In the evenings, the workers returned like proverbial bees to the hive, in cowboy hats and boots, gimmie caps and sneakers, riding bicycles instead of horses or mules, taking their ease, waiting patiently with well-thumbed phone cards in hand to call home, or paying a pittance for a 15-minute trick with slaves like Elena.

“Go down, Moses Way down in Egypt's Land. Tell ol'Pharaoh, Let my people go.”
- Traditional Spiritual

Elena Gonzales * was a sex slave in Lake Worth.

At an age when most girls of 14 were putting on lipstick, thinking about boys and struggling with math problems in middle school, Elena was struggling with a different kind of math: calculating how many migrant farm workers she'd need to have sex with to free herself from the toxic web of the notorious Cadena family.

Like many other young Mexican girls, she'd been smuggled into the U.S. from Vera Cruz through Matamoras to Brownsville, Texas, lured across the border with the specious promise of a legitimate job and the opportunity to quickly pay off several thousand dollars she owed the polleros , or chicken-ranchers as the smugglers are known, for her passage. Outfitted like a Tijuana tartlette in skimpy clothes from a Kmart in Houston, she found herself a slave in the network of fast-fuckaterias operated by the Cadena family. Every 15 days, the girls were rotated between Lake Worth, West Palm Beach, Boynton Beach, Avon Park, Fort Myers, Fort Pierce, Homestead, Orlando, Okeechobee, and the Carolinas.

Elena, like many others, was held captive in a decrepit house, locked in rooms with no windows, given little or no money and threatened with beatings and reprisal attacks against her family in Mexico.

What could she do except obey? She was an illegal alien in a foreign country, without language or documents and no recourse. If she went to the police, she would most surely be deported, that is if she were to survive an escape.

“Some just end up face down in Lake Osborne,” an undercover officer on the vice squad of the Lake Worth Police Department told me.

Patronized by the Hispanic field hands and pickers who worked the farms west of town, some of the Cadenas' brothels were within walking distance of the Lake Worth Police Department. One, in the squalid heart of the alphabet blocks, was a mere stone's throw from Lake Avenue, the town's gentrified main street of antique shops, al fresco eateries, and raucous bars. It was near the parking lot alongside the Tropical Market where, every morning, eager young Hispanic and Mayan immigrant men swarmed, waiting for a chance to be picked up as day laborers either to work in the fields or manicure the lush estates of the billionaires who lived in unabashed luxury just minutes away .

The houses were well known and the vice squad of the Lake Worth Police Department made periodic raids on them. An undercover op would go in and buy a symbolic form of currency from the manager or a ticketero – a red eraser, a playing card, a metal screw – for $20-$25 to be exchanged for sex in tiny rooms divided by bed sheets draped across ropes or wires. At a pre-arranged signal, the black-clad tactical squad would swoop in to make arrests. If the women received any money for their labors, it could be as little $3 to be applied to their ever-increasing debt and they were expected to service 100-150 men a week.

When two 15-year-old girls escaped and told their stories to the Mexican consulate in Miami, Operation Red Ticket was mounted. It was a joint task force of local police, sheriffs, the Border Patrol and the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, and the FBI that finally closed down the sordid operations of the Cadena family in 1998, but not before they had pocketed “about $2.5 million,” according to Newsda y .

“They're out of business now,” said Lake Worth community policing officer Oscar Cardenas.

Hugo Cadena-Sosa, the head man, and seven of his cohorts including Rogerio Cadena copped pleas and were sentenced to prison and fines, but several others are at large.

And what of their slaves? There are few answers here.

“Some of them go back into prostitution, because it's the only way they know to make money,” said Cardenas sadly.

As heartrending as that story is, it is only one of the chronicles of misery of the millions of men, women and children held in slavery in the world today. Estimates of those in bondage range from 27 million to an astounding 200,000 million. The modern slave trade is a multinational, multi-billion-dollar business in which everyone profits, except for those bound by chains of fear.

“Here and abroad,” said Secretary of State Colin Powell in a government report on human trafficking and slavery, “the victims…toil under inhuman conditions – in brothels, sweatshops, fields and even in private homes.”

The state department report estimated that “some 50,000 women and children are trafficked annually for sexual exploitation in the United States.”

Though the idea of people as chattel, forced to work for little or no pay, subject to the whims of their owner on pain of brutality and even death would seem repugnant to modern civilization, it persists.

