Woman Gets 8 Years in Thai Slave Case

A Woodland Hills woman with family ties to Thailand’s political elite was sentenced to eight years and one month in federal prison Monday for involuntary servitude, harboring illegal immigrants and using their signatures to make credit card purchases.

Supawan Veerapol, 55, was led away in handcuffs from the courtroom filled with members of the Thai immigrant community, where the case has attracted considerable attention.

Veerapol, identified by prosecutors as the common-law wife of Thailand’s ambassador to Sweden, was convicted last August on 11 of 13 criminal charges stemming from her treatment of Thai immigrants who worked at her home and her restaurant in the San Fernando Valley.

The immigrants, all women, testified that they were forced to work 18 hours a day, seven days a week, for little pay and that Veerapol censored their mail and restricted their contacts with other Thai immigrants.

One of the workers told of being forced to crawl on her hands and knees as a sign of subservience when Veerapol entertained house guests from the Thai Consulate.

Although Veerapol disputed that account, U.S. District Court Judge Carlos R. Moreno cited the episode in rejecting her lawyer’s plea for a lighter sentence.

“Even to this day, the defendant doesn’t think she’s done anything wrong,” Moreno said.

Defense lawyer W. Anthony Willoughby noted that the jury acquitted Veerapol on two of three involuntary servitude charges, the most serious ones lodged against her.

“Whether she was a kind and gentle soul or a mean and miserable soul,” Veerapol was simply trying to help some fellow immigrants start a new life in America, her lawyer told the judge.

But Assistant U.S. Atty. Jack Weiss, who prosecuted the case, said Veerapol’s conduct over a decade was “egregious, depraved and inhumane.”

He cited the trial testimony of one victim who said Veerapol threatened to have her relatives in Thailand killed if she left for a better-paying job.

Veerapol was arrested by INS agents in 1998 after two of her employees fled her home with the help of a sympathetic Thai family who brought them to a Thai community services center.

Further investigation found that Veerapol had chalked up more than $85,000 in debts using credit cards she obtained in the names of her workers. Moreno ordered her to make restitution to the banks that were defrauded.