SHOW:  Fresh Air
DATE:  January 26, 2004

DAVE DAVIES, host:
This is FRESH AIR.  I'm Dave Davies, senior writer at the Philadelphia Daily News, filling in for Terry Gross.

In a speech to the United Nations last year, President Bush condemned what he called `the special evil' of the world's sex trade.  Much attention has focused on sex slaves held in the Far East, but growing evidence suggests the problem is much closer to home, maybe even next door.  My guest, Peter Landesman, is the author of "Sex Slaves on Main Street," the cover story in this week's New York Times Magazine.  Landesman found that tens of thousands of young women,
teen-agers and children are being held in captivity and used as prostitutes, providing sex seven days a week without consent or compensation in places from Atlanta, Georgia, to Plainfield, New Jersey.

Victims are lured from Eastern Europe or kidnapped in Mexico, then brutalized into a life of terror and submission.  Landesman's reporting took him to sex trafficking sites in Mexico, where he was accompanied by his wife, photographer Kimberlee Aquarro, who shot the pictures for the piece.  A warning to listeners: Some of the descriptions in this interview are disturbing and may not be suitable for children.

Landesman is contributing writer to The Times Magazine and has covered subjects from the arms trade to civil war in Rwanda.  I spoke to him last week.

You write in your piece about how slave traders in Eastern Europe lure their victims.  How do they do it?

Mr. PETER LANDESMAN (Contributing Writer, The New York Times Magazine): Well, I first saw this in Moldova last spring.  I was finishing a story on arms trafficking that took me to the former Soviet Union.  And in Chisinau, the capital, I noticed a billboard with a sort of fresh-faced young woman, and the tag line was inviting young women to nanny positions and waitress positions, baby-sitting positions in Western Europe and mostly the United States.
The former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, has a huge population of
well-educated, young women, specifically, who basically have no jobs.  Poverty rate is up to 80 percent in most of those countries; Moldova's even worse. These are girls who are ripe for the picking because they're desperate for jobs, they're desperate for something to do, and, also, in various parts of the world they're considered to be extremely attractive.  So they're really perfect victims for this industry.

DAVIES: So they think they're signing up to become a nanny or maybe to get a waitressing position.  And then what happens?

Mr. LANDESMAN: Exactly.  And they go to sometimes quasi-legitimate travel agencies, who, at these victims' own expense, I should say, arrange for flights to Mexico City.  And the reason Mexico City is the destination is because they're told that Mexico, as it is for millions of others, is the easiest conduit for illegal entry into the United States.  They say, `It's just a short walk across the border, the no-man's-land, and sooner or later you'll end up in sort of the wavy palm-tree area of sunny Los Angeles.'

So often, in an incredibly cynical way, these girls, as young as 13, as old as probably 20, pay their way to Mexico City.  Once they arrive in Mexico City, they are greeted by Mexican officials, who are complicit in the industry, who hand them over to traffickers.  And once they are in the hands of the traffickers, either literally or figuratively, these young women are in chains and become slaves.

DAVIES: Now you found that the corrupt Mexican authorities cooperate with the slave traffickers, literally, at the Mexico City Airport?

Mr. LANDESMAN: Literally, the highest customs and immigration officials at the Mexico City Airport know which flights are coming in with these women and sometimes, I was told by people who work at the airport, that some of these flights have as many as seven to 10 of these girls on any one flight.  These flights are expected.  The seat numbers of the girls are known.  Sometimes these girls are escorted around passport control, sometimes they're escorted through passport control.  But they're awaited and passed through and handed on to the traffickers by, yes, Mexican officials.

DAVIES: What happens next?

Mr. LANDESMAN: Well, every ethnicity in this industry is treated differently. These trafficking organizations are mono-ethnic machines, so the Russians have their own trafficking mechanisms, the Ukrainians their own, the Moldovans their own, the Mexicans their own.  Since we're talking about the Eastern Europeans, they arrive in Mexico City, they're usually flown or bused to Baja California, just south of California, USA.

DAVIES: So that's not on United States' soil.

Mr. LANDESMAN: No.

DAVIES: That's actually part of Mexico.

Mr. LANDESMAN: We're still in Mexico.  And at this point these girls still think they're being prepped for a trip across the border to, you know, happily ever after in the United States.  They arrive in Rosarito or Ensenada to, really, kind of windblown, gritty tourist towns in Baja California, where they're taught to utter typically American phrases like `US citizen.' And this is in preparation for if they are caught and stopped.  Or they're told to say `San Diego Zoo,' as though they're actually trying to get to the United States, you know, from Chisinau to go to the San Diego Zoo.

