The Wall Street Journal

U.S. NEWS
JUNE 10, 2009
Immigrants Become Hostages as Gangs Prey on Mexicans
By JOEL MILLMAN
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124441724453292457.html

EL MIRAGE, Ariz. -- A whispered 911 call from a cellphone early one January morning brought police to a home on West Columbine Drive in this Phoenix suburb. Inside, they found more than 30 half-naked and shivering men -- prisoners, police say, of a gang that had smuggled them in from Mexico.

Beaten and threatened with a 9-mm Beretta pistol, a local detective's report said, the men were being shaken down for as much as $5,000 apiece, a ransom above the $1,000 that each had agreed to pay before being spirited across the border.
Such cases are increasingly common in Phoenix, which is gaining notoriety as the kidnapping capital of America. Authorities blame forces ranging from Mexico's rising drug violence to a gang takeover of the immigrant-smuggling business.

Another factor: the volatile housing market in the city, which has left it strewn with thousands of rental houses on sometimes sparsely populated suburban blocks, handy places for smugglers to store either drugs or people. The police call these "drop houses." They say federal, state and local authorities discovered 194 such houses in 2007, then 169 last year and dozens more so far in 2009.

While most of Phoenix's abduction cases relate to the drug trade, as dealers snatch rivals to demand ransom or settle debts, increasing numbers involve undocumented migrants. "Of 368 kidnap cases last year, 78 were drop-house cases involving illegal aliens," says Sgt. Tommy Thompson of the Phoenix Police Department. Officials say that in 68 alleged drop houses identified in the first five months of 2009, authorities found 1,069 illegal immigrants.

What's happening here marks a shift in the people-smuggling business. A couple of decades ago, workers commonly traveled back and forth across the U.S.-Mexico border, going to the same American farm or construction job each year. To make the passages they often would use the same smuggler, called a "coyote," each time.

Now, organized gangs own the people-smuggling trade. According to U.S. and Mexican police, this is partly an unintended consequence of a border crackdown. Making crossings more difficult drove up their cost, attracting brutal Mexican crime rings that forced the small operators out of business. The Phoenix area also was affected because tougher enforcement at the border focused on traditional routes in Texas and California -- funneling more traffic through Arizona along desert corridors controlled by Mexico's Sinaloa drug cartel.

Even the recent falloff in immigration resulting from U.S. job losses helps to fuel kidnapping, some authorities believe. They say that as border crossings decline, gangs earn less money directly from smuggling fees than from holding some of their clients for ransom, before delivering them to their destination farther inside the U.S.

"The alien becomes a commodity," says Matthew Allen, senior agent in charge of the Phoenix office of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. "One way you raise the value of that commodity is by threatening: terrorizing someone in a drop house."
Last month, police raided two houses in the suburb of Avondale, at both of which they say they rescued undocumented immigrants. On May 12, they found 14 immigrants held at a "fortress-like" house on West Madison Street. Heavy deadbolt locks had been installed on doors, windows were sealed, and a closed-circuit video system enabled guards in one part of the house to monitor other rooms.

Police photos of the scene reveal a thick black stain running the length of one bedroom wall where hostages allegedly were kept, a residue left by sweaty bodies jammed in tightly. "The darker it is, the longer they were there," said Lt. Robert Smart of the Arizona Department of Public Safety.

Local authorities learned of the house when someone called police in New Jersey and said a relative who had recently crossed into Arizona from Mexico was being held hostage. Lt. Smart said New Jersey authorities traced the alleged extortion demand to a ring operating from Tucson, about 135 miles away from Avondale, which police believe was handling negotiations for those holding the immigrants.

Four nights later, at a second house three miles away in the same suburb, police say they rescued 34 immigrants, including two pregnant women, who law-enforcement officials estimate had been held anywhere from three days to two months.
Earlier, one house was raided twice in two months. The home on West Lumbee Street had two characteristics attractive to smugglers: a site close to an Interstate highway and a large attached garage that made it easy to move people in or out undetected.

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On Dec. 4, police stopped a van on Interstate 10, the highway linking Phoenix and Los Angeles, and found it jammed with 19 men. An investigation led to the West Lumbee Street house, where two people were taken into custody. Yet before the end of January, police were back at the same house, this time, they say, rescuing two immigrants held captive by a different gang.
The area's housing market has facilitated such activities. When the real-estate bubble was inflating, some investors bought houses and offered them for rent while waiting for a chance to flip them. By the time the mortgage market faltered in mid-2007, according to the Maricopa County assessor's office, the supply of houses for rent in the Phoenix area had swelled to 73,700, up nearly 75% from 2000.

