Stock art of a statue of Lady Justice in a courtroom in the Frank Crowley Courts Building in Dallas Thursday December 18, 2018. (Andy Jacobsohn/The Dallas Morning News)
2017 File Photo/Staff
Sometimes the fight for justice for sex trafficking survivors isn’t just with their abusers. Sometimes it’s with the government.
A South Texas brothel case illustrates how aggressively the government can fight to keep money instead of allowing it to compensate survivors.
The case began in 2010. Agents rescued four Honduran girls who were working at a bar in Mission, outside McAllen, and forced into sex work by Beleal Garcia-Gonzalez, the bar’s owner, court records show. The girls were smuggled into Texas after being promised restaurant jobs, prosecutors said. They were made to work from 3 p.m. to 2 a.m., court records show.
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After arrests were made in the McAllen case, three of the child survivors, ages 14, 15 and 17, were sent to a social services agency in Michigan where they were referred to a law firm specializing in child exploitation cases. That firm filed a motion to be appointed guardian ad litem for the girls. The judge approved.
The firm also assisted the prosecutor in filing a request for restitution.
Garcia-Gonzalez was sentenced in 2011 to 30 years in prison for child sex trafficking and harboring illegal aliens.
At his sentencing hearing in McAllen, U.S. District Judge Randy Crane granted the government’s motion for a preliminary order of forfeiture. Crane said he was ordering Garcia-Gonzalez to forfeit his home because he used it to harbor the girls.
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At the same 2011 hearing, Crane agreed to order over $1 million in restitution for the three girls. That included counseling and housing expenses, court records show, as well as compensation “for the wages that were never paid to them while they worked for Mr. Garcia.”
At the time, prosecutors had a choice about what to do with the proceeds from the forfeiture. They could use it to help pay the court-ordered restitution. Or, they could give it to the government and its law enforcement partners.
During the hearing, one of the children’s lawyers requested restitution payments begin immediately.
“The children are foster children,” the lawyer, Heidi Naasko, said. “They have no assets. They have no spending money except what’s given to them by their foster parents.”
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“He will have no assets,” the judge told Naasko. “Those are all being forfeited to the government.”
In a filing three months after the sentencing hearing, one of the girls’ attorneys pressed their case.
“The heinous nature of this crime in which poor, unsophisticated girls were callously forced into prostitution, combined with the victims’ utter lack of alternative resources, together argue strongly for using a portion of the forfeiture sale proceeds to satisfy the restitution order,” lawyer Katarzyna Brozynski wrote in the filing.
The government disagreed, setting up a years-long legal battle over who should receive the money and how much.
Tokyo Sauna at Harry Hines Boulevard in Dallas.
LOUIS DeLUCA/Dallas Morning News
In one filing in March 2015, the U.S. attorney’s office in McAllen reiterated its position. Their argument was simple: laws passed by Congress mandated victims of sex trafficking receive compensation, but it left up to government prosecutors how restitution should be collected.
“The Crime Victims’ Rights Act,” government lawyers wrote in the case, “does not give the victims the right to instruct the United States on how it must collect restitution.”
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The government’s lawyers also disagreed with the judge’s method for calculating how much restitution the girls were entitled to. The prosecutors, noting they consulted with the Justice Department, argued the child victims should not be compensated for lost wages.
The harm Garcia-Gonzalez inflicted on the girls “was primarily psychological and emotional” rather than financial, the prosecutors said in their March 2015 filing. They also said the victims did not submit evidence of their losses such as “invoices and receipts.”
The stalemate led to a remarkable series of exchanges between lawyers for the victims and the government, in which the victims accused prosecutors of intentionally stalling.
Crane, the trial judge, had included calculations for lost wages in his restitution order for the child victims, given they were forced to work without pay in the cantina. The prosecutor said the Justice Department indicated even if it was able to compensate the girls for lost wages, it could not reimburse them for the “sex acts or “tricks’” they performed or for their “undocumented overtime.”
A lawyer for the girls noted in a filing that sex traffickers are not in the habit of keeping records of their crimes. Dallas attorney Jason M. Ross accused the government of erecting “roadblocks” and using “smoke and mirrors” to try to excuse the delay.
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“The role of the United States,” Ross wrote in April 2015, “is not to be adversarial to the victims of the Defendant’s crimes who are seeking to enforce this Court’s restitution order.”
While the case dragged on, Congress in 2015 passed the Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act. It made clear that law enforcement officials must prioritize using forfeiture proceeds for restitution.
The law took effect in May 2015.
The Dallas Police vice unit raided a massage parlor named Number 1 on Walnut Hill Lane in Northwest Dallas in 2019. (Tom Fox/The Dallas Morning News)
Tom Fox/Dallas Morning News
Prosecutors acknowledged the change in the law in a filing in the case, yet the impasse continued. While the government had sought a preliminary order of forfeiture more than four years earlier, it had never moved forward.
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Without a final order of forfeiture, the new legislation didn’t apply. Similarly, forfeiture money can only be applied if there is an order of restitution. Both conditions must exist to compensate victims in such cases,
Victim advocates lament that prosecutors have not taken advantage of the law to compensate survivors as Congress intended in the years since.
In at least eight federal brothel prosecutions in North Texas since 2015, the government took in a combined $5 million in forfeited money, in addition to buildings, vehicles and jewelry, according to case files. In none of those cases did prosecutors seek an order of restitution for the survivors. As such, the government and its law enforcement partners kept it all.
Unlike most brothel trafficking cases, the girls in the McAllen case had legal representation — and their attorneys pressed on, arguing in filings the government was intentionally stalling with the forfeiture action.
In January 2017, seven years after the preliminary forfeiture order was entered, the government sought a final order of forfeiture against Garcia-Gonzalez’s house in Mission to make it official, court records show.
How much money the girls were actually paid in restitution is not clear. An employee in the Southern District of Texas court clerk’s finance department acknowledged restitution payments have been received. He said his check of the computer record did not reveal any large payments.
Their lead attorney, Naasko, declined to comment, saying she didn’t have “authorization to speak.” A spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Texas said she did not have any information to share about the restitution outcome.