State has yet to test slavery statute

When Westminster police raided the apartment, they were convinced they were freeing the eight women inside from modern-day slavery.

Police said the women had agreed to come to the United States from villages in Malaysia and Singapore on vague promises of a better life, but instead found themselves forced into prostitution.

Their pimps seized their passports and kept the women locked in a series of bleak apartments, with video cameras monitoring their movements and furniture barricading the doors. On the rare occasions the women were allowed outside, police said, it was with an escort.

Cases like this one prompted California last year to become the first state to enact a federally drafted law cracking down on human trafficking. Despite some well-publicized cases, authorities said existing law did not provide the legal tools to fight the crime, instead forcing them to use other charges, which often carry little or no jail time.

When Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed the bill into law amid much fanfare and with the hope that it would become a national model, he said it would help put an end to “a horrific crime that our society cannot abide.”

But in the 11 months since the law went into effect, not a single human trafficking case has been prosecuted, according to the law’s sponsor, Assemblywoman Sally Lieber (D-Mountain View). Police complain the law makes it too difficult to prove that human trafficking has taken place.

The problem is that seldom is the evidence black and white. Were the workers being kept against their will, or were they enduring their hardships willingly as a step up the economic pecking order?

Another problem is persuading people to tell their stories of involuntary servitude. Authorities said victims often fear police because of bad experiences in their homelands and because their captors have told them their families would suffer retaliation if they talked.

“We certainly can see that the fear [on the part] of immigrants particularly has been even deeper than we expected,” said San Francisco Dist. Atty. Kamala D. Harris, a co-sponsor of the law. “We can’t get around the fact that the new law is being underused, but there is great promise.”

On the other hand, Sally Thomas, a Los Angeles County deputy district attorney who helped draft the law, doubts it will be used extensively. “We often find it’s more appropriate to bring kidnapping, false imprisonment or extortion in these cases,” she said. “The statute is a very narrow statute.... Our expectations should not be extremely high.”

Lawmakers believed the law was particularly important in California’s immigrant communities, the sites of several well-publicized cases over the last decade. The U.S. Justice Department estimates that 17,500 people are enslaved in the nation’s fields, factories and brothels, with a disproportionately large share in California, although the department acknowledges the figure may not be completely reliable.

This year, an Irvine couple were convicted in federal court of keeping a young Egyptian girl as their domestic slave. In 1995, authorities freed 71 Thai workers held behind razor wire in an El Monte sweatshop. The problems there had been reported to police two years earlier by Win Chuai Ngan, a worker who had escaped, but authorities found his story hard to believe.

A Justice Department report said the criminal rings that bring these workers to the United States have a more lucrative business than drug traffickers because of the low cost of slave labor and the small risk of getting caught.

When the state law passed -- providing penalties of three to five years in prison and four to eight years if the victim is a minor -- detectives dramatically stepped up their investigations, helped by federal grants aimed at fighting the trafficking rings.

The LAPD received more than $450,000, and an Orange County task force received $200,000, some of which it used to hire a liaison to teach local government and nonprofit agencies how to spot signs of trafficking.

The money also went to pay for investigations involving sophisticated surveillance equipment and informants and to pay detectives.

Westminster Police Lt. Derek Marsh leads the city’s detective squad in Orange County’s Little Saigon, a community believed to be a landing strip for human traffickers. In February, detectives were told by informants that a massage parlor advertising young Asian masseuses on Vietnamese and Chinese websites was a front for a brothel that enslaved prostitutes.

The detectives followed leads to Monterey Park and Rosemead, and learned that it was a sophisticated operation that moved almost monthly to avoid detection.

The women spoke no English and never saw anyone but pimps and johns, Marsh said. They often didn’t use condoms.

By the time police raided the San Gabriel Valley operation in August, the eight women had worked in the two cities for as long as three years. They were paid $130 per john, and they split the money with their pimps, police said.

Five men were arrested as alleged brothel operators. A sixth suspect was believed to be recruiting additional women in Malaysia, police said.

Police said only one woman would speak to them. Marsh said she told a chilling story of forced labor and abuse.

“This is the best, most convincing case we have found,” he said.

The Los Angeles district attorney’s office felt otherwise.

“They really weren’t being held against their will,” prosecutor Marcia Daniel said. “Only one woman was willing to be truthful, and she made it abundantly clear that she did the work willingly. I don’t think anybody enjoys it, but there’s so much money involved.”

Prosecutors charged the five men with pimping and pandering. They are awaiting trial. The women were not charged, and they are being held as potential witnesses and for review of their immigration status.

The Los Angeles district attorney has come close to prosecuting only one other trafficking case, involving a woman accused of forcing a homeless teenage girl into prostitution. The district attorney initially filed human trafficking and pimping and pandering charges but later dropped the trafficking charge.

Even the bill’s author is surprised about the unexpected roadblock.

“We went through a lot of difficulty to get this bill passed, so it’s obviously difficult to hear that the law is not being used more,” said Lieber, who hopes to find ways to improve the law, the first felony added to the California penal code since 1999.

An important part of the trafficking law, its supporters said, can help persuade victims to cooperate. If there is a conviction, it allows victims to sue their captors for back wages, receive housing and medical assistance, obtain legal residency and receive job training and small-business loans.

Federal authorities are struggling with their law as well. The federal statute was passed in 2000, but there have been few convictions. Federal authorities say local authorities have more people to root out these cases and encouraged passage of the state law.

The Justice Department has expressed disappointment with its own progress, reporting in September that only 122 laborers and prostitutes qualified for victim benefits, 14 fewer than in the previous year.

Those benefits can provide a happy ending to workers’ hardships.

Two examples are Win Chuai Ngan and his wife, Sokanya Sutthiprapha, who were among those freed from the El Monte sweatshop. With loans and training from the nonprofit Thai Community Development Center, they opened two Thai restaurants and a spa.

In the meantime, the women in the Westminster police case will be deported once the pimping and pandering trial is over.

Marsh predicted that some of their families will reject them, and that they will go back to working as prostitutes, perhaps for the same organization.

garrett.therolf@latimes.com