It persists in Greece and Turkey, Israel, England, Scotland where Richard Elias and Andrew Walker reported in the Scottish Daily Record that Scots Triads, an affiliation dating back to the 1970s, are working with “snakeheads” (the Chinese equivalent of the Mexican coyotes) to bring in illegal immigrants. The connection suggests Chinese government complicity.

It persists in London, Australia, Albania, and the Balkan states, France, Germany, Spain and Belgium. It persists in India, China, Thailand, Burma, the Sudan (where a California Christian group raised almost $4,000 to purchase the freedom of 103 people – at an average price of $35 a head, according to Tom Kisken of the Ventura County Star ) , the Philippines, and Pakistan.

It persists in Latin America and Central America (the National Labor Committee has charged a Hondurans sweatshop manufacturing the Sean John line of clothes for Sean “P. Diddy” Combs paid workers 24 cents for each $50 sweatshirt they sewed during 11-to-12-hour shifts, required daily body searches and provided contaminated drinking water), the Caribbean, American Samoa (where the largest case of modern slavery was broken by the FBI, according to Attorney General John Ashcroft ), and Africa. There is an especially cruel irony in the fact that in Africa, UNICEF estimates that 200,000 children are sold into slavery each year.

And it persists in America.

In Fort Pierce, the violent brothers Ramiro, a.k.a. “ El Diablo ”, Juan Ramos and the Ramos' cousin Jose Ramos were convicted of smuggling some 700 illegal Mexican immigrants by trailer into Florida through Arizona and forcing them into slave labor in the fields and citrus groves around Lake Placid, northwest of Lake Okeechobee. Tropicana and Minute Maid were apparent beneficiaries. The FBI and the Border Patrol snared the Ramos trio in the case initiated by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers three years ago.

In handing down their sentence, U.S. District Judge K. Michael Moore said, “others at a higher level of the fruit-picking industry seem complicit in one way or another….”

In Seattle last year, the U.S. Attorney indicted eight men and one woman on charges of running a West Coast sex slavery ring with girls from Asian countries. In suburban Long Island, a young Malaysian woman sued her captors for involuntary servitude, claiming Martin and Somanti Joseph “tricked her into returning with their family to the United States…forced her to work endless days and subjected her to endless humiliation,” allegations federal judge Nicholas Garaufis called “acts of barbarism and unrelenting mental brutality.”

In Texas, the American Civil Liberties Union filed suit against the executive director of the state's Department of Criminal Justice and more than a dozen officials at the James Allred Prison on behalf of inmate Roderick Johnson, who claimed he endured 18 months of rape and sexual slavery.

In Los Angeles, Thai garment workers were imprisoned behind barbed wire fences in 1996.

There is another kind of slavery, too. Less brutal perhaps, but still humiliating.

In the 1600s, it was called indentured servitude. Europeans over the age of 15, mostly from England, sold themselves into debt bondage for the price of the passage to America – the equivalent of 120 pounds of tobacco – promising to work for two to seven years until they could pay of their debt. Once on shore, they could be auctioned off to the highest bidder and it's estimated as many as three-quarters of the immigrants to the colonies of the time were indentured servants. But it was a dangerous voyage and it's said some 35 percent of the women and 50 percent of the men died aboard ship, according to Virginia's website Virtual Jamestown .

Now, most are illegal aliens who enter the U. S. who, like their 17 th century forbearers, come with the hope of a better life.

Some, like the Indian nationals recruited by “body shops” to work in high-tech industries, paid only a fraction of their promised salaries, and are shocked to find themselves marooned in a bureaucratic no-man's land when their visas expire and they apply for the Holy Grail of immigrants, the green card which would grant them permanent residency.

Others willingly pay thousands of dollars for a shot at the American Dream.

Such was the case with the 24 Chinese immigrants whose friends and relatives had paid snakeheads up to $65,000 each to smuggle them into New York, then sent to work in Ai Fa Yang's all-you-can-eat King Buffets in Lauderhill and West Palm Beach. All were arrested by U.S. Marshals and INS agents as a result of a yearlong investigation dubbed Operation Dragon Eyes.

They were housed in Sunrise and in the Watermarke apartment complex at 500 Congress Avenue in West Palm Beach in “deplorable living conditions,” according to James Goldman chief of investigations for the INS. Bunk beds filled every room.

Both Yang and Zeng Chang Huang were convicted in Judge Daniel T. K. Hurley's federal courtroom in West Palm Beach of bringing in and harboring aliens.

