Thursday, December 1, 2011
Mobsters busted for human smuggling
From NY1:
Immigration and law enforcement officials have arrested and charged 20 people, including five Queens residents and three Brooklyn residents, in connection with a human trafficking operation that allegedly brought women from Russia and Eastern Europe and forced them to dance in various strip clubs in the city.
The charges, which were unveiled today at Federal Plaza in Downtown Manhattan, allege that four members of the Gambino crime family and three members of the Bonnano crime family worked with Russian collaborators to bring the victimized women into the country on work and travel visas.
Once the women were brought into the country, they were forced to work as exotic dancers.
Visa rules forbid employment in adult entertainment.
Authorities conducted raids for evidence early this morning at clubs where the women were allegedly forced to strip, including Cheetah's Gentlemen's Club on 43rd Street in Midtown and Gallagher's in Long Island City, Queens.
Other women were forced to marry men in Binghamton, N.Y.
The 20 defendants are facing varying charges, including visa fraud, marriage fraud, racketeering, extortion and transporting, harboring and inducing the entry of illegal aliens.
14 comments:
"brought women from Russia and Eastern Europe and forced them to dance in various strip clubs"..."they were forced to work as exotic dancers"..."Gallagher's in Long Island City"
Puh-leaze. I have been to Gallagher's 3 or 4 times - the first time out of curiosity, the next 2 or 3 being cajoled into going, as it was expensive and lame. How are any of the women there being "forced" to work there as the article repeatedly says. Any girl in there can go in the dressing room, put her clothes on and walk out the door, never to be seen again by "Russian traffickers". I talked to some Russian girls there. They said they come over here on a visa for a few months, work in a strip club, and head back. The idea they have a gun to their head is ludicrous.
I see news stories all the time about how foreign women are forced to work in strip clubs in this country. It is quite ridiculous. The news article keeps saying they were forced to by others - how was this done? How can you force someone to do this if they can walk out of the club at any time? Why doesn't the article talk about how they were forced to do this? Ludicrous claims.
You can say they are "forced" to by economic necessity, but then they can join the club - the "we are the 99%" club that was in Zuccotti Park who work for the 1% of the people who have all the money. Once you get beyond the sexual hysteria that many people have, how is being a stripper worse than going down in a coal mine with a score of OSHA violations, like those miners did in West Virginia? Or one million other crappy, unpleasant, degrading jobs? The same religious hysterics who flip out over strippers vote for the same conservative Republicans who work to stop coal mine inspections, resulting in more cave-ins. And so on. getting black lung or a cave-in OK, but heaven forbid some young girl flashes her boobs in a bar.
You may think Gallaghers is an eyesore that should go, you may not. But these lies printed as truth in the media that girls are forced to work there fall apart on the slightest inspection. And there's been a drumbeat about forced strip club workers in the press for the past years, which is total nonsense.
They housed the women around the city and brought them to and from the strip clubs, where they were required to perform as exotic dancers.
Other women were forced into fake marriages to give them legal status, prosecutors allege.
The defendants are also accused of extorting money from the clubs by threatening violence, all while keeping tabs on the women they forced to work there.
20 charged in stripper trafficking
Crapper, the first commenter might not be 100% on point, but as a former prosecutor turned defense attorney I can tell you that these stories are overblown on the "forced labor" side. The perps might very well be guilty of passport - fraud and money laundering and tax evasion and all that boring stuff, but sex sells news stories and that's all that is. Not one of these "victims" will testify. and these perps will plead to the white collar stuff. Count on it.
How can you force someone to do this if they can walk out of the club at any time? Why doesn't the article talk about how they were forced to do this?
You threaten to kill their family back in their homeland which in turn makes them comply with your demands.... either that or your family is dead.
