Invisible Chains Read Free Page A

visas enabling the women to enter Canada. Once they’d arrived, the women were forced to hand over their travel documents, which were destroyed to prevent anyone from tracing their identities and whereabouts.
    The traffickers covered their tracks by using bogus identification to obtain real driver’s licences for the women in British Columbia. For an average of twenty-five hundred dollars, a “Wellness Centre” in Richmond, British Columbia, issued certificates stating that thewomen were trained massage therapists. The fake certificates were sufficient evidence for local municipal officials to issue massage therapy licences. In Calgary alone, at least forty-three people were granted licences based on the fraudulent Wellness Centre documents.
    Once in Canada, the women were sold to massage parlour owners in Vancouver, Calgary, and other cities for between eight and fifteen thousand dollars each—not hired or employed, but instead sold.
    In the hands of her new “owner,” each woman was required to pay off a “contract” of at least forty thousand dollars to the massage parlour operator through sex acts with customers. To generate the amount needed to secure their release, the women had to service numerous men almost every day. Most of the women didn’t speak English.
    Was Cloud 9 Body Care unique or did it serve as a model for similar ventures in other areas of the city? To determine the answer, Calgary police officers went undercover as men wanting to set up their own massage parlour offering sexual services. Within a short time, they had negotiated the “purchase” of several women, along with advice from the traffickers on how to maximize their profits and minimize their problems in handling the victims.
    Any amount of money deemed appropriate, the traffickers suggested, could be imposed on the women as the price for their freedom. “We were looking at an eighty thousand dollar contract per girl before their obligations were concluded,” says Detective Cam Brooks of the Calgary Police Service. The traffickers even advised the undercover officers on how to ensure that the women did not attempt to flee or alert authorities to their situation.
    â€œYou can’t let them go out,” the traffickers said. “You have to keep them separated so that they don’t start talking among themselves about how they can get out of this before their contract is fulfilled. You must watch their every movement.”
    Based on secretly taped conversations, police obtained arrest and search warrants to raid massage parlours implicated in the criminal network. The owners and operators of the parlours were arrested, and the women found on the premises taken into custody for questioning.As the dust settled in Calgary after the raids, questions arose about the fate of the exploited women in the massage parlours and the alleged traffickers.
    â€œWe see these women as victims, as anyone in the sex trade is,” Staff Sergeant Joe Houben told the media. We now know, however, that the foreign women captured in the dragnet who did not have legal immigration status were detained and deported by federal officials, further traumatizing them and exposing them to the risk of re-trafficking or reprisal. The few women who were legally in Canada were released and soon vanished; police suspect they were sent to other locations in Calgary or moved to Vancouver and Toronto.
    More than fifty criminal charges were laid against twenty-eight people as a result of Operation Relaxation, but the outcome of those prosecutions is much less impressive than the number of charges suggests. Anthony Lee, a thirty-six-year-old Chinese-Canadian and the alleged owner of Cloud 9 Body Care, managed to evade police during the initial sweep. Police believed that Lee had links to organized crime in Vancouver. After a forty-one-day manhunt, Lee turned himself in to police, who charged him with a series of offences