The three women looked scared shitless, but that was normal. I was scared too. Any undercover agent who doesn't feel fear in situations like this is either nuts or incredibly stupid, and likely to do something that gets him or her killed. I'd learned how to mask that fear. Undercover agents who couldn't do that usually ended up dead.
I was there posing as a buyer for a guy high up in the Russian mob who was planning on opening a new massage parlor next to a military base in Tennessee, and I was there to inspect and maybe pick up some merchandise. The three Asian girls, none of which I figured was much over nineteen, were the merchandise.
The Russian guy and the massage parlor were a carefully crafted scam designed to expose a sex trafficking operation my FBI office had been trying to crack open for two years. Three years before, an undercover city cop in Houston had infiltrated a ring of six massage parlors in Houston and the surrounding suburbs with the intent of arresting the owner and employees and shutting them down.
The cop had started as muscle to help uncooperative clients leave and convince them not to come back. After six months, he had managed to work his way up in the organization high enough he became one of the guys who transported the girls from one massage parlor to the other. I guess some guys like to get their blowjob or other fun from a different girl each time because they rotated the girls about once a month.
This cop got to know the girls and in the process, discovered the massage parlors weren't owned by one guy like they'd thought. The guy with his name on the business permit had a boss. The cop couldn't find out the name of the top dog because none of the people he worked with were high enough to have that information. What he did find out is the main people in each massage parlor talked about being afraid of the crossing their employer - one of the Mexican cartels.
He also became friends with the few girls who spoke English and learned that all the girls were illegal and all were Asian. The girls told the cop a very interesting story about how they got to the US and working in a massage parlor, and it was that story that caught our interest.
Some guy would meet them in Vietnam, Thailand, South Korea, or some other Pacific Rim country, seemingly innocently, and then gain their confidence. He'd sympathize with them if they were poor, like most of them were, or if they thought their parents were too strict. He'd buy them little gifts and take them out to eat. Once the girl thought they were friends or maybe even more, the guy would say he had a brother or other relative in the US and had just gotten a letter from him. He'd even let the girl read the letter if she could read English. If she couldn't, he'd read it to her.
The letter would have a bunch of crap like any guy would write to his brother, but down toward the end, it would say there were lots of jobs in the US that girls could do and they didn't need a lot of education. They were jobs like working in a restaurant or taking care of someone's house and kids, and the letter would say how much those jobs paid.
The guy would tell the girl if she went to the US, she could get one of those jobs and start a new life. Sometimes he'd say he'd pay her way if she'd wait for him to come at a later date. Sometimes he'd tell the girl he'd heard about a man or a church group - it varied by the girl - who was financed from the US by people originally from her country and who were interested in saving girls from the problems at home. That man or group would pay for a ticket to some South American country where the immigration laws were lax or not well enforced. From there, this same man or group would take them to the US and help them find a job.
Now, to you and I this sounds like one of those "if it sounds too good to be true, you can bet it is" stories, but to a girl living in a one-room shack and having trouble making enough money eat, it probably seems like a dream come true.
Many of the girls were part Caucasian or Black, the result of the US involvement in Korea and Vietnam, and were the daughters of prostitutes. They'd been abandoned by their mothers, who were often daughters of prostitutes themselves, and had been raised in orphanages. When they grew up, they found that marriage and good jobs weren't available because of their mixed-race status and were living in poverty. Their only real option was to continue the cycle by becoming prostitutes, and most didn't want to do that.
All the girls in the massage parlors had bought the story, packed a bag, and let the guy put them on a plane or boat. When they got to wherever the ticket sent them, they were met by other people who started out being friendly and looked after them. Once the girls were in a house owned by the cartel, their world changed.
They were taken by car or truck to a staging point near the US/Mexican border and then either crammed in with a semi load of fruit or appliances or something else big enough to hide in, or forced to walk from there to the border. Along the way, most were raped and beaten to make them do what the cartel wanted them to do.
The US Border Patrol caught some of them, but many still made it across and were handed off to other cartel members in the US. They'd finally end up in a massage parlor or in some pimp's stable of girls and were told what was expected of them. They quickly learned that if they resisted, they got slapped around, and if slapping didn't do it, the beating they got would change their mind. Most had accepted their fate or turned to drugs to temporarily take them away from it. Often the pimp would start them on drugs in order to make it easier to control them.
The Houston massage parlors were massage parlors in name only. A girl would pick up a guy at the desk and take him back to a room with a massage table. Once in the back room, she'd show him a menu. They used a menu because most of them couldn't speak English. If they'd landed in Central America, some could speak some Spanish because it took a while to get from there to the US, but not well enough to rattle off what was available.
The menu would list the services she could perform and the price for a blowjob, hand job, and for fucking her on the massage table along with whatever else the massage parlor offered. The john would point to what he wanted and then pay the girl. After she took the money to the guy at the desk, she'd come back and fulfill her part of the contract.
