Slave Next Door (13 page)

federal authorities with a list of witnesses, and time and again they were

met with resounding silence.28

Another year passed, and in August 1994 a third prosecutor was put

on the case who finally, slowly, painfully, started the wheels in motion.

He interviewed Julia Gabriel, the woman who had first told the CIW of

the Flores ring. In Laura Germino’s words, Julia, at 4′ 10′′, was “a tiny

woman with a big story to tell.”29 By early 1995, DOJ prosecutors had

re
interviewed several of the witnesses with whom the FBI had spoken,

in some instances, several times. Availability for interviews was a major

issue: the DOJ and the FBI never quite seemed to understand that the

workers traveled with the harvest, often ranging from Florida to

Pennsylvania, and working very long days. Even when the workers were

in the vicinity, it was absurd to schedule an interview at, say, ten o’clock

in the morning and assume a worker would be there; yet that is precisely

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what the agents did, so that the interviews would conform to their own

schedules. Still, the workers would manage to show up, over and over

again, to give their testimony. Meanwhile, the number of men and

women Flores had enslaved continued to grow, as did the stories of his

violence against workers, translators, informants, and witnesses.

Despite all the efforts being put forth by the CIW and the dozens of

witnesses and escapees who had come forward, life went on undis-

turbed in Flores’s camps. Many mornings, Sebastian Gomez woke the

workers by firing his nine-millimeter semiautomatic Smith and Wesson

pistol in the air, and his partner, Miguel Flores, would punctuate his

curses in the fields with shots from his own gun. When vendors or visi-

tors approached his camps, he drove them off by brandishing his pistol

or firing over their heads. On one occasion, he shot out a visitor’s tires.

Over the years, Flores was arrested periodically on firearms and abuse

charges, and sometimes he was bailed out by the local growers for

whom he supplied the workers. He was never prosecuted. Former DOL

senior investigator Armando Brana states, “In my files, I have seven

reports of workers who disappeared or died while working for Flores.

Even for those who were shot, it was listed as ‘death by natural causes.’

Some, it seemed, fell off a bridge, or were hit by a tractor or a bus.”

Investigations were cursory. “In one case,” recalls Brana, “the coroner

on the case was the farmer Flores was working for!”30

In January 1996, the DOJ was still evaluating the situation and had

not yet committed to fully pursuing it. It was, however, still reinter-

viewing witnesses. Meanwhile, it had become apparent that the case

would be helped by introducing additional investigators beyond the

FBI, and the DOJ asked the Border Patrol to step in. For the first time in

more than three years, a dedicated, bilingual agent was on the case.

Agent Mike Baron was given his own budget and free rein to conduct

his own investigation. Baron had picked crops as a boy, and he knew the

business from the inside. He reached out to the CIW and the workers

and provided an interest and an understanding that had been lacking.

One significant change he made was to interview workers only on the

weekends, to avoid stirring suspicion by their absence and to allow them

the weekdays to keep earning.

Finally, in October 1996, an indictment was brought in the U.S.

District Court in South Carolina against Miguel Flores, Sebastian

Gomez, and two of their recruiters on charges of conspiracy, involun-

tary servitude, extortion, illegal possession of a firearm, use of a firearm

in the commission of a violent crime, transporting and harboring aliens,

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and unlawful entry into the United States after deportation. The judge

considered the defendants a high flight risk and ordered them held

without bail.31

In May 1997—nearly five years after the CIW started its campaign

against the Flores slavery ring—the defendants entered a plea of guilty.

This left only the sentencing hearing. Julia Gabriel, the tiny woman with

the big story to tell, came forward to speak for a severe sentence. She

told her story, and that of friends and co-workers who had been threat-

ened and brutalized, and when she finished, she said,

That’s what I saw. And everything they did to others, they had no com-

passion for them. A lot of people were hurt. And there were a lot of vic-

tims, because they were very sure of themselves, and they could do

anything. And they took advantage of the people, and that’s why I’m here,

so that they will receive a harsh sentence, because they hurt a lot of

people . . . and these people did nothing to them. These people are vic-

tims. . . . And now is the moment of sentencing, and what I want is for

them to see that . . . if they are prisoners . . . they will see what they did to

other people. And if they are given a short sentence then they can, once

they are out . . . go for revenge, and no, that shouldn’t be. They are bad

people. And that’s the truth I’m telling you.32

The court believed her. Flores and Gomez were each sentenced to fif-

teen years in federal prison.

Although there had been other cases of slavery in the fields, some

going back to the 1970s, the Miguel Flores case was the first contem-

porary agricultural trafficking case to gain national prominence. It had

caught the government flatfooted. The government simply wasn’t pre-

pared for modern slavery, and the result was hesitation, confusion, lack

of interest, and constant misunderstandings on the government’s part in

pursuing it, as well as the inordinately long time it took to bring the

traffickers to justice.33 At one point, the FBI actually conducted a brief

investigation of Flores and found him to be “in full compliance with the

law.”34 Former DOL senior investigator Armando Brana recalls that

when he began working with Border Patrol agent-in-charge Mike Baron

his bosses resented the time he spent on the Flores case. “Dealing with

my supervisors was harder than conducting the actual investigation.

