Amid U.S. Opulence, a Life of Servitude

“Dear mr. police office sir,” her letter began. “Plaese plaese plaese.”

Late at night, Supik Indrawati had worked on the letter, while her master and his family were asleep in their Rancho Palos Verdes home. Indrawati’s English was limited to “Thank you” and “Excuse me.”

She pored through a tattered English-Indonesian dictionary, laboring for weeks on the letter with her aunt. Indrawati hid it under her mattress. Finally, in a children’s book about dinosaurs, her aunt discovered a useful phrase: “I really need your help.”

For more than two years, Indrawati, 33, had worked as a maid for businessman Robert Tjhoen Lie, 56, and his wife, Shirley, 58, a schoolteacher, and their two grown children. Indrawati cleaned the house and yard, even the dirt beneath Robert Lie’s toenails. She worked 12 hours a day, seven days a week, including holidays.

Lie, pronounced “Lee,” did not pay Indrawati a penny of her monthly salary: $150.

He held her passport. Indrawati was not allowed to go anywhere alone. She feared the world beyond the Lies’ driveway because she didn’t understand its language. She feared neighbors because the Lies said passersby would report her to authorities. She feared law enforcement because the Lies said she would be thrown in jail since she had no work permit.

In her final year with the family, she most feared being left alone with the boss. “In Robert Lie’s house,” she said, speaking through a translator, “it was as if I was in hell.”

Robert Lie declined to answer letters requesting interviews. Reached at her home, Shirley Lie said, “I’m not obligated to talk to you.”

Indrawati’s hell, recounted in dozens of interviews, court records and a federal investigation, shows slavery is not dead in America. It can exist in a wealthy Los Angeles County neighborhood, where doctors and businessmen drive BMWs and Lexuses on winding lanes overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

Until recently, drug smugglers spent more time behind bars than traffickers in humans. But former President Clinton, acknowledging a problem that has drawn scant attention, signed a bill last fall that increased penalties for ushering illegal immigrants into the country and exploiting them. Now, in extreme cases, a trafficker could face life in prison.

About 10,000 illegal immigrants are forced to work in sweatshops, restaurants, farm fields, brothels and homes in the Los Angeles area, said Scott Morris, a special agent with the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Nationwide, 50,000 people are brought to the United States under false pretenses, according to one government report, and held in virtual servitude.

In most cases, these immigrants work for salaries that would insult an American but are big money in the currency of their homeland. Few complain. It is not known how many people are unpaid. Often the victim and captor share cultural roots; Indrawati, like Lie, is from Indonesia. Generally, these situations come to official attention when work conditions become intolerable.

In the past decade, a number of high-profile cases have emerged. Hearing-impaired and mute Mexicans were enslaved and peddled trinkets in New York. Latvian women were forced to dance nude in Chicago. Thai workers were held in an El Monte sweatshop by guards, razor wire and spiked fencing.

Sometimes locks and barricades prevent escape; other times, it is psychological coercion. Nobee Saeieo, a 59-year-old Thai, worked seven years as a cook and housekeeper, crawling on her knees to serve food to her Woodland Hills boss.

Why didn’t she try to escape? “I was scared,” Saeieo said.

Coming to America

Indrawati’s aunt, Siti Pasinah, now 51, was the first in her family to come to America. Pasinah, the youngest of nine, lived in a bamboo house with dirt floors in eastern Java. Her father was a farmer. Pasinah got a housekeeping job at age 12 and has been a maid or nanny ever since. In 1990, she took a job working for the family of Robert Lie, a wealthy Indonesian living in Rancho Palos Verdes.

Pasinah cooked and cleaned, laundered and ironed, tidied the yard and pool, washed cars and bathed four dogs. At Lie’s business, a medical supply company, she checked for holes in surgical gloves and cleaned his office.

For six years, she got no pay.

Then Lie gave Pasinah $1,000 in cash and wired $11,000 to Indonesia for her, Pasinah recalls. Lie would later tell police he paid $14,000.

