Supreme Court OKs System to Weed out Legal Impostors
By Mark Bixler
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Every day in Georgia, immigrants pay big bucks to people who promise to help them renew a work permit, become a legal resident or bring a spouse to the United States. They often do not know they're paying shady consultants who promise hope but deliver disappointment.
Phony lawyers fleece legal immigrants with a poor understanding of the legal system and illegal immigrants who avoid authorities for fear of deportation. They often break a law against nonlawyers acting as lawyers, but they are rarely taken to court.
Now the Georgia Supreme Court is cracking down on immigration consultants and others who practice law without a license. The court is creating panels around Georgia to investigate suspected scam artists. And it has cleared the way for the State Bar of Georgia to ask judges to intervene in egregious cases.
Justice Carol Hunstein said the Supreme Court decided last month to establish 10 committees that will periodically present findings to a statewide 23-member committee which will, in turn, forward some cases to the state bar. The bar could ask a judge to order unscrupulous people to stop acting like lawyers. If they did not, they could go to jail.
It sounds cumbersome but will actually make it easier to tackle a growing problem, said Steve Kaczkowski, a lawyer for the state bar. Before the Supreme Court acted, the bar could investigate but take little action against people posing as lawyers --- it was up to local prosecutors to decide whether to charge someone with the misdemeanor of unauthorized practice of law.
"The enforcement of that law has been very spotty," Hunstein said. "Probably the biggest problem with the unauthorized practice of law is in the immigrant community."
Hunstein said the changes came after a committee of judges and attorneys reviewed the problem and decided the state needed to do more to enforce the law against people who pass themselves off as lawyers.
Some nonlawyers, mainly Hispanics, prey on other Hispanics by advertising themselves as notaries public, a term used for prestigious lawyers in much of Latin America. Recent arrivals often do not know that almost anyone with $15 can be a notary in Georgia. Some shell out a few thousand dollars for bad advice and sloppy paperwork. Advocates say hundreds of immigrants have been deported after paying a notary to handle immigration paperwork.
"They're taking advantage of a cultural or historic custom," said Ralph Perales, president of the Georgia Hispanic Bar Association. "All anybody here has to do is put an ad in the paper saying, 'I'm a notary public.' "
Perales said the Supreme Court's action will help address a problem that otherwise would go largely unchecked.
Kristin Grods, an Atlanta lawyer with the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said shady immigration consultants have sprung up around Georgia recently to take advantage of confusion about a new immigration law. The law affects relatively few illegal immigrants in Georgia, but some are making money by falsely portraying it as an amnesty.
"It's a huge problem. I'm sure this is happening all over the state," she said. "It's pretty much an everyday activity, that someone is making money by misleading people."
The panels will not limit themselves to complaints involving immigrants. They also will review complaints about nonlawyers representing people in cases involving issues such as divorce, child custody and real estate. But the committees could have a particularly strong impact among immigrants. That's because immigrants, especially illegal ones, often are reluctant to tell police or testify in court if someone has defrauded them by masquerading as a lawyer.
Kaczkowski said the Supreme Court's action might make it more difficult for people to rake in money by giving bogus legal advice. "I think we'll certainly get the attention of some folks," he said. "I have no doubt about it."
USA V MATSUMARU
Case Number: Date Filed:
99-10334 04/03/01
FOR PUBLICATION
UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS
FOR THE NINTH CIRCUIT
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,
No. 99-10334
Plaintiff-Appellee,
D.C. No.
v. CR-97-00974-SOM
SHO JAY MATSUMARU,
OPINION
Defendant-Appellant.
Appeal from the United States District Court
for the District of Hawaii
Susan Oki Mollway, District Judge, Presiding
Argued and Submitted
November 13, 2000--Honolulu, Hawaii
Filed April 3, 2001
Before: Procter Hug, Jr., Chief Judge, Stephen S. Trott, and
Kim McLane Wardlaw, Circuit Judges.
Opinion by Judge Trott
COUNSEL
William L. Osterhoudt, Law Offices of William L.
Osterhoudt, San Francisco, California, for the defendant-
appellant.
Omer G. Poirier, United States Attorney's Office, Honolulu,
Hawaii, for the plaintiff-appellee.
OPINION
TROTT, Circuit Judge:
It's been said that "good counselors lack no clients. "WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, MEASURE FOR MEASURE act I, sc.2.Sho Jay Matsumaru certainly did not lack clients, but according to the government, it was not because he was a "good counselor." To the contrary, the government characterizes Matsumaru as a cunning, sophisticated lawyer engaged in a complex, multi-layered criminal scheme designed to defraud his clients and the United States government.
