Slave Next Door (28 page)

often-imaginary infractions and without their clothes were made to tear

down a barn, repair barbed-wire fences, and unload cement blocks

from a pickup truck. Besides talking to Kaufman, the sheriff’s office did

nothing in response to the complaint.

Two years later, acting on suspicion that the Kaufmans were system-

atically defrauding Medicare, the residents, and their families, agents of

the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) raided the

Kaufmans’ home, searching for records. They found more than they

bargained for—more than thirty videotapes, explicitly showing the

Kaufmans conducting “nude therapy sessions.” At Arlan’s direction,

residents were “forced and coerced”—in the wording of the subsequent

indictment—to engage in activities that “included, but were not limited

to: massaging each other; exhibiting their genitalia; masturbating; shav-

ing each other’s genitalia; fondling each other’s genitalia; and having

defendant Arlan Dean Kaufman fondle the residents’ genitalia.”33

Amazingly, in spite of the videos, Kaufman House was allowed to

stay open. The only fallout was the suspension of Arlan’s license to prac-

tice social work in Kansas. Linda’s nurse’s license was suspended—three

years later. (An attorney for the Kansas Regulatory Board of Nursing

was at a loss to explain why the nursing board failed to act on Mrs.

Kaufman’s license until 2004.)34 There was a twenty-four-year-long

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period of official nonaction, beginning in the 1980s, as local, state, and

federal agencies examined the operations of Kaufman House but never

closed its doors. In addition to the response—and subsequent inactivity—

of the sheriff’s office and HHS, local Newton police responded to dis-

turbance calls “multiple times,” and the Kansas Department of Social

and Rehabilitation Services (SRS) “received at least a half-dozen com-

plaints about exploitation of Kaufman clients but repeatedly tried to

shift responsibility to others.”35

Over the years, any attempt by police or social services to enter the

facilities was rebuffed by the Kaufmans; no one defied them. Residents

who were questioned by authorities were “manipulated . . . into making

statements that were favorable to the [Kaufmans].”36 Not until February

2004 did a persistent Newton police detective finally manage to gain

entry into one of the residences when the Kaufmans were away and

interview a patient in her fifties. She told the detective that Arlan

Kaufman, “while serving as her legal guardian, landlord and therapist,

had victimized her for decades.” She painted a verbal picture of the

Kaufmans’ activities and ended by stating, “I want to go home.”37

Rather than go to SRS, which had proved ineffectual in the past, the

policeman turned the case over to the state attorney general, who then

went to the Disability Rights Center of Kansas. Their subsequent report

regarding this woman—whom they referred to as “Pam”—allowed the

detective and the Disability Rights Center’s attorneys to brace Arlan

Kaufman at his door with a change-of-guardianship court order for

Pam. Once free of the Kaufmans’ domination, Pam provided sufficient

information to light a fire under the federal government’s stalled investi-

gation into their illicit business dealings. As Rocky Nichols, director of

the Disability Rights Center, stated, “We got the first person out, and

the rest fell into place.”38

Further investigation revealed the Kaufmans’ depravity. One forty-

two-year-old resident testified that Arlan had “used him as a guinea pig

to demonstrate [a stun gun] to Linda and two female residents.” The

female residents shocked his testicles, and the Kaufmans “zapped” his

penis. As a result, he said, his testicles bled. So complete was the

Kaufmans’ psychological control that the man actually told police that

he had deserved it. The stun gun was subsequently found in Kaufman’s

desk.39

In October 2004—eight months after the detective first spoke with

Pam, and twenty-four years after the Kaufmans opened their facility—

two dozen FBI agents served warrants at the Kaufmans’ group homes and

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their personal residence. The agents found residents housed in deplorable

conditions. The homes were generally grimy, were infested with roaches

and mice, had nonworking bathrooms and appliances, and had live elec-

trical wires running through a basement area where people took showers.

Arlan and Linda Kaufman were arrested and charged with involuntary

servitude—slavery. The indictment was amended to include thirty-four

criminal counts, including health care fraud, mail fraud, forced labor, and

obstructing a federal audit. (It seems when the Kaufmans learned the feds

were looking into their false Medicare claims they sold all their property

to their three sons for one dollar apiece.)40 The indictment charged,

among other things, that the Kaufmans “purported to provide care and

therapy to mentally ill adults . . . but in truth and in fact, subjected them

to serious harm, including, but not limited to: sexual abuse; psychologi-

cal abuse; physical abuse; coercion; isolation; denial of proper psycholog-

ical treatment; deprivation of property; substandard living conditions;

forced or prolonged nudity; and threats of institutionalization.”41

The indictment states that the Kaufmans “obtained the labor and

services of the Kaufman House residents by: the use and threatened use

of physical restraint; the infliction of physical injury; the use and threat-

ened use of serious harm; use of a scheme, plan, and pattern intended

to cause the resident to believe that failure to perform such labor and

services would result in serious harm or physical restraint; and the abuse

and threatened abuse of the law and legal process.”42 So here was a case

that involved all three of the legal criteria for human trafficking: force,

fraud,
and
coercion. And not content with enslaving and brutalizing

their helpless charges, the Kaufmans submitted nearly a million dollars

in claims to Medicare for their bogus “therapy” sessions—more than

any other such care provider in the state. Over a ten-year period,

Medicare paid them well over $200,000.43 The government, in effect,

was financing both their perversions and their enslavement of patients.

Tucked away on page six of the forty-two-page indictment is an

admirably concise, one-sentence morality lesson: “A provider of med-

ical and clinical services, including a licensed clinical social worker and

a registered nurse, should ‘first do no harm’ and should provide honest

services, as opposed to providing services driven by a desire to enhance

the provider’s income, to entertain the provider, or to satisfy the

provider’s prurient sexual interests.”44

The Kaufmans, according to the indictment, “created and encour-

aged the creation of sexually explicit video tapes with the intent and

purpose of profiting, selling, and otherwise sharing the tapes with others

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outside of the Kaufman House.”45 Federal prosecutors showed that

Arlan Kaufman took such pride in his video “documentations” that he

offered them to the American Nudist Research Library in Kissimmee,

Florida. The library director declined.46

One of the Kaufmans’ defense attorneys stated, “They are not dan-

gerous to anyone. These are gentle people. They’re churchgoing

people.”47 The court disagreed, finding Arlan guilty of thirty-one counts

of the indictment and sentencing him to thirty years in prison. Linda

was found guilty on seven counts; she received a seven-year sentence. In

June 2006, the Kaufmans were further ordered to pay $534,810 in com-

pensation to former patients and to reimburse Medicare for fraudulent

claims. In his ruling against the Kaufmans, the judge noted, “A sad

irony is that defendants’ conditions of confinement [in prison] will be

better than the conditions endured by many of the Kaufman House res-

idents.”48 At this writing, the case has been appealed by both the

Kaufmans and the federal prosecutors, who are asking that Linda

Kaufman’s sentence be increased.49

“Made in America”—by Slaves

Clothing does not have to be fabricated in New York, or Los Angeles, or

Gary, Indiana, to bear the tag “Made in America.” Some of our most

prominent clothing manufacturers and vendors contract to factories in

American territories, where labor is cheap.50 These factories pay a frac-

tion of what they would in the States, since minimum wage law doesn’t

apply, but they can still put “Made in America” on the product. Yet

despite how little the garment workers are paid, to some factory owners

it’s still too much.

Kil Soo Lee was the Korean owner of the Daewoosa garment factory

in Tafuna, American Samoa. He secured contracts to provide garments

for Wal-Mart, JCPenney, Target, and Sears, and he trolled for laborers

by using familiar bait: the promise of steady work, good pay, and decent

housing. In this way, he caught over 250 Chinese and Vietnamese work-

ers, mostly young women. Beguiled by Lee’s promises, they each paid

him and his fellow traffickers between $5,000 and $8,000 for the oppor-

tunity of being enslaved. Since this was the equivalent of five to ten years’

pay at home, many of the women and their families took on massive

debt to make the payment.

In return for the “recruitment fee,” Kil Soo Lee and his thugs beat the

women, starved them, sexually assaulted them, locked them—thirty-six

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to a room—in a rat-infested barracks in a gated compound, and forced

them to work long hours in heat that reached well over one hundred

degrees every day. He paid them nothing for months at a time. In addi-

tion to the physical abuse, he threatened them with deportation. And on

at least one occasion, this went beyond mere threats. When workers

complained about the conditions, Lee withheld food for two days, then

had four of them arrested and deported. While deportation might seem

preferable to abuse, remember that their families in China and Vietnam

were counting on these young women to make good the debts they had

taken on and to use their earnings to support their brothers and sisters

at home. To return a failure was to betray their families.

This treatment went on for nearly two years. When one woman was

courageous—or desperate—enough to complain, one of Lee’s overseers

blinded her in one eye with a piece of broken pipe. On one occasion, as a

show of control, Lee and his henchmen staged a mass beating of the

women with chairs and pipes. Lee and two of his thugs were finally

arrested and charged with various crimes, including extortion, money

laundering, conspiracy to violate individual civil rights, and eleven counts

of involuntary servitude. Lee was sentenced to forty years in prison.51

As for the workers, the FBI reported that around two hundred of

them were given T visas and “settled in some 20 different states around

the country.” Others fled, and “some were deported to their native lands

[by immigration services] before investigators arrived.” Wherever they

have gone, they all doubtless carry with them a mental tag that reads

“Enslaved in America.”52

C H I L D R E N O F M Y S T E RY

Connecticut residents are proud of their state’s reputation as the wealth-

iest in the nation. And in 2002–3, even after the U.S. attorney and his

assistants assembled a solid antitrafficking task force composed of

representatives from Immigration, the FBI, the Coast Guard, the

Department of Social Security, and the IRS, as well as members of local

NGOs, it was still hard to believe that slavery could happen there. Then

one day a Meriden policeman, summoned to a house on a complaint,

accidentally knocked on the wrong door.

A woman answered, and the officer saw that a number of school-age

children were inside, at midday on a school week. He also noted that

both the woman and the children were speaking in a foreign language,

which turned out to be Swahili. Sensing that something was amiss, the

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police officer reported his suspicions—and nothing further was done.

Inside the house, however, panic ensued, as the woman and her male

partner got rid of the children. How they did so and where the children

went is still unknown. A third adult, who called himself the “Bongo

Man,” felt sorry for one young girl; he kept her and at one point tried to

enroll her in a local school. Alarm bells went off when it became appar-

ent to school officials that he knew nothing of the girl’s history and that