The Lie About Human Trafficking That’s Costing Lives with Bill Loucks

In this first installment of a two-part conversation, Bill Loucks returns to Behind The Thin Blue Line to examine the realities of human trafficking in the United States. While many people picture kidnapping and border crossings, Loucks explains that most trafficking cases occur in plain sight, inside hotels, restaurants, illicit massage businesses, and private homes. Drawing from decades of investigative experience in law enforcement and victim-centered work, he breaks down the legal framework, investigative challenges, and behavioral patterns that often go unrecognized.

This episode focuses on how force, fraud, and coercion operate in real-world cases, why victims are frequently misidentified as offenders, and how technology has accelerated recruitment and exploitation. From runaway juveniles to illicit massage operations tied to international criminal networks, this conversation lays the foundation for understanding the scope, speed, and complexity of modern human trafficking.

Episode Highlights

[04:02] The biggest misconception about human trafficking and why kidnapping is rare
[06:23] Early encounters with trafficking victims that went unrecognized
[09:24] Legal definition of human trafficking under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act
[13:06] Why physical movement is not required for trafficking to occur
[14:06] How traffickers exploit vulnerabilities and create trauma bonds
[16:55] Gaps in law enforcement training and courtroom challenges
[23:14] How technology and social media transformed recruitment and advertising
[25:23] The grooming or “boyfriend” method and digital targeting of juveniles
[27:56] Why victims often appear independent during law enforcement contact
[35:14] How quickly runaway juveniles can be advertised for sale
[36:56] Behavioral cues parents and communities should recognize
[39:15] How illicit massage businesses operate and move victims
[44:16] Red flags communities can identify in storefront operations
[46:03] Connections to Asian criminal organizations and national money flow
[51:33] Why federal cases often resolve as prostitution instead of trafficking

Listener Advisory

This episode contains discussions related to human trafficking, sexual exploitation, coercion, violence, and criminal investigations. Some material may be emotionally intense. Listener discretion is advised.

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Contact us: mbridgeman@behindthethinblueline.org

Follow Behind The Thin Blue Line for Part 2 of this conversation with Bill Loucks, where the discussion continues into labor trafficking investigations and the operational challenges facing law enforcement.

Listener Advisory

This episode includes discussions of real-world violence, criminal activity, and emotionally intense subject matter. Listener discretion is advised.

Transcript

Bill Loucks  0:00  
Once they get a victim in hand, they'll have them online as quick as possible. I helped a particular agency here in North Carolina. One of my old partners was doing a social media scrub. The girl, who was 14, I believe, had already popped up. He'd already found her on facial recognition. So it was approximately 13 hours from the time she left home, she was already being advertised for sale at a hotel at the age of 14, this podcast contains real world

David L. White  0:30  
accounts and discussions related to law enforcement, military, criminal investigations, public safety incidents and violent crime. Topics may include graphic descriptions, strong language, trauma, death and emotionally intense subject matter and may not be suitable for all audiences. Listener, discretion is advised.

