Invisible Chains (17 page)

“Made-in-Canada” traffickers

North Preston, Nova Scotia, is a place of Shakespearean irony. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the community became a refuge for freed slaves. Today, it is the home base of a national human trafficking ring.

The community traces its roots back to the 1780s and the end of the U.S. War of Independence, when the first large influx of black Loyalists arrived in Canada. These early settlers had been promised land grants but instead received rocky, hilly terrain with soil unsuitable for growing crops.

In the 1790s, more than one thousand black residents of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick left for Sierra Leone, founding the city of Freetown. Many of these freed slaves were among the best-educated and most influential community leaders. Two centuries later, residents of North Preston have seen their community become a breeding ground for trafficking in guns, drugs, women, and girls.

The Scotians, also known as North Preston's Finest, are one of the most notorious street gangs to profit from domestic sex trafficking across the country. Traditionally, biker gangs in Quebec and southwestern Ontario have controlled the sex trade, but after major police crackdowns in those regions NPF moved in to fill the vacuum. NPF since has been implicated in multiple shootings and
drug trafficking. Moreover, police officers have been warned to exercise extreme caution in approaching these African-Canadian gang members, who often bear NPF tattoos on their necks and are considered “armed and dangerous.”

For more than a decade, NPF has actively recruited girls and young women from Nova Scotia, forcing them into prostitution in southwestern Ontario. In his 1996 book
Somebody's Daughter,
investigative reporter Phonse Jessome documented the problem, calling it a “Halifax-Toronto pimping ring.” In the book, the case of Stacey Jackson dramatically illustrates the traffickers' tactics.

Shy and attractive, Stacey grew up in a home with an abusive father. When their mother left, Stacey and her brother chose to continue living with their father, because they didn't want to abandon their friends at school. The decision led to a volatile relationship between mother and daughter.

In 1992, seventeen-year-old Stacey gave birth to a son and settled in an apartment in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, where a neighbour, Rachel, quickly befriended her. Stacey soon learned that a man known as “T-Bar” was forcibly selling Rachel for sex. Not long after meeting Stacey, T-Bar brought around a friend, Kenny, who began to spend time with Stacey and her baby boy.

One night Rachel convinced Stacey to dye and style her hair after Kenny had complimented her on her good looks. Upon seeing Stacey's new hair, Kenny bought her expensive clothes to complete the look. Within just a few weeks, Kenny had become her “boyfriend,” and he often talked about visiting Toronto, an idea that excited Stacey.

Kenny also began promoting prostitution as “a game,” a plausible alternative for any woman considering her career options. The longed-for trip to Toronto would happen sooner, Kenny suggested, if Stacey raised some of the money on her own. Through constant pressure, Kenny convinced his “girlfriend” to begin working at an escort agency—actually a front for prostitution. Over time, Kenny's control and psychological manipulation of Stacey led her into a violent underworld, but she continued to interpret Kenny's actions
and behaviour as demonstrations of love. At least until she was too far in to get out on her own. In the end Stacey was rescued, but not before experiencing serious trauma, including sexual, physical, and psychological abuse.

Despite Jessome's revelations, NPF has only grown stronger since the early 1990s. “Our bars were rampant with the North Preston gang,” says a police investigator in the Greater Toronto Area, “They would bring their girls back and forth from Peel to Niagara.”

The Peel Regional Police began a sustained effort to identify individuals affiliated with NPF and have them banned from strip clubs. After some time, the gang got the message that it was no longer open season for trafficking in girls and women. However, once NPF felt pressure from police and began moving elsewhere, an opportunity opened up for other gangs in the business of sexual exploitation. Haitian gangs who call themselves “Bloods” and “Crips” (after notorious inner-city gangs in the United States), along with Jamaican gangs and individual opportunistic criminals who had been active in the background, moved into southwestern Ontario. “North Preston's Finest and the Haitian gangs have killed more people than the biker gangs,” says Constable Mike Viozzi of the Peel Regional Police. “They are not afraid to cap off a round. They own Montreal more than here.”

When southwestern Ontario became a less welcome place for them to operate, NPF members began spreading westward. Police officers have identified NPF members actively recruiting local girls and young women in major cities in Western Canada and claiming territory within this part of the country. Traffickers unaffiliated with NPF nevertheless will pay off NPF members in some cities to avoid a violent confrontation with them. “You don't put a woman out on the street without paying them,” says Sergeant Mark Schwartz of the Calgary Police Service, Vice Unit.

Majors in psychology, minors in exploitation

The tactics employed by groups like NPF are highly effective but not unusual. In the United States, prosecutors are aware that the most
sophisticated domestic sex trafficking networks use physical force as a last resort. There, as elsewhere, victims are manipulated to be loyal to their traffickers.

“I've never met a juvenile involved in prostitution who didn't have a pimp,” says Sharon Marcus-Kurn, assistant U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. “I have also never met a juvenile in prostitution who hasn't said during the initial interview, ‘I don't have a pimp—that guy is my boyfriend.'”

One Canadian law enforcement officer who's working to eradicate human trafficking sums up the approach: “These pimps say, ‘You made one thousand dollars tonight, I'm so proud of you, that's great.' The next night, the girls want to make one thousand one hundred dollars for their pimp. They still get treated like shit. But all of a sudden, one night he will say, ‘Hey, I wanna take you to dinner.' That's huge. He might carry the tray for her at McDonald's. They're still going out and eating food. It's anything other than eating in that hotel room where she has to stay. The girls almost well up in tears.”

“These guys are psychology majors without ever going to school,” adds another officer familiar with the tactics of traffickers. “They learn from other pimps. They know how to get into a girl's head. It is not unlike battered women's syndrome. They get beaten, they have an opportunity to leave, but they don't.”

She tells the following tale about the deviousness of a recently convicted trafficker:

“One girl was on the bottom floor of a two-storey motel, and her pimp had another girl on the second floor and neither of them knew that each other was there. They each fully believed that this guy was their man, their boyfriend. He was saying the same thing to both of them.”

Clearly, victims of domestic sex trafficking have a lot in common psychologically with victims of domestic abuse. In both instances, victims nourish the hope that if only they love their abuser enough, he will change.

It is, tragically, this hope for a better day that keeps them trapped in their horrible predicament.

During ten years of front-line police work in Montreal, Detective Sergeant Dominic Montchamp has come to know many victims of domestic sex trafficking. Most do not view themselves as victims or recognize the degree of abuse until they're out of the exploitative relationships. “Many girls say, ‘Why are you arresting my pimp? I want to give him cash,'” Montchamp states, describing how some victims want to post bail for their exploiters. Only later, when they are out of their trafficker's clutches and able to see both his and their own actions in a new light, do they fully understand what was happening. “Three or four years later they tell us, ‘You saved my life.'”

You've just been sold

While many traffickers prefer that their victims abstain from hard drugs in case they become unstable, some provide drugs to both control their victim and increase their supposed “exit fee.”

Convicted trafficker Vytautas Vilutis, whom we encountered in
Chapter 6
, exploited a twenty-year-old Canadian woman who'd initially become trapped in prostitution because of a serious crack cocaine addiction. Vilutis implemented a rule that the victim could not buy drugs from anyone but him, thereby cementing his position as her drug trafficker and the trafficker of her body.

Vilutis also imposed a system of “fines” to increase the amount that his victim had to pay him before she could be set free. Smoking in the bedroom carried a one hundred dollar fine, while sleeping in would add five hundred dollars to the exit fee. Over three weeks, fifteen hundred dollars in fines had accumulated. Of course, the point of these gratuitous fines is to keep upping the victim's “debt” so that she remains an indentured servant.

While traffickers treat their victims like property that can be used and eventually discarded, organized crime groups trade victims or sell them to one another. Victims are usually unaware that they've been bought, sold, or exchanged because the transactions rarely take place
in front of them. For the victim, the change simply means having a new person take control.

The buying and selling of women takes place between two extremes. First, at the “addiction extreme,” women are traded for drug debts, both their own and those of their traffickers. Sometimes johns buy women, or “rent” them, not just for an hour or two but for longer periods. At the other extreme, “high-end” organizations buy and sell women based on their “marketability”—their physical appearance, age, and other attributes—in the way that a new or used automobile may be traded. The value or price of a woman goes up if she has an exotic appearance and good social skills, carries herself like a model, and looks physically attractive. These women initially may believe they're in control but soon find they have no easy way to escape. For example, they might be “working” as a prostitute in Vancouver when their “boyfriend” sends them to Toronto; when they arrive, a new man tells them “Now you're my baby” and demands money from sex acts he arranges for her with random men. The woman might believe her “boyfriend” in Vancouver can still help her until one of the other girls explains that she's been bought and paid for like a piece of property. It's only then that the hard reality sinks in—she's just been sold.

“If you want to leave your pimp, if he will even allow you to leave, it's going to cost you money,” explains Constable Viozzi. “Or another pimp will buy you out.” One trafficker investigated by Viozzi had valuated a victim he controlled at three hundred thousand dollars a year—potentially a multi-million-dollar asset.

11

JUSTICE TOO OFTEN DENIED

T
o those familiar with the extent of human trafficking in Canada, and the resulting brutality and damage, one fact remains both shocking and incomprehensible: the rarity of successful convictions and appropriate penalties meted out to the worst perpetrators.

Worldwide, nearly twenty thousand human traffickers were brought to justice and convicted between 2003 and 2008. In 2008 alone, more than five thousand trafficking prosecutions were recorded globally, leading to almost three thousand convictions.

Canada took until late 2005 to make “trafficking in persons” a
Criminal Code
offence and did not secure its first conviction until June 2008. For those who choose the career of trafficking in people, Canada has offered a promising venue in which to launch their “business”—and this may still be so, despite the relatively recent addition of human trafficking to
Criminal Code
violations.

Obtaining convictions may not be easy, but it's essential

Perpetrators of modern-day slavery and their accomplices are systematic in their crimes and profit greatly from their illicit criminal lifestyle. Many are serial enslavers; once caught up in the enormous profits and exposed to only minimal potential penalties, they cannot imagine supporting themselves by any other means. Police officers say that traffickers consider the penalties handed down by Canadian
courts to be a joke—well worth the benefits they gain while they're at large in the community.

The clandestine, mobile, and often violent nature of human trafficking operations, both large and small scale, makes them difficult to detect and investigate. Yet traffickers must be brought to justice. They must be held accountable with penalties that reflect the grave nature of their offence and, when released from prison, be subject to stringent conditions that recognize their modus operandi.

On November 25, 2005, “trafficking in persons” became an indictable offence in Canada's
Criminal Code.
Irwin Cotler, then minister of justice and attorney general, introduced the offence, which has two essential elements. First, the accused must have committed any
one
of the following acts: recruitment; transportation; transferring; receiving; holding; concealing or harbouring a person; or exercising control, direction, or influence over the movements of a person. Second, the accused must have committed one of those acts for the purpose of exploitation, defined as “causing the victim to provide labour or a service by engaging in conduct that could reasonably be expected to cause the victim to believe that their safety, or the safety of a person known to them, would be threatened if they failed to provide the labour or service.”