Whole Life Times: The Joy of Freedom

At her job today, Thonglim treasures her hard-won ability to “work or not as I please, just like other normal people.” Photo: Steve Shea

January 2005

The Joy of Freedom

Escapee from Woodland Hills exploitation speaks out

by Matthew Heller

In the Culver City condominium of a Hollywood executive and his wife, the dogs dined on chicken nuggets that the housekeeper heated for them and bananas and pears that she cut up for them. The housekeeper was forced to eat leftovers. The dogs got daily vitamins, but the housekeeper didn’t even have a doctor. At night, the weary housekeeper, a Filipina woman who worked 18 hours a day for her well-heeled employers, slept on a dog bed in the living room.

This isn’t some tale of gothic horror, but a real, worse-than-a dog’s-life case that a jury heard recently in a Santa Monica courtroom. The housekeeper, Nena Ruiz, alleged that James Jackson, a vice-president of legal affairs at Sony Corp., and his wife Elizabeth had, in effect, enslaved her, paying her only $300 for a year’s labor. The jury agreed, awarding her $825,000 in damages for involuntary servitude, false imprisonment, assault and other claims.

“Slavery still exists, and I want to tell victims they should not tolerate it and should not be afraid to seek help,” Ruiz, 60, said at a news conference after the verdict.

Ruiz wasn’t using hyperbole. Amid the plenty and progress of Los Angeles and other metropolitan areas of the United States, slavery — an institution associated with ancient Roman galleys and antebellum cotton fields — is thriving, a supply of poverty-stricken Third World victims meeting the demands of traffickers in cheap labor. “It doesn’t just happen around organized crime, but in your backyard, literally,” says Namju Cho, Communications & Policy Director with the Los Angeles-based Coalition to Abolish Slavery & Trafficking (CAST), which represents Ruiz and other trafficking victims.

There are no definitive statistics on the number of victims, in part because forced labor is so hidden and the U.S. government counts only “survivors” of trafficking rather than the actual number of victimized persons. According to the Department of Justice, the U.S. Government estimates that 14,500 to 17,500 people are trafficked into the U.S. each year. According to the September 2004 independent report “Hidden Slaves: Forced Labor in the United States,” the media reported 131 cases in the past five years involving 19,254 men, women and children.

The report — compiled by the Washington, D.C.-based group, Free the Slaves and the Human Rights Center at UC-Berkeley — identified China, Mexico and Vietnam as the leading source countries of the enslaved. Victims toil in areas of the U.S. economy with a high demand for cheap labor, including brothels, restaurants, hotels, sweatshops and agricultural fields. In this underground world, the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution outlawing slavery doesn’t seem to apply.

Frequently, the trafficker is a naturalized U.S. citizen who originates from the same country as the trafficked — Elizabeth Jackson, like Ruiz, is a native of the Philippines. Their own success in “making it” in America only adds to the appeal of their sales pitch to a compatriot struggling to break out of Third World poverty. If the trafficker comes from a higher social class or caste, they can use that, too. “Class differences... are used by traffickers to exploit victims,” observes Michael J. Gennaco, a former federal prosecutor in Los Angeles who is a CAST board member.

Along with Florida, New York and Texas, California leads the way in forced labor operations with its large immigrant communities. In 1995, a major bust in El Monte, a Los Angeles suburb, graphically illustrated the seriousness of the problem. In a cockroach-infested compound fenced off from the outside world by barbed wire, approximately 72 workers, mostly Thai women, had been forced to sew garments for at least 16 hours a day.

Nena Ruiz was not available for an interview, Cho says, due to a pending criminal investigation and her ongoing civil case. But what happened to Ruiz revived the memories of another CAST client, a Thai woman who agreed to be interviewed about her own nightmare as a slave in L.A. “I want everybody to know about it,” the woman explains. “I want to prevent it from happening again.”

How It Happens

Now 47 years old, Thonglim Kamphiranon is diminutive, with deepset eyes and short, wiry dark hair. She speaks some English, but still needs an interpreter when she is interviewed. As she talks about her years of servitude, she crosses her arms in front of her as if trying to keep the pain at bay. When a painful memory does surface, she shakes her head, a gesture that suggests she is chasing it away.

Sometimes, she doesn’t need words to evoke the indignities that she suffered at the hands of her employer, a Thai restaurant owner named Supawan Veerapol. Asked to describe how she would serve Supawan, she takes a cup of coffee, gets down on her knees and crawls across the floor. “It was almost like she was from the royal family [of Thailand],” she says, the shame of it creasing her face.

Thonglim, in fact, is related to Supawan, whose sister married Thonglim’s brother, but Supawan’s family belonged to a higher social caste. The glamorous-looking Supawan had become the common-law wife of Thailand’s ambassador to Sweden. “She needed to make people who worked for her feel like her servants,” Thonglim believes.

During the interview, Thonglim describes a familiar Third World path to servitude. She left school in Thailand after the fourth grade to help her father in his work as a school janitor. At the age of 20, she married a businessman. But he had an affair, and, after 10 years of marriage, she divorced him. She was desperately short of money to care for their two children when she agreed to work for Supawan in the U.S.

Supawan would pay her 6,000 baht a month in Thai currency and give her free room and board. “She said, ‘Since you’ll have no expenses, you can send money back to support your kids,” Thonglim recalls. She had “no idea” that 6,000 baht converted into only $240, $100 of which would be deducted in each of the first five months of employment. But it was still more than she could earn in Thailand.

