Human Trafficking: a million-dollar industry in Destin

She was 19, petite and brunette.

She was from Eastern Europe and had been in the United States for less than a month.

Promised a job as a housekeeper at a hotel or condominium in Okaloosa County, she instead found herself stripping at a local topless bar.

She had to borrow a costume and when she hit the dance floor, she moved without rhythm or style, as if her body and her mind were in two different places.

This isn't what she came to the United States to do.

After being tipped off by a concerned citizen, the Okaloosa County Sheriff's Office rescued the woman and removed her from her workplace.

Still, the woman had been conditioned by those who brought her to Okaloosa County to fear law enforcement. The young woman was so terrifi ed that she trembled with fear and wouldn't utter a word to sheriff's deputies and investigators, let alone cooperate with an investigation aimed at prosecuting her exploiters.

She was put on the next flight home.

It's happening in our midst

Every summer more than 1,000 would-be human traffi cking victims arrive in Destin to make sandwiches, fold sheets, wash dishes and fill the need for unskilled labor in this bustling resort community. But for many the promise of the American dream and the land of milk and honey becomes a nightmare.

These men and women, many of them college students, come from places such as Guatemala, El Salvador, Poland, the Ukraine, Slovenia, Russia, Sweden, the Philippines, and Thailand and fi nd themselves working at low-wage jobs in Orlando, Jacksonville, Tampa, Tallahassee, Miami and Destin.

The stripper's story is not uncommon to many who fi nd themselves in similar situations around the county, around the state and in Destin. Promised a summer abroad and a job making enough money to pay for an entire year of college back home, thousands of young adults from all over the world come as part of work/travel programs. Some of the programs are legitimate and above board. Some are not.

Inspector George Collins, a criminal intelligence specialist at the Okaloosa County Sheriff's Office, has been working human trafficking cases since 2003 and has filed more than 500 intelligence reports with various federal agencies regarding human traffi cking cases with connections to Okaloosa County.

"Working these cases has been very frustrating. From the cop frame of mind, I'm like, OK, we have a crime. Who did it? Let's put them in jail.' In human trafficking cases, that's not how it's done," he said in an interview.

Instead, Collins says he measures his success not by arrests and prosecutions but by how many people he can rescue from potentially dangerous situations and then relocate them out of harm's way.

"We've found it's tough to investigate and prosecute a human trafficking case because either the victims are too afraid or they just want to get back home as soon as they can. But we don't give up," Okaloosa County Sheriff Charlie Morris said. "We sometimes have to prosecute other offenses to shut down the operation. I'm going to be persistent in doing everything I can to put traffickers out of business in Okaloosa County."

With human trafficking, arrests and prosecutions are hard to come by, given the international crime syndicates often involved in such operations across the country and even in Okaloosa County along with the unwillingness of victims to testify against their exploiters.

"They're here for six months and the attraction for these kids is that they get to see the United States and they're promised to make enough money in one summer to pay for an entire year of college that's books, tuition, living expenses, all of it," Collins said. "Some of these operations are above board and some are completely crooked from the ground up."

Prosecuting the crooked organizations can be diffi cult because more often than not, Collins said, worker exploitation cases are handled in a civil and administrative manner, in accordance with U.S. labor law.

If the offenses have escalated to criminal offenses that would warrant a jury trial, convincing victims to stay in the United States for another year to testify at trial is nearly impossible, Collins said.

"These victims don't want to stick around for two years and put their life back home on hold to testify. They want to go home and forget about it," he said. "Unfortunately in this country, we have this little thing called the Constitution that says that someone has the right to face their accuser in court. We rely on that testimony to prove our case."

Anna Rodriguez, the founder of the Florida Coalition Against Human Trafficking, said the unwillingness of victims to cooperate with the authorities is one of the biggest obstacles in putting criminals behind bars.

"When we find the victims and identify the perpetrators, all of that takes a long time. There's surveillance that's done and you have multiple jurisdictions and you have to wait to get an indictment, and sometimes you won't see an arrest in these cases for six weeks," she said. "Yes, we want to see people in jail for these crimes but our first priority is rescuing these victims as soon as possible."

