ST PAUL, Minnesota: A US federal jury on Wednesday convicted five people on charges of trafficking Thai women into the United States for the sex trade.
Prosecutors alleged during the six-week trial that the defendants, along with 34 co-conspirators, ran a sex trafficking operation that lasted more than a decade and crossed borders.
Speaking after the verdicts on Wednesday, US Attorney for Minnesota Erica MacDonald calls the sex trafficking operation one of largest, most sophisticated transnational sex rings ever dismantled.
Government attorneys called it a case of "modern day sex slavery'', with Thai women forced to have sex with multiple men daily to pay off "bondage debts'' owed to traffickers for help travelling into the US Some victims testified during the trial.
All were found to have conspired to commit sex trafficking and other charges. Jurors returned their verdict just a day after receiving the case.
The defendants were Michael "Uncle Bill" Morris, 65, of Seal Beach, California; Pawinee "Fon" Unpradit, 46, of Dallas; Saowapha "Nancy" or "Kung" Thinram, 44, of Hutto, Texas; Thoucharin "Noiy" Ruttanamongkongul, 35, of Chicago; and Waralee "Wan" Wanless, 39, of Colony, Texas.
Prosecutors said the victims were misled about how much they owed. The women were threatened if they tried to leave the business.
Defence attorneys for all five contended the women were willful participants.
According to prosecutors, women were made to have sex on a “near-constant basis” to pay off debts exceeding $40,000 to $60,000, the Star-Tribune reported.
Many were shuttled between apartments or spas in US cities like Minneapolis, Chicago and Los Angeles, their services advertised on online forums where sex buyers would later comment and rate their performance.
Less than two-thirds of what the women earned went toward their debts while the rest went to their “house bosses” who used some of the money to cover expenses associated with the business.
The case began when a federal prosecutor and a Homeland Security Investigations agent followed a 2014 tip that a victim was being flown into Minnesota and traced her to the apartment where she was sold for sex, the report said.
Two defendants — Unpradit and Thinram — began as victims of the organization. Unpradit later went on to help funnel women to work at one of several houses of prostitution Morris operated in California. Thinram later opened her own business in Austin, Texas, after paying off her bondage debt. Her husband, who pleaded guilty, helped her run the house.
Panida Rzonca, directing attorney for the Thai Community Development Center in Los Angeles, said Wednesday that her organization is helping to represent about 20 victims linked to the case and made a plea for others to come forward, adding, “We can still help them; this is not the end.”
“There are hundreds if not thousands of victims of this organization — some of those women we know, some of those brave women testified at trial, some of those women we know their real names but we don’t know where they are. Some of them we know have nicknames, some of them we have pictures. … We’re going to continue looking for them,” said Assistant US Attorney Melinda Williams, one of two federal prosecutors who tried the case.