Mark Bridgeman  0:46  
Hey, welcome to the next edition of Behind the Thin Blue Line Podcast. Today we're going to talk about a crime that is hidden in plain sight when people hear human trafficking, most picture chains, cargo containers or border crossings. The reality is far more uncomfortable. Human trafficking in America happens in strip malls, massage parlors, farms, construction sites, restaurants, private homes. It involves sex. It involves labor, and increasingly involves children, some who entered this country alone and were released into communities and are now unaccounted for. We're not talking about politics. We're talking about victims. We're talking about organized crime. Where'd the system fail and how do we fix it? I'm your host, Marc Bridgeman, and this is behind the thin blue line. This podcast is built on four pillars, service, sacrifice, strength and support. I spent more than three decades in law enforcement and criminal intelligence, working violent crimes, narcotics, human trafficking, organized crime at both the local and federal levels. Behind the thin blue line exists to bridge the gap between what the public hears and what law enforcement actually experiences through the real conversations, real context, real people. This episode is meant to inform, not sensationalize, to educate, not overwhelm. So let's get started. Our guest today is Bill Lux Jr Bill has worked human trafficking problem from a multiple of eight angles, law enforcement, intelligence, victim centered investigations. He has served as a North Carolina senior investigator for hope for justice, conducting human trafficking investigations for non governmental organization focused on victim identification and exploitation networks. Prior to that, Bill spent more than a decade as narcotics game detective with Metro Nashville Police Department. He's authored over 800 search warrants, participated in over 1000 search warrant executions targeting complex criminal organizations. Bill's trained over 10,000 law enforcement officers and practitioners on controlled substances, gangs, human trafficking, and has testified as an expert witness in multiple courts on clandestine labs and gang structures. He brings more than 17,000 hours of investigative experience, including work involving transnational criminal organizations, complex trafficking networks. Before Bill was in law enforcement, he did eight and a half years the 82nd airborne the Fort Bragg, and he was a flight engineer with the 116 Special Operations Aviation Regiment, also known as the Night Stalkers. Currently, Bill works for the North Carolina Justice Academy as an instructor. Bill, I appreciate you being here and participating in this issue. Appreciate you and come Okay, let's kind of like set the tone. What's the ground truth when it comes to human trafficking? What are people most misunderstood about human trafficking.

Bill Loucks  4:02  
Everybody thinks somebody's going to get kidnapped and they're run into Mexico. The biggest misconception is kidnapping and somebody's chained up and they're run to other countries, when in fact, kidnapping accounts for less than 1% of actual human trafficking here in the United States.

Mark Bridgeman  4:19  
Wow, that's amazing, how often are victims of human trafficking encountered by law enforcement or regular people and but not recognize that this is individuals being trafficked

Bill Loucks  4:33  
every victim every day, and that could be from a young child who's being trafficked by in a familiar case, maybe by an uncle, stepfather, something like that. And this child has to go to the doctor, pediatrician, urgent care, doc in the box, CVS, Minute Clinic, or something like that. They're encompassed when they're at the store. If they get to go to the store, they're seen a lot of times, and. Hotels, their places where their actual trafficking events will actually occur. Some of these victims are seen daily by like teachers and stuff at school, especially if they're labor trafficking victims, which is a huge, huge

Mark Bridgeman  5:16  
human trafficking events. What are you referring to?

Bill Loucks  5:19  
Like if they were, say, a sex trafficking victim. Every time that a sex buyer is involved engaged with that individual, that's a separate event, okay, human trafficking event, but police, we often miss it because we don't understand it, and what we get nationally. Nationally, it's not just here, it's nationally. Framework. What we get in our basic academies is very, very minimal, and when I teach it, I teach the human trafficking aspect from not only patrol, domestic violence, gang, narcotics, other detective realms, investigators. And I show four separate instances, all the way back to 2004 which is the very first time I can account and understand and tell you for sure that I came into contact with 16 human trafficking victims had a call for service, alarm call, and these were all male victims locked inside of a Chinese restaurant.

Mark Bridgeman  6:23  
That's the other urban myth that these are just girls that are being

Bill Loucks  6:27  
trafficked now they Yeah, it's everybody is the victims look like anything and everything, even though sex trafficking accounts for the largest percentage of human trafficking, and with that, females accounting for the largest percentage of that, but there is still labor trafficking in various forms, and it's not just a female and it's not just a young female, either. Interesting.