After flying to Los Angeles in August 1989, Thonglim settled into an arduous routine, working 12 hours a day at Supawan’s restaurant in a Woodland Hills strip mall, and another six each day in Supawan’s home. In 1991, she briefly returned to Thailand after her mother, who had been taking care of her children, died. She arranged for the children to live with her sister in a house on land owned by Supawan. Back at the Gulf of Siam restaurant, Thonglim had up to a dozen co-workers and, she says, “We enjoyed each other’s company.” Supawan left the management of the business to a niece, only showing up herself to pick up the day’s proceeds.

But by 1995, the staff was down to three women — Nobi Saeieo, Somkhit Yindiphot and Thonglim. Supawan, who had to wait tables herself, would clash frequently with Nobi, even physically attacking her in the strip mall parking lot. After one final fight, Nobi was able to return to Thailand after her sister contacted the Thai consulate. “She didn’t care about anything else,” Thonglim says.

As she starts to recall life after Nobi’s departure, Thonglim’s emotions overwhelm her. Crying, her arms uncrossed, she gropes for words. “She did too much to me,” she manages to say, referring to Supawan. “I’m still very upset when I think about it.”

Thonglim’s wages had gone up by $40 a year to $600 a month, two-thirds of which Thonglim, of necessity, entrusted to Supawan to send back home (though Thonglim’s relatives insist much of that money never arrived). Thonglim’s duties also included helping with the care of Supawan’s young son and a disabled niece. The demands from her boss were relentless. “When I was exhausted [after working at the restaurant], she would knock on my door and ask, ‘Can you clean my car?’” Thonglim says. Sometimes, she would have to clean all three of Supawan’s Mercedes’. When she had a severe toothache from an infected molar, Supawan lied to her, saying no dentist would see her for three weeks. She gulped down some Tylenol and gouged the tooth out with a metal nail file.

As part of a regime of isolation, Supawan barred her workers from going to stores, speaking to her houseguests and customers, or using the telephone. Thonglim had long ago overstayed her visa, and Supawan instilled her with a fear of the police. She could be arrested and deported simply for riding on a bus, Supawan told her. In Thonglim’s prison without walls, she was convinced her family would be harmed if she tried to leave.

“She said she could even kill them,” Thonglim says, expressing her anguish by pounding her fist into her hand. “She said you only pay 5,000 baht to have someone killed.”

In 1997, Supawan sold the Gulf of Siam to Peter Thipp, a Thai business rival who renamed the restaurant the Bangkok Princess and kept Thonglim and Somkhit on to work there. The women, who were still living with and serving Supawan at her Woodland Hills home, told Thipp of their mistreatment. Shocked, he helped them form a plan of escape. “I just wanted to get out of there,” Thonglim says. “I had no fear left.”

Early one morning in January 1998 when Supawan was away, Thonglim and Somkhit left the house and got into Thipp’s car which he had parked around the corner. As they drove off, Thonglim pressed her hands together. “I prayed,” she remembers, “that I would never have to come back again.”

Free at Last

Thonglim didn’t have to come back. The Thai Community Development Center in Hollywood provided her and Somkhit with shelter and referred them to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, which had prosecuted the El Monte sweatshop case. In October 1998, a federal grand jury indicted Supawan on charges that she enslaved Thonglim, Somkhit and Nobi, who had returned from Thailand to help with the case against her former boss.

At Supawan’s trial in July 1999, all three women testified. The defense claimed Thipp had encouraged them to make false allegations, and that they were free to come and go as they pleased. But the jury convicted Supawan of involuntary servitude in Nobi’s case, and of harboring illegal immigrants in the cases of Thonglim and Somkhit. The ambassador’s wife was sentenced to more than eight years in prison and ordered to pay Nobi more than $71,000 in back wages.

To be convicted of involuntary servitude, a trafficker has to physically harm or threaten to physically harm the victim. “I think the charges of involuntary servitude were proved as to all three of [the victims],” says Michael Gennaco, the lead prosecutor on the case.

After Supawan’s convictions, Congress addressed the trafficking problem in 2000 with a major piece of legislation. For a new crime of forced labor, the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act (TVPA) broadened the definition of “coercion” to include psychological manipulation that causes a victim to believe he or she will “suffer serious harm or physical restraint.” The law has “lowered the barriers with regard to getting convictions,” Gennaco says. Since January 2001, federal prosecutors have convicted or secured jail time for more than 70 defendants in slavery cases.

TVPA allows victims of “a severe form of trafficking” to stay in the U.S. under a temporary “T” visa, even if they entered the country illegally. In 2003, the government issued 297 of these visas to trafficking survivors. The number was well under the available quota and critics say the application process is slow and cumbersome. “The United States is at a critical juncture in its struggle to end forced labor,” the recent “Hidden Slaves” report says, arguing for “new measures that will further strengthen eradication of this egregious practice.”

As Ruiz’ case shows, the civil courts also are available to victims. In November, an Ecuadorian national filed an involuntary servitude case against a New York woman for allegedly forcing her to work as a nanny and housekeeper. Linda Velez claims she got only $200 for her two years of labor.

Thonglim, meanwhile, didn’t get any financial compensation for her ordeal. But she has a “T” visa and a job working as a cook at a Thai restaurant in a Hollywood strip mall. The work is tough, the hours long, but she makes enough to pay the rent on the one-bedroom apartment she shares with her son and her old companion in misery, Somkhit Yindiphot. And the boss doesn’t mind if she takes the occasional day off. Some 15 years after she first left Thailand, Thonglim Kamphiranon is enjoying some contentment.

“I have peace of mind,” she says with a warm smile. “I can go to work or not as I please, just like other normal people.”

Matthew Heller is a Los Angeles-based investigative journalist. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the LA Weekly, and New Times.

Recommend this page to a friend

Top Ten pages recommended to friends: