Denver has spent the past four years building a robust investigative team to tackle hard-to-make human and labor trafficking cases, and the payoff is coming through convictions.
One of those cases was a hard-to-come-by labor trafficking conviction this year, the first in Denver. The office currently has 38 open trafficking cases, and worked with city officials to pass the new massage business ordinance.
Much of the success lies in a new avenue of investigation — a collaboration with community nonprofits that are contacted by women in trouble, often Chinese women who were trafficked from their native country or after they arrived in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and other major U.
In some cases, law officers meet with community service providers ahead of a trafficking bust, in part so that the nonprofit is ready to help victims find food and shelter. Department of Justice. Under the new massage business ordinance, operators must submit to a vetting process before they can open their doors, an effort to combat money laundering and wage theft. Without the new law, and the manpower to complete months of investigative work, it was often the case that the women who worked in illicit spas were the ones busted instead of the leaders funding the operation, laundering money and coercing women into prostitution, Mullin said.
In recent years, Aurora city officials have alerted Denver officials that a massage business with history of trafficking or prostitution — information collected at the time of a licensing application — was trying to open in Denver, Mullin said. The defendants trafficked women from China to engage in sex acts with customers, Denver District Attorney Beth McCann said when the indictment was announced.