The prosecution pieced together the acts of Matsumaru's tragic play during a week-long trial, featuring over twenty-five witnesses. The denouement came when a jury convicted the protagonist, Matsumaru, of two counts of wire fraud, two counts of visa fraud, and one count of establishing a commercial enterprise for the purpose of evading immigration laws. The district court closed the script by sentencing Matsumaru to five concurrent forty-one month sentences and by ordering him to pay $50,000 in restitution.
Not content with his fate, Matsumaru appealed his convictions and sentence. We have jurisdiction of this sequel under 28 U.S.C. S 1291. As discussed in detail below, we affirm four of Matsumaru's five convictions, and affirm his sentence, except with respect to the amount of restitution ordered by the district court. Accordingly, we affirm in part, reverse in part,
and remand the case to the district court for the limited purpose of calculating the amount of restitution Matsumaru must pay.
I
Background
1. The Scheme
Matsumaru is a Japanese citizen who has been a permanent resident of the United States since 1984. In addition to speaking both Japanese and English, Mastumaru is a licensed attorney who practiced law in Hawaii from 1988 until the time ofhis conviction in 1999. Among other disciplines, Matsumaru helped Japanese clients obtain visas from the United States government. He bragged that he had almost a 100% success rate in securing visas for his clients.
The government surmised that Matsumaru's success rate was a function of an elaborate, multifaceted strategy devised to defraud the United States government, and at the same time, to swindle his unwitting foreign clients. First, Matsumaru advertised in a Japanese language publication as a bilingual immigration attorney capable of helping Japanese citizens obtain visas from the United States Department of State ("State Department"). Japanese citizens desirous of living in the United States who saw Matsumaru's advertisement contacted him. Matsumaru explained that in order to qualify for a particular visa, a Japanese citizen must invest a substantial sum of money in a United States company. To effectuate the investment, Matsumaru instructed the Japanese citizens to wire money from their Japanese bank accounts to newly formed corporate bank accounts in Hawaii. Instead of using these funds to invest in United States companies, however, Matsumaru, without authorization, diverted most of the money to his own personal uses.
Then, after creating the paper trail supposedly demonstrating his clients' investments in viable United States companies, Matsumaru endeavored to secure visas for his clients. He prepared application materials for his clients to submit to the United States consulate in Japan. In these materials, Matsumaru made several false representations to the United States government about the history of his clients' investments and about the formation of their United States enterprises. Relying on these false representations, the government granted visas to Matsumaru's clients.
2. The Clients
Several clients sought Matsumaru's legal assistance in securing visas that would allow them to live in the United States. Matsumaru's representation of three clients in particular -- Yasutsugu Wada ("Wada"), Kimio Murakami ("Murakami"), and Shinji Tsutsumi ("Tsutsumi") -- gives rise to the instant case.
a. Yasutsugu Wada
After seeing Matsumaru's advertisement in a Japanese publication, Wada contacted the immigration attorney, expressing his desire to live in the United States. Because Wada's previous application for a student visa had been denied, Matsumaru knew that the United States government would be reluctant to grant Wada a permanent visa. Matsumaru suggested that
Wada first try to obtain a treaty investor visa, known as an "E-2 visa,"1 which would allow him to stay temporarily in the United States. If successful in obtaining a temporary treaty investor visa, Wada should then try to secure a visa that would allow him to stay permanently in the United States.
Wada hired Matsumaru to help him obtain both visas, and they entered into a two-part written agreement setting forth each party's rights and responsibilities. Wada paid Matsumaru $10,000 to help him obtain the E-2 treaty investor visa. If the government denied Wada's petition for a treaty investor visa, Matsumaru agreed to reimburse the $10,000 fee, less expenses. But, if Wada was successful in obtaining a temporary treaty investor visa and was later able to secure a permanent visa, Wada agreed to pay Matsumaru an additional $10,000 fee.
Matsumaru explained to Wada that in order to qualify as a treaty investor, he had to invest a substantial sum of money in a United States company. Wada agreed to establish a new United States company named Paradise Corporation. Per Matsumaru's instructions, Wada wired $650,000 from his bank in Japan to a newly formed Paradise Corporation bank account
in Hawaii on which both Wada and Matsumaru were signatories. According to their arrangement, Matsumaru was the sole manager of Paradise Corporation, and Wada contractually agreed "not [to] interfere with the business matters at all."
An E-2 treaty investor visa is available to citizens of certain foreign countries, including Japan, who come to the United States "solely to develop and direct the operations of an enterprise in which he has invested, or of an enterprise in which he is actively in the process of investing a substantial amount of capital." 8 U.S.C. S 1101(a)(15)(E)(ii). This provision comprises the heart of Matsumaru's first two claims on appeal and is discussed in detail in Section II.1.b., infra.