Pasinah returned to Indonesia and bought a cow and a house for her daughter. She said Lie asked her to come back in June 1996. If she worked another five years in America, she reasoned, she could buy a house for herself. Pasinah agreed, provided she could bring her niece, who had grown up in the same village.

Supik Indrawati was divorced, having fled an arranged marriage. She had been living and working in a clothing factory eight hours by bus from her home, earning $2.50 a day. She sent money to her parents and allowed herself only two extravagances: a Walkman and a pair of earrings.

Indrawati was afraid of coming to America. She’d never been a maid. Besides, she enjoyed sewing. And factory work did not prevent her, a devout Muslim, from praying five times a day.

But she hoped one day to open her own boutique.

You will never accomplish your dreams on Indonesian wages, Pasinah told her. Indrawati knew Pasinah was right.

‘You Show Respect’

Robert Lie and his son, Fred, then 22, met them at Los Angeles International Airport. Indrawati was quiet, her eyes cast down. When they asked a question, she agreed or smiled. “They are the haves, and we are the have-nots,” she would later say. “When you speak to someone wealthy, you show respect.”

In her grandmother’s day, servants had crawled on their knees to serve their masters. Indrawati still honored basic prohibitions born of class: A maid does not sit with a boss. If a boss sits on the couch, a maid sits on the floor. If the boss drives, the maid sits in back.

Indrawati usually wears her wavy black hair in a bun at the nape of her neck. Her cheekbones are high, and thick lashes frame her brown eyes. Shy, she speaks quietly and blushes easily. She weighs 115 pounds and stands 5-foot 1-inch.

Indrawati had never seen a house like the Lie’s. In her village, houses had glass in front windows only--slats of wood covered the rest. The Lies’ house had huge glass windows, as well as little ones, and glass doors. There was even a grand piano. This was how she imagined royalty lived.

“Oh my God,” she said. “How could I clean this?”

Indrawati slept on a twin bed in a windowless storage room, next to the laundry room. Pasinah slept in a blanket on the floor.

Indrawati woke early on her first day. In Indonesia, she had cooked over a wood fire and washed dishes by the well. Now, Pasinah showed her how to put bread in a toaster, scramble eggs, brew coffee, use a toothbrush to clean the grout between the kitchen tiles, wipe down the edges of the white wall-to-wall carpet. She demonstrated the vacuum, washer and dryer.

When the dryer bell rang, Indrawati panicked--she’d broken an appliance on her first day.

No, Pasinah said, the clothes are ready.

Shirley Lie would run her finger along a cabinet for dust. She got furious if a task was not completed, Indrawati would later recall, or if it weren’t done to her satisfaction. When you finish one task, she was told, do another.

Early on, Shirley Lie scolded Indrawati for staying in her room until 7 a.m. on Saturday when the family was sleeping. Work outside, Indrawati remembered her saying. So Indrawati usually rose at 5:30 a.m. and knocked down spider webs from eaves or raked the lawn. She washed and vacuumed the cars. She fished leaves from the pool and scoured the fishpond. She polished the outdoor metal lamps and scrubbed the awning. If it rained, she cut holes in a trash bag for her head and arms and wore it as she emptied debris from the gutters.

Often in the evenings, Shirley Lie, a kindergarten teacher at Catskill Avenue Elementary School in Carson, asked Indrawati to help prepare materials for class. Indrawati used pinking shears to create scores of feathers and headbands from colored construction paper. She cut out dozens of geometric shapes or figures of people. She laminated posters and drawings.

Sometimes Shirley Lie asked her to use a ruler and draw lines on blank paper, creating stacks for handwriting exercises.

“To be a maid, I go from early in the morning until late at night. I have no rest,” Indrawati said later. “It’s as if I’m an engine.”

Several months after Indrawati’s arrival, Pasinah went to work for Lie’s daughter, Elizabeth Hanson, her husband, Stephen, and their children in Newport Beach. About every two weeks, Elizabeth visited her parents, and Pasinah saw Indrawati.

With her aunt away, Indrawati felt achingly isolated. Robert Lie was the only family member who spoke Indonesian. Indrawati wrote her parents, saying she was homesick. Twice in two years she talked to her family by phone, after Robert Lie placed the call, Indrawati recalled.

