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For 2 refugees, a nightmare in captivity

Unwitting teens forced to work at 8 Mile strip club

By PATRICIA MONTEMURRI
Free Press Staff Writer

The men who would become her captors enticed her with a sunny, American-as-apple-pie tale.

Leave your family in Kiev, Ukraine, and come to learn English and work as a waitress at a seaside summer resort, they told the 19-year-old Katya, which is not her real name.
Instead, when Katya and a friend accepted the offer and flew to the U.S. in May 2004, they were put on a bus to Detroit and three days later began their life in America in a way neither of them imagined.
They were forced to work as strippers at a club on 8 Mile.
At Cheetah's on the Strip, the two teens worked from 2 p.m. to 2 a.m. six days a week. They turned over all of the money they made to their captors, who wouldn't let them keep a dollar to themselves.
The two men who had charmed them into coming to the U.S. now threatened to hurt them and kill their family members in Ukraine if they tried to flee.
For nine months, Katya and her friend, who spoke no English, lived in a Novi apartment without a phone. They could only leave the building in their captors' presence. After about nine months, they confided their story to an acquaintance at the club, who spirited them away one day to the customs office in Detroit.
It was the case that introduced metro Detroit law enforcement to the horror and dimension of human trafficking in Michigan. With their dash to freedom, Katya and her friend uncloaked a never-before-exposed underworld of sex slaves in Detroit. Investigators eventually learned that Katya's captors had enslaved 12 Eastern European women in apartments around Detroit and elsewhere, forcing them to work as strippers.
For Bridgette Carr, a newly minted lawyer living in Ann Arbor doing volunteer immigration work, the case unleashed a passion for helping victims like Katya. Carr's efforts to aid Katya and the other women eventually led to the creation of a Human Trafficking Law Clinic at the University of Michigan, the only one of its kind.
Estimates vary in trying to put a dimension on the scale of human trafficking in the U.S. It's not the same issue as human smuggling or illegal immigration. The victims of human traffickers are forced to work for the profit of their captors -- in the sex trade or as domestic servants or hair braiders in sweatshop salons, for example.
Human trafficking often includes people ensnared by prostitution at a time when the Internet has made it easier -- and more lucrative -- to solicit sex.
"When we got that first big case in 2005, it opened our eyes into what was going on," says Sandra Todaro, supervisory special agent for U.S. Homeland Security in Detroit. "We just didn't think trafficking was going on in the United States. I think the problem is much bigger than most people realize.
"You'd hear about it overseas. You don't hear about it here. We'd hear about trafficking on the southwest border with Mexico, where women who paid to be smuggled in were held captive and forced into prostitution," says Todaro. "As far as sex trafficking in the Midwest, it was kind of new for us."
Testimony by Katya led to the February 2005 arrests of Aleksandr Maksimenko, then 25, and Michail Aronov, 32, of Chicago on charges of obtaining labor and services through threats, physical restraint and aggravated sexual abuse.
Both men are in prison, while Katya is making a life for herself in the U.S.
Tales of domestic trafficking often start with promises of a better life. Katya met the men in Kiev, where Maksimenko's father operated a nightclub. "I knew them, and they kept telling this great story about how I could help my family and earn some money. They said we'll pay your plane ticket," recounted Katya.
Katya and her friend flew together in May 2004 to London, and London to Washington, D.C. At the airport, they were met by Maksimenko and Aronov, with a change in plans.
"They were very nice, and they put us on a bus to Detroit and said we'll meet you in Detroit," says Katya. And the men did, whisking them to a hotel in Livonia. The men asked the women for their passports, which they handed over, believing the story that they were needed for paperwork.
"Their faces changed" then, says Katya. "They said because we brought you here, you will give us $25,000 and we have three months to do it."
"You are going to work at strip clubs in Detroit. We drop you there. You don't tell them who you are, where you are from," she recalls. "Everything you make, you're going to give us."
The men stood by as the women called home to assure family they had arrived safely. The men warned them not to say anything or that their families would suffer.
"We were scared. We don't even know what to do," Katya recalls.
On their third day in the city, the men drove them to Cheetah's, on 8 Mile between Southfield and Evergreen in northwest Detroit. They had bought them stripper outfits and had other dancers coach them on how to perform onstage, and do a private dance for a customer. Every day, their captors picked them up for work. At shift's end, the women turned over their daily take -- $300 to $1,000 a day. Drinking helped them get through the shifts.
"You would dance $20 a dance," says Katya. "Everything we made, we put in a wallet. We would give the house mom $5, the deejay $20, and the bouncers $5 or $10."
And when Maksimenko came to pick them up, he'd tell them to "count and pass me the money."
"If you keep $5 or $1, you'll be sorry," he told them.
She didn't know any English. Her stage name was Angela.
"I could hardly say anything. It took me four months before I could say anything ... and nothing I could use in the street" to get away, Katya says.
When Katya and her friend argued with their captors, the men threatened to put them out on the street as prostitutes.
And there were physical assaults. Katya sometimes heard her crying roommate try to fend off Maksimenko; she said he pushed her friend into a shower and raped her. "I could hear her scream, and she would tell me how she hated everything," recalled Katya. "That's how we first started thinking about running (away).
"If they're going shoot us, then they'll shoot running."
Little by little, the women were learning English. At the strip club, they came to confide in one customer, who wanted to help them escape. The women didn't even know their own address. But Katya spotted a Victoria's Secret catalogue left in a corridor of the apartment building and grabbed it. It had an address on it, and she showed it to their friend at the club.
After a Saturday night at work, Maksimenko and Aronov drove the women to their apartment and left.
"We packed our clothes in garbage bags at 4 a.m. and waited by our door until 6 a.m.," she says. That's when the knock on the door signaled that their friend had come to rescue them. It was Feb. 13, 2005, and their friend took them to a hotel that Sunday as they tried to figure out what to do next.
On Monday morning, their friend took them to federal authorities in downtown Detroit.
Based on the women's stories, federal authorities also freed two other Ukrainian women working at Cheetah's as strippers enslaved to Maksimenko and Aronov.
Maksimenko pled guilty to involuntary servitude, alien smuggling conspiracy and money laundering. He is serving a prison sentence of 14 years and was ordered to pay restitution of $1.57 million to the women he had enslaved. Aronov, a Lithuanian citizen, is serving a 71/2-year sentence. He was ordered to pay $1 million in restitution. When they were arrested, federal agents seized more than $500,000 from the rafters of Maksimenko's home and from safe deposit boxes.
Six other people pleaded guilty in the case, including Maksimenko's wife, mother and stepmother.
The women had kept detailed logs of what they earned and turned over to their captors. Those logs helped investigators work out restitution payments to the women, from proceeds recovered during their captors' arrests and penalties assessed against them.
Katya and the other Ukrainian women were helped through the Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000 (TVPA). That law made them eligible for services available to refugees, including cash assistance and Medicaid. It also can provide crisis counseling and short-term housing for victims' protection.
Katya is engaged to be married soon, is taking college classes and thinking about a career in nursing or maybe working for the FBI.
"I'm just lucky that nothing bad happened to me," says Katya. "It could have been much worse."