Butch an owner of Gallaghers is a scumbag always has been and he does love Russian girls and if you think for a moment that all the girls dancing in the clubs want to your sadly mistaken ;-( Young women are forced to work in these clubs and to do a HELL of a lot more than dancing if you've been to the club like you say you that's true and the next time your in one that young woman that looks underage 9 times out of 10 she is ;-( Butchie had girls as young as 15 yrs old working back in the 90's did you know about the 17 yr old dancer that O.D. at Gallaghers 2 back in the late 90's in College Point Butch knew she was a kid and hired her anyway because she brought in $$$$
Worst thing to happen to this country (besides the 1965 immigration act) was the fall of the wall.
down goes the USSR and in floods all the eurotrash from Hungary, Albania, Russia, Poland, etc, etc
the previous poster sounds bitter...
Russia is in Asia not europe.
The Mafia is - and always has been - made up of the scum of the earth.
And we wonder why we have such a huge problem with illegals - thanks to organized crime families - from all the different ethnic groups - I hope they keep in jail for a long time. They are anti-American crap.
"Russia is in Asia not europe."
- - - - - - - - -- - -
Wrong! Russia is in both Europe AND Asia (referred to as "Eurasia")
"You threaten to kill their family back in their homeland...either that or your family is dead."
This is all rather melodramatic and overblown. You would have to assume that there is a massive shortage of decent looking, young but impoverished girls in Russia, who would be willing to dance on a stage, show their boobs, and flirt with balding drunks. So to remedy this, they kidnap a bunch of girls, and have people local to them in Russia ready to kill their family (remember Russia is the world's 11th largest economy, and more stable under Putin, it is not some backwater). Somehow they smuggle these kidnapped girls out of Russia and into the US - evading both border security and these girls who want to escape. Then they have someone watching the girls all the time when they're at home, drive them to and from work, and have guards posted outside the front of the club and the backdoor in case they try to escape. The girls never tell patrons how they are being held hostage.
This is all a quite ridiculous invention. Do all the American strippers in New York have similar stories? Who kidnapped them and forced them to work in the clubs. As the above poster says, this hysteria is invented to make the DA's case look good, and to sell newspapers. Plenty of American girls are willing to show their boobs for the hundreds of dollars they can make a night working, so why wouldn't some Russian girl from a more impoverished background do the same? Your stories about killers on a hair-trigger, sitting in a country that figured out how to launch satellites before the US could - the 11th largest economy in the world, waiting to kill these girl's families if they sneak out of a strip club - it is a wild, unsubstantiated claim. The people making these far-out claims are who have to back this all up.
There is something to be said about how strip clubs, massage parlors, Spanish dollar a dance clubs and the like should be kept away from residential neighborhoods. But I find it hard to believe hundreds of girls are kidnapped and being forced to work in strip clubs in Queens, with gunmen in Moscow ready to wipe out their whole family. It is beyond ludicrous. This is the borough where Veronica Lueken could draw a crowd of hundreds by saying Jesus appeared to her and told her they were all going to be killed by the blacks, so it doesn't surprise me the gullible will believe these wild stories as well.
You can easily tell if these girls are forced to or not by watching how they dance. Really. No one who is a "Slave" and has a "Gun to their head" can dance in such a way. Fellas, holla if ya hear me!
rayski la rue
Doing the stripping that American women won't do.
Some of you that refuse to believe in the sex slave trade seem to have a little guilt preventing you from seeing reality?
Perhaps you were at one of these clubs and enjoyed watching a stripper that you 'knew' was underage, but did nothing about it and now you want to downgrade the urgency and filth of this problem?
Yes, I am assuming - but so are you if you think every one of those girls enjoy it.
Sometimes these women have to work a total amount of days before getting their freedom (and being reassured of their family's safety) AND sometimes they just have to work off a dollar amount that is owed.
If you think they can just *disappear* out the back door you are mistaken. These people have more loyalty to their family than our US-born spoiled brats, and the threat of harm to the parents, siblings, etc can cause these girls to do ANYTHING they are told.
Take that fear and loneliness and ADD IN some drugs and alcohol, instant compliance.
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