“It was a tragic case, said Fred Haddad , the Fort Lauderdale lawyer for Yang who has four American-born children. “They were just trying to get out of Red China.”

Some had been secreted in metal cargo containers aboard freighters, according to Haddad.

In Newsday , reporter Anthony DeStefano wrote that Chinese immigrants like these “have flown via Moscow and the Netherlands into Cuba, St. Maarten, Jamaica, Haiti, the Dominican Republic and the Grand Caymans, then on to Miami and New York.”

The U.S. Attorney who tried the Yang-Huang case, Neil Karadbil, told me that. Freeport in the Bahamas is a major staging area.

DeStefano noted, “law enforcement officials believe that thousands of Chinese immigrants are waiting in the Caribbean to be moved into the United States.”

And, more and more Eastern Europeans are being trafficked into the U.S. The recent raids on 60 Wal-Mart stores in 21 states netted 250 illegal immigrants who were paid $6-$8 an hour to mop the floors and clean the toilets of the world's largest retailer while shoppers had sweet dreams of price roll-backs.

Thirty-five of the immigrants arrested were Czechs and others came from former communist states including Mongolia.

Though they were working for independent contractors, investigators say there's ample evidence some Wal-Mart executives and store managers knew what was going on, though the company denies it.

White slavery was cause for moral panic in the urban America of the early 1900s, but now, an alarmingly increasing number of Eastern European young women are turning up in Miami, New York, Los Angeles and even, Alaska, though no local official would confirm any pending cases, They are smuggled into the U.S. and condemned to a life of sexual slavery by elements of the Organizatsiya, the Russian Mafia families who already have their fingers in drug trade from Colombia and Mexico.

There is no doubt that slavery is still very much a human rights scourge and a source of profit. Even, as Attorney General Ashcroft called it, “an affront to human dignity.”

In the United States, the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 provides “the tools to combat trafficking in persons, both worldwide and domestically,” according to the state department, but despite Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge's vow to do “whatever it takes to dismantle the criminal organizations behind human smuggling,” the practice continues virtually unabated.

And it will, “as long as this country has any economic growth, this (employment of foreign workers) always has to be because somebody has to do the job,” said Stanlislaw Kostek, one of the contractors who provided Wal-Mart with illegal workers.

* Her name has been changed to protect her identity, as some of the gang is still at large.

"Miami is a microcosm of Hollyweird but without the show business BS. We've got our own BS here, which is a surrealistic combination of Ripley's Believe It Or Not , La Dolce Vita and Dateline . I love it!"

She's the reigning queen of Miami's nightlife scene, the final arbiter of what is chic and not so chic in the la-la land beyond the velvet rope. As nightlife columnist for the Miami Herald , Lesley Abravanel is arguably the highest profile nightlife-celebrity scribe in a city filled with nocturnal wannabees. Yet it is by dishing equal parts insider information on “the scene” and celebrity sightings with an appropriate level of disdain that has led to her ascent in the hybrid world of entertainment media in South Florida. New York native Abravanel, 30, holds a degree in journalism and English Literature, but success came when she carried her childhood passion for gossip, scandal and the fabulously tacky Studio 54 era into her work. Her early nightlife column on Miami Beach, “Nocturnal Admissions” set a new standard for nightlife coverage by balancing revealing coverage with well-deserved condescension. She took that mocking tone and ultimate insider persona with her when she launched her “Velvet Underground” column, now appearing weekly in the Miami Herald . Abravanel contributes to Time Out , Black Book Magazine , AOL Digital City and assorted publications whose fascination with Miami nightlife and gossip is undying. Smart, sassy and sexy, Abravanel has a petite wit that can alternately exude love for her adopted hometown and skewer the bloated egos that populate it.

Closer decided to dig beneath the surface and see what makes this unique Miami personality tick.

CLOSER: There's no ring on your finger, and yet you would be on any list of Miami's most eligible young women. Is there someone in your life? And when your life is glitz and glamour, what do you look for in a man?

LA: I thought of trying out for the next “Bachelorette” to find “the one,” but I couldn't possibly be as compelling, intelligent and dynamic as Trista, so I decided to do it the old fashioned way and pick up a guy who was partying in Key West over Memorial Weekend. And yes, he's straight. What I look for in a man is intelligence, sense of humor, confidence, patience, and enough energy to keep up with me. Oh, and the sensibility to realize that bling bling equals no no !

CLOSER: What would a perfect night out for pleasure be for you?

LA: Eating buffalo wings at Flanigan's and then hanging out in a dive bar with a fabulous juke box or seeing doormen of certain establishments getting rejected at the door on their nights off.

CLOSER : Better invention: TiVo or Viagra?

LA: You can't fast forward through the boring parts with Viagra, so hands down, TiVo.

CLOSER: Tell us one thing about “the scene” on South Beach that would totally surprise us.

LA: It's all one big dream—or nightmare, depending on your perception-- and one morning, we're all going to wake up and find ourselves in some insipid Midwestern town hanging out at the local TGI Friday's.

CLOSER: Tell us one thing about you that would totally surprise us.

LA: I love country music and hope that one day soon an ambitious promoter will do a themed night to the tune of Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton and the likes. Hee haw!

CLOSER: You're a native New Yorker, a nightlife star, and notoriously fascinated with celebrity – what is it about Miami that keeps you here?

LA: The fact that I can be sitting in a bar, restaurant or hotel and lo and behold, sitting right next to me is someone fabulous like Screech from Saved By the Bell . Miami is a microcosm of Hollyweird but without the show business BS. We've got our own BS here, which is a surrealistic combination of Ripley's Believe It Or Not , La Dolce Vita and Dateline . I love it!

CLOSER: What's the weirdest celebrity moment you have had in your career?

LA: I was crashing the MTV Awards in NYC and just as I was about to get kicked out, Buddy Hackett grabbed me and brought me in! Oh, and most recently I was at Al Malnik's birthday party at The Forge and had Jacko autograph my surgical mask!

CLOSER: Miami nightspots are notoriously ephemeral – which now-defunct establishment do you miss the most and why?

LA: Oooh, that's a tough one. There were so many---The Bar, Velvet, the Strand, Liquid…but the one I miss the most personally is Bar None, which is now Harrison's. Those were the halcyon days of South Beach, when everyone from Madonna to Jack Nicholson would show up and just dance their asses off.

CLOSER: Which Sex and the City character do you think you most resemble?

LA: Oy. Everyone always compares me to Carrie for obvious reasons, but I think I am a hybrid of all four. I am the least bit similar to Charlotte, except for the Judaism! I met Candace Bushnell at a party once and she told me I was “so Carrie,” which is kind of cool because it is based on her and not the character we see on the television show.

CLOSER: Which Sex and the City character do you think your friends would say you most resemble?

LA: Carrie, but with less agita.

CLOSER: Tell us the most important names hanging in your closet?

LA: I'm not a label whore but I do have a bit of vintage Pucci.

CLOSER: Most people don't know this, but you were a big winner on “ The Weakest Link ,” back when it was wildly popular. We have to know – was Anne Robinson as big a bitch as we all thought?

LA: She really played the part well. I don't know if she's a bitch in reality, but I am sure she became one when her show started tanking and she was shipped back across the pond. Thankfully I was on during its heyday.

CLOSER: Prada or Gucci?

LA: Prada, but on my writer's salary, a knock-off from Canal Street will have to do for now.

CLOSER: So, you are a total hottie, but what one thing would you change about your appearance if you could?

LA: I'd be a bit taller. I am only 5 feet, which they call petite, but I call it short. For once I'd love to walk into a crowded room and see over peoples' heads.

CLOSER: Having your ass kissed when you are out covering the scene – love it or loathe it?

LA: It's bittersweet. It depends on who's doing the kissing.

CLOSER: “ For Love or Money ” or “The Bachelor ”?

LA: “For Love or Money”

CLOSER: What's the worst opening line a guy has ever tried out on you in an obvious pickup situation?

LA: “You must be Cuban. I love Latins.” For the record, I am not even remotely Latin—I am a Jew from New York, don't speak a lick of Spanish, but to his credit I must say I am pretty tan. But still. What kind of line is that? That's like me going up to a pale redhead and saying “You must be Irish. I love the Irish.”

CLOSER: Wanna share an opening line that would actually, you know, work like a charm with you?

CLOSER: So, we don't want to look so 2002, what cocktail should we be learning to like this year?

LA: Enough with the candy-flavored martinis. Yuck. A return to the classics –gin martinis, Tom Collins—you know, retro fabulous, would be really cool.

CLOSER: Who's your favorite nightlife columnist?

LA: Back in the day it was Michael Musto of the Village Voice , whose bizarre ramblings of the New York City nightlife scene transported me from the sheer boredom of suburban Long Island and took me to another world.