16 Charged With Forcing Women Into Prostitution

As many as two dozen women and girls--some as young as 14--were held in virtual slavery and forced to work as prostitutes in a chain of filthy Florida and South Carolina brothels after being lured from Mexico by the promise of work as field hands or domestics, federal officials said Thursday.

Catering to a clientele of farm workers, the women were allowed to keep $3 of the $20 charged each customer while working off so-called transportation fees that could range as high as $3,000, according to U.S. Justice Department officials.

Women who tried to flee were beaten, even imprisoned for days in a closet. Those who became pregnant were forced to undergo abortions, the officials said.

Bill Lann Lee, acting assistant attorney general for civil rights, announced a 52-count indictment charging six members of a Veracruz, Mexico, family and 10 associates with multiple violations of federal immigration, sexual exploitation and extortion laws. Lee, in Miami for a Thursday afternoon press conference, described the operation as “modern-day slavery of an unconscionable kind. There was no escape for them.”

In custody are eight of the 16 people named in the federal indictment, including Rogerio Cadena, 51, accused of being one of the ringleaders. He was arrested Feb. 20 while raking leaves in front of one of the brothels in Fort Myers.

In Washington earlier Thursday, Lee stood beside Atty. Gen. Janet Reno as she announced the creation of a federal task force to attack the growing incidence of servitude in the United States, especially among immigrants. “Slavery is one of history’s worst moments, but it isn’t just history when you look at some of these cases,” Reno said.

Just last year, 60 deaf Mexicans were forced to peddle key chains on the streets of Manhattan, Reno said in recounting recent cases. In California, Thai garment workers were made to work 20-hour shifts in sweatshop conditions as armed guards stood over them. Farm workers in Georgia, Florida and South Carolina have been held in unsanitary living conditions and threatened with physical harm if they tried to escape.

In the last three years, the Justice Department “has brought 10 cases of modern-day slavery involving more than 150 persons,” said Lee.

The investigation into the Florida case began in November 1996 after two 15-year-old girls escaped a brothel in West Palm Beach and told the Mexican consulate in Miami of their imprisonment.

Federal agents said that over the next few months they uncovered a widespread prostitution operation. Members of the Cadena family are accused of recruiting young women from the Veracruz area on Mexico’s southeast coast and enticing them to cross the border with promises of legitimate jobs in the fields or cleaning houses.

“They lured these women into the U.S. with the promise that here they would find the land of opportunity,” said U.S. Atty. Thomas E. Scott. “They did not. Instead what they found was a one-way ticket to forced sex.”

The chain of brothels included trailers and ramshackle rented houses in poor neighborhoods in Orlando, Tampa, Fort Myers, Lake Worth and other agricultural areas in Florida and in South Carolina.

Almost all the customers were farm workers, usually Mexican nationals, who paid a man at the door, called a “ticketero,” $20 for a condom. The condom served as the ticket for a 15-minute visit. The women were paid at the end of the day on the basis of the number of condom wrappers they turned in.

The eight people not in custody are believed to be hiding in South Florida or Mexico, which has been asked to extradite them, federal agents said. Among them are three of Cadena’s nephews and the wife of one of them.

The first of several raids on the brothels was conducted in October 1997.

Eventually 13 Mexican women and girls were taken into protective custody. All are now free, material witnesses in a criminal case, and living in the Miami area.

“They are traumatized. They have been through a horrible, horrible experience,” said Virginia P. Coto, an attorney with the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center in Miami.

According to the indictment, recruiters handed off women to “coyotes” on the Mexican border who brought them into the United States through Brownsville, Texas. Once in Florida, the women and girls were rotated every 15 days among several brothels set up in rented spaces in various Florida towns, as well as in Lake City and John’s Island, S.C.

Women who tried to flee were severely punished. Beatings, sexual assaults and threats to family members in Mexico were common, federal agents said. One woman was forced to work by an overseer who shot a gun in her direction. Another woman was disciplined by being locked in a closet for 15 days. Another suffered a miscarriage when she was kicked in the abdomen.

The Cadena family advertised the brothels in the Fort Pierce area in central Florida with business card-sized maps that were distributed to farm workers, federal agents said. With the operation at its peak last year, the leaders were believed to be netting as much as $10,000 a day.

Times staff writer Ronald J. Ostrow in Washington and researcher Anna M. Virtue in Miami contributed to this story.