Human Trafficking

Editor’s Note: This is the second of a three-part series on Freedom13 and its ministry to human trafficking victims and survivors, and the issue of human trafficking in Louisiana.

Local human trafficking ministry Freedom13 and its founder Lindsey Crawford, of Ruston, can step in and begin offering guidance, support and healing to victims.

It’s why they kicked off their Campaign13 this week. The fundraising project will be ongoing until August 13, but there is much work to be done beyond that date.

And while Freedom13 and other organizations affiliated with human trafficking can quote statistics and enlighten the public with awareness, there are names and real stories to be told.

That’s why Crawford invited John Asmussen, a criminal investigator with the Louisiana State Police in the Monroe Field Office., to put a face on human trafficking. He was the guest speaker at the Campaign13 event held Tuesday evening at Temple Baptist Church in Ruston.

What does a human trafficker look like? What does a victim look like?

“Oftentimes it’s the people you least expect, or we should least expect. It’s the ones who have the most trust in our communities,” Asmussen said about traffickers.

As for victims, “They can be peers, they can be friends, and they are oftentimes recruited through high schools or juvenile detention centers,” he said.

“It’s not always the what you see on a TV show where the older male subject is the pimp,” Asmussen continued. “Or that they are easily identifiable through all sorts of criminal activities. It can be like that, but traffickers can also be regular people.”

According to Polaris Project, a non-governmental, non-profit organization founded to battle sex and labor trafficking, of the sex trafficking situations reported to the National Human Trafficking Hotline in 2019, the top two ways that sex trafficking victims were recruited into their situations were through intimate partners or family members.

Human traffickers prey on victims and take advantage of their desire for love and affection. Asmussen calls it an “easy win” for the predators — they target individuals who are easily manipulated. Often, the victim is innocently looking for attention.

“Maybe they’ve grown up in an abusive home, and if you show that person just a little bit of attention and a little bit of love and they will cling to you,” he said. “They will continue to do whatever you ask them to do.”

It almost becomes a case of Stockholm syndrome, in which those held captive develop a psychological bond with those holding them hostage.

That makes it tough for law enforcement to pry information from victims, making it even more difficult to prosecute traffickers. Without eye witness testimony from victims, there won’t be a conviction in most cases. Statutes under law require those who have been exploited to be cooperative. That’s a catch-22 for investigators.

“Victims don’t trust law enforcement. They tend to only trust the person who has been pimping them out in sex trade,” Asmussen said. “There’s also a lot of guilt and shame involved, which makes it less likely for them to come forward.”

For law enforcement to differentiate between victims and criminals can be quite difficult as well, due to the fact that in a number of cases the trafficker was a victim at some point.

“Then you have cases where some of these people being forced to engage in sexual acts are also being forced to recruit others for the trafficking ring,” Asmussen explained.

A prime example is a case investigated jointly in Monroe and Jackson, Miss., involving a human trafficking ring led by a single individual.

In the summer of 2016, Asmussen said the FBI field office in Monroe received a call from Judge Sharon Marchman of Monroe regarding a letter she received from a 16-year-old at Green Oaks Detention Center explaining why she had returned to jail and tested positive for drugs. In the letter, the teen explained that she was being forced to prostitute herself “for her pimp.”

Marchman asked the FBI to at least make contact with the teen. The young girl explained to law enforcement that she was held in a Monroe hotel for over 30 days, force-fed food and drugs and forced to have sex with a countless number of men, according to Asmussen.

“She was broken. It took a lot of time to build a rapport with her and gain her trust enough for her to come clean and tell us everything she knew,” he said.

“The juvenile only knew the pimp’s nickname, ‘Big Bank.’ And that he is from Mississippi. We kept thinking that she knew who he really was, some sort of name or phone number that could help us identify him.”

She didn’t know.

An intelligence analyst with the FBI began to search data bases for any information related to “Big Bank.” They found one reference buried in a case file in Jackson, Miss., regarding the nickname. The case file had a photo of Big Bank, which Asmussen said was shown to the teen, who then identified him as her pimp.

They finally had Big Bank, Willie Blackmon. What they also found out by working with the Jackson FBI office was that Blackmon was part of a larger human trafficking ring that operated in 11 states: Louisiana, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, Kansas, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee.

They began to identify patterns of posts to known prostitution websites by members of this group. The brazen attempts to recruit out in the open is what took down Blackmon. According to Asmussen, he used his Facebook account to try to recruit a 15-year-old target from Tennessee to come work for his crew. The FBI task force obtained a warrant for Blackmon’s private messages on Facebook and developed enough evidence to take him down.

Blackmon was arrested in February of 2017 and went to trial in November of 2018. A jury convicted him in less than 30 minutes of deliberation, and Judge Carlton Reeves sentenced him to 384 months (32 years) in federal prison.

One drawback from that particular case that Asmussen said is common is the fact that most traffickers have a hierarchy among their victims. There is usually one person they trust most which becomes what they call a “bottom.” This person is used for recruiting and training other victims. Blackmon’s bottom was a 33-year-old female by the name of Lindsey Hutto.

The FBI felt Hutto was just as culpable as Blackmon in putting together the trafficking ring and keeping the girls hostage. Hutto faced no charges in the Blackmon case due to her claims that she was a victim of trafficking herself.

As for this particular teen victim and other victims just like her, this is where ministries like Freedom13 step in and pick up the pieces. The damage has been done, but thanks to volunteers like Crawford, they have a fighting chance to regain dignity and hope for a better adult life.

Asmussen said there are more like Big Banks out there, and it’s up to law enforcement, prosecutors and legislators to team up to fight this growing epidemic.