Human Trafficking: Too Ugly for Corporate Media to Report On

Preorder Mike Papantonio's latest legal thriller 'Inhuman Trafficking' today

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

The United States is currently going through many crises. We have of course the ongoing pandemic. We still have an opioid crisis out there. But there is another one that is not getting the attention that it deserves, and that is the human trafficking crisis here in the United States. I have Mike Papantonio with me. Mike has a new book coming out very soon here. It's called Inhuman Trafficking, and this is your fourth novel in recent years, actually. So I know you've worked on human trafficking cases. You've now turned it into this book. So give us just kind of the quick picture without giving too much away.

Yeah. When you can tell a story... It's a fiction book, but it's based on absolute... Most of everything in the book is true in one form or another. And what I do is I take cases. For example, we filed the first national human trafficking case up in Ohio, where we're trying to spin that into what we call an MDL. That's a multi-district litigation group where all the lawyers in the country converge, and we try to solve the problem. So we filed that, and in the story in this book, Inhuman Trafficking, is driven by what we filed. You can almost take our complaint that we filed in federal court, and you could follow that complaint and understand what the book is about, in the sense that this particular book focuses on the same characters that if you've read the other novels... You have Deke, you have [Carol Morris 00:01:50]. You've got all the same characters in this book, but this is a little more intense.

And the other books have had terrible tragedies, but I don't know how it gets any more tragic than human trafficking. So what we've done is taken a couple of cases that we're familiar with. One case happened right down the road, where you had people in the Ukraine that were recruited to come over here to the United States and supposedly to move into the restaurant business. They were supposed to be greeters. They're supposed to learn the service industry in the United States. So you would have the traffickers go to the Ukraine. They would set up applications and interviews as if they're going to get this job here in the United States. And they'd bring them over here, and they'd say, "Well, okay. I need your passport, I need your identification, and I'll keep your money for you and just give you money as you need it."

And we're having to do that because of the immigration laws, and of course it was nonsense. But they would the girls working as greeters at a restaurant maybe for two weeks, and then they would say, "Well, would you like to make some more money? Because oh, by the way, we happen to also own a strip club right down the road. And if you're a greeter in the strip club, you'll make more money there in the strip club." And then two weeks later, "Oh, by the way, if you don't mind taking off your clothes and going up on the pole and dancing, you're going to make more money." And then two weeks later, "Oh, by the way, Tom out here in the audience wants to take you on a date," and it's a step-up process. And in each process, they're making more money.

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