Officials Warn of Growing Problem With Human Sex Trafficking in Suffolk County

“Operation Yacht Club” is the name law enforcement officials would give to a 2018 human trafficking case on Long Island and the region that would eventually see a dozen convictions on federal sex-trafficking charges — a successful outcome that highlighted an insidious sex trafficking crisis on Long Island, and one that has a presence on the East End.

A key moment in the Operation Yacht Club investigation occurred when an East Hampton Town Police officer made a traffic stop of a vehicle whose occupants were later determined to be a trafficker and a young woman being transported to an East End client.

Details from that case and several others were highlighted by Suffolk County Police Detective James Johnson, and others, at a September 30 conference on sex trafficking held at Brookhaven Town Hall in Farmingville called “Make it Stop: Human Trafficking — the Sad Reality.” The conference was organized by the town’s Division of Women’s Services.

The event drew in numerous law enforcement officials and nonprofit advocates from around Suffolk County to discuss what event emcee and retired Suffolk County Supreme Court Judge Marion McNulty called “this awful scourge” of human trafficking across Long Island.

Johnson is an investigator with SCPD’s Human Trafficking Investigations Unit, which was created in 2018 to address a growing sex-trafficking crisis on Long Island that, to an extent, has been fueled by and tracks with an opioid crisis beginning around 2008. He is also assigned to a Federal Bureau of Investigation task force to work with larger, federal cases that involve interstate trafficking of the victims “that tie into local cases here,” he said.

“The officer from the East Hampton Police Department did a fantastic job,” said Johnson in response to follow-up questions sent to him after the conference about the Yacht Club case. “The information garnered during that stop proved invaluable to our larger investigation. Each defendant in the case either pleaded guilty or was found guilty at trial.”

At the conference, Johnson provided attendees with a number of jarring details about Operation Yacht Club, including information that the victims had been tattooed, or “branded” with depictions of an anchor to indicate that, “these are our girls.”

That case exemplified how most locally-based sex trafficking rings don’t involve girls being grabbed off the street and imprisoned in dungeons — but are rather focused on targeting vulnerable local victims who are lured into the ring, in this case via an online video from musician-traffickers who called themselves “The Yacht Club Band,” and promoted a sort of party-time appeal to young women.

Ninety-one percent of all human trafficking cases involve girls or young women.

As several law enforcement officials stressed at the conference, this is a problem largely hiding in plain sight and one that, more often than not, finds a trafficker exploiting a young person with some sort of preexisting vulnerability — from low self-esteem to an existing drug problem to a difficult home life — which a trafficker will exploit by making promises of visits to the nail salon, or a new wardrobe, a stable living situation, and in all too many cases, an unlimited supply of drugs, whether it’s heroin, fentanyl, cocaine or marijuana. For human sex traffickers, selling young women is a highly profitable and “renewable” resource, unlike drugs, that only requires that a trafficker pay for a hotel room for the victim.

The Yacht Club trafficking ring would eventually involve about 30 young women, the youngest of whom was 12 years old, said Johnson.

“We were the pivot,” said Captain Christopher Anderson of the East Hampton Town Police Department by way of explaining his agency’s role in helping break up that ring. “We were contacted by Suffolk PD regarding some interactions that we had with individuals, and we were able to provide information by way of background that was obviously good info.

“If you look at these cases,” he added, “they are similar in nature to narcotics investigations, where an officer, a unit has a good target, but you just don’t have enough yet to advance the investigation — it just takes one interaction, one nugget of info on the officer’s part.”

The human trafficking phenomenon on Long Island, said Anderson, “is like the drug culture — a lot of people would be shocked, or are shocked, when they hear about fentanyl in their communities because they never look in those dark crevices and corners of society, but it’s there. So yes, it is there. Listen — our transient summer population, with that comes unique sets of circumstances, crimes and problems that roll in seasonally and roll out seasonally.”

Some of the girls rescued in the Yacht Club case have since died, said Johnson, “others are doing well.”

Ongoing Problem

About a week before the trafficking conference, the U.S. Department of Justice announced two new human trafficking indictments, including a multiple count indictment against Lamont Young, who is charged with six sex trafficking crimes, including trafficking a minor.

The indictment identifies that the trafficking ring was in Suffolk County and involved five women in a case that spans from 2011 to 2021.

In a September 27 letter to U.S. Magistrate Judge James Wicks of the Eastern District of New York asking that Young be held without bail, U.S. Attorney Breon Peace alleged that “between approximately 2011 and November 2021, the defendant operated as a ‘pimp’ who used violence and the threat of violence to compel the commission of commercial sex acts by others, including by at least one minor, for his financial benefit.”

Like the Yacht Club case, the young women were given tattoos to identify that they “belonged” to Young.

The indictment document laying out the charges against Young identifies several Suffolk County motels where he is alleged to have based his trafficking operation.