She had no sense of where she was. She had never seen a map of California. “I was in America,” she said, “but I didn’t know where. Sometimes I felt so bored, always in the same place. Sometimes I’d just pray. I just felt so sad; I prayed that I wouldn’t be sad anymore.”

She never saw any wages. When she asked to send money home, she said, the Lies tried to dissuade her, citing unrest in Indonesia. She said they told her that her family would fritter away her hard-earned money.

During 2 1/2 years, Indrawati said, Robert Lie sent about $1,800 to her family. She said he told her the money was a bonus. “I work so hard every day, and why don’t they give me my monthly salary?” She recalled thinking. “I didn’t say anything to Pasinah, but I got suspicious.”

Surprise Audiotape

One day, after a year with the Lies, Indrawati found a cassette in the trash. Its label said Indonesian music. She played it in the laundry room. One side had a song. On the other, she heard Shirley Lie speaking in English with another woman. Shirley Lie sounded angry.

Pasinah translated for Indrawati on her next visit. The tape was made in 1980. Shirley Lie had filed for divorce that year, but the proceedings were later dropped. On the tape, Shirley Lie was speaking to a maid, who preceded Pasinah. The maid was saying Robert Lie sexually assaulted her, sometimes when the children were at school, other times while they watched television, according to the tape. Once he held a knife to the maid’s face, according to the tape. Shirley Lie described walking in on her husband having sex with the maid, according to the tape, when he thought he’d locked the door.

Robert Lie had told Indrawati and Pasinah about the former maid. They remembered him saying the maid told his wife that he had raped her. It was an allegation he denied. Indrawati thought the woman had left because there was too much work. Now Indrawati heard the woman’s version.

Pasinah counseled: Keep this tape where Shirley Lie will never find it. Indrawati slid it under her mattress.

Boss’ Demands

In February 1998, Indrawati said, Robert Lie ordered her to clean his toenails. She obeyed.

She had worked for the family nearly two years, and he had never asked this. It seemed wrong. Maybe, Pasinah said later, Robert Lie had gotten too fat and old to reach his feet. They’d giggled.

But Indrawati felt afraid.

Weeks later, Robert Lie demanded a foot massage. Indrawati complied.

Days later, she said, Robert Lie told her to massage his back, then his calf. He complained of an injury from swimming, she said. Over time, he ordered massages higher and higher on his legs, she would later tell federal investigators. Next, it was his knee, then his thigh.

“I was afraid because no one was around, but I just kept quiet,” Indrawati remembered. “He’s the boss, if he ordered me to do these things, I just have to do it.”

In March, she told investigators, Lie began ordering her to massage his genitals. These massages continued for several months, Indrawati told investigators.

Indrawati felt trapped. She spoke no English. If she fled, Robert Lie might punish Pasinah, who was living at his daughter’s house. He could harm her or Pasinah, and no one would ever know, she reasoned. But how could they escape without money? Where would they go?

At Indrawati’s urging, Pasinah began crafting a letter in English asking Lie’s neighbor for help. The letter took more than a month. Although Pasinah could speak some English, writing was another matter.

For Indrawati, life got worse.

During one massage that fall, Robert Lie, who outweighed Indrawati by 100 pounds, knocked her to the floor, Indrawati said. Then he raped her, she told investigators.

Afterward, Indrawati ran to her bathroom, closed the door and sat weeping on the white tile floor. “I’m not pure anymore,” she remembered thinking.

After an hour, she left the bathroom. The house was empty. She cleaned, crying as she scrubbed. “I was afraid if Shirley Lie came home and the work was not completed, she’d get upset,” Indrawati recalled. “But after that day, I didn’t work the same; after that I always felt sad.”

When she saw Pasinah again, she wept and told her it was time to send the letter to the only neighbor Pasinah had spoken with over the years. Indrawati hoped the letter would prompt the neighbor, Li-Ann Lee, to call the authorities, who would send her home when they learned she had no green card.