They're dressed in American clothes, baseball caps.  And then very frequently they're actually, at that point, tried out on the local population, and at that point begins a long and sort of deeply barbaric process of subduing these women, making them essentially obedient sex slaves.  And that involves beatings, drug addiction, sort of perpetual intoxification and repeated rapings by either their captors and/or the customers of their captors.  So they're literally raped and beaten into submission in Mexico, often by other women put in charge of these houses and these stash houses in Mexico, primarily because
women, females, have a sort of more direct line to the psyches and hearts and minds of these girls.

And once these girls and women come to trust these keepers, they're often handed over to other men and literally just, you know, raped repeatedly and again prostituted out to local population.  That goes on for days and weeks, until the women and the young girls become sort of sufficiently subdued, so that when they do arrive in the United States at their destination, they can be pimped out and the traffickers no longer have to worry that these girls are going to ask for help.
DAVIES: Now we've been talking about women and girls who are recruited from Eastern Europe.  Quite a number of them are also taken, literally kidnapped, from Mexico, right?  There are gangs...

Mr. LANDESMAN: Indeed.

DAVIES: ...that undertake this activity.  Tell us about that.

Mr. LANDESMAN: Yeah.  The Mexican line works a little differently.  There are pimping organizations that are based out of particularly one town in Mexico called Tenancingo, which is about an hour south of Mexico City.  It's a very strange, little place, this town.  You come upon it, you travel across miles and miles of hardscrabble Mexican wasteland, and then you arrive at this town that's filled with candy-colored mansions that are owned by these trafficking organizations.  And that tells you two things.  It tells you how profitable this business is, and it also tells you how these organizations act with impunity, out in the open, in Mexico, which of course leads you to the conclusion, which I verified, that local, state and federal authorities in Mexico not only are on the take and not only protect these organizations but, in some cases, they are the organizations.

So the agents of these pimping families, which are built around hierarchies that are similar to the Sicilian mob--they spread out throughout Mexico, and they literally troll the lines, the trail that are followed by, you know, young Mexican women who are looking for employment or looking for something to do, looking for a drink, looking for an ice cream cone.  And the seduction can last for 30 seconds, it could last for a week, however long it takes to get these
girls in a car, around a corner, to their house, at which point there begins a process of subjugation, after which they're brought across the US border north to the United States.

And I should add there actually that the most important stop along that trail is a street in the ghetto in Mexico City called La Merced.  The street is called Calle Santo Tomas, which is literally a slave market in which many of these girls--and I'm talking thousands and thousands a year--are walked in a circle, in a kind of parabola, around this street.  Surrounding them are hundreds of men, some of them buyers, some of them renters, some of them just purely johns.  And these girls will be forced to have sex with these men up to  30 times a day, and that process can last weeks, until these girls, at the end of which, are just--they're, really, purely fodder and easily manipulated, easily intimidated.  And, really, by then, you know, they're often starved,
they're frequently beaten almost every day, and by the time they arrive in the US, you know, they will just obey orders.

DAVIES: You actually traveled to La Merced and witnessed this, didn't you?

Mr. LANDESMAN: Yeah.  I saw this twice.  It's not a place that foreigners get to easily.  It's deeply dangerous.  I went late at night one night with four very heavily armed federales and one US agent.  We went at night for obvious reasons; so I wouldn't stick out.  We stayed there for a while.  I returned during the day with my wife, who's actually the photographer on this story, Kimberlee Aquarro, so she could shoot it.  That was a little dicier. There were spotters everywhere looking for outsiders, looking for policemen who are not
complicit, policemen who are not in on this, who actually might give them a hard time.  And, yeah, it was sort of deeply unpleasant.

DAVIES: You described going into, I guess you would call it, a brothel, a putrid-smelling area where there was a warren of--well, you describe it.  I mean, it was a lot of booths in effect, where these girls take these men for having sex.  How did you get in there?  Did you pretend to be a john?

Mr. LANDESMAN: Yeah.  This was part of the difficult part of reporting this story.  As I said, my wife Kimberlee, who is the photographer on this story—we spent some time trolling the area, trying to get her good angles on this street action, while I was doing some reporting.  We were leaving--literally behind us and in front of us these federales, who are under orders of their boss to really make sure nothing happened to us.  We were leaving, and I spied to the doorway to this brothel, and I realized that I was seeing the external nature of these mechanisms.  And I was talking to victims and getting their story, but
I had yet to actually get a firsthand look at what went on in this place.