The bust has enlarged rental-house numbers by 12,000 more, as strapped owners of hard-to-sell homes try to rent them out. The abundance favors smugglers two ways: by making owners less picky about tenants and by spawning "dead zones" containing many unoccupied houses, where there are few residents to notice suspicious activity.

A recent survey by the state attorney general's staff of 170 former drop houses found that more than half had been mortgaged with no-money-down, interest-only financing, and 42% have gone into foreclosure.

At the West Lumbee Street house raided twice in two months, the owners, Pablo and Ana Maria Sandoval, had moved to a larger home and were eager to find a tenant to help them pay the mortgage. They rented the house out for $1,200 a month.
"We had heard about these smugglers, but something like this had never happened to anyone we knew," says Mr. Sandoval, who repairs vending machines for a living. He says he has taken the house off the rental market and it's now occupied by a son who lost his own home to foreclosure.

The Sandovals didn't face any charges. The owners of such homes are almost never charged, says Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard, because it's hard to prove owners knew their houses were being used by renters in criminal activity. To date, after more than 500 alleged drop houses have been busted, no absentee owner has been charged with a smuggling-related offense. Most illegal aliens found inside are deported, except for a few needed as prosecution witnesses.

In all, a thousand houses in the Phoenix area are being used as drop houses at any given time, many never discovered, police say. They found out about the house in El Mirage when a dispatcher answered a 911 call at 7:50 a.m. on Jan. 31 and heard the word "help" -- along with what sounded like the chirp of a smoke alarm.

The call lasted long enough for El Mirage police to determine the street it came from: West Columbine Drive, a suburban street where early this year almost a third of the 34 homes were unoccupied and six were in foreclosure. Officers conducted a search of the street and, after detecting a smoke-alarm chirp coming from No. 12301, surrounded the house and went in.
According to a local detective's report, the upstairs windows were sealed from the inside with plywood. The police found 37 people inside, most of them illegal aliens.

A single small upstairs bedroom contained 22 men. "The subjects I found were all in their underwear and laying in a line next to each other along the walls and inside the closet," one officer wrote, in a report reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. They had been jammed in so tightly and so long that the wallboard showed indentations from bare backs pressed against it. Pink walls, decorated with stickers of Disney characters, were stained with sweat smudges.

Down a short hallway was a tiny laundry room labeled "Office." There, according to captives' accounts to investigators reviewed by the Journal, immigrants were beaten and ordered to produce phone numbers of relatives in the U.S., who were then called and told to wire ransom money.

The documents say one captive, a 39-year-old Honduran named Jorge Argueta-Pineda, told investigators that after being beaten repeatedly, he arranged to have relatives wire $3,200 to a Western Union office in Mexico. While most of those found inside were deported, Mr. Argueta has been allowed to stay in the U.S. to testify against his alleged captors. He couldn't be reached for comment.

In the case, seven Mexican nationals in custody pleaded not guilty to federal charges including hostage-taking and possession of a firearm during a crime of violence. Among them were several who, according to the local police, were in the house when it was raided, and stripped off their clothes to try to pass as captives.

The owners of the house are Aniceto Alcantar, who works at a plastics factory, and his wife, Laura, a schoolteacher. After moving to another house, the Alcantars had offered the one on West Columbine for rent in December. Weeks went by without a nibble, but finally they received a call from a young couple.

Mr. Alcantar, 37, says it didn't bother him that the two -- Mexican-born, like himself -- had no references. "They said they had just moved to Phoenix from California. Supposedly they sold cars for a living, out of their home," he says. What gave him confidence they weren't criminals, Mr. Alcantar adds, was that they said they were too poor to afford the security deposit and asked to pay it in installments.

The $750 deposit might have helped with the cleanup. After the January raid, Mr. Alcantar says he found thousands of dollars in damage to the house, from ruined carpets to damaged plumbing. He says he had to paint his children's former bedrooms several times to cover the stench of bodies that been pressed together for too long.
"I guess I got lucky: The police found out quickly," Mr. Alcantar says. "If they had been in here much longer, they would have destroyed my house."