The letter said:

Hi MRS LEE DO YOU KNOW [street number] NEIGH BORO THEY HAPE 2 LAOY HAPE NO GREEN CARD AND PLEES DON’T TELL ANYONE IF YOU COLL 911 GIVE YOU SECRETS THANK YOU IS YOU NEIGHBOR

The letter baffled Li-Ann Lee, an artist. She recalled in an interview that she began to watch the Lie house carefully.

Two weeks later, Indrawati and Pasinah tried another letter.

Still Li-Ann Lee did nothing. “In the U.S.,” she said, “you can’t just go like that to the police without evidence.”

During December, Indrawati was raped six more times, she told investigators and wrote in her diary. After each time, she told investigators, she was ordered not to tell anyone.

Pasinah knew something was wrong. When she visited, her niece cried so hard she could not speak. Pasinah tried one more letter. This was mailed to police in Newport Beach on Dec. 28. Pasinah wrote:

“Dear mr. police office sir. Plaese plaese plaese. I really need your help police office sir. Plaese help my friend.”

Pasinah included the Lies’ address and continued:

“They have two housekeeping from Indonesia for long teme . . . it is trues and very serious. My friend can’t quit and no one can help. So I send letter . . . they have no green cards . . . and they pay very little money. So plaese police officer sir help.”

A Knock at the Door

On Jan. 5, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Det. Tony Wolschon, accompanied by other deputies, rang the bell at the Lies’ home. Shirley Lie came to the door, and Wolschon showed her the letter. Wolschon asked if anyone was inside. She said no. As she spoke, Wolschon could see a young Asian woman--Indrawati--peering through the blinds.

He repeated his question. This time, Shirley Lie told him her daughter, Julie, lived at home, according to his report. He tried once more.

Shirley Lie apologized, he wrote in his report, and she said: “I lied to you. Someone is inside, she works for us.”

When the deputies entered Indrawati’s room, she was praying. Wolschon thought she seemed both frightened and relieved.

Shirley Lie told Wolschon’s partner she had provided temporary living quarters for Indrawati for two years because Indrawati’s aunt had disappeared, according to a police report.

Then Shirley Lie said for a second time that she was not telling the truth. Indrawati’s aunt, she explained, took care of Shirley Lie’s daughter and her family in Newport Beach.

By the pool, Wolschon talked with Indrawati, who twisted a dish towel in her hands.

When Robert Lie arrived, Wolschon showed him the letter. He bragged about his businesses and his collection of memorabilia from USC, which he, his wife, son and daughter Julie had attended. He showed off a helmet once worn by O.J. Simpson. Lie then admitted he had no deposit slips, canceled checks or proof that he had paid the women.

Wolschon asked if Indrawati had money to help her relocate. He said Lie peeled five $100 bills from his wallet for her.

Later, when Wolschon returned to the neighborhood, only two neighbors had ever seen the Indonesian servants. The women had obeyed the Lies and been virtually invisible, Wolschon thought.

“I was convinced we were dealing with evil,” Wolschon recalled. “It was like being under house arrest, only worse.”

Later that day, police arrived at daughter Elizabeth’s home and asked Stephen Hanson, her husband, if he employed Indrawati’s aunt. He said no, she was simply a house guest who had stayed a few years, according to a police report.

Hanson, 34, a veterinarian in West Los Angeles, declined to discuss the case with The Times.

Elizabeth Hanson, 31, also a veterinarian, said in an interview that Indrawati’s and Pasinah’s employment “was definitely a mutual agreement. They wanted to be here.”

She declined to discuss the case any further. But she said she believed Pasinah and Indrawati should be deported.

“You have to understand,” she said, “illegal immigrants are everywhere. Illegal immigrants are a dime a dozen.”

‘I Had My Strength’

Pasinah and Indrawati had finally escaped.

Indrawati thought they’d be taken directly to the airport and sent home. Instead, they went to a detention center run by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. Their spirits plunged.

The Lie family had warned if they ever went outside the house, the police would put them in jail. It turned out, Indrawati thought, the Lies were right.