It was a very last-minute decision, and I went in posing as a john with one of the younger federales to get a look around and found a kind of deeply disturbing scene in there, as I describe in the article.  These girls, many of them, are wearing the pendant of the Grim Reaper; that's sort of, you know, an age-old custom among prostitutes and forced prostitutes in Mexico to ward off evil spirits.  They enter the brothel.  They first pat down the johns looking for weapons.  Then they genuflect in front of a statue of St. Jude, which is the saint of lost causes.

They lead you to the back, and it really is a putrid place.  They first point you toward a urinal to empty yourself.  A condom is handed over.  A roll of toilet paper is handed over.  I mean, we're talking about the basest, most primal level of sex here.  And they lead you to the back, and it literally is like a row of bathroom stalls, of toilet stalls, one after the other after the other.  I think I estimated 30 to 50.  They were all being used.  They were all filled up.  So you can imagine the coupling going on there.

And the strangest detail was--I couldn't figure it out until I actually left, but I realized I didn't hear a sound; that is, with all the sex and deeply unpleasant sex, I have to add, being done back there, there wasn't a single noise.  I couldn't hear a grunt or a noise or a voice.  All I heard was the shuffling of feet.  And it struck me as extremely representative of this entire thing; that is, we're talking about sex, which, in our culture, is, you know, purportedly about pleasure.  And yet back there I couldn't imagine any pleasure going on, obviously not for the girls.  But even for the men, it just seemed to be some sort of automated response or automated satiation.  There was no voice
pleasure, there was nothing positive about what was going on back there.

DAVIES: What did you do when you reached the booth with the girl who was bringing you in?

Mr. LANDESMAN: After she patted me down for weapons and after she genuflected in front of the saint, we went in the back.  And as I said, every one of these booths was in use.  And she kind of propped me against the wall next to, I guess, her booth.  And, by the way, these booths are separated by curtains. Again, strange--no noise because there's nothing between these booths.  You'd think you'd be able to hear everything.  And I waited and I looked around, and I was trying to obviously absorb as much detail as possible.  And I suppose, just before it was time for us to go in, the curtain was thrust aside.  The
couple that was in there before exited.  She walked in, and I essentially walked in the other direction out.  And she followed me closely because she became very nervous obviously.  I mean, again, I have to say, these are not women who work for themselves.  They work for men, who not only will injure or kill them but injure or kill their families if something goes awry.  So, of course, she's deeply concerned that I was going to complain or something.  What I essentially did was I doubled her fee; I gave her twice as much I had to. And I tried to tell her as best I could that I wasn't interested, and I walked out.

And we arranged it, really, mostly through hand signals and, I assume, really
for her safety that we would walk out together, and that's what actually happens.  The john doesn't walk out, and the sex slave does not follow.  They walk out together.  So we had to walk out together as though we had consummated the act.  And I realized silently and just, really, in the span of a few seconds that, you know, her life actually may have depended upon this transaction.

DAVIES: Journalist Peter Landesman.  We'll talk more after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.

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DAVIES: Let's get back to our interview with journalist Peter Landesman, whose cover story in this week's New York Times Magazine deals with women and children being held as sex slaves in the United States.

There's an incredibly compelling photograph that accompanies your story by your wife, Kimberlee Aquarro.  It's shot at this place that you describe, La Merced, in Mexico, where these sex slaves are paraded in front of, you know, dozens, even hundreds of men.  And we see, from an overhead shot, a young woman surrounded by, I'd guess, 10 or 20 men that are in the picture with her head down.  How did she get that photo?

Mr. LANDESMAN: It's an extraordinary shot.  It's an award-winning shot. Kimberlee was actually seven months pregnant at this point, you know, which multiplied our concern about the safety in this area.  And she had to do this in daylight, obviously, to be able to take the photograph.  She was wearing a bulletproof vest and, at some point, a helmet.  And the night before I had gone back with some of these Federales to try and rent out a room that sat above this street.  It wasn't easy to do.  Everybody's very deeply suspicious, and obviously nobody wanted to be seen as complicit definitely with the police but
most definitely with an American journalist.  So with enough money, we actually convinced somebody to rent us the room for an hour or two.