Once Wada wired the $650,000 into the Paradise Corporation bank account, Matsumaru diverted a substantial portion of those funds for personal uses. For instance, Matsumaru deposited a $370,000 Paradise Corporation check, denominated as a loan, into his personal account at another bank. Wada testified that he never authorized any "loan " to Matsumaru, much less a loan for $370,000. Moreover, Matsumaru used corporate funds to pay directly for personal debts and services, including physical therapy, massages, guitar lessons, and alimony to his ex-wife.
With a paper trail supposedly evidencing Wada's investment, Matsumaru turned his attention toward securing Wada a treaty investor visa. He prepared a packet of materials for Wada to submit to the United States consulate in Japan. As part of the packet, Matsumaru wrote a letter describing Wada and the creation of Paradise Corporation. In this letter, Matsumaru made two allegedly false statements: (1) that Wada was a qualified treaty investor when, in fact, Wada was not a qualified treaty investor because he had contractually ceded all managerial responsibilities over Paradise Corporation to Matsumaru; and (2) that Paradise Corporation had purchased a travel company, known as Pacific Hawaiian Travel, for $239,000, when, in fact, Paradise Corporation had not done so. The United States government granted Wada's E-2 visa petition.
The jury convicted Matsumaru of (1) committing wire fraud against Wada in violation of 18 U.S.C. S 1343 and (2) committing visa fraud against the United States in violation of 18 U.S.C. S 1546.
b. Kimio Murakami
Murakami also saw Matsumaru's advertisement and contacted him seeking legal assistance in obtaining an E-2 treaty investor visa. Matsumaru told Murakami that he had to make a substantial investment in a United States corporation in order to qualify for a treaty investor visa and suggested that Murakami start a golf tour business called Jin Golf. Murakami agreed, wrote a $50,000 check to create Jin Golf, and, per Matsumaru's instructions, wired $200,000 from his bank in Japan to Jin Golf's corporate account in Hawaii.
To get Jin Golf rolling, Matsumaru convinced Murakami to pay $50,000 for Big Golf, an existing golf tour company owned by one of Matsumaru's former clients. Matsumaru drew up the sales agreement, Murakami signed the agreement, and Murakami's wife wrote a check, denominated as a "van purchase," on the Jin Golf account for $50,000. Instead of getting the entire Big Golf company, however, Murakami received only one van and one business license.
At trial, Kusuo Urahama, the owner of Big Golf and a former client of Matsumaru's, testified that he had already sold Big Golf to another man, and therefore could not have sold it to Murakami. Urahama also explained that he never received any part of Jin Golf's $50,000 check. In fact, Matsumaru deposited the $50,000 check into a bank account of which Urahama was wholly unaware.
The jury convicted Matsumaru of committing wire fraud against Murakami in violation of 18 U.S.C. S 1343.2
c. Shinji Tsutsumi
Like Wada and Murakami, Tsutsumi also saw Matsumaru's advertisement in a Japanese publication and contacted him seeking legal assistance in obtaining a treaty investor visa. Matsumaru told Tsutumi that he had to make a substantial investment in a United States corporation in order to qualify
2 The government charged Matsumaru with visa fraud for allegedly making false statements to the United States government in connection with Murakami's treaty investor visa petition. The jury acquitted Matsumaru of this charge. as a treaty investor. Matsumaru convinced Tsutsumi to invest in Paradise Resorts, a company previously owned by Matsumaru's sister. Per Matsumaru's instructions, Tsutsumi invested $300,000 in Paradise Resorts.
Once Tsutsumi invested in Paradise Resorts, Matsumaru prepared a packet of materials for Tsutsumi to submit to the United States government along with his treaty investor visa petition. As part of the packet, Matsumaru wrote a letter describing Tsutsumi and the history of Paradise Resorts. In this letter, Matsumaru made two allegedly false statements: (1) that Paradise Resorts managed several condominium units, when in fact, Paradise Resorts did not manage several condo units; and (2) that Paradise Resorts provided resort-management and travel services, when, in fact, it did not provide those services. The U.S. government granted Tsutsumi's E-2 visa petition.
The jury convicted Matsumaru of committing visa fraud against the United States in violation of 18 U.S.C.S 1546.3
3 The government also charged Matsumaru with committing wire fraud against Tsutsumi, but the jury acquitted Matsumaru of this charge. Additionally, the government charged Matsumaru with committing visa fraud against the United States in connection with the treaty investor visa petition of another client, Osamu Masuda, but the jury acquitted Matsumaru of this charge, as well.
