Slave Next Door (26 page)

had taken a chance on a good-paying job in America and lost.

The acrobats told the agents that they were hungry. They’d been

restricted to small servings of instant noodles, rice, and vegetables

twice a day. They explained that they had to perform twice a day, were

awakened early, and didn’t get to go to sleep until very late. Li had con-

fiscated their visas and passports and had warned the team members

that he would eavesdrop on phone calls made to their families. One of

the juveniles told authorities that he feared for his family’s safety in

China and that he had seen Li’s assistant Jun Hu beat up another per-

former. In the suburban house Li had them sleeping four to six per

bedroom. When they were not performing, Li rented the acrobats out

to another man, who used them to clean and renovate houses and do

yard work. The performers had been promised up to $1,600 per

month; most received no pay at all, though some were given $50 or

$100 per month as pocket money. Though most of the acrobats had

very limited English, FBI spokesman David Staretz explained they were

overjoyed at being liberated—“They literally hugged the investigators

when they arrived.”4

Though he told investigators he made only $30,000 per year, You

Zhi Li seemed to be doing well with his acrobats. After a little digging,

police found that he owned a $320,000 home, had paid off and owned

another $170,000 home, had $110,000 in his business bank account

and $30,000 in his personal bank account, and owned four vans worth

about $25,000 apiece.

The reactions of Li’s neighbors to the revelation that twenty people

were being held in his house are typical of American suburbanites when

they first meet the slave next door—puzzlement and confusion as they

attempt to understand how slavery fits within the workings of a normal

neighborhood. A man living next door said that he had noticed “exces-

sive amounts of trash put out for collection” but added that his neigh-

bors “weren’t very noisy and were always friendly.” Across the street a

man stated that he had often seen the acrobats exercising in the garage

but explained, “They were not boisterous. They were model citizens. I

wouldn’t have known anything was happening over there that wasn’t on

the up and up.”5

If there was anything odd about the case of the trafficked acrobats—

besides the fact that they were
acrobats
—it was the quick action on the

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part of the Chinese government to deny that any such crime had taken

place. Normally when foreign nationals are trafficked into the United

States their home government will either offer help or simply ignore

them, leaving their care and rehabilitation to U.S. service agencies. But

in this case, the Chinese government quickly went on record support-

ing the traffickers. Articles on the government Web site China.org,

“China’s Official Gateway to News and Information,” rolled out a

remarkable set of reasons why these acrobats were not trafficking vic-

tims. According to a report by Zou Di, the acrobats’ passports weren’t

confiscated; they were just “kept away from the members in case they

were lost.” Di’s report also argued that the “accusation of using child

labor is groundless as well, since acrobatics is, to a large extent, an art

of the young” and that it was “difficult to find evidence for human traf-

ficking, because all performers have valid visas and passports.”6

American law, of course, doesn’t exempt exploitative child labor for

any reason, and many trafficking victims are brought into the country

with valid visas and passports. Why the Chinese government wants to

deny this case is unclear, but their report ends by asserting, “Some

believe the complaints are false and were made by acrobats trying to

find a way to stay in the US.” The “some” who believe this are never

identified.

The Best Of fer They Never Heard

A beautiful young woman in expensive clothing and costly jewelry

goes to the door of a dilapidated shack in a small Mexican village. The

little hut, or
jacal,
has no amenities, and the toilet is a hole in the back-

yard. The woman enters and immediately begins to play what one

activist refers to as her “psychological war game” with the family

within.

“How can you live like this?” she demands, shaming them with the

squalor.

Taking from her purse an album of photographs, she shows them pic-

tures of the luxuries she enjoys in “el Norte”: the big house in Queens,

New York, the expensive car, the elegant clothes. She tells them that

the simple job she holds in New York enables her to live at this level.

“You, too, can have this, and money to send home besides, to help your

family.”

The young woman repeats this performance in many such homes,

varying the story as the situation requires. She tells one family she works

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in a restaurant; another, that she works as a cleaning woman. The lie is

apparent, unless you don’t know to look for it. Perhaps they believe her

because of the single characteristic she shares with them: the woman

and all the people she is recruiting are deaf.

She convinces them by the busload to accompany her across the

border, where their lives will improve a hundredfold. She dresses up

some of them to look like average tourists and teaches them how to sign

ignorance to the border guards, who more often than not wave them

through. Others make the long trek on foot, but they come by the hun-

dreds over a ten-year period, clinging to her false words of promise.7

The woman’s name is Adriana Paoletti, and she was a major player in

a particularly vicious family-run human trafficking ring. For ten years,

the Paolettis, a deaf family from Mexico, made a business of illegally

importing deaf and hearing-impaired men and women into California,

transporting them to Chicago and New York City, and enslaving them

there as street peddlers.

Sometimes the family would vary its methods by recruiting deaf teens

out of school.8 In Mexico, the future held little promise for deaf

youths—special education was available only through junior high

school—and they had virtually nowhere to go; frequently their own

families would reject them. The promise of a better life in the United

States made them easy victims, and, according to Jose Badillo Huerta,

director of Mexico City’s National School for Deaf Mutes, “There are

dozens of families like the Paolettis in Mexico who exploit the deaf.”9

In New York City, fifty-seven of the deaf Mexicans were crammed

into small, rundown apartments in two Queens houses and forced to

sleep on the floor or on bare mattresses. They were threatened, abused,

and beaten as a matter of course. Some of the women were systemati-

cally raped. Every day, seven days a week, they were each given one hun-

dred cheap trinkets—which the Paolettis had purchased for $3 per

dozen from a novelty company—and sent out to sell them for a dollar

apiece.10 Some of the men were given two hundred trinkets a day. They

were all told not to return until every trinket was sold. For twelve to

eighteen hours, they would walk the city’s streets or stand on corners

staring at the sidewalk and holding out their trinkets; or they would ride

the subways, eyes cast down, leaving with the riders a trinket—a pen or

a key chain—and a small, worn card reading, “I am deaf,” then return-

ing to collect either the trinket or a dollar. If they came home at night

with any trinkets left, they were beaten, shocked with stun guns, denied

food and water, or locked out. One woman later told the judge, through

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a translator, that there were days “when she walked down subway cars

with the bruises and bumps from the frequent beatings the ringleaders

delivered.”11

The Paoletti family members were masters of psychological manipu-

lation. They featured an “incentive program,” in which the peddlers

who sold the most trinkets were given prizes, such as a trip to

Disneyworld. One man was told he had won a van; he had no license,

couldn’t drive, and wouldn’t have known where to go if he could, but

from time to time his controllers let him sit behind the wheel of “his”

van. Those who performed well tended to always perform well, and

they continually won the prizes. The others received harsh treat-

ment; they were constantly abused. Ironically, because of their limita-

tions, those who suffered the most at the hands of the Paolettis

eventually had the hardest time explaining the exploitation they had suf-

fered to the police and prosecutors.12

The Paolettis were smart. They knew that the victims’ families back

in Mexico would worry if they received no word, so once in a while they

took everyone to Disneyworld or to other tourist attractions. Here they

would take dozens of photos showing their victims smiling and would

mail them home, saying, “Your son is doing well, and working as a [fill

in the blank].” The Paolettis also had a paid contact working in the

Mexican consulate, who would call the families with imaginary

“updates.”13

The Paoletti family made a fortune. Do the math: with each of the

fifty-seven victims bringing home at least $100 a day, the family was

taking in a minimum of $5,700 daily in New York City alone. And there

was also the Chicago ring. The two cities frequently exchanged victims

who failed to meet quota, to give their associates the chance to

“straighten them out.” Following a familiar slaveholder’s pattern, some

victims were made enforcers or overseers and were coerced into inform-

ing against—and beating—their friends. This had a severe psychological

effect all its own on both the enforcers and their victims.

The peddlers’ knowledge of the city’s streets and subway routes was

staggering, yet their freedom to roam at will was an illusion. The vic-

tims couldn’t communicate with the world outside their group. They

didn’t speak, write, or sign English—and in more than a few cases

couldn’t read or write at all. And they were living under constant threat.

According to a
Time
magazine article, neighbors later told the authori-

ties of “a nightly horror show of barefoot women, clad only in night-

gowns, fleeing from the houses with men in pursuit; of babies crying,

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their squalls unattended; of walls vibrating from slamming doors and

pounding fists.”14

Various opportunities on the part of New York City agencies to help

these victims came—and went. On at least one occasion, police and

emergency workers arrived at one of the houses to give medical atten-

tion to a woman. The fire and building departments made inspection

appearances as well. No one blew a whistle. When the trafficking ring

was finally uncovered, it was not because the various public servants

who had witnessed the conditions in which these people lived took

action. It was because the victims finally decided they’d had enough.

Choosing four men from among their number—a hard choice, since

they all felt those chosen would come to harm—they sent them off to

find the police. With no language skills, the four tried several times,

unsuccessfully, to make themselves understood to the police in the local

Queens precincts. Finally, an older deaf man—an American—working

at Newark Airport befriended them. Although he spoke no Spanish, he

helped them write a letter describing their enslavement. At four in the

morning on July 19, 1997, they walked into a Queens police station and

handed the letter to the desk sergeant.15

The police followed the four men back to the houses and staged a

predawn raid; what they found was heartbreaking. As
Time
magazine

reported, “Police discovered 57 Mexicans, most of them deaf-mute ille-

gal immigrants, crammed into two top-floor apartments.”16 To build a

case, communication with the victims was essential—and nearly impos-

sible. At this juncture, Lou de Baca was called in. De Baca was the invol-

untary servitude and slavery coordinator at the Department of Justice

and the department’s most experienced trial attorney on slavery cases.

“They called me on the Sunday following the Friday raids. I had just fin-

ished the Miguel Flores case [described in chapter 3], and I thought I’d

take some time off. Instead, I was flown to New York as a trafficking

expert.”17

During the course of the investigation, which was conducted by

both the FBI and Immigration and Naturalization Services, a wide

array of agencies and service providers was introduced to the case. De

Baca worked closely with Sandy Cohen, chief of civil rights for the U.S.