And with a federales standing guard at the door, another one in the staircase, we went up to this room, and we spent about an hour and a half.  And Kimberlee, in bulletproof vest--because you have to understand, in this part of Mexico City, so many people are armed: knives, guns.  And, obviously, in her condition, because she's pregnant, we were very concerned.  There were spotters everywhere.  So she spent about an hour and a half leaning out this window taking shots of various aspects of this industry and these transactions. And
that was one of the shots she got.  It was really--the second she took it, I knew it was an extraordinary picture of this poor girl. And my guess is she was maybe 13 or 14--was surrounded by these men who, you know--it almost looks like a sheep surrounded by wolves.  And it struck me as very representative of everything we're talking about, everything from her posture to the postures of the men around her.

DAVIES: And some of the men surrounding her are buyers or traders.  Some of them are simply johns?

Mr. LANDESMAN: Yeah.  It's very difficult to tell the difference.  You know, there were some men who, I think, were most obviously buyers.  And there were some men who just seemed to be day laborers looking for a very, very inexpensive 15 minutes.  And I must say that, you know, it's not as though you get an hour with these girls.  You know, for very little money--and I'm talking, you know 4.50 worth of pesos, you get 15 minutes.  So, you know, these are men not really looking for intimacy.

DAVIES: A lot of attention has been paid to tightening border crossings between the United States and Mexico.  How did traffickers move these sex slaves across the border and, in some cases, back and forth several times?

Mr. LANDESMAN: They would frequently piggyback on the largest migration in human history from Mexico into the United States: different mechanisms, different traffickers, different coyotes who moved different groups.  The sex slaves were usually moved separately.  And, again, since these networks are mono-ethnic machines, the Russians and Ukrainians utilized, basically, two
routes.  One was by boat from Rosarito Esenada up the Pacific to usually San Diego or Los Angeles, and they would avoid customs and the Coast Guard that way.

DAVIES: Land on the beach?

Mr. LANDESMAN: Land on the beach, yes.  And they'd be met by other boats who'd bring these girls ashore, and once they arrived in San Diego or LA, usually the person who reserved them or bought them, usually for about 10,000 apiece, would be waiting for them and would take them away in cars and vans. Mexicans and, also, the Ukrainians were also marched across two or three routes over land near Tecate, Mexico, through the no-man's-land, the hills up towards San Diego.
And you're talking about a 12-mile trek.  You're talking about women who are dressed, you know, pretty much ready to go in scantily clad clothing, you know, in lipstick, sometimes in the high heels, and they'd be marched over really tough, barren territory, just a sort of brutal, forced march.  Mexican girls sometimes marched through the same area; also, snuck across other parts of the border into Arizona and Texas in a similar manner as regular illegal aliens.

There's one particular area south of San Diego where the enormous fence that begins near Tijuana that separates the United States from Mexico--it begins in this ocean.  It ends in this really hardscrabble, tough, little village in Mexico.  The customs officials call this the end of the fence.  It's also the end of a lot of other things.  There, sort of spelled into the hillside in letters 10 feet tall, is the word `Jesus.' And up above that, top of this hill, is this 15-foot-high, white, wooden cross.  And the sex traffickers would march the women up to this cross, allow them to pray and then herd them north towards
San Diego, across the hills and through the trails toward their destination.

DAVIES: Journalist Peter Landesman, who wrote about sex slavery in the United States in this week's New York Times Magazine.  He'll be back in the second half of the show.  I'm Dave Davies, and this is FRESH AIR.

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(Announcements)

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DAVIES: Coming up, a victim's story.  We continue our conversation with journalist Peter Landesman, who wrote about sex slavery here in the US in this week's New York Times Magazine.  One young woman he interviewed was held captive from the age of four; she's now in her early 20s.

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DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR.  I'm Dave Davies, filling in for Terry Gross, back with journalist Peter Landesman, who wrote the cover story for this week's New York Times Magazine.  The piece is called "Sex Slaves On Main Street."
According to Landesman, authorities believe there are tens of thousands of young women, teen-agers and children being held in captivity and forced into prostitution in the United States, most of them foreigners who were smuggled into the country through Mexico.  We caution that some listeners may find this interview disturbing and not suitable or children.

Peter Landesman, some of the most compelling parts of your story are the stories of the victims that you spoke with.  You mentioned one named Andrea—I guess most of these are pseudonyms--who describes her experience living in a basement in an upper-middle-class neighborhood in Los Angeles.  Tell us about her story.