Conclusion
For the reasons expressed above, we affirm Matsumaru's convictions for the two counts of wire fraud and the two counts of visa fraud. We reverse Matsumaru's conviction for establishing a commercial enterprise for the purpose of evading immigration laws in violation of 8 U.S.C. S 1325(d). Finally, we affirm the sentence imposed by the district judge, except with respect to the restitution amount.
AFFIRMED in part, REVERSED in part, and REMANDED.
USCIS Developing Regulations for New 'V' Nonimmigrant Status
Eligible Applicants Living in the United States Must Wait to Apply
WASHINGTON –– The Immigration and Naturalization Service (BCIS) announced today that persons eligible for "V" status living in the United States must wait until USCIS publishes "V" regulations in the Federal Register before applying for "V" nonimmigrant status and work authorization. The agency expects to have regulations published in the Federal Register by May 2001 that will establish an application form and filing procedures. The Department of State will begin processing "V" nonimmigrant visas for eligible persons living abroad on Monday, April 2.
The Legal Immigration Family Equity Act (LIFE Act), signed into law on December 21, 2000, created a number of immigration benefits, including a new "V" visa and status. This nonimmigrant status allows certain spouses and minor children of lawful permanent residents to live and work in the United States and to travel to and from this country while they wait until an immigrant visa number becomes available and they obtain lawful permanent resident status.
NOTE: Persons who have been unlawfully present in the United States for more than 180 days and depart the country must be cautious because their departure triggers the grounds of inadmissibility regarding unlawful presence. Although these grounds of inadmissibility—— which bar admission to the United States for three years or 10 years——do not prevent eligible persons from obtaining "V" status or from being readmitted to the United States in "V" status following travel abroad, these grounds do prevent such persons from adjusting status to lawful permanent resident (for the applicable 3-year or 10-year period) unless they obtain a waiver.
Applicants for the "V" visa and status MUST:
· Be the spouse or unmarried child (under 21 years of age) of a lawful permanent resident;
· Have a Form I-130 (Petition for Alien Relative) filed with the USCIS on his or her behalf by the lawful permanent resident spouse or parent on or before December 21, 2000; and
· Have been waiting for at least three years after the Form I-130 was filed for their immigrant visa number (priority date) to become available in accordance with the Department of State''s monthly Visa Bulletin; or
· Be the unmarried child (under 21 years of age) of a person who meets the above three requirements.
Persons who have been issued a "V" visa abroad from the Department of State and admitted to the United States may apply for authorization to work in the United States by mailing a Form I-765 (Application for Employment Authorization) along with the $100 application fee to:
U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service
P.O. Box 7216
Chicago, IL 60607-7216
Eligible applicants living in the United States must wait to apply until USCIS publishes its "V" regulations.
Smuggled for Sex - Teenagers Tell of Forced Prostitution
By Sean Gardiner and Geoffrey Mohan
Newsday
Maria Isabel Chalanda Pio was 15, a virgin and eager to earn dollars for her family when she left for Miami from her hometown of Santiago Tuxtla in the Gulf Coast state of Veracruz, Mexico.
She came back raped, abused and pregnant after being forced into sexual slavery by a family of immigrant smugglers from her own town.
At least a dozen more like Maria Chalanda were duped into leaving a string of small colonial towns in the green hills not far from the waters that separate Mexico from Florida. And these young women, as well as the families that entrusted them to the Cadena Sosa family, which grew up beside them, are as poor or even poorer now than when they left. Most of their captors remain free.
The former sex slaves of Veracruz had a lot in common. They were young, pretty, naive and looking for money to buy a house or land by working illegally in the United States. At home, they had been lemon-pickers, belt-makers or cleaning ladies, eking out desperate livings in desperately poor towns. In the United States, they were told, they would work in restaurants or take care of children, earning more in a week than they saw in a year at home.
Instead, they shared a unique ring of hell. Shuttled among trailers and houses all over rural South Florida, these teens-and some pre-teens-were forced to have sex with a seemingly endless series of migrant field workers, supposedly to pay off a 22,000-peso ($2,750) debt smugglers charged them to come north.
"They made us work as long as they wanted," Maria Chalanda said, holding her 2-year-old daughter, Denys, whose father, she said, could be any of the immigrants who had sex with her. "There were up to 25 men, more, in a night," she said. "I had to do what they said. I had to do what they wanted. They paid $20 and we got $3." Forced abortions, beatings and threats were all part of their new lives in America, the women said later in depositions given in Florida. They worked six days a week, having sex in 15-minute sessions with men who paid the women's bosses $20 or $25. Thirty men a day was not unusual, and after the brothels closed for the night, the men who guarded the girls took their turn. In some cases, virgins were initiated into their sexual servitude by being raped repeatedly.
For some of the women, the hell lasted only a couple of weeks; others were held captive for months. One woman endured 20 months in the guarded Florida prostitution prisons before a series of FBI and Border Patrol raids finally put an end in February 1998 to what one federal judge said was "one of the most base, most vile, most despicable, most reprehensible crimes" he had ever encountered.
Although the Cadena ring got relatively little public attention at the time-surprisingly little, given its extreme nature-it has been held up by federal officials and human rights advocates as one of the best arguments for having tough laws to attack sex trafficking.
The young women who worked in the brothels galvanized lawmakers in Washington with their tales of kidnaping and rape. That helped make the case for the nation's first comprehensive anti-trafficking law, signed by President Bill Clinton in October. It could double the prison terms for some traffickers, give life sentences to others and offer permanent residence to up to 5,000 of their victims a year-possibly including some of the Cadena ring women.
In a world where lines can be murky-where it is not always clear whether sex work is coerced or voluntary, whether women were duped or knowingly chose an illegal path-the Cadena ring is a chillingly clear case. In the broad spectrum of sexual trafficking, it defines one extreme: sexual enslavement.
The men who ran the brothels, said Lou DeBaca, Justice Department senior litigation counsel, "tapped into the American dream and perverted it." They also got rich. The ring made about $2.5 million over two years, investigators estimate, from 25 to 40 women. The captors still own large tracts of property in the fringes of this tourist zone in Mexico. One of the Cadenas, Abel Cadena Sosa, has been imprisoned in Mexico since April 1999 after fleeing prosecution in Florida, where his uncle, Rogerio Cadena, was handed a 15-year prison sentence for his part in the ring. But others indicted in Florida, including two brothers of Abel's, have disappeared somewhere in Mexico.
In fact, Maria, known as Mari, said she regularly bumps into at least three men she remembers as guards in the brothels where she was captive. No one is going after them, as far as anyone here can tell.
Rogerio Cadena and others in the ring were, however, ordered to pay $1 million in restitution to 16 of the women, the first time such a monetary award has been handed out in a forced-prostitution case. Each woman's share-ranging from $6,750 to $198,000-was set by a unique formula: Multiply 132 sex acts per week by the number of weeks held captive by $25, the
amount the Cadenas charged for sex. In other words, these women were supposed to get $25 for each time they were forced to have sex.
But Rogerio Cadena has pleaded poverty, and no restitution has been paid.
"Because we're poor, and they have money, there's no justice," said Julia Pio Conchi. She said her daughter, Coribel Flores Pio, was duped like Mari when she was 16 and now lives hand-to-mouth somewhere in South Florida, collecting cans for cash.
"She has a baby, and she can't work, so she doesn't have money to come back," Pio said. "She goes from house to house, wandering, wherever they give her food to eat. She can't work, has no money, and she can't speak English." Mari's mother, Carmen Pio (who is not directly related to Julia Pio), grew up with the men who ruined her daughter. The Cadena Sosa brothers-Abel, Juan Luis, and Rafael Alberto, known as Beto-were normal kids who grew up in poverty, as did everyone else in Barrio El Pilar, on the wrong side of the highway from the quaint colonial center of town.
But after the Cadenas began going north sometime in the 1980s, they and their recruiters came back driving new trucks and flashing cash. Slick talkers, they promised to take young girls and a few men up north, where they could earn quick bucks. It was tempting, even though the girls were minors. Families like these-eight or 10 people living on as little as $35 a week-make hard calculations. This time they would regret the result.
"They told me I was going to work in Beto's house," Mari explained. "I told my mom. I said, 'They are going to pay me 1,000 pesos [$125 at the time] a week.' She wouldn't let me. She told me no. My father neither. They said no.
But later I convinced them to let me go, so I could buy a little bit of land.
They gave me permission to go." On Aug. 14, 1996, Mari left with a small duffel bag with four changes of clothing. For a couple of months after she got to South Florida, things went as promised. She cared for Beto's children, even went to the beach. Then Beto turned on her, raping her, she said.
"He threatened me with a pistol," Mari said, her broad face and chocolate eyes betraying no emotion as she sat on the porch of her family's one-room home. "I cried a lot. I got down on my knees and begged him not to do anything to me. Later I talked to Abel and told him to send me back to Mexico. He said, yes, he would take me back to Mexico, and he came to pick
me up. But afterwards they came to an agreement and put me in a house in Okeechobee. That was the first house I started to work in.
"They told me I had to work there. I told them no. I cried. I kept saying no, that I didn't want to work there. Beto threatened me with the pistol again.
He said, 'If you want to go back to Mexico, we'll send you back, but right now I'm going to get on the phone to Santiago [Tuxtla, her hometown], and I'll tell them you stole $10,000. And you are going to sign a paper here that says you robbed $10,000 from me. If you want to go, something can happen to your family.' He said, 'If you don't want to work there by your own will, we will make you work there by force. Your family depends on you,' he said, 'so think about it right now.'" It is not an easy story to tell. Three years have passed since Mari escaped. She has never talked to a psychiatrist. She has spared her mother, Carmen Pio, many of the details. Only months before she left home, her father and mother had thrown her the traditional quinceanera coming-of-age pageant for 15-year-old girls. How could she tell them that for her, coming of age meant rape, sexual abuse and captivity? She tried to ignore the men, tried not to think about what she had to do with them. "There were Mexicans, Guatemalans, Puerto Ricans," she said. "They would come in drunk...There were girls who were 12 or 13 years old. They wanted me to help them. But I said, 'What can I do to help you?'" Like Mari's mother, three other mothers in Santiago Tuxtla told Newsday similar nightmare stories about their daughters, who remain in South Florida.
Erika Maria Isidoro Toga was 14 when she was lured away by one of the Cadena brothers, Juan Luis, according to her mother, Juana Toga Cruz, who has not heard from Erika in a year and a half.
"He told us that various girls were going, even his niece, his cousin, to trust him," Toga recalled. "A lot of girls were going, to take care of children, wash dishes. So, she got excited. The truth is, we wouldn't let her, but she got excited and said, 'Mama, I'm going, so I can pull us up.' "How did we know they were going to trick her? With so many other girls going from here? And them saying their niece and cousin were going?" Months later, Toga found out the truth that was beginning to be whispered among other mothers in the village, where the Cadena Sosa brothers regularly returned and where the family matriarch, Antonia Sosa, lived until she died several months ago.
Then Toga's daughter slipped out of the house and called home. "She told me that the first guy who had his way with her left her in bed for eight days," Toga said. "Eight days they left her in bed. She said, 'My friends were helping me. I couldn't even stand up.' She told me...[that] among the ones who took care of her, they told her to take a drink so she wouldn't feel anything." Other women trapped in Cadena brothels in places like Boynton Beach, West Palm Beach and other Southeast coast towns where citrus fruits flourish were going through the same horrors. To protect their privacy, authorities identified them only by false first names.
Inez, then 18, who had been a lemon-picker back home, spent six weeks in Cadena brothels. With her long, brown hair and big, brown eyes, Inez had the misfortune to be particularly popular.
"Most of the clients had weapons, and if I did not do what they wanted me to do sexually they beat me," she said, recounting her story at a Washington conference on the need for anti-trafficking laws. She said she dealt with the horror of her new life by getting drunk before, and after, each shift. At night she had a bathing ritual to soothe her anguish and shame.
"I would fill a bathtub with hot water and lay in it, drinking and crying.
I would smoke one cigarette after another, and then I would go to bed drunk because it was the only way I could fall asleep," Inez remembered.
Maria, then 18, was a maid who came to the United States to support her daughter and family. She said in a deposition that one of the girls she worked with ran away only to be brought back, beaten and brutally raped in front of her and the other women to teach them all a lesson.
"All I could do is stand there and watch," she said.
The girls were repeatedly told that once they paid off their debts they were free to go. But those debts never seemed to decrease, no matter how many men were sent to them.
"At the end of the night I turned in the condom wrappers," Maria said.
"Each wrapper represented a supposed deduction to my smuggling fee. We tried to keep our own records but the bosses destroyed them. We were never sure what we owed." Rosa, who was 14, said in a deposition that when she got to Orlando, she found out her job would be prostitution.
"I told them I was not capable of working like this. They told me no other jobs were available and I had a debt to pay. When they showed me the short and skimpy clothes I was expected to wear for this new job, I began to cry." Rosa said that because she was a virgin, the brothel guards took turns raping her to teach her how to have sex.
"I still shudder to think about the first time I had to have sex with a customer..." she said. "After the trailer closed for the night, we would change our sheets and then go to sleep in the same beds in which we had been forced to service customers.
"It was awful. Although the men were supposed to wear condoms, some didn't, so eventually I became pregnant and was forced to have an abortion." She said the brothel bosses charged her for the cost of the abortion, as they did for her room and board, then put her right back to work.
"There seemed to be no end to my nightmare," she said. "My debt continued to grow. The bosses did not pay me a percentage of the money that they made from me, although I know other women were paid. I was therefore forced to borrow money from the bosses to buy food and call my family in Mexico. Each time this money would be added to my overall debt." Freedom did not end the nightmare for Rosa. "I cannot forget what has happened...I can't put it behind me. I find it nearly impossible to trust people. I still feel shame. I was a decent girl in Mexico. I used to go to church with my family. I only wish none of this had happened." In October 1997, two young women escaped from one of the Cadena brothels and went to the Mexican consulate in Miami looking for help.
One of the women took Border Patrol and FBI agents to several of the Cadena brothels. The brothels, said FBI agent Alex Rivas, were rundown trailers or duplexes located down winding dirt roads near the fields where the migrant workers toiled all day picking oranges or grapefruits.
The windows were broken or boarded up. Inside, soiled mattresses were strewn on the floor, separated from each other only by hanging sheets, if at all. Garbage, condom wrappers and condoms littered the brothels, and "the bathrooms, I can't begin to tell you just how bad they were," Rivas remembered.
"We walked in there and we were covered up from head to toe and using gloves and trying to insulate ourselves from whatever was lurking inside those places." "It was dirty, just dirty," he said.
Between November 1997 and February 1998, raids closed three Cadena brothels. Another three locations were found abandoned. Eight women from Veracruz and five ticketeros, men in charge of collecting the money from the johns, were arrested.
But if Rivas and Border Patrol Agent Kevin Douglas were expecting a hero's welcome from the captive women, they didn't get it. The girls had been threatened, Rivas said, that if police found them, they should say nothing or else they would go to jail for a long time.
"When we came in they weren't smiling or anything," Rivas said. "They were figuring that it would be just another stage in their ordeal." They may have been right. For the next six months, the eight women were held in jails as material witnesses. Many of them didn't understand why, and some came to believe that the Cadenas' threats about the U.S. police were accurate, according to Virginia Coto, a former attorney for the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center in Miami. The advocacy center eventually helped the women gain their freedom.
To get the women to talk to prosecutors and agents, Rivas said, took "seat time, just sitting down and talking to them and listening to what they have to say." "It's not the kind of thing that anybody is readily going to come out and tell you, so it took a little while," Rivas said. "A couple of them surprised me. I was very surprised when they began to give us the details. In a couple of instances I wasn't ready for it." All their tales were "equally sad," Rivas said. "Some were inherently bad just because they were so young. They might not have had some of the violent things happen to them, just that they were so young. But a lot of them were subject to some pretty serious violence. There was some gun play, there were rapes, it just really was bad." .
Of the major players in the ring, Abel Cadena is in jail in Mexico being investigated on charges of human smuggling, pandering and international trafficking of minors for prostitution. He declined Newsday's requests for comment. Six low-level men in the ring, men like the ticketeros, were sentenced to jail terms of 2 1/2 to 6 1/2 years.
Rogerio Cadena was nabbed by federal and local police on Feb. 20, 1998, while mowing the lawn of one of his brothels in Florida. He pleaded guilty to conspiring to violate the civil rights of 14 women under the 12th Amendment, which prohibits slavery and involuntary servitude. At his sentencing April 2, 1999, he read poetry he had written and used Bible passages to contend that he was only a foot soldier, not a ringleader.
Rogerio Cadena, who is serving his 15-year sentence in the Federal Correctional Institution at Sandstone in Minnesota, declined to be interviewed by Newsday.
Fourteen women in the case, who remain in the Miami area, are still represented by the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center. They've been waiting for more than a year to get "S" visas, for witnesses in major criminal cases, so they can apply for permanent residency, said Maria Jose Fletcher, the head of the center.
"They're working-you know, jobs like fast food, taking care of children," she said. "They do have authorization to work. Some of them are not working.
Some now have families with children they're taking care of. Others are trying to learn English." In Santiago Tuxtla, the mothers, and Mari, have little more than scraps of paper with the telephone numbers of Mexican investigators who visited when the case broke two years ago. No one stays in touch, and all the numbers have since been changed.
They say they were promised a rapid and vigorous investigation and financial compensation by authorities in Mexico, but they have seen precious few results and no money at all.
After a month of repeated requests, the Mexican attorney general's office would release no information on the case, nor would it say whether there is an active search for the Cadena Sosas who remain at large.
"The fact is, we don't know anything," said Mari's mother, Carmen Pio, who lives with her daughter, granddaughter and three sons-all on her husband's salary of $35 a week as a field hand in Santiago Tuxtla. "We can't do anything against them because of their money...And for us there is no justice. It's been more than two years that we haven't heard anything [about getting compensation]." In the last week of November, Mari and three others were subpoenaed to appear in Mexican federal court in Jalapa, 200 miles and a $10 round-trip bus fare away, to give a deposition in the case against Abel. They couldn't raise the money and had to beg a ride.
Mari has little more than a scrapbook of photographs taken in the houses where she lived out her nightmare. They show young women in heavy makeup, cheap, tight clothes and no smiles, in front of typical suburban American homes, leaning against fancy cars or standing in the aisles of ordinary supermarkets.
With no more than a fifth-grade education and one more mouth to feed, Mari is thinking of slipping across the border again to find a job on her own this time. For now, she takes her daughter-who has her mother's face and eyes, but someone else's light hair-to the town square to pass sultry evenings dreaming of another life. "Sometimes I remember," she says of her last sojourn up north. "I start to cry. I don't want to go out with anyone. People are critical. They ask, 'Where did you work? Who is the father?'" This story was reported by Gardiner in Washington, D.C., Miami and New York and Mohan in Mexico.
Census Illustrates Diversity from Sea to Shining Sea
Nearly one in every three U.S. residents a minority
By Robert A. Rosenblatt
Los Angeles Times
WASHINGTON--Nearly one in every three Americans is a member of a minority group, reflecting a massive surge in immigration during the 1990s, the Census Bureau reported Monday.
"The change in diversity will be our big story," said John Long, chief of the Census Bureau population division, as his agency announced its overview of race and ethnicity--a report highlighted by a surge in the nation's Asian population.
Census Bureau figures show the total population of Asians jumped to a range of 10.5 million to 12.8 million, a dramatic rise from 7.3 million a decade ago. Figures on race and ethnicity from the 2000 census are reported as ranges because this census for the first time allowed people to report themselves as belonging to more than one group.
The census is painting a statistical portrait of a nation that is still majority white but increasingly diverse. The nation's total population is roughly 70% non-Latino white, down from 76% in 1990.
Diversity is no longer restricted to the coasts or large cities. As figures for individual states are issued, the results of the census are showing rapid increases in the Latino and Asian populations in virtually all sections of the country.
"We now think of the U.S. as multiple melting pots," said William Frey, a demographer at the Milken Institute of Santa Monica. "The assimilation of [the] 21st century will be regional, with no place in America that looks exactly like this portrait of the whole."
African Americans are still probably the largest minority group, with a population ranging from 34.6 million to 36.4 million, up from 30 million a decade ago, the Census Bureau reported.
Latinos totaled between 31.8 million and 35.3 million, an increase from 22.4 million in 1990.
The nation is the most ethnically and racially varied in modern times, according to experts, but direct comparisons are difficult because of the changing nature of census questions. For example, 1970 was the first time the census included a question about Latino origin.
"Certainly within the last 40 or 50 years, there is probably more diversity now than ever before," said Jorge del Pinal, chief of special population statistics at the Census Bureau.
About 2.4% of Americans, some 6.8 million people, reported themselves as belonging to more than one racial group.
The trend to diversity will continue, experts believe. Immigration remains at high levels. And the Asian and Latino populations are younger than the non-Latino whites.
The reported American Indian and Alaska Native population also rose dramatically during the decade, reaching a range of 2.1 million to 4.1 million, compared to 2 million in 1990. As the range shows, the increase appears to have come from people who reported themselves as being both Native American and some other racial group.
Even with the size of minority groups increasing, there is still concern among some minority advocates that the census was not fully accurate.
"They could be way off," said Art Montez, a member of the Centralia school board in Orange County and past president of the Santa Ana chapter of the League of United Latin American Citizens. He said the Latino enrollment in his district's schools is growing 5% to 10% a semester.
Unified into a single entity to accommodate census shorthand, Latinos will be a complex group as they move into position soon as the nation's largest minority bloc, demographers said.
"Hispanics, as an interest group, have wanted the large umbrella, but as the group gets larger it may splinter off as people conform more to their national and cultural identities," Frey said.
Blacks are likely to continue to dominate ethnic politics and federal entitlements, at least for now, experts concluded.
"Most blacks are native-born and citizens and vote more heavily, so they dominate through seniority and through a unity rooted in common experience, which Latinos don't have," said Dowell Myers, director of the California Demographic Futures Project at USC. "In the long term, though, this builds a basis for Latino dissatisfaction with lack of representation and influence."
On initial analysis, the Census Bureau's first attempt at giving respondents the chance to choose more than one race may yield as much befuddlement as enlightenment.
Among Latinos, 48% listed themselves as white, 42% as "some other race," 2% as black, and 6% as belonging to two or more races.
The population that checked African American or black alone was 33.9 million. An additional 2.5 million checked black and another racial designation.
The figure was "unexpected, but not surprising," said Robert Hill, a member of the Census Bureau Committee on Race and Ethnicity. "The higher black multiracial responses are, the more likely it is that they might erode affirmative action and civil rights enforcement. We're worried about it. That's why we objected to the multiracial categories in the first place. We've opened Pandora's box."
Among Asians, 10.5 million checked exclusively an Asian or Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander designation, while another 2.3 million checked Asian and another racial designation.
American Indians were most likely to add another racial designation: 2.1 million checked the Indian category exclusively while another 2 million selected two races.