Indrawati believed her plight had gone from bad to worse. She had no idea how long she would remain behind bars.

“I regretted sending the letter to the police,” Indrawati remembered thinking. “If I knew it would be like this, I wouldn’t have sent the letter.” Another fear nagged Indrawati: What if she was pregnant?

At the public phones, Indrawati called Robert Lie collect and asked for her clothes and money. “I cannot give you your belongings,” she remembered him saying. “I will have to consult with my attorney.”

Wasn’t it bad enough that Robert Lie had raped her? she thought. How could she return home without her money and belongings? How could she spend 2 1/2 years in that house and leave America as poor as she’d arrived?

“From then on,” Indrawati recalled, “I had my strength to tell the truth.”

On Jan. 19, after they signed deportation papers, Indrawati told authorities that Lie wouldn’t return her belongings or pay her salary. Then she told of the rapes. She said she didn’t want this to happen to another Indonesian woman.

“If he’d given all their property back,” INS Agent Scott Mulay said later, “they never would have said anything.”

A Guilty Plea

Indrawati and Pasinah were released after 16 days in detention. As witnesses in the case against Lie, they were granted temporary work permits.

Nearly a year later, in December 1999, Robert Lie pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court to two counts of alien harboring and two counts of willful failure to pay minimum wage. Prosecutors did not charge rape because they had no physical evidence. In his plea bargain, Lie did not contest the government’s evidence, now under seal, that he raped and sexually assaulted Indrawati.

He received a stiffer sentence because of the rape allegation, said Assistant U.S. Atty. Thomas Warren.

In exchange, Warren agreed not to pursue charges against Shirley Lie, daughter Elizabeth Hanson or Elizabeth’s husband Stephen.

Attorney Yolanda Barrera, who represented Lie in federal court, said, “My client didn’t think this was regular employment, and the law does not see it that way. If your sister stays with you, you give her spending money, and then later she claims she was your housekeeper working 18 hours a day--that’s sort of what happened here.”

On April 25, 2000, before being sentenced, Robert Lie signed a declaration saying Pasinah did “light housework in exchange for her room and board.”

Fred Lie supported his father’s account in a declaration: “We treated them like family.” Julie Lie Maemoto, now 27, said in her sworn statement, “I never told Pasinah to do anything for me; not even to get me a drink of water.”

U.S. District Court Judge J. Spencer Letts was not persuaded. On April 27, 2000, when Lie returned for sentencing, Letts said, “The admitted facts of this case are terribly ugly facts. . . . This was a very, very bad crime. This is indentured servitude at best.”

Robert Lie faced a maximum of 21 years in prison and a fine of $520,000. He was sentenced to 27 months in federal prison--less than the time Indrawati worked in Lie’s house.

Judge Letts ordered Lie to three years of supervised release after prison and to pay $51,411.40 to Indrawati and $49,846.42 to Pasinah in restitution. The sums were calculated by deducting room and board for 2 1/2 years and figuring minimum wages and overtime for a 7-day workweek at 12 hours a day.

So far, Indrawati and Pasinah have received only $2,700. Barrera, Lie’s lawyer, said she thought it unlikely the women would get more money because Lie, as a felon, will have difficulty finding work once out of prison. Indrawati and Pasinah have filed a civil suit to collect back wages and damages.

Lie declared bankruptcy in March 1999--more than a year before the sentencing--as his plywood import business faltered.

Today, Pasinah and Indrawati work as part-time nannies for families in West Los Angeles. They earn $10 an hour and share a one-bedroom apartment. They have temporary work permits that expire March 1.

Indrawati has told none of her friends or family about her first 2 1/2 years in America. With savings from her new job, she has purchased a small piece of farmland for her father in Indonesia and a house for her sister. She has resumed sewing and prays regularly. She took driving lessons, a birthday present from her current boss, and hopes to soon get her license.

“Now,” said Indrawati, “I’m living the life I expected.”

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To report a slavery case, contact the Coalition to Abolish Slavery & Trafficking at (213) 473-1625 (www.trafficked-women.org) or the National Worker Task Force Complaint Line at (888) 428-7581.