Mr. LANDESMAN: In my years as a journalist and the dozens of stories I've done, Andrea's probably the most compelling and disturbing interview I've ever done. Yes, Andrea is her pseudonym.  In fact, it's important to know that Andrea doesn't actually know her name, and the reason she doesn't know her name or her age, for that matter, or where she was born or when is because she was abducted or sold--she doesn't even know--she thinks around four years old to a ring of
pedophile S&M traffickers in the West Coast.

I have to be careful here. Andrea lives in an undisclosed location.  I visited her there, but she's in deep jeopardy.  If these traffickers knew she was alive and certainly knew she was talking, with what she knows and what she went through, she could put a lot of people behind bars for a very long time.

What's unique about her is that any young woman who's reached her
position--she's now in her early 20s.  She was in captivity for, she thinks, about 12 to 14 years.  Any young woman in her position would either be dead or so, you know, maddened, driven to madness, that they wouldn't be a worthwhile witness.  What's remarkable about Andrea, who suffers from multiple personality disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder--what's remarkable about her, the details that she remembers: the color-coded exchange of toddlers at Disneyland; the rest stops along American interstates, where one set of traffickers would exchange children for another set of children from a different set of traffickers; how she was trafficked back and forth across the Mexican border to Juarez, to Guadalajara, to Veracruz.

She remembers the hotel rooms, she remembers the hotel ceilings.  And, again--this is bitter, bitter medicine--she remembers the hotel ceilings because that's, really, what she saw.  She remembers the older mostly American men who paid to have sex with her as young as four years old.  I mean, she told me that her very first childhood memory is being gang raped at four years old, and then it just accelerated from there.

DAVIES: You open the story with your visit to what had been a sex slave brothel in a neighborhood in New Jersey, where a bunch of young, teen-age girls were kept for months and months, visited by dozens, hundreds of men.  It seems Andrea's story is different.  She moved around a lot.  I mean, what's the pattern?  Is there a pattern?

Mr. LANDESMAN: What's different about Andrea is that she's American, and she's light-skinned, and she was a toddler.  When I say toddler, I mean not even prepubescent; I mean, under 10, under nine.  And it's important to make these distinctions.  We are talking about different types of sexual appetites. It's important to do this without being graphic.  The men who go after sex with toddlers are after something else.  It's more than just satiation.  It's really repeated acts of rape, repeated acts of barbarity.  And Andrea would frequently tell me about moments of absolution after these acts, in which these men would have to sort of tunnel through their remorse by--in one case, she told me about a man who would read the Bible to her before and after.

When we're talking about sex with foreigners, Mexicans and Eastern Europeans who were brought into this country, they're usually a little older.  And when I say older, they could be 10 but usually young teen-agers--middle teens, late typically men who will use any other prostitute; that is, the typical john. You know, we're talking about average American men who pay for sex who don't know
the story of the girl or woman who's underneath him.  What they're looking for is obviously cheap sex.  What they're looking for exotic sex, sex with a girl darker-skinned or speaks a different language than he is.  And that's a different kind of sexual appetite than pedophilia sex, than--and not just pedophilia sex.  And that's broken down into sadomasochistic sex with children.

Andrea would frequently tell me about moments of videoing sex with minors and how her particular group of victims, all between four and 16 years old--and she said there were roughly 10 to 15 of them held captive in this basement in Southern California--they were broken down into different groups.  There was the toddler group, there was the young teen-ager group, the older teen-age group, and then there's something called the damaged group.

DAVIES: What was the damage...

Mr. LANDESMAN: And the damaged...

DAVIES: Yeah.

Mr. LANDESMAN: Andrea said that at one point she entered the damaged group after she had been used by a man who physically damaged her.  The damaged group is a group of children--and, again, it could be any age, as young as four or five--in which the paying customer can literally do anything to them, anything short of killing them and sometimes even killing them.  Andrea would tell me
that Mexican children, especially, were so disposable that it was possible to kill them and actually it not being that big a deal; they'd probably have to pay a little bit more money.  But in the damaged group, you're talking about sadomasochistic sex with children that would often result in physical damaged, which is why they were called the damaged group.

DAVIES: She lived, you wrote, in the basement of an upper-middle-class house in the Los Angeles.  And where the kids simply spent all of their times in the basement, where they were relatively safe with each other, the trouble came when the door would open.

Mr. LANDESMAN: Yes.

DAVIES: Would they tell each other their experiences?  I mean...

Mr. LANDESMAN: No.

DAVIES: ...did they know what kind of damage--no.

Mr. LANDESMAN: They would not talk about what happened outside.  She was very specific about this actually.  They hardly talked at all.  Most of their interaction came in training exercises, in which the traffickers or keepers or captors would force them to train each other to have sex with older people. That is, I mean, their very young bodies are not built to be penetrated by adult men.  She talked about how to teach a six-year-old toddler, six-year-old girl, how to perform oral sex on a man using honey.  That was, really, the basis of their interaction.

DAVIES: She mentioned that when the door opened and one of them was required for a trip, that they were often given clothes, dresses, that were color-coded.  What was that about?

Mr. LANDESMAN: Groups of these children would be exchanged for other groups of children.  Actually it was not the Los Angeles area, but she was in Southern California, and her particular trafficker seemed to use Disneyland frequently as a place of transit and a place of exchange; Disneyland being the perfect cover because there's nothing but children and adults.  And nobody's looking at identity cards, and nobody's checking drivers' licenses.  You know, an adult walks up with a child, the assumption is that child belongs to that adult.  And the way she described it was that the customer or the other trafficker would be told beforehand what color of clothes these kids would be wearing, so they were easily identifiable.

So there's a kind of color-coded mechanism by which one set of children was brought, exchanged for another set or a customer waiting for one child, two children, three--would, again, be waiting for a certain color clothing to show up.  And then Andrea told me that she would walk up to the gentleman and say something that was prearranged.  In one case, it was, `I've been waiting for you, Daddy,' and put her hand in his, and that was the code, and she'd be wearing the right clothes, and then he would take her away.

DAVIES: A lot of these kids and young women were marched across, of course, the border to the United States, where they were placed in brothels all around the country and in situations like this.  Did operators in the United States literally place orders for the sex slaves from these Mexican markets?

Mr. LANDESMAN: Yes.  Stash houses in the larger hub cities of the United States, which is where this activity's mostly concentrated; you're talking New York, LA, Atlanta, Chicago.  The stash houses would call down to pimping organizations or families that they worked with, usually in this town Tenancingo, and say, you know, `We need five.  We need five of this age.' They would put in orders for numbers, orders for quality and orders for age.

DAVIES: And what do they pay?

Mr.  LANDESMAN: Nothing actually.  These girls in Mexico were abducted, so the overhead from the beginning was zero.  Sometimes they're bought for 500 from an impoverished family, who thinks their child is going on to a better life in the United States.  Profit-sharing happens on the other end, and the profits are enormous.  For instance, in Calle Santo Tamas, where these girls are tried out and trained, one girl could earn a trafficker something less than 2,000 a week, and that's 30 men a day, seven days a week.  That same girl in the United
States could earn a trafficker up to 30,000.  And then if you're talking about Russians and Ukrainians, who frequently are used for a different subset of customer, usually much higher paying, you're talking earning a trafficker or a captor up to 50,000 a week.  Now this is often, frequently, with zero investment.  So the profit margin is absolutely enormous.  There's plenty of money to go around.

And just as one example, in Sonora in Mexico, a Mexican state which is across from Arizona, 10 federal police officers and government officials who are complicit in the industry there--every week they share a payoff of 200,000; that's 20,000 apiece, which in Mexico is absolutely a king's ransom.  So if 200,000 a week is shared by just 10 officers in one place, one place among hundreds of places where these kids and girls and young women are trafficked across--you know, simple arithmetic brings you to the numbers of dollars we're talking about, billions.

DAVIES: My guest is journalist Peter Landesman.  We'll talk more after a short break.  This is FRESH AIR.

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DAVIES: We're back with journalist Peter Landesman.  His cover story in this week's New York Times Magazine deals with the sex slave trade here in the United States.

You met some victims of the sex trade.  How did you get them to talk to you? Was it difficult?  What was their process of opening up like?

Mr. LANDESMAN: It was very difficult.  I probably met a dozen, and probably in the end eight spoke to me: some, in the end, reluctantly; some spoke to me with great remorse--that is, afterwards they really regretted it.  It was really a long negotiation of trust; that is, A, they wanted to know why I wanted to know these lurid details, and, B, was I going to hurt them?  Every single one of these victims, if it was known by their trafficker from whom they escaped that she was talking, she would be dead.  There's no question that these girls would
most likely be killed.

In the end, you know, they put their lives in my hands, and that kind of process is very long and can be very sweet because, in the end, you know, I get the information and their story, and they receive sometimes catharsis but also the sense of trust.  And don't forget, because I'm a man, I represent to them two things: I represent their subjugators, their captors, who are mostly men, and I represent the, quote-unquote, "customers." I represent the kind of guy who would have sex with them, you know, sometimes dozens of times a day. So I
had that working against me.

And, actually, when I met Andrea at the airport--before we met, we spoke by telephone, and she asked me if I had any facial hair.  And I said, `No.' And she said, `Well, that's good because if you did, I wouldn't be able to meet with you because my captor, my keeper, had a beard.' And then I got off the plane, and I approached her with my wife, Kimberlee, and I specifically put Kimberlee in front of me in order to lessen as much as possible her pain.  But it was a warm day, and I was wearing an open shirt, and Andrea took one look at me, and a look of horror came over her face, and she kind of staggered backwards.  And I realized I was wearing an open shirt, and my chest hair had obviously reminded her of somebody.  I didn't ask her who; I didn't even really need to ask her who.

It really took about four or five hours before Andrea felt comfortable saying literally anything.  And then after a while it became a flood, like a torrent, of information, and she made it very clear that this is the first and last time she would talk about this because every time she did talk about it to me, when she took breaks, she would return to her room, to the bathroom and do damage to herself; she was a cutter.  And so in order to relieve herself of the pain of the attention of speaking to me, she would need to injure herself in order almost to distract one kind of pain and replace it with another kind of pain.
So that was a very difficult negotiation.  And I'm not sure if I should regret asking her to talk about it or to feel grateful that she did because I actually think she's done a great service.

DAVIES: Do we have any idea how many people have escaped from the sex slavery?

Mr. LANDESMAN: We have no idea how many people have escaped because we really have no idea how many people are really in it.  Let me give you one example of that in terms of the numbers.  One case in Atlanta, recent case, of sex trafficking--the federal government broke up one sex-trafficking ring in a medium-sized city, a medium-sized ring.  They actually met and helped and saved about two dozen of their victims.  But this particular ring was strange in the sense that it kept enormously detailed records.  There was literally a black book with the girls, the age, where they came from, how much money they'd made. This particular ring had brought in over a thousand girls in that one year.

So the federal government found a couple dozen, saved them, but where are the other 980?  They're dispersed throughout the United States unaccounted for, uncounted.  So any number the government comes up with is going to include the couple dozen, but the rest of the thousand will not be counted.  So we're talking about many orders of magnitude in terms of how much bigger this problem is than the government probably even knows.

DAVIES: Let's talk a bit about what anybody's doing about this.  You quote Laura Lederer, a senior State Department adviser on trafficking, as saying, `We're not finding victims in the United States because we're not looking for them.' What's being done about this?

Mr. LANDESMAN: At the moment, very, very little.  One of the problems is that the Bush administration--faith-based, influenced very much by evangelical core of their constituency, very susceptible to influence by other faith-based organizations and, really, quite rightly are very focused on the sex slave trade elsewhere: Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam.  And they have targeted American sex tourists who go there and engage in sex with minors in Cambodia and Thailand and the like.

What they are not realizing--and I don't think they're ignoring; I think they just do not know--that in their back yard, in the United States, this problem is really just as bad; that is, off the record and on background, State Department officials have admitted to me that the number of girls and women being trafficked into the United States for sex slavery and forced sex is probably in the six figures, somewhere between a hundred and two hundred thousand people.  Conservative number...

DAVIES: Per year?

Mr. LANDESMAN: Per year, annually.  Conservative numbers put that in the tens of thousands, and that's what they will say on the record.  But the reality, they know and I certainly know, is much worse than that.  The reason this is happening is partly because, what we got into before, the issue of language and definition.  Prostitutes or girls being used for sex are looked at as, you know, quote-unquote "hookers" and "girls for hire" and "call girls" and "escorts." You know, local police look at these women as, `Yes, they may have a tough individual, independent story, but they're basically volunteers. They're basically voluntarily doing this for whatever reason.' And the reason is, really, not their concern.  Most of these--not most of these girls.  Many, many
of these girls fit the category that we're talking about actually as sort of sex slavery.

So the government on every level, local, state and federal, essentially doesn't know this is going on.  It's not being reported.  In neighborhoods where these stash houses are set, they look through the activity.  I'm not saying that they see it and ignore it.  I just don't think they even know to look for it.  I can tell you that in all of my reporting over four months, the dozens of law enforcement officials I've spoken to on both sides of the US-Mexico border and mostly American law enforcement--officials and, also, officers--not a single
one thought this is a big deal or a big problem.  They just thought it was minor and not even, really, worth their attention on the scale of the felonies that they deal with on a daily basis.

