Posted on 06/30/2008 8:19:39 AM PDT by SwinneySwitch
Team rescued 120 women from grim conditions when it dismantled the operation in Houston
The farewell party was in full swing at midnight when police came for Maximino "El Chimino" Mondragon, his accomplices and his victims — scantily dressed women and girls he forced to sell beers and sexual favors under the flashing lights of a revolving crystalline disco ball inside his strip mall bar off Hempstead Highway.
Mondragon was celebrating his retirement at El Potrero de Chimino bar, also known as the Wagon Wheel. He had a one-way ticket back to his native El Salvador and blueprints in the bar for a brand-new hotel back home.
Then uninvited guests arrived.
Pickups packed the parking lots at five related bars and restaurants in northwest Houston, as more than 100 officers from federal, state and local agencies rushed in the night of Nov. 13, 2005.
Interviews with the arresting agents and documents recently obtained by the Houston Chronicle provide the first detailed account on how one of the nation's largest sex trafficking rings was dismantled in Houston — considered both a center of operations and transit point for international sex and labor traffickers.
Task force members — including Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the FBI, the Harris County Sheriff's Office and the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission — had expected to find 50 or 60 women. Eventually, they rescued about 120 victims.
In interviews, victims told agents they had been forced to work six or seven nights a week and to allow men to buy them overpriced drinks in exchange for their company or for sexual favors.
The main targets were the lead cantina owner, Mondragon; head smuggler, Walter Corea; as well as their relatives and wives. Corea was sentenced in May to 15 years; Mondragon's sentencing, the last, is set for Sept...
(Excerpt) Read more at chron.com ...
Maybe La Comuerte?
No no no. They have it all wrong.
Illegal immigration is all about honest hard-working people just trying to make a living doing the jobs Americans won’t do.
It’s not about slavery or prostitution rings.
Has this guy been confined to jail since Nov. 2005 or has he been out on bond? If out on bond, I’m surprised he didn’t flee back to El Savador.....
This guy is in business for years & they bust him during his retirement party on the eve of leaving the country. I'm guessing he paid his taxes on time.
ping
19-year-old son, brothers, sister-in-law and girlfriend were arrested, too.
Family values!
How did I know without looking that you were class of '97 or '98? ;-)
Greetings, fellow cynic!
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