The bad guys

With an estimated $9 billion in profit to be made each year from human traffi cking across the globe, law enforcement is working diligently to take down human traffi cking operations. Doing so, however, is easier said than done.

According to an internal training presentation put together by Collins, traffi ckers are often members of the victim's own ethnicity or nationality, are in the United States legally, are bilingual, and have greater social or political status in their home country than their victims do.

In this area, though, the major perpetrators are independently owned businesses that consist of contractors or agents who provide unskilled laborers for agricultural, construction, restaurant and hospitality jobs, or janitorial work.

Rodriguez said the state's growth and tourism-centered economy makes the state a perfect breeding ground for rampant human traffi cking operations. Currently, Florida has the second-highest incidence of human trafficking in the country, according to the University of California at Berkeley's Human Rights Center.

With the number of cases the coalition is working on today, Rodriguez said, Florida could soon surpass California as the state with the largest number of human traffi cking cases.

"There's a demand for unskilled labor in this state. With the tourism, agriculture and the construction we have because of our growth, you're going to have demand, and when there's demand there's going to be a supply," she said.

According to Collins, with thousands of jobs in construction, retail and tourism, Destin is a potential hotspot for human trafficking and worker exploitation.

"There are millions of dollars involved in Destin in this enterprise," he said.

Collins said he reports independent contractors suspected of mistreating their workers to the State Department where they can become de-certifi ed in the United States and in the country from which the workers are recruited. That's where the shell game begins, he said.

Some of the criminal organizations are so sophisticated they will create shell companies to fool the State Department and sometimes cite a different list of directors for the shell company that won't result in the application being red-flagged or denied based on the previous de-certification. The companies will even list one of their recruited workers as a member of the company's board of directors for appearances only.

Locking up traffickers could be integral to shutting down other criminal activities, authorities say. According to the State Department, human trafficking is becoming a preferred business for crime syndicates around the world and has been related to alien smuggling and harboring, drug traffi cking, sex tourism, child pornography and prostitution, money laundering and extortion.

"This is slavery and the idea that there are human slaves in my county is offensive to me," Collins said.

Modern slavery

The fight against human trafficking is also a fight against perception.

It is the public's perception that all human trafficking victims are illegal immigrants. Not so, Collins said.

The majority of victims he has dealt with arrived in the United States legally.

Rodriguez, founder of the Florida Coalition Against Human Trafficking, said Florida sees more human traffi cking victims arriving daily on airplanes at the state's airports than arrive in the back of a pickup across the Mexican border in the Southwest.

Human trafficking in Okaloosa County may not evoke the colonial images of slavery but the grip that human traffi ckers have on their victims is every bit as strong.

"The perception when you say the word slavery' is that you're talking about people living in huts with chains and all that, but that's not the case. You'll find these people in half-million dollar houses," Collins said.

The tactics used by traffi ckers to control and dominate are on par with intimidation tactics used by some military regimes on prisoners of war, Collins said. In many cases, psychological chains are every bit as effective as physical chains.

"Imagine that you're a Russian kid and your boss is Russian and he says to you, You can't tell anyone what's happening here because if you do, we know where your family lives and we'll kill them.' Where these kids come from, organized crime is very real and these kids believe it."

Traffickers will also conduct random room searches and wake up victims in the middle of the night for employee briefi ngs to demonstrate that the victims have no control over their lives, Collins said. Such tactics are subtle but effective.

According to the internal training presentation Collins put together, traffi ckers have resorted to beatings, burnings, rape, starvation, drug and alcohol dependency, isolation and threats of deportation to control and exploit their victims.

The victims are also taught to fear those who can help them, such as law enforcement.

Rodriguez said victims are told that law enforcement knows what is going on and are friends with their traffi ckers and if the victims go to the police for help, the traffi ckers will know.

"I've been places internationally where I've seen uniformed law enforcement offi cers handing out fliers to the brothels," she said. "This is the environment some of these victims are coming from."

Given an inherited distrust of law enforcement, it's not surprising that human traffi cking victims often don't seek help.

"Victims are hard to fi nd. For one thing, they do not self-identify. Nobody dials 911 and says Help me, I'm a victim of human traffi cking,'" Collins said.

In addition to mental abuse and threats and acts of physical violence, traffi ckers sometimes take advantage of cultural differences between the victims and the United States.

"Traffickers will tell the victims, You're in America, Americans don't care about you. You're just here to work.' And they will tell them that they have no rights here," Collins said.

Hot-bunking'

Housing human trafficking victims is yet another way traffi ckers turn a profit.

Collins cited a case in Fort Walton Beach where 32 victims were squeezed into a four-bedroom home.

Often, traffickers will buy houses and take out mortgages and then charge each visiting worker for rent. For examle, if a three-bedroom apartment costs $1,500 a month in rent, a trafficker will put 10 people in the apartment and charge $300 each, making an additional $1,500 in profi t.

It's not unheard of, Collins said, for a traffi cker to have as many as 100 workers in one area at any given time.

With living space at a premium, traffi cking victims sometimes resort to "hot bunking." A term typically associated with submarining, it refers to a ship that has more sailors than beds and the practice of one sailor sleeping in a bed when another is working and alternating off and on.

Collins said it's not uncommon for three people to share one bed.

And that's no way for human beings to live, he said.

"What we hear all the time is that, Well, what they have is better than what they came from' and that's not always true," he said. "If you were a college kid and you went to Poland to work for the summer, would you want to be treated like this?"

Still, living arrangements for human traffi cking victims presents an opportunity for the public to catch a trafficker and notify law enforcement.

In Collins' internal presentation, he lists landlord/tenant complaints, specifi cally complaints of mass evictions, as a clue deputies can use to identify human traffi cking.

The houses or apartments where human trafficking victims are held are not always in what would be considered the "bad sections of town."

"You'll have eight to 15, sometimes 20 people, living in a three- or fourbedroom house. A van comes to pick people up in the morning to go to work, comes back in the afternoon to drop them off and pick up more workers and then comes back later that evening to do the same thing," he said. "The grass isn't cut because they could care less about what the place looks like. There will be 10 bikes on the front porch because that's their only mode of transportation. Those are things that people can look out for in their own neighborhoods."

Out of harm's way

When Collins and the sheriff's office locate a victim of human traffi cking, they perform what is referred to as a "rescue."

A rescue, he said, isn't a raid. A SWAT team isn't involved. Instead, subtly and without incident, deputies remove the individual or individuals from the situation.

"Let's just put it this way: Someone just suddenly stops showing up for work," he said.

The work has just begun when a victim is rescued.

As a victim, the young man or young woman relies almost exclusively on their exploiter for food, shelter and transportation. Then when that bond is broken, the victim loses his or her support net.

"When we rescue a kid, I just got myself a 19-year-old kid and they become completely reliant on the Okaloosa County Sheriff's Office for everything," Collins said.

The sheriff's offi ce can accommodate rescued victims for about a week, he said. The Florida Coalition Against Human Trafficking, which has a staff member working at the Sheriff's Offi ce Administration Building in Shalimar, steps in to provide services after that.

In 2000, Congress passed the U.S. Victims of Traffi cking and Violence Protection Act, which found that there were not adequate services or facilities for victims of human trafficking, the majority of whom are women and children.

The federal government also provides grants to develop, expand or strengthen services for victims.

Under the act, human trafficking victims are also eligible for the same federal benefits and services promised to others who have received refugee status under federal law.

However, a lengthy certification process must occur at the federal level to confirm the person is indeed a victim of human traffi cking.

To put it in perspective, the Okaloosa County Sheriff's Offi ce has rescued eight victims in the past few months who have been certified by the federal government as human traffi cking victims, Collins said. Statewide, only 17 certifi ed victims have been rescued this year.

That statistic might lead one to believe that perhaps human traffi cking isn't a widespread problem in Okaloosa County and across the state but they would be wrong, Collins said.

"For every victim that we rescue that is certifi ed by the federal government, there are 20 more victims who have not been certified," he said. "A human traffi cking victim isn't a victim because they say they are."

For the adult traffi cking victims he's rescued, the certifi cation process took three months, with each victim having to be cleared by the State Department, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Justice Department. The notable exception was a young victim they rescued who was certified in less than 24 hours.

"For some reason, the system is much more responsive when you're dealing with a minor," Collins said.

The lengthy federal certification process has frustrated Collins on more than one occasion but none greater than when he found a victim willing to testify against her captors and even serve as an informant.

Collins fought to get her visa extended and worked through the federal bureaucracy for months.

"In the end, she just got frustrated and walked away from it and I haven't heard from her since," Collins said. "You can't work these cases without a lot of federal cooperation."

Despite the headaches involved with the federal certifi cation process, Rodriguez said helping victims is incredibly rewarding.

"When we convince them that we are here to help them and you develop that trust, it's really beautiful," she said. "You can change someone's life."

Rodriguez said the group has been busy with a group of victims they rescued in the Jacksonville area. The coalition put the victims up in an apartment, provided them with gift cards for food and was working with the federal government to get their work authorization papers.

Fighting on all fronts

Anna Rodriguez isn't content with just fi ghting Florida's war against human traffi cking.

Rodriguez, who founded the coalition in 2004, has opened offi ces in Tampa, Miami, Jacksonville and Shalimar, and an offi ce in Orlando is in the works. In addition to the Florida offices, the coalition is working to help other large metro areas such as Boston and Baltimore combat human traffi cking. Rodriguez said she also was working with the Argentine government to help snub out human traffi cking there.

Locally, Sheriff Morris has teamed up with the sheriffs in Escambia, Walton and Santa Rosa counties to form the Northwest Florida Trafficking and Smuggling Task Force. The objective is to draw more federal resources to the area to combat illegal immigration as well as human traffi cking.

"You know, most people are surprised that this is happening in our back yard. As soon as I learned about it, I knew we had to start allocating resources to the problem as well as educating our deputies on what to look for," he said. "The other signifi cant step was to partner with the Florida Coalition Against Human Trafficking so we can provide help to the victims we encounter. We were the first agency in Northwest Florida to start actively investigating human traffi cking cases and the first in North Florida to make offi ce space available for a coalition person as well."

Elsewhere in the area, would-be law enforcement officers are being trained to spot signs of potential human traffi cking.

Brian Shonk, director of the public safety and criminal justice division at Okaloosa-Walton College, said as of January 2007, the state required that everyone who passed through his program undergo four hours of human traffi cking training.

After completing the program at OWC, Shonk's students will sit for the Florida Offi cer Certifi - cate Examination, which allows them to be hired by any law enforcement agency in the state.

"People don't realize how bad the problem is, and the officers that come through our program will be fighting it on the front lines so it's important that they are able to look for and identify signs of human traffi cking," he said.

In Destin, Mayor Craig Barker said it's crucial that citizens cooperate and work with sheriff's deputies and law enforcement.

"Human trafficking is a terrible crime that should not and will not be tolerated in Destin," Barker said. "I urge any citizen who observes such a travesty to report it to the authorities immediately."

The federal response to human trafficking may be integral to snubbing out the problem at the local, state, national and international levels.

U.S. Rep. Jeff Miller, a Republican from Chumuckla, said the federal government and Congress must persist in their efforts to make sure victims of these crimes don't slip through the cracks.

"Trafficking in persons is rapidly becoming one of the leading international criminal enterprises of the 21st century. Congress has taken steps to close loopholes in the law and provide for apprehension and prosecution of traffickers," he said. "I voted for the Traffi cking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2005, which had particular focus on women and children victims.

"But Congress needs to do more. Securing the border is key not only to our nationally security, but also to stopping the trade in human beings. Stopping illegal border crossings is the single most important thing that Congress can do to stop trafficking," he said.