[Stop-traffic] News/USA: Obstruction Is Charged in Sex Slavery Case

[stop-traffic@friends-partners.org]

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/03/nyregion/03slave.html

Excerpt
New York Times 

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February 3, 2004
Obstruction Is Charged in Sex Slavery Case
By WILLIAM GLABERSON
 
n November, a federal immigration agent flashed his badge at the door of a Queens apartment and told a frightened young woman from South Korea that he was there to deport her.

The woman had been cooperating with the police against the owners of a Flushing bar that she said had held her captive in a case of human trafficking, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn said yesterday. The woman said they beat her and tried to coerce her to become a prostitute to pay back an ever-growing debt. 

The immigration agent, Nisim Yushuvayev, was legitimate. But his threats were not, the prosecutors said in an obstruction-of-justice complaint they filed against him yesterday. They said he was in league with the bar owners to spirit the woman out of the country to keep her from providing prosecutors with more information against him. 

The story of the agent and the young South Korean woman provided a glimpse of the shadowy world of forced labor and what the prosecutors described as sex slavery in New York City. The prosecutors said the bar owners, Wun and Kyongja Kang, used promises of a better life in the United States to entice two young women from Seoul to work at the bar, the Renaissance Bar & Room Café in Flushing.