Mark Bridgeman  6:53  
So what do you think the officers you know, what do they think they're seeing if they're coming across a victim of human trafficking. What's their perception? They just think it's another drug

Bill Loucks  7:06  
addict, or most of the most of the times it starts with a drug issue, and then it turns in, it's like responded to, like a domestic or a drug issue, where I teach it, I talk about my second FTO field training officer rotation in 2003 early 2004 working in a high crime area. Obviously, when you're going on FTO rotation, you don't go to the nice areas of town during the night shifts, and nor should you. Yeah, one of my female FTO she was actually pointing out all of what she classified and discussed as crackheads. You know, addicts. They're just addicts and stuff like that, a bunch of hookers and prostitutes. These were terms that I came to know is just, that's what it was in policing, because somebody selling themselves, you didn't understand that there was they could potentially actually be forced into selling,

Mark Bridgeman  8:02  
yeah, and working in Fayetteville for 26 years. You know, when I was brand new rookie on the streets, you know, I had the area, still to this day, Eastern Boulevard, that area downtown, that there's a street level prostitution. Some of the girls had pimps, but I had no idea that they were being forced into that lifestyle or coerced into staying within that lifestyle.

Bill Loucks  8:31  
And it was, for me, it was kind of like a learned thing I had no understanding, because at the time in 2003 when I went through the academy, there was no human trafficking training. There was nothing out at the academies. And then to go to where you're talking about with a pimp and a prostitute, there is actually some there is a difference between prostitution and actual human trafficking. And there are some prostitutes that are actually working for a pimp in protection of their own, selling it themselves, right? And stuff. So it's where we have to learn the distinct line in between it via the methods of force, fraud and coercion, to be able to identify what that looks like in various aspects. Okay?

Mark Bridgeman  9:15  
So give us a kind of a thumbnail sketch, a definition, if you would, of what human trafficking is.

Bill Loucks  9:24  
Human trafficking is basically going to be the buying, selling and or trading of human beings for sex acts and or labor. Okay, if it is for the purposes of sex trafficking, if a person enters into that commercial sex realm, that means there's some form of payment, whether it's for drugs or something like that, and they're being forced into it by a force, fraud or coercion. They are under the age of 18, according to the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, TVPA, by federal statute. That means they it's they're under the age of 18. It's automatically human trafficking. Automatically consider that. So when it comes to labor, labor is use of force, fraud or coercion by moving people around for labor purposes. It providing any provisions, transportation services, hiding them, the transportation aspect that one just came to light in national news with Al brego Garcia, yes, remember Maryland dad, when, in fact, I actually got to meet part of the unit that actually classified him as an MS 13 gang member, actual game detectives, and Tennessee Highway Patrol does the traffic stop of him, and it has all the classic signs, multiple people inside the vehicle. Some of the stories match. Some of them don't. They don't have their identification. One person is controlling basically everybody and anybody up front, and that's Alberto Garcia. He was transporting human trafficking victims from one place to another under the ruse of, oh, this is employment. And what made it worse during that whole stop was, as you know, we'll figure out a little bit throughout this language is often a barrier in working a lot of these cases. But as a Spanish speaking officer, started talking to a brego, he, all sudden, he barely speaks Spanish. Now, yeah, and it's like, Damn,

Speaker 1  11:30  
that's a clue. Okay, can't have

Bill Loucks  11:32  
it both. Yeah, that's a clue, right? Now, labor trafficking is a lot of people, when they think labor trafficking, are thinking, Oh, that's somebody out here, working under the visas and stuff like that, are some of the companies doing agricultural work or in the fields. That's not where we see a lot of our labor trafficking victims. We actually see our labor trafficking victims in places like hotel hospitality industries in the back end of restaurants, nail salons and stuff, they will sell more seasonal too. Do you think you do see them get moved around a little bit seasonal? But a lot of that seasonal is kind of heavily monitored, usually by some state Department of Agriculture or something like that. So they've got a good grasp on what they are looking for here in North Carolina, I think that division is run by Steve Troxler, and I know his Department of Agricultural folks. They are well versed, and they know exactly what to look for out there on some of these farms. A lot of people we used to get calls a lot of times, working on with a nonprofit group, hope for justice. For a little while, people would call and say, I drove by a field, saw a bunch of people. They all looked Mexican. They had a bus and a porta potty out there. I know they're human trafficking victims. I'm like, that's somebody taking this employees out to the field. They're working, yes, transporting them from one place to another. Yeah, that could be but just because it's a bunch of Hispanics sitting in a field work, it doesn't mean it's going to be a human trafficking issue.

Mark Bridgeman  13:00  
So why is physical movement not required to have human trafficking?

Bill Loucks  13:06  
You can often keep somebody in one place to do the trafficking. IE, we could be living at one of the better red row fan or Deluxe inn hotels or something like that running and I never have to move my victim. I have everybody, all my sex buyers, come in to there once. If it is a labor trafficking victim. Obviously, like drugs, somebody has to get from point A to point B, but there's a point where they can stop and they could stay in place. Because if I don't have to take you out in public, I don't have to have a lot of exposure for you. If I don't have to run you out of the hotel room a lot, that means the hotel staff, cleaning crews, managers aren't going to see a lot, so they're not going to get a lot of chances to talk to you and figure out, hey, something may be actually wrong with you.

Mark Bridgeman  13:47  
I want the audience, the listening audience, to kind of understand it's not necessarily trafficking, like traffic going down the road. It's the sale of goods or services or labor or sex or whatever. Right? How do traffickers blur the line between choice and coercion, especially when they're

Bill Loucks  14:06  
most adult victims. So most victims, if you look at a victim, and I found this just about an every single victim I've talked to, you can always look at a vulnerability that they have that the trafficker is capitalized on. Okay, so for existence, for example, it could be a 14 year old girl who ran away from home because mom's boyfriend is sexually abusing her. She's tired of it, but she's been talking with somebody online who says, you shouldn't have to take that come stay with me. Now she's with living at some Gangster's house, and he is now out there selling her. He's gonna make it sound like, hey, you've got a choice to do this, but you really ain't got a choice to do this. You're gonna get through. So there's always a mechanism of force, fraud or coercion. It's up to us as long. Law enforcement to actually document that and articulate that to make that a successful case.

Mark Bridgeman  15:05  
And the documentation may come over a period of time. It's, it's,

Bill Loucks  15:09  
it is. There's nothing. There's nothing clear cut, because you're talking about an actual, true victim who is basically kind of, at some point in time, becomes trauma, bonded with their actual trafficker, and they will try to protect them. Stockholm Central, stock Yes, exactly. And for us, for police, we get the perception this person's just lying. It's It's like another domestic she called, said he beat her. I took her downtown, got warrants. We served. The warrants arrested him two nights later, they're back in bed together after the order of protection is gone and you're like, what? That doesn't make sense. If you truly need help, then why would you lie about it? But we didn't understand what goes on mentally, the bondage chained that goes on to this person. This person is basically going to try to protect that trafficker, because historically, every time they come into contact, the police are getting arrested and or released. And the traffickers, like, do you say anything? And they're getting beat regardless, correct?

Mark Bridgeman  16:10  
So beat or tortured. More cases where the victims are absolutely tortured in some way, shape or form, decent cigarettes and

Bill Loucks  16:20  
what it's a mechanism of force a trafficker is not beyond, beyond any, any method of force.

Mark Bridgeman  16:28  
So what concept, and this where the education part comes in, for the entire community, but especially first responders and law enforcement. You don't have to be a law enforcement officer to recognize the human trafficking aspect, you know, but what's some of the confusion in the reporting and in the court systems that kind of like, don't do this issue justice?

Bill Loucks  16:55  
Who I start with? Where it starts? Gonna start with police. Okay, when you look nationally at our training and human trafficking in most academies. It's a lot of definitions, okay, yeah, might you might get a practical example. Okay, now an officer gets so force, fraud or coercion, but they don't identify and understand what force actually is, or what the fraud is, or what the coercion, what we like to call the or this or factor, so we're mislabeling this in reports. I can recall the first time. I can even think back to a domestic I can even point down to the street in Nashville. Duke Street in Nashville is a young cop in 2005 going to a domestic call, same house being we're there once every two weeks. Okay, constant domestic, constant chaos, constant runaways, constant drug usage, alcoholism. But this time I for some reason, it resonated when the victim, because I determined the husband the boyfriend, his primary aggressor. She tells me, he beat me again, word for word, because I wouldn't F his drug dealer so he could get his meth. Right there, just that term, he beat me because I would not have sex with his drug dealer so he could in payment for his meth. That is, she is describing the elements of force. To me, I see the physical evidence on her. She is describing that her boyfriend is trying to sex trafficker in exchange for controlled substances. Had no idea of that, so I'm chalking it up like another domestic just kind of writing away and stuff. Now we look at beyond us, then we go into the court system the other half. When I talk to Das, and I asked them, Do you understand completely human trafficking? Well, I know the definitions, and I know where it is in the statute. Like, do you understand can you? Are you confident enough, competent enough and capable enough that you could take a human trafficking case if you have a rock star investigator all the way through, and 95% of the prosecutors that I've talked to go, no, we'll plead out. It's too messy, takes too long, plugs up the system. Witnesses aren't credible, and there's your, yeah, that's, that's a whole, that's a whole separate ball wax the way they hit the hit that. And it's, you know, because they're always going to have a past, and so, yeah, it's, it's, it's a problem. So that becomes very problematic in court, and that a lot of victims do not just plain out, understand or recognize or even accept that they're mentally they haven't even gone, Oh, crap, I'm actually a victim. This isn't supposed to be happening to me. This man is forcing me to have sex with 20 people a day. If I don't, he beats me, but when I do, he takes me to Subway and buys me a sandwich. And lets me sleep all night, and I get a shower enough to do it the next day, and if I don't do 20, then he's going to beat me. Okay, so there is a lot of confusion in the courts. Let's go a little bit beyond the courts. So we're talking about courts. We give you a hypothetical situation. Second of sun, we'll say his name is Hunter. Okay, Hunter may have a laptop. Maybe that's not working. He's got to take it to a laptop store get worked at. Come on, think about where this level of human trafficking, it is up in DC with politicians. I mean, it has been shown, and it was proven that Hunter Biden had we have the actual canceled checks where that man wrote checks to an Eastern European Human Trafficking group buying human trafficking victims. Those checks went through his account through a legitimate, legal financial institution. We have the finalized canceled checks at the end the nepstein comes up, you know, and then he hangs himself in the most secure facility there is in the world. And then his partner, just Lane Maxwell, gets prosecuted, one person with numerous victims. And it is still unclear to this day to the general public, how many true victims there were, and this is where I get. This is where this, this kind of hits to the point the sex buyer is anybody and everybody. Okay, it's general person, it's a dad, it's a preacher, it's firefighter, it's cop, it's a politician. I don't care D or R. It's a judge, it's a referee, it's a general, it's ds. So you cannot put down a general definition, say, Oh, it's this age group, mail, this much money, basically working in a factory, and it's everybody, and we figure out that this kind of goes pretty deep, because we just released Epstein files again, and we got nothing but black square or something, you know. So that's, that's another reason it gets confusing, because there's, there's a lot of people who have hands somewhere. I'm not saying they were involved in the human trafficking, but good Lord, if they it should have been proven that. No, we didn't. We didn't do anything. So it's, it's a unique scope.

Mark Bridgeman  22:35  
So, you know, with sex training in the United States, it's the oldest profession. Goes back to Biblical times, you know. But how is technology? Because I remember working back then, we called them escorts or prostitution cases, but now they would be labeled as human trafficking cases. We'd pull out the phone book the Fayetteville Cumberland County, flip through and order up girls through the phone book. Well, we don't have phone books anymore, so you know, how does technology really morph this into taking it to the next level,

Bill Loucks  23:14  
two phases. Number one, like you said in old in our days, it was a phone book. It was a newspaper ad. Before caller ID, we could just dial it straight from the PD phone. After caller ID, we had to take dimes and go to a pay phone. Some of our listeners will have to Google Pay phone. But you know now with the age of technology, everybody has a smart device, even kids, at some point in time, are going to have an iPad, something in their hands, even at school. Okay, so people are advertising anonymously, even though you could see their face and stuff on there, but they're using end to end peer encrypted like WhatsApp, number signal devices, then you end up going to meet them. So it's an easy thing to do on phone, but on the reverse side, it goes back to the old adage. I remember my grandma used to tell me. She was like, now don't when you go outside, if you go outside the yard, somebody tries to pull up in a van and offer you candy, don't jump in there. And I'm like, come I've been fat since I was three. Marc, if somebody, if you had a roll up, I said, Bill, jump in. Had a bag M and M's right there, I'd have knocked you out of the driver's seat. Said, I'm driving. Let's roll. But now the trafficker, because of technology, they can reach to those kids, because every kid is online right now, and I think kids under the age of 14. Statistically, 79% of children under the age of 14 are online at least 17 times a week. Okay, so they're using apps that you and I generally don't understand, and when I teach parents, I'll search show up social media apps that kids are currently using between the ages of 12 and 17. 99% of the parents in the room cannot. Identify everything just by the icon they're like, I've

Mark Bridgeman  25:03  
never seen that. Yeah, so and, you know, kids nowadays think Facebook is for old people, which I don't argue with that, because it holds so explain the boyfriend slash grooming method. You know, this is how a person that's luring somebody into that lifestyle. How would they do that?

Bill Loucks  25:23  
Trafficker will start to meet first. A lot of them are grown online. Because obviously, if you don't have a social media page, you didn't take pictures of your eggs and waffles this morning. Do you really exist? Okay, according to younger generations. So because of that, a lot of kids are just wide open online, and they put silly stuff out online, like, they'll show a can of like, Beanie Weenies, yeah, or something, or pizza rolls on a plate, and they'll be like, Thanks, Mom, you're working again tonight. I guess dinner's on me. Just by doing that post that tells a trafficker. Female I can see in her profile, she looks like 16. Thanks, Mom, you're working late again. I guess dinner's on me. It sounds like dad is nowhere in this pile, single mom, then that person is like, Oh, that sucks that you have to eat that, man. If you was with me, I'd make you steak. And somebody's like, thank you. Yeah, that sucks. My mom's working. Or, you suck, Mom, I'm grounded again, you know, or just something like that. They put it out in the trafficker keys, yeah, onto this. And we've interviewed traffickers post arrest and done in depth debriefings with them. This is what we got from a schematic. A lot of them would say, on average, I would put out like prior to covid, 500 messages a day. Just copy, paste, copy, paste. You look beautiful. You look beautiful. You look beautiful. On average, they would say, I would get out of 515% would respond back. Another 5% after that, 15% would actually engaged in a conversation. Post 2020, everything went digital at that point in time, and those traffickers were saying, Now I was pushing out 5000 of those messages, and I was getting probably about a 70% return, because everybody's locked in a home, everybody's got a smart device. Kids schools were giving kids tablets to do, you know, schoolwork from home, and believe it or not, I don't care how what you think you could put in their firewalls. Wise, a 1617, 18 year old kid understands internet technology coding better than a lot of IBM social engineers that are actually working on computers and stuff because they grew up in it? Sure. No, yeah, you and I didn't we. Pagers were a fantastic thing when they came out. Now, telling our age,

Mark Bridgeman  27:52  
why do the victims appear independent when they come into contact with law enforcement?

Bill Loucks  27:56  
That's That's how the trafficker trains him. If this person looks like they are selling themselves, operating by themselves, then they suspect that police are only in the side of the room with the victim. Because of that, it lets them be anonymous, and they're like, she's gonna get locked up. I'll come, I'll bond her out, and I'll beat her. Said anything. I know she ain't gonna say nothing she does. She ain't gonna have a place to stay, and she knows I'm gonna hurt her again. So it's, it's a mechanism that they use to try to protect them. Basically, they're, that's their MO

Mark Bridgeman  28:32  
the education and training of first responders, officers, recognizing the signs of trafficking is really vital, because oftentimes they look at these people as criminals, the Trafficking Victims criminals, and more apt to arrest versus help and asking the right questions and getting them some resources,

Bill Loucks  28:57  
and that becomes kind of like a double edged sword, and here's why, for every victim that I would recover, that we would bring into safety, identify this person's looks said, I need help. This person's forced me to do this. We'd find them. We'd work with other NGOs, like gate beautiful is a fantastic one at Fayetteville. They would help us move these victims around place to place, and get them into a program to start the rehabilitation process. But the average amount of times that a trafficker will return to their trafficker, or the same trafficking situation with a different trafficker is approximately seven times before they come out of it. So we have essentially had victims that we've rescued called us, said, meet us somewhere. We need help. I need help. I'm tired of this. We've swooped them up, been able to corroborate everything, figure out truly that they're a victim, take them, get them to a safe place, and in transit, they just disappear. Where they leave the facility. Why do a lot of them get arrested? Well, because a lot of us don't identify as law enforcement. We're out here doing these human trafficking operations. We talk about human trafficking operations, and for me, we don't just put people out. Used to be in the old days, Vice would do prostitution operations, yeah, and they take the they come to roll call and pick the prettiest girls on the detail, stick them outside, walk them down the road and let guys come up try to buy them. Well, we figured out that's kind of bad, because I've seen an officer actually get kidnapped in the process of this one. So all we're doing is just repeatedly getting these Johns, but with these victims, when we get them, and we do set up an operation, a lot of operations fail to collect what's going on in the ground. So when you talked about like victims, why do they seem independent? Some of these victims are actually driven by an actual trafficker. Sometimes we would be up in the room. One of us would be doing the undercover. We've got a cover room. We got everything going on. We'd see a vehicle pull up and guy and a young girl, and then the guy would be talking to the girl, trying to coax her. A few times, we would see the door open. He would actually Yank her out of the car, smack her, bring her up to the door, point to the door for her to knock and walk in to our operation. Because of that, we were failing to recognize it's probably a victim that's gonna be the trafficker, but when she's up there going, No, no, he didn't make me do it. I just I needed to make money. It's just me and stuff like that. You can't force them into coming out of that situation. And then it's a double edged sword, because, yeah, they've committed a crime, but it's under force, fraud or coercion. And then some command staff who are prosecutors, and we try to always lead that to them, the prosecutors be like, lock them up. At least should be safe for a little bit. And I'm like, Man, that's a lot to undo. That's a whole lot to undo. And I've seen this numerous times. So a lot of these, lot of these girls would get locked up continuously, multiple times over. I remember one particular girl in Nashville off of Dickerson Pike, I probably arrested her 48 times just off of crack bites of prostitution. I'd arrest her at the beginning of shift for a crack bite. And there we were just citing, releasing, and so they didn't have warrants. She'd get arrested on paper, told come to court and catch her four hours later having oral sex with somebody that she had due to just come in from another county. They'd be talking to her like, what is going on? Why can't you stop this? She was like, he will not let me. I had no idea I was hearing this all the way back to 2004 I had a victim sitting behind me the car, in cuffs. Here I am resting on paper and hearing her tell me he'll beat me. And I'm like, you don't even live in this area of town. She had actually disappeared for a period of time and came back. And when she came back, she was like, she looked like she'd been hit by a car. This man had found her on the other side of Nashville, Davidson County. Nashville is a big place. There's a little over many people there too. He found her, bought her back to there. But to me, because I was like, Wait, you're out here walking the streets. You're free. You could just, you could just leave if you want, not realizing that's actually not the case, right? You know? So a lot of may end up just getting arrested by a lack of training understanding a lot of the human trafficking operations kind of lack the proper resources just to take care of a victim on the spot. Also, like victim witness coordinator Social Services NGOs, a faith based organization, somebody standing there with an extra couple sets of clothes to match this person and to take them somewhere other than a hotel, because most of their trafficking has been occurring at a hotel, correct? Do I need to take this trafficker and put them into another hotel so in NGOs that can provide that type of asset and resources are very far and few, and I can tell you too that I know hope for justice number one, and then gate beautiful there in Fayetteville two, that anytime police have called, they've been able to react and assist them with something with a victim, whether it's a plane ticket, me and my ex partner, Jeff and I would pick up victims and actually put them on planes, buy plane tickets for them. If they didn't have identification, I can't put them on a plane ticket to like a human trafficking victim program, say, in Orlando, Florida. So if they didn't have an ID, I can't put them through TSA, right? So we partner with other NGOs that were had private planes. So we would schedule with them, saying, hey, I need somebody to get a plane here as quick as possible. And we would take them to municipal airport and do the handoff plane site, at the ramp, put that victim on there. To try to get them to the right place.