They’d ask me sarcastically, ‘So, have you joined the Border Patrol?’”35

The conviction of Flores was a landmark case and instrumental in

bringing about the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act in

2000, with its sets of definitions, charges, and penalties for dealing

specifically with cases of sex and labor slavery in the United States. And

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from a time when, in the words of Mike Baron, “you could fit the whole

antislavery movement in the back of my patrol truck,” it helped spark

the anti–human trafficking effort in the country today.36 Baron is lavish

in his praise of the coalition’s efforts: “If law enforcement had the same

dedication and tenacity as the CIW, and weren’t bound by our restric-

tions, there wouldn’t be a place for the criminals to hide. They main-

tained contact with the workers and tracked the movements of the crew

leaders. Without the CIW, we wouldn’t have had any witnesses; we never

would have found the victims.”37

More Bad Apples to Pick

With the awareness that slavery existed in the fields, there was no going

back. “It became clear,” says Germino, “that this wasn’t a one-time bad

apple employer. This was something . . . the community decided we had

to fight back against.”38 The CIW made the liberation of enslaved, as

well as oppressed, workers a priority. Now, with its deep-rooted, com-

munity-based network of over three thousand members, the CIW some-

times receives word that a crew leader is operating a slave camp, and

they begin to investigate. In their words, “Workers are well-placed to

understand, analyze, investigate, and operate within the parallel and

totally separate world that captive workers and their employers inhabit

in rural agricultural communities.”39

By 2009, the CIW had contributed to the uncovering, investigation,

and prosecution of several trafficking operations in four states, resulting

in the liberation of well over a thousand workers and long sentences for

the offenders. Among those cases was that of the notorious Ramoses—

two brothers and a cousin—who enslaved hundreds of workers. To gather

information, a young CIW member, Romeo Ramirez, volunteered to infil-

trate one of the Ramos camps, pretending to seek work. He lived in

squalid conditions with several other workers, and when he left he took

with him enough information to justify an investigation. When asked if he

feared for his safety while among the Ramoses’ crew, Ramirez replied,

“When you’re afraid, you can’t get anything done.” Eventually, the

Ramoses were sentenced to lengthy prison terms, their land and property

were confiscated, and they were fined $3,000,000—the amount the judge

determined they had earned off the labor of their enslaved workers.40

In early 2007, the CIW was helpful in bringing about the arrest and

conviction of a man who owned labor camps in Palatka, Florida, and

Newton Grove, North Carolina. For over fifteen years, Ronald Evans

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recruited workers from homeless shelters and kept them in debt by pro-

viding them with overpriced crack cocaine and alcohol, coupled with

exorbitant charges for rent and food. Aside from the horrific nature of

the offense, what makes this servitude case unusual these days is the fact

that Evans was not preying on foreign migrant workers; nearly all his

victims were American born. Once again, the coalition was instrumen-

tal in investigating the case, traveling to Palatka and North Carolina

several times to gather information. Along with advocates from advo-

cate organization Touching Miami with Love, “The Coalition hit laun-

dromats, gas stations, and convenience stores. They talked to workers,

clinic officials, priests, waitresses and growers” in their search for wit-

nesses and victims.41 They then turned their findings over to the DOJ,

which brought Evans to justice. In attempting to minimize the slavery

aspects of the case, Evans’s attorney callously argued, “This was the

best situation most of these people ever had in their lives.” The judge

disagreed and sentenced Evans to thirty years in federal prison.42

M U LT I TA S K I N G A G A I N S T S L AV E RY

The CIW defines its antislavery campaign as a “worker-based approach

to eliminating modern-day slavery in the agricultural industry.”43

Members work on multiple fronts. In their attempts to deal with exist-

ing slavery situations, they combine community outreach, investigation,

and counseling. They hold member meetings on a regular basis. To help

get the word out, the CIW has its own radio station in Immokalee—

Radio Conciencia—which broadcasts locally in the various languages

spoken by the workers. Its programs combine music with vital informa-

tion on workers’ rights.

Because the coalition is worker-based, members have access to situa-

tions and places that would be inaccessible to government and law

enforcement agents. As a member states, “The CIW members know

how slavery camps operate, and often become aware of such operations

due to being tapped into networks in the world of migrant labor.”44

When they uncover slavery, the coalition works closely with the DOJ—

which has made tremendous strides since the days of the Flores case—

to bring the captives to freedom and the perpetrators to trial.

Because of the complex, violent nature of agricultural slavery, the inves-

tigative techniques used by the CIW are many and varied. As in the case

of Romeo Ramirez, they will send a member into a slave camp to gather

evidence. (Mike Baron credits them with perfecting their techniques for

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“covert operations.”)45 They frequently travel to various states, visiting

remote camps, looking for evidence of forced labor, and speaking with

the workers. In the course of their investigations, some of which have

taken years, they have spoken with “workers, growers, store owners,

flea market vendors, police, motel owners, priests, nurses, gunmen, and

crew leaders.”46 They have combed the Internet, performing criminal

background checks and license plate searches; they have studied police

records and court documents. And when they’ve discovered workers in

a slavery situation, they’ve helped them escape.

Once a worker is free, the CIW provides counseling, as well as edu-

cation and peer support. The freed worker can train in slavery aware-

ness, labor rights, and organizing techniques. He or she can, in turn,