A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Eastern District, John Marzulli could not comment on any aspect of the Young case beyond what was in the indictment.

But, speaking generally about sex trafficking on the East End, Johnson said there was an “uptick in the summer months,” in reports of sex trafficking on the East End, at short-term vacation rentals and elsewhere, based on information provided by local police.

He also noted that often, human trafficking referrals that emanate from the East End, when investigated, were actually found to be labor- and wage-theft related, and involved a vulnerable immigrant workforce that arrives annually, and not necessarily sexual exploitation.

Erin Meunkle is an investigator and corrections officer with the Suffolk County Sheriff’s Office who works within the two Suffolk County jails, in Yaphank and Riverside. She and a small staff gather intelligence from inmates and victims about human trafficking.

Based on what she’s learned over the past five years about the plague of child sex trafficking in the county, Meunkle told the assembled crowd, “I can bet that within 5 miles of where we’re sitting right now, someone is being trafficked.”

Other speakers noted that the human sex-trafficking phenomenon is going on at hotels all across Long Island — from low-budget flophouses to well-known higher-end hotels chains and short-term house rentals.

“Trafficking happens everywhere,” said Vanessa McEvoy, a prosecutor with the Suffolk County District Attorney’s office, “in every town in the United States, including Suffolk County.”

Anderson didn’t specify any particular sex trafficking incidents since 2018 that East Hampton Town Police were involved with, but he did highlight that “any addictions, any problems, anything that anyone is involved with is going to roll with them,” during the high-season summer months, and that included parties at Airbnb rentals, he said, where there have been shootings — and possibly other activities.

“What else other than guns is going on at these places?” he said.

“There is an element that does exist out here,” Anderson added, but with a qualifier: “Do we have a large portion of our population that reports things to us that they think is human trafficking? Quite frankly, no.”

Officers do receive training while at the police academy to identify traffickers — a lot more training nowadays, said Anderson, as he described the challenges for both citizens and police officers to pick up on signals that someone might be in a situation where they’re being trafficked.

“It’s always something that’s just a little bit aloof,” he said.

Johnson highlighted that it’s a problem often hiding in plain sight. A person may see a victim at a supermarket, at a store, walking along a road, he said, and “may not realize that’s who they are“ — not just a homeless person, or an addict, or person down on their luck — but a victim.

Sea Change in Sex Trafficking Laws and Protocols

The alarms raised throughout the conference about a growing problem in child sex trafficking on Long Island also signaled a vigorous and locally-driven effort afoot to end it. That effort has been ramped up considerably following changes in state law and county law enforcement protocols when it comes to dealing with child prostitution more as a human rights issue than a criminal one. As Suffolk County District Attorney Ray Tierney noted recently, county prosecutors “are just beginning to scratch the surface” of the crisis.

The New York State Interagency Task Force on Human Trafficking was created in 2007 to address the trafficking problem in the state. In 2018, the agency’s annual report noted changes in state law that had been implemented that year, which reformed New York’s child sex trafficking laws to punish any would-be trafficker who forced anyone under 21 into sex trafficking work.

The state implemented a program called Safe Harbor in 2008 that changed the way child welfare agencies and courts dealt with victims of sex trafficking. Those two reforms together helped give rise to a sharp increase in human sex trafficking cases and convictions over the past six years since the Yacht Club case.

Before 2018, Johnson relayed, there had been a total of two arrests and two convictions for human sex trafficking in the entire history of Suffolk County.

Since 2018, 177 people have been arrested on human sex trafficking charges in Suffolk County, 847 charges have been filed, more than 300 indictments issued — and 165 convictions put in the book.

Following changes to state law in 2018, prosecutors no longer had to rely on testimony from often-reluctant victims of sex trafficking that they had been forced or coerced into prostitution against their will.

That reform to child sex trafficking laws in the state followed on broader policy adjustments that ensued in jails and courts resulting from the 2008 Safe Harbor program implemented by the state Office of Children and Family Services.

Prior to 2008, prostitution was treated first as a quality-of-life issue in communities that had to deal with it in their local hotels and streets, at massage parlors and elsewhere — even when victims were dealing with multiple traumas, were abused by their trafficker, were given unlimited amounts of drugs but no food, were exposed to sexually transmitted diseases and further trauma.

Until 2008, they were seen as criminals first and victims second under the law. The Safe Harbor Act of 2008 remedied that longstanding problem where “sexually exploited youth didn’t get protection of Family Court and were instead prosecuted criminally rather than being treated as victims who need supportive services,” said Stephanie Muller, a social worker at EAC Safe Harbor, which assists at-risk youth or those who have been impacted by sex trafficking. EAC stands for Empower, Assist, Care. As part of the reform movement in sex trafficking prosecutions, a special court was established to deal specifically with sex trafficking cases involving exploited and vulnerable victims of the scourge.

And when Rodney Harrison was tapped to be Suffolk County’s new police commissioner in late 2021, he said one of the first things he realized was that the Suffolk County Police Department was “woefully understaffed to deal with the problem.” Seven detectives were deployed just to deal with human sex trafficking, but more than the additional manpower, he said, was a renewed emphasis on preventing girls from being caught up in sex trafficking in the first place.

Those changes would ripple through to the Suffolk County jails, where, said Muenkle, young trafficking victims would wind up in the same facility as their trafficker — or the trafficker who was on the outside would bail out the victim without their consent or knowledge, and further the victim’s cycle of trauma. Female inmates will also try to recruit new victims on behalf of traffickers on the outside

Furthering the county’s efforts to tackle the trafficking problem locally, Muenkle’s role as a jailhouse trafficking specialist was formalized in 2019 when the Suffolk County Sheriff’s Anti-Tracking Initiative (SATI) was established as a division of the Sheriff’s Intelligence Bureau.

That helped investigators to gather jailhouse intelligence, for example, on one particularly vicious patron of trafficking victims, Andy Frey, whose victims were so desperate to escape the violence and trauma that one of them jumped from a car moving at 40 mph on William Floyd Parkway.

Frey would bring his victims to hotels but also county parks, including Cathedral Pines in Middle Island, said Johnson. He’s awaiting sentencing on multiple charges thanks in part to intelligence gathered at the jails: Inmates there had warned investigators, “saying how bad this guy was with his sex workers,” said Johnson.

Muenkle noted that the reforms also helped stem the trafficking that would continue inside the jail: A victim might, for example, find that someone had been putting money into their jail account — and then find themselves owned, because of the debt to the trafficker.

Now, said Muenkle, victims are identified when they enter the system and are protected from further exploitation.

Still, Johnson and other speakers noted the difficulty in gaining the trust of victims who had been rescued from motels by law enforcement. “Often these victims are not happy to see us,” said Johnson.

Prosecutions that rely solely on the testimony of victims of sex trafficking often don’t go anywhere, said Tierney. Instead, prosecutors will follow the money — the money laundering — and build their cases on crimes that are ancillary to the core human trafficking scheme, given the difficulties of coaxing victims to testify against their former traffickers.

The problem for investigators and prosecutors is that victims often see the police as the enemy that will undo whatever sense of stability the trafficker had provided for them, which creates the challenge of having to gain the victim’s trust so prosecutors can move forward with cases.

Amanda Burke is a member Tierney’s recently created Hate Crimes, Elder Abuse, Anti-Bias and Human Trafficking unit, known as “HEAT,” which deals with vulnerable communities and individuals, including trafficked females.

She echoed a message from Tierney that the focus of HEAT was on “the strong intersection between child abuse and trafficking, and gang violence and trafficking.”

“Children are vulnerable, and children are in demand,” McEvoy said. “They want to buy children.”

The key elements of human sex trafficking are fraud, force and coercion, and the phenomenon doesn’t hew to any particular socioeconomic group — wealthy families can be just as impacted by sex trafficking as by those of lesser means.

Johnson, for instance, relayed a story of an intact, two parent Cold Spring Harbor family household who lived in a million-dollar-plus home, but who had a troubled daughter that wound up being trafficked.

Violence is not always the norm when traffickers set out to groom a victim, but the threat of violence is always there, creating what’s called a “trauma bond” between the trafficked victim and the trafficker.

They are often lured in with appeals to their self-esteem via flattery, and more than half of all sex trafficking victims, 55 percent, have their first contact with their eventual trafficker via digital technology — where they may encounter a charm offensive from a trafficker promising opportunities for modeling, performing in a music video, or free visits to a nail salon, or, perhaps lure them in with the promise of a high-paying summer job in the Hamptons, said Johnson. According to an infographic presented at the conference, 65 percent of those first digital encounters between a trafficker and victim take place on Facebook.

Prior to the 2018 changes in state law, sex trafficking victims had to prove that they were forced into prostitution.

Burke explained why this had been a highly inadequate policy as she relayed a story of a girl who had been repeatedly trafficked by her mother for $200 and a carton of Newport cigarettes.

She was 6 years old, Burke said, and obviously unable to articulate to police that she was a victim who had been forced into performing sex acts with adult men. She was just doing what mom told her.

It’s a complex and nasty world of exploitation as met with manipulation, where victims don’t always see themselves as such and where the formerly trafficked, when they “age out” will sometimes become traffickers themselves — perpetuating the trauma they faced by being forced to have sex with strangers on the next set of victims.

And while human sex trafficking doesn’t typically involve girls being chained to beds and enslaved — though it does happen — several speakers noted that the “chains” that the women do face, were the ongoing trauma they endured. “You don’t need to be kidnapped and chained to a wall to be in this situation,” said Johnson. “For many, the trauma itself makes them feel chained to the exploiter.”