DAVIES: Journalist Peter Landesman, who wrote about sex slavery in the United States in this week's New York Times magazine.  We'll continue our conversation after a break.

This is FRESH AIR.

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DAVIES: If you're just joining us, my guest is journalist Peter Landesman. His piece in Sunday's New York Times magazine tells the story of sex slaves who were captured and brought to the United States, where they're forced into prostitution.  I asked Landesman about the speech President Bush gave to the United Nations last year in which he condemned what he called `the special evil of the sex trade.' I asked if Bush was referring mostly to the trade outside the United States.

Mr. LANDESMAN: One hundred percent yes...

DAVIES: Right.

Mr. LANDESMAN: ...you know, and quite rightly.  I mean, they are, in some ways, really putting the screws to governments of countries where this happens.  The Cambodian and Thai governments have recently cooperated with US agencies in sting operations to capture American tourists who are engaging in sex with minors.  But they really had to be deeply influenced, and I say that politely. It took an enormous amount of pressure.  And we're, really, still talking about
prosecutions in the single digits at this point.  This isn't, really, even a
drop in the ocean.  And my fear is like so much legislation and verbal activity around trafficking in general--and we're talking drugs and weapons and, also, human sex slaves--despite all the rhetoric, despite all the legislation, really, none of this is stopping or even slowing.  It all happens with impunity, and the sex trade is no different.

DAVIES: Well, you've described fairly open collaboration in Mexico between local authorities, local law enforcement and even, I guess, some in the immigration authorities in Mexico, collaborations between them and sex traffickers.  Now it would appear that if the United States wanted to, it could use some trade and diplomatic pressures to make a difference.  Is that right?

Mr. LANDESMAN: It absolutely can.  Yeah, the sex--trafficking in general, whether it be drugs or human, with Mexico's very sensitive to this administration.  The administration has to pick and choose the subject matter it raises with the Fox administration very carefully.  It can't push them too hard.  I know that there are individuals high in the Fox administration in Mexico City that are interested in this, but they have zero support and zero resources to deal with this.  The United States could probably shame them into trying to do something, but they recognize that the Mexican political culture is so saturated in corruption--the same political party in power for over 60 years--you're really talking about turning around an enormous ship.  And I'd say that maybe it's tilting 2 or 3 degrees in one direction or the other, but
it would be an enormous job to change the political culture in Mexico
overnight.  So the administration probably has to weigh: `What would we gain by embarrassing, shaming or even penalizing the Mexican government into acting on this, you know, beyond what they could realistically do?'

DAVIES: You know, I have to say this story is hard to read.  I mean, this is truly heartbreaking.  I can only imagine what it was like to report it. You're a husband and a father.  How do you prepare yourself emotionally for this kind of reporting?

Mr. LANDESMAN: Reporting like this comes in waves.  Some of the time I can shield myself behind the need to consistently look for the architecture of the narrative; that is, I hear information, whether it be, you know, an address or information like, you know, Andrea's story, which is almost unbearable to listen to, no less to have experienced--I receive information.  And, still, my job, what I'm paid to do, is to put together a story that's coherent, that makes sense, that makes a point, that may make a difference, may not.  But my job as a writer is to write a story that is whole and has power, and that's about craftsmanship.  And craftsmanship is, really, emotionless. It's not
about emotion.  It's about a skill.  Now that's on a good day.

On a bad day, which is most of the time, I hear this information, and I go back and have a very difficult time with it.  Andrea's interview was done over the course of a couple days.  We would need to take breaks frequently.  It was almost unbearable at times.  The fact that I was doing this story with my wife was a positive experience.  Somehow, since Kimberlee was pregnant, there seemed to be an even exchange going on; that is, we were bringing life into the world while we were reporting on the extinguishing of all these innocent lives.  But
in the end, you know, when the story's closed and shipped and edited and the magazine's out, I'm left with the content, just like a reader is.  And over the course of the following days and weeks--and I'm including now--it all sort of crashes over me in the same way it would crash over you. And I can read it and come to the story fresh again and be just as deeply affected.  So I guess my answer is the pain comes in waves, and I balance it with the job.

DAVIES: Well, Peter Landesman, thanks so much for being with us.

Mr. LANDESMAN: You're welcome.

DAVIES: Journalist Peter Landesman.  His piece in this week's New York Times Magazine is "Sex Slaves On Main Street."

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DAVIES: For Terry Gross, I'm Dave Davies.