Pennsylvania Sex Slavery Ring Shut Down

The slave next door: women trafficked from Mexico and Ecuador have been rescued from brothels run by alleged Mexican drug dealers in the Pennsylvania borough of Norristown, a few short miles northwest of Philadelphia.

One woman was held captive at a brothel located just down the street from a neighborhood elementary school.

In a recent press conference the Montgomery County District Attorney described the large-scale drug and prostitution ring organized by five illegal aliens arrested in the case:

[District Attorney Ferman] said houses at 566 Kohn St. and 34 East Oak St. were used for prostitution, and she showed pictures of the sparsely furnished interiors. One small, partitioned room had a blanket hanging in place of a door. A single mattress took up most of the room’s modest floor space.

When the residences were raided in May [2009], two Mexican women were discovered at the Kohn Street house; a woman from Ecuador was inside the East Oak Street residence.

“This is the way these women were forced to live, but really, there is no privacy,” the DA said.

Saturdays and Mondays were the busiest times for the Norristown brothels, according to authorities. The men paid $30 to a doorman, who handed out tickets that the men gave the women, reports indicate.

Eventually, the prostitutes would exchange their accumulated tickets for $15 a piece, according to reports.

“On Monday, they would start with a fresh crop of girls,” Ferman said. “Fifteen minutes at a time.”

Hernandez-Garcia, Gonzales-Sosa and Guzman-Hernandez were allegedly employed by Castillo to run the day-to-day operations at the houses. The men controlled the women inside the residences and threatened them with violence, authorities allege.

“The women were beaten if they didn’t comply,” she said.

Castillo, who had been deported from the United States twice and returned, reportedy told investigators there was a “circuit” across the U.S. that exploited women as prostitutes. Many women are recruited unwittingly in Mexico with the promise of a better life in America, he reportedly said.