It’s extremely difficult, said investigators and prosecutors, to break those trauma chains.

When victims have been exploited for so long, they come to view the police with hostility, and their trafficker as some sort of protector — a kind of sex-work Stockholm Syndrome that is very tough to undo when law enforcement tries to, as Suffolk County Police Commissioner Rodney Harrison put it, ease their way from sex trafficking victim to sex trafficking survivor.

It doesn’t always work out that way, and Johnson noted that of 400 sex trafficking victims identified on Long Island since 2017, 35 have died. “Others struggle to recover from the trauma and the violence. Trafficking is on a spectrum — some revert, some overdose. It’s hard to break out of it and heal.” ​

Burke related a story where a Long Island girl who was recovered from a Suffolk County hotel room where a trafficker had been keeping her and answered the door naked when police arrived. She was 12 years old and had been under the traffickers’ control for years — and by now saw the police not as saviors, but as the people who were about to bring instability into her world. Her trafficker was her guardian, her protector. She would eventually tell her story to prosecutors, said Burke, “but when she did, she told it to me as if she was telling me a good thing.”

Johnson relayed another recent case he worked that involved a trafficking operation that was run out of a Ronkonkoma motel. In that case, a 16-year-old helped traffickers to recruit a 12-year-old who had spent time in foster care and in a group home. Besides being trafficked for sex, that girl was also subjected to being photographed to feed a demand among sex offenders for pornographic images involving children.

According to New York State records, there are dozens of registered sex offenders living in the towns of Southampton, East Hampton and adjacent townships.

To meet the demand, traffickers will prey on poverty, neglect, prior sexual abuse, low self-esteem, substance-abuse issues, developmental disabilities, or children from broken homes who wind up in the foster care system. And while victims are trafficked internationally from Central America, a big takeaway from the recent conference is that this a homegrown phenomenon whose victims are drawn from towns including Huntington, Port Jefferson, Brentwood and Patchogue.

Laura Mullen is a former sex trafficking victim whose journey into what she calls slavery began when she was a child growing up in poverty in Suffolk County. Her father was a pimp, her mother was a prostitute, and she was sold at the age of 12 by her brother to a customer that her former trafficker had sold crack cocaine to.

Mullen described a dark path that she went down as a traumatized youth coming from a deeply broken family, who became a parent at 16 years old and lived on the streets of Central Islip before she met her first trafficker, “who held me captive in a basement.”

She would go on to lose her son, and ended up in jail, where she first encountered Erin Meunkle and the organization ECLI-Vibes, which was founded in 2015 by Suffolk County women who named their enterprise the Empowerment Collaborative of Long Island. Now Mullen works for ECLI-Vibes as co-founder and president of their Human Traffic Advisory Board. She was reunited with her son, who now works at ECLI-Vibes, too.

For parents concerned about their own children’s vulnerability, this is more than just a “stranger danger” warning and it’s up to them to keep an eye out for whether their child is being “groomed” by human sex traffickers, said McEvoy, who is a deputy bureau chief in the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Violent Criminal Enterprise Unit, and a member of Tierney’s HEAT unit. She’s also a Special Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York.

Warning Signs

Here’s a checklist for educators, medical professionals, service providers — and parents — to be on the lookout for whether a child is being groomed by a sex trafficker:

Is the child running away all the time? Do they have a substance abuse problem? Are there any signs of physical trauma? Is the child always checking in with someone you don’t know on their phone? Maybe there’s a boyfriend, but he’s much older and never comes around? Or maybe the child is telling obviously rehearsed lies or wearing inappropriate clothing or pricey, unfamiliar jewelry.

Other advice for concerned parents from Burke: Keep your ears peeled for any of the routine lingo deployed by sex traffickers: “Daddy,” “on a date,” “in the life,” “in calls,” “out calls” are all signals that a child might have been groomed by a trafficker.

And consider it a huge red flag, said Burke, if a parent or teacher or caregiver finds a motel room key among a child’s possessions.

“It’s all about parental radar,” said Captain Anderson with the East Hampton Town Police, “and it is so true that this crosses socioeconomic lines.”

Law enforcement officials at the local level here, he said, have an ancillary role in human trafficking investigations as he stressed the importance of information sharing between agencies — and the role the public can play in thwarting human trafficking — not just through vigilance on the parental front, but contacting law enforcement if something just doesn’t look right.

As Mullen put it, taking a page from the 9/11 handbook for citizen engagement: “If you see something, say something. Keep your eyes open, your ears open.”

Residents are encouraged to call Crimestoppers if they suspect human trafficking in their midst at 1-800-220-TIPS. As Johnson assures — callers are assured anonymity.

As Meunkle noted, there’s a high likelihood that someone is being sexually exploited within 5 miles of where you are sitting.