An FBI agent talked about Minneapolis teens lured to Omaha by promises of modeling, but instead forced into prostitution.

The Omaha police chief talked about how pimps force people into prostitution with jewelry, abuse, coercion and even promises of love.

An attorney from the attorney general’s office talked about how he prosecuted an Omaha case where three juveniles were lured from a Minneapolis mall with promises of modeling, but instead were forced into prostitution.

And a family advocate talked about helping a Lincoln teenage girl who wanted to get in the music industry but ended up being pimped out on videos and online.

All of those examples – and more – were given to a Nebraska legislative panel today as lawmakers considered what more Nebraska could be doing to deal with human trafficking.

The first hurdle? Convincing people that indeed, human trafficking happens in Nebraska.

“People believe it’s not going on in the state,” Omaha Police Chief Alex Hayes said. “It does go on in our city. … It is always kind of a constant thing that’s gone on.”

He said judges, prostitutes and others need to be educated about the issue in Nebraska. He said there are pimps who push people into prostitution through abuse, coercion, promises of love or jewels, but they often just get probation and a small fine.

“They’re back out in to society to do it again,” he said.

He said a lot of escort services and massage parlors deal in sex, and suggested the industry be regulated.

“It’s definitely out there,” he said.

Weysan Dun, special agent in the Omaha field office of the FBI, said in the past decade, “lone predators with limited reach” have grown to “global communities of pedophiles on the Internet.” He said the trafficking of juveniles for prostitution in Nebraska is likely more prevalent than empirical data indicates.

“We have moved from back-alley bookstores to criminal enterprises that treat children as merely another commodity for sale in the global marketplace,” Dun said. “We have moved from videos in plain brown packages to encrypted websites, flash drives and cell phones capable of storing thousands of images. Sexual exploitation of children has become a growth industry.”

Since the Great Plains Innocence Lost Task Force launched in Omaha in January 2010, six underage girls have been found to have been forced into prostitution through threats and violence. In one case, Meredith Crane Horton, Ramon Heredia and others were convicted running a prostitution enterprise in Omaha for years. They used underage girls, including a 15-year-old and 13-year-old girl who were runaways who sought refuge with Heredia. He promised them a life of partying, but almost immediately they were pimped out. The 15-year-old was forced to pose for suggestive photos which were posted on the Internet and prostituted. The 13-year-old was about to be prostituted when the girls escaped.

Their sentences ranged from three years to 17.5 years, Dun said.

In a Council Bluffs case, an underage girl was taken to Florida, Colorado and Iowa to prostitute. And another case involved numerous prostitutes and three people who ran a long-term prostitution enterprise that employed coercion, threats and physical and sexual assaults to maintain control over the victims. One of the prostitutes was a 19-year-old girl who was kidnapped and forced into prostitution; she managed to escape and call 911.

The three are awaiting sentencing, Dun said.

One 20-year-old prostitute was recruited from Arkansas over the Internet at age 17 and prostituted all over the country before being caught during the College World Series in Omaha, where she was brought by her pimp to work.

The FBI agent said nearly every woman identified by the task force as having engaged in prostitution said they were coerced or forced in the beginning, and after becoming numb to the life, they stayed in the business because they saw no other way to make a living.

Corey O’Brien, chief prosecutor for the Nebraska attorney general, prosecuted a case in Omaha in 2001 where three juveniles were lured from a Minneapolis mall with promises of modeling, but instead were forced into prostitution. They were given expensive clothing and even cosmetic surgery, he said.

He said the cases can be very tough to prosecute, however, because victims are afraid.

And Al Riskowski of the Nebraska Family Alliance said a Lincoln mother came to them last Christmas because her daughter was coming home with bruises; they discovered she was trying to get into the music industry but instead was being advertised and prostituted on the Internet and on DVDs.

“This is a Nebraska issue,” he said.

Lincoln Public Safety Director Tom Casady said most people who are trafficked are exploited because they have mental illness, are poor or drug addicted. A couple of years ago, he examined the histories of 10 prostitutes and found they had a combined record of 105 runaways, 44 child abuse reports and 35 sex assaults all before age 19.

He, too, recommended lawmakers find a way to regulate escort services and increase the maximum sentences for such offenses. Casady said a man convicted of pandering this year was fined $350.

Mark Vasina of Nebraskans for Peace said Lakota women from the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota are being transported across the border to Whiteclay, where they have sex with store owners and their friends in exchange for beer and cigarettes.

One of the women was raped the night before he was going to interview her to “keep her quiet,” Vasina said. He said Nebraska needs to do “serious and proper investigations.”

“It falls on us to protect them,” he said.

And a Lexington woman said she has identified about 250 victims of labor trafficking – often undocumented workers who smuggled into the country and then work in meatpacking plants, bean fields or corn fields for little to nothing. She said she got a call from an undocumented maid last week who said she’s being assaulted by her boss in a meatpacking plant.

She also said there’s a problem with “bar girls” being told to sell shots of whiskey and perform sexual favors for customers – selling up to 75 shots per weekend. It’s a problem along Interstate 80 particularly in Latino clubs, she said.

Sen. Brad Ashford, chairman of the Judiciary Committee that held the hearing, said Nebraska needs to collect more data on trafficking to try to “get its arms” around the problem.

“We need to know how big of a problem it is,” he said.

Sen. Amanda McGill has worked extensively on the issue, and said she is working to find ways to strengthen Nebraska laws that deal with trafficking.

Anchalee Panigabutra-Roberts, an assistant professor of women’s and gender studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, recommended the state of Nebraska commission a study, compile statistics and establish a state task force on human trafficking.

Reported by Deena Winter, deena@nebraskawatchdog.org

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