Mexican Prostitution Ring Trapped Girls In NYC Apartments: Feds

NEW YORK, NY — A group of men used romance, false promises and rape to draw young girls into a Mexican sex trafficking ring that left them trapped in New York City apartments, federal authorities alleged on Friday.

Federal prosecutors in Manhattan have charged eight men from Mexico and New York, including four extradited from Mexico in about the last week, who ran a prostitution scheme that ferried women and girls to johns in New York and surrounding states for more than a decade.

"The scope of devastation these defendants allegedy inflicted on countless victims is beyond comprehension," Geoffrey Berman, the U.S. attorney for New York's Southern District, said in a statement. "But now they face significant criminal charges in an American court, and will have to answer for their allegedly reprensible actions."

The men — Efrain Granados-Corona, Emilio Rojas-Romero, Alan Romero-Granados, Pedro Rojas-Romero, Raul Romero-Granados, Isaac Lomeli-Rivera, Julio Sainz-Flores and Juan Romero-Granados — trafficked women and girls largely as a family business from at least 2000 to 2016, when they were first indicted.

Using romantic promises, rape and other methods, the men would separate the victims — many of them minors — from their families and trap them in apartments without food, prosecutors said.

The women were allegedly told they owed a debt they would have to repay through prostitution. The men first forced them to see at least 20 to 40 customers a day in Mexico City, prosecutors said. They'd allegedly track the number of johns the victims saw by monitoring them and even counting the number of condoms they were given.

Eventually the men would have the women and girls smuggled into the U.S. and taken to New York City, where many lived in shared apartments and were forbidden from talking to each other, prosecutors said.

Once there, the traffickers forced them to work weeklong shifts in brothels or had them driven to customers' houses, where the johns usually paid $30 to $35 for 15 minutes of sex, according to the indictment. This allegedly happened in New York and other nearby states including Connecticut, New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia and Delaware.

As when they were in Mexico, the women and girls had to hand over any money they earned to the traffickers, who would then send some of it back to their family and associates in Mexico, prosecutors said.

The eight men together face 23 criminal charges and could each face life in prison if convicted, prosecutors said.

(Lead image: Photo by ChameleonsEye/Shutterstock.com)