forgotten corners of Clinton Drive.


Secret doors and meetings

In late 2004, state alcohol inspectors first noticed something odd at the Maria Bonita Cantina: Women went to the restroom and never came out.

An undercover police operation in February 2005 revealed that the women's bathroom mirror doubled as a door that led to a fenced backyard.

Meanwhile, clients left the bar and went to the backyard through a guarded gate, then entered an outer building for a paid rendezvous arranged by the bartender, according to records, crime scene photos and interviews with Sgt. Michael Barnett, who leads the enforcement team of the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission's office in Houston.

One photo captured the sordid atmosphere inside: a discarded condom atop a striped mattress in a closet-like room.

At the time, David Salazar held the liquor license for the Maria Bonita, owned the property and controlled its business name, public records show.

The TABC's lead agent on the case, Ben Giese, suspected David Salazar also was involved in trafficking or prostituting women.

But Giese, who now works for the Naval Criminal Investigative Service in Brazil, told the Chronicle that victims he and others attempted to question in 2005 were "scared to death."

"We even arrested one out of there — but she wouldn't talk to us, even though she was getting deported," Giese said.


Reluctance to testify
The victim lived at the Willow Creek Apartments, a village-sized complex with many newly arrived immigrants, where Gerardo Salazar's ring kept its captives in 2005, records show.

In June 2005 one woman called a domestic violence hot line. A 16-year-old girl branded with a rooster tattoo was picked up at the apartments by a rescue worker who took her to a woman's shelter. But when told police would want to question her, she returned to Gerardo Salazar.

His welcome was savage. He hit her with a belt, slapped her in the face, kicked her in the stomach and legs and forced her to return to prostitution, court documents show.

Investigators spent the next weeks trying to find her again.

On July 16, 2005, she was discovered among other women at a cantina near the Maria Bonita called La Costeñita.

This time, a Latina FBI special agent named Maritza Conde-Vasquez persuaded her to cooperate.

Two months later, authorities raided Willow Creek apartments.

They first arrested Gerardo Salazar's two nephews and another accomplice. Weeks later, they captured his two sons.

But Gerardo Salazar got away.

In the aftermath, investigators with the sex trafficking task force were overwhelmed by another case. Several agents with connections and experience later left the state, and leads about bars like the Maria Bonita went unexplored.

Bar owners who operate businesses as fronts for organized crime can be shut down, or even lose their property, under various state and federal laws, though the process can be complex. Lawless cantina owners often use legal tricks to keep operating by changing ownership on deed records or renewing liquor licenses under names borrowed from family or friends.

Despite evidence that his bar was a center for trafficking used by Gerardo Salazar's gang, David Salazar continued to own it until last year.

He and his mother also ran another Houston cantina, El Club Guerrero, on Wallisville Road, police said.


A prisoner at 16
It was there that David Salazar is accused of selling a 16-year-old sex slave himself, court documents show.

In March 2008, a teenage girl called 911, saying she had been held prisoner inside a house in Jacinto City, six miles east of the Maria Bonita.

Her alleged captors were cantina operators David Salazar and his mother.

The girl stands 5 feet tall and and weighs about 90 pounds. She likes stuffed animals, dolls and coloring books, according to Jacinto City Detective B.J. Silva, who extensively interviewed her.


A promise of love
The girl told the detective she met David Salazar in 2007 when he bumped into her as she was walking home from school, scattering her books.

David Salazar had the cachet of a rich man. He owned a late-model SUV and homes in Mexico and the United States, records show.

The teenager, abandoned by both parents, said she fell for his promise of love and an escape from extreme poverty.

David Salazar paid a coyote to bring her across the border in January 2008.

He admitted he picked her up from the smuggler on Telephone Road in Houston, Jacinto City police said.

Once she got to Jacinto City, the girl said, she was locked up in his mother's house and forced to sell herself five to six nights a week in his Wallisvillle Road cantina.

"When she refused, they would lock her up in a room and wouldn't feed her for days," Silva said.

The yard was fenced and guarded by pit bulls and a chow. House windows were barred, and the storage room where the girl slept was padlocked.

She only managed to call for help after a cantina customer slipped her a cell phone and showed her how to dial 911, Silva said.

When she called, the girl didn't know her captors' address. Jacinto City police finally found her on March 7 after two house-to-house searches.

"It was very disturbing," Silva said."At first, we didn't know what we had."

David Salazar and his mother face felony charges of kidnapping and aggravated sexual assault of a child in Harris County.

Their lawyers did not return phone calls.

Suspected family ties and other possible links between David Salazar, his mother, fugitive Gerardo Salazar and organized crime groups in Mexico remain under investigation.

Jacinto City Police Chief Joe Ayala has filed papers to seize and sell the suspects' home in Jacinto City.

Their old place, the Maria Bonita, remains open — under new ownership.

lise.olsen@chron.com

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/5987854.html

"We even arrested one out of there — but she wouldn't talk to us, even though she was getting deported," Giese said.

Heck, I don't think I'd care where they sent me as long as it was away from this looser. I can't imagine what these poor girls have gone through........these are truely some ruthless people.

This is what is happening IN OUR COUNTRY folks. If our politicians don't get with this and get it cleaned up, we are for even bigger trouble. Illegal immigration is the only way that people understand that when you come here, you are expected to obey the laws.


I say every time we see an article like this, send it the the Texas Governor, send it to Kay Bay Hutchinson, if it is in your state do the same, send it to your DC reps, to your state reps, and give it to your city reps in town council meetings. We need to keep these things going constantly so that they see what this country is up against.