The FBI wouldn't ordinarily have been particularly interested in a whorehouse. We left that headache to the local LEO's, and it was a real headache. Prostitution is illegal in Texas, but as long as there are men and women, there will be some women willing to sell themselves and some men willing to pay whatever it costs to get their rocks off.
It's impossible to eradicate. When I was a patrol cop in Philly, we busted the same street girls at least once a month. Their pimps would bail them out an hour after they were booked, and we'd see them again the next night dressed in shorts or skirts that showed their ass cheeks and a top that left most of their tits exposed.
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The girls in Houston also told the cop they thought some girls were sold to other men. They didn't know where they went, but they said somebody from the massage parlor would take a girl or two out of the place where they lived and they never came back.
The Houston Police Department thought there was more than just a massage parlor involved, and relayed all their information to DHS and they shared it with the FBI. There were some high-level meetings to plan strategy, and one of those strategies was to get someone inside the organization or at least in a position to identify the low levels of the sex trafficking branch. We'd take down the low fruit and then convince them to sing until we got the next level. By doing it this way, we'd eventually get to the top of the heap.
Getting someone into the organization of any of the cartels is very difficult as well as damned dangerous. If you can even get in at all, the cartel's way of handling anyone they even suspect of being a threat is a bullet. Nobody who isn't Mexican can get higher than the first few levels of the organization, so any undercover agent trying to get to the cartel itself would have to pass as a Mexican native and preferably from the area where the cartel was centered.
Those guys are few and far between in the FBI and the FBI didn't want to risk losing one if it was possible to avoid doing that. They were too valuable for tracking the drug trade. The decision was to invent a business that needed Asian girls and then have that business try to buy them from the cartel. I was the agent picked to pose as the representative of the business. My grandparents were from Western Poland so I looked the part, and I also spoke enough Russian to fool anybody who didn't.
That business was going to be more massage parlors because we knew a lot about what went on in them and it would be easier to "talk the talk" without getting tripped up. The Russian mob business was located in Chicago rather than Houston, and was in the process of expanding to Tennessee and Detroit. We knew there were similar massage parlors in Chicago, and figured the cartel would know that as well so the story would be at least plausible.
My assignment was to make contact with the cartel and tell them I was interested in purchasing some girls. Once I made enough deals some high-priced defense lawyer would have trouble convincing a jury it was entrapment, a team of FBI and DHS agents along with the Houston PD Swat Team would crash the door and arrest everybody, including me. That way I could stay under cover and maybe get some more information while I was in jail. As soon as that was done, they'd call the teams watching the cartel massage parlors and bust everybody there.
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It took six months to make contact with the cartel. Buying a prostitute is not like going to a car lot and asking for a particular make and model of car. Nobody comes to greet you and try to sell you what they offer. You have to be introduced to the cartel and then get the approval from some higher level to set up a meeting. That level depends upon how deep they think they need to dive into your past and how much money they think you're willing to spend.
If you're a guy who looks and acts like a small-time hood or pimp and you want to buy a little coke every month or are looking for a couple of new girls, probably a local guy can make that decision. If you're a little more sophisticated and looking for a kilo or more a week or several girls, that starts to sound fishy and they'll check you out pretty well before they'll set up a meeting with you.
That first meeting and maybe one or two more are just "getting to know you" meetings. You won't get close enough to actually see anything until they think you're real and trust you a little. They'll never trust you completely, so at each meeting there will be at least one other guy hanging around seemingly doing nothing. He's watching you for any signs that say you aren't what you claim to be. They're always armed, and if they suspect anything's wrong, you'll end up rotting away somewhere miles away. If you're lucky, they'll bury you in a shallow grave and you won't become an easy food source for the coyotes and foxes.
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The Houston PD had a confidential informant who claimed he knew a couple of low-level guys in one of the massage parlors and who was willing to trade my introduction to the organization for a reduction in charges from aggravated assault to simple assault. When he got out on bail, he told the guy he knew of a Russian guy looking for some Asian girls if they were interested. One of the guys took that information to his boss and then told the CI his boss was thinking about it and he'd get back to him.
While I was waiting, the FBI worked with the Chicago PD to raid a couple massage parlors run by the Russian mob and they made sure those raids made the national news. In a televised interview, the Chicago PD was careful to state they'd learned the Russian mob had plans to expand into other states and were forwarding that information to the states involved. That was to give some credence to the sting and also to warn the cartel not to mess with those plans. The cartels know the Russian mob is just as brutal as they are. They're not really afraid of the Russian mob, but they do respect them, and since both organizations do business in some of the same cities, they wouldn't want to start a war.
The first meeting was in a small Mexican restaurant, and when I got there, there were two guys waiting outside. One guy was short and dark with black hair, and was obviously Latino. The other guy was tall and had blonde hair, but that wasn't all that unusual. With the money the cartel has, they can buy anybody who's buyable if they need a particular type of person to do something.
As soon as the guy and I walked inside, everybody else left including the waitress and the cook. We sat down at a table and the blonde guy spent almost a full minute staring at me. Then he cleared his throat.
"I hear you're looking for some lambs for your farm."
