By Ed Meyer
Beacon Journal staff writer
Published: May 7, 2013 -
Human sex-trafficking crimes, many similar to the cases of the Cleveland women found alive Monday after disappearing as teens more than a decade ago, are occurring all around the area.
That was the main topic of a sobering speech U.S. Attorney Steven M. Dettelbach delivered less than a week ago at the City Club of Cleveland.
Juvenile trafficking in particular, for forced labor or “literally being raped for money,” occurs “in our midst” in communities throughout Northeast Ohio, he said.
“It’s down the street at a coffee shop. It’s at that hotel you drive by off the freeway exit where you live. It’s in your neighborhood nail parlor or some of the farms you drive by as you use our interstates,” Dettelbach said in his hourlong speech.
Although his federal agency, the U.S. Attorney’s Office, declined to make any distinct connection between teen trafficking and the extraordinary case involving Gina DeJesus, Amanda Berry and Michelle Knight, the issue was brought to public attention by DeJesus’ mother.
In April 2004, Gina was 14 when she was last seen on her way home from Wilbur Wright Middle School near West 105th Street and Lorain Avenue in Cleveland.
Years later, after never giving up hope her daughter would be found alive, Nancy Ruiz told a Cleveland television crew in April 2012: “I always said it from the beginning: She was sold to the highest bidder.”
Dettelbach, who began his prosecution career in California in 1996, when he won convictions in a case involving 70 Thai women forced to live in “sub-human conditions” at a compound where they worked as seamstresses for no pay, told his audience Friday that the same kind of horrific conduct has happened here.
“It’s in downtown Cleveland. It’s in Willoughby Hills. It’s in North Olmsted. It’s in Mentor,” he said.
“And that’s not just conjecture or me picking on particular cities. That’s telling you the places where we discovered some of this conduct and cases we have already prosecuted.”
In a meeting in Akron last May with reporters and staff members of the Beacon Journal editorial pages, Dettelbach told a similarly chilling story of a trafficking crime that happened a block away from his office.
In December 2011, Eric Tutstone, 44, of Cleveland, was sent to prison for 11 years for trying to sell a 16-year-old girl into prostitution to a madam for the sum of $300.
The attempted sale, Dettelbach said, took place at a Starbucks coffee shop on West Sixth Street in Cleveland’s Warehouse District.
Court records showed the girl told an FBI agent investigating the case: “When I saw Eric take the money, I knew I had just been sold.”
In another “sex for sale” trafficking case, Dettelbach said in his Beacon Journal interview, a Toledo girl who disappeared as a runaway — at the same age as Gina DeJesus when she went missing — was rescued by authorities only two blocks from where she lived.
Michael Tobin, Dettelbach’s spokesman, said there are signs the public can look for to prevent trafficking crimes.
“In general, it’s when something doesn’t look right. It can happen in a restaurant or a local nail salon,” Tobin said, “when someone is not allowed to talk, or are being intimidated, or appear to be in fear.”
In Friday’s speech in Cleveland, Dettelbach used the stunning example of the Thai women who were kept in forced labor in a guarded compound. It was surrounded by a barbed-wire fence with the wire pointed inward, he said, “so that nobody could get out.”
Tobin urged anyone suspecting such illegal conduct to make the first call to the FBI: 216-522-1400 in the Cleveland area or 330-535-6156 in the Akron area.
That was the main topic of a sobering speech U.S. Attorney Steven M. Dettelbach delivered less than a week ago at the City Club of Cleveland.
Juvenile trafficking in particular, for forced labor or “literally being raped for money,” occurs “in our midst” in communities throughout Northeast Ohio, he said.
“It’s down the street at a coffee shop. It’s at that hotel you drive by off the freeway exit where you live. It’s in your neighborhood nail parlor or some of the farms you drive by as you use our interstates,” Dettelbach said in his hourlong speech.
Although his federal agency, the U.S. Attorney’s Office, declined to make any distinct connection between teen trafficking and the extraordinary case involving Gina DeJesus, Amanda Berry and Michelle Knight, the issue was brought to public attention by DeJesus’ mother.
In April 2004, Gina was 14 when she was last seen on her way home from Wilbur Wright Middle School near West 105th Street and Lorain Avenue in Cleveland.
Years later, after never giving up hope her daughter would be found alive, Nancy Ruiz told a Cleveland television crew in April 2012: “I always said it from the beginning: She was sold to the highest bidder.”
Dettelbach, who began his prosecution career in California in 1996, when he won convictions in a case involving 70 Thai women forced to live in “sub-human conditions” at a compound where they worked as seamstresses for no pay, told his audience Friday that the same kind of horrific conduct has happened here.
“It’s in downtown Cleveland. It’s in Willoughby Hills. It’s in North Olmsted. It’s in Mentor,” he said.
“And that’s not just conjecture or me picking on particular cities. That’s telling you the places where we discovered some of this conduct and cases we have already prosecuted.”
In a meeting in Akron last May with reporters and staff members of the Beacon Journal editorial pages, Dettelbach told a similarly chilling story of a trafficking crime that happened a block away from his office.
In December 2011, Eric Tutstone, 44, of Cleveland, was sent to prison for 11 years for trying to sell a 16-year-old girl into prostitution to a madam for the sum of $300.
The attempted sale, Dettelbach said, took place at a Starbucks coffee shop on West Sixth Street in Cleveland’s Warehouse District.
Court records showed the girl told an FBI agent investigating the case: “When I saw Eric take the money, I knew I had just been sold.”
In another “sex for sale” trafficking case, Dettelbach said in his Beacon Journal interview, a Toledo girl who disappeared as a runaway — at the same age as Gina DeJesus when she went missing — was rescued by authorities only two blocks from where she lived.
Michael Tobin, Dettelbach’s spokesman, said there are signs the public can look for to prevent trafficking crimes.
“In general, it’s when something doesn’t look right. It can happen in a restaurant or a local nail salon,” Tobin said, “when someone is not allowed to talk, or are being intimidated, or appear to be in fear.”
In Friday’s speech in Cleveland, Dettelbach used the stunning example of the Thai women who were kept in forced labor in a guarded compound. It was surrounded by a barbed-wire fence with the wire pointed inward, he said, “so that nobody could get out.”
Tobin urged anyone suspecting such illegal conduct to make the first call to the FBI: 216-522-1400 in the Cleveland area or 330-535-6156 in the Akron area.
