Recent Cases in Metro DC
In August 2000, a Gaithersburg man was sentenced to six and a half years and ordered to pay $110,000 in restitution to a Brazilian woman he held in his home for twenty years, having promised her citizenship. She was held against her will until a concerned neighbor took her to the hospital for an infection in her leg in 1998. The man and his family forced her to sleep in a windowless room in the basement, padlocked the refrigerator in order to bar her access to food and drink, and did not get her medical treatment for a stomach tumor and an infected wound on her leg. When unhappy with her performance, the couple resorted to physical violence, once pouring hot soup on her face and chest when she did not like the way it had been prepared.
In November 2003, a Germantown couple was indicted on charges of involuntary servitude, conspiracy, and harboring an alien for financial gain--all crimes connected to their scheme to hold a 14 year old Nigerian girl against her will. The couple recruited the girl with the promise that she would be paid and would attend school. The couple held her captive in their home from September 1996 to October 2001, forcing her to work without pay, and often physically and sexually assaulted her.
In June 2003, a jury in Greenbelt convicted a Takoma Park couple of bringing a Ghanaian woman into the United States and forcing her to work seven days a week without pay. The victim testified that the couple had abused her from February 2000 until July 2001 when she ran away. The codefendant testified that she was not a servant but a family member who had volunteered to help with household tasks. She was convicted of forced labor, conspiracy, harboring an illegal alien for financial gain and hiding the victim's passport and visa. Her husband was convicted of conspiracy and harboring an alien for financial gain.
In November 2000, the Washington Post reported that two Kenyan women had filed a civil suit against their employer in Greenbelt, Maryland. The women claimed that their employer, who worked as a secretary at the Kenyan Embassy, had violated the Fair Labor Standards Act by forcing them to work more than 126 hours a week without pay. She claimed to have hired them because she wanted someone from her own culture to care for her children but restricted them from leaving her home or in any way engaging with the outside world and threatened that they would be arrested, jailed or shot if they returned to Kenya. Their attorney learned of their predicament from a member to the local Kenyan community and extracted them with the help of uniformed Prince George's County police officers.
On December 3, 2003, a federal Grand Jury in the District of Columbia returned an indictment against Carlos Curtis charging him with sex trafficking, transporting a minor in interstate commerce for prostitution, transportation of any person for prostitution, production of child pornography, and transporting child pornography in interstate commerce. The FBI began investigating this case as part of "Operation Innocence Lost." Carlos Curtis and other associates recruited a twelve year-old girl in Times Square in New York, brought her to a hotel room in Brooklyn, where he photographed the girl engaged in sexually explicit conduct with an adult prostitute, and then transported her by car with another minor and an adult prostitute from New York to Washington, D.C. He provided the twelve year-old clothing he deemed appropriate, instructed her on how much to charge for particular sex acts, and sent her out as a prostitute in the District of Columbia. The group was apprehended by a Washington, D.C. police officer.