Mark Bridgeman  35:01  
Yeah. So in your experience, from the time somebody is groomed, how quickly can the trafficker advertise and put that person out?

Bill Loucks  35:14  
Once they get a victim in hand, have physical possession of them to get them to a place where they will actually be trafficked at. They'll they'll have them online as quick as possible, whether it's mega personal, skip the games, whatever the advertising platform is, so it's, it's not like a long period of time at all. And in some cases, I've seen some runaways, when this is where we have to from the law enforcement aspect, we've got to, got to get a little bit better understanding on how fast a juvenile runaway can end up into a trafficking situation. Because most traffickers, most runaway juveniles, are lured into some form of prostitution within I think it's one out of three. So 30% of them, within the first 48 hours running away from home. And most of them are running away from home because they're running away to meet with a trafficker is providing or giving them a false promise of some other better life, better situation, better phone, better clothes. Sure you know that type of situation. I helped a particular agency here in North Carolina. One of my old partners was doing a social media scrub. The girl, who was 14, I believe, had already popped up. He'd already found her on facial recognition. So we it was approximately 13 hours from the time she left home, she was already being advertised for sale at a hotel at the age of 14.

Mark Bridgeman  36:48  
So what are some of the behavioral cues, and why do they matter more than the physical science

Bill Loucks  36:56  
some of the behavioral cues, let's look at, say, juvenile juveniles obviously going through puberty. Kids are going just through awkward changes, but if your child becomes extremely aggressive, they're now avoiding high contact with you. They're being very protective with things like their phones, stuff like that. They are all of a sudden showing up with new clothes and stuff that's that's something they didn't have in a behavioral pattern before that should identify what is? What is going on? Who? Who are they trying to protect? Why are they hiding everything? Why are they clearing their internet history? Why is a 14 year old clearing their internet history? As a parent you should be digging into their phones. Sure so if you look at all of these victims, especially our juvenile victims, there is a pattern of behavioral cues that a parent should have known or been able to recognize. Had they known what to look for that would have told them something is going on. My child is gearing towards a behavioral pattern that is kind of common with somebody who's about to run away or get into a trafficking situation, or maybe in a trafficking situation, they're just coming home at night. It may be the local gangsters are making them, him or her, have sex with multiple dudes, give oral sex, do all kinds of stuff and sex acts throughout the day at school, and they come home the end of the night. And I should have been able to see that as a parent. Most people say, Oh, that would never happen at my No, of course, it's never. It's never, yeah, Angel denial. It's it's never. At my house I would be able to see it, you know, until all of a sudden it's visible, and the parents go, I wish I would have known, yeah. This leads

Mark Bridgeman  38:53  
into another level of human trafficking, illicit massage businesses, aka massage parlors. How do these businesses operate? You know, I know they're working in and around Fayetteville most of my adult life. Sometimes they're in a storefront operation, sometimes they're in a house.

Bill Loