Four For Friday - The Trafficking Train

A lot of moving parts here that involve not just sex trafficking, but also drug trafficking and an obscure piece of geography that makes it all possible.

A couple of decades ago, this foreign born actress was the hottest actress in her country. She wanted to be known. She pushed the boundary of what was socially acceptable in that country and eventually paid the price when the public wanted her to reign it in a bit and she refused. The last movie she made, she was kicked off when she wouldn't sleep with the director. That all changed when a mafia leader in the country went to the home of the director with three other men and raped the director's significant other at the time while making the director watch. The next day, the actress was back on the film, but it was her last.

That mafia leader became the husband of the actress and they moved to the Middle East to, you guessed it, Dubai. There they started trafficking in men to be exploited in the construction industry and in women to supply maids and housekeepers for private homes. Those women were often sexually assaulted by their employers and also abused and even in some cases murdered.

Other women were trafficked to the country solely for use as sex workers for the men working in the construction industry.

The pair never got into any trouble for any of the human trafficking, but did get in some hot water for drugs. They had paid enough in bribes over the years though, that a potential death sentence just led them to having their visas revoked and they were kicked out of the country.

The couple then found themselves in an African country. Kenya to be exact. There they continued their human and sex trafficking business and added Kenyan women to the growing list of people they were shipping all over the world. What brought them down again was their thirst for more money and drug trafficking. They just couldn't stop and they were busted.

In order to get a lighter sentence, they sold some people higher up in the food chain to authorities and also dropped a lot of high powered names around the world who were the recipients of these women for their "household staff." A shocking number of them went through Canada to the US by a fluke of geography that allows a piece of what should be mainland Canada to actually be located in the US. The border there is porous or non existent and once across, the trafficked women can be moved easily to another state.

The way it worked was the women would be flown from India to Canada where they didn't need a visa or were able to easily get one and then walked across the border to the US where they were then put on a boat for an hour to a more easily accessible US location. The couple estimates they shipped 500-600 women that way that were basically sex slaves to their employers. Over the past few years, some of those employers have been exposed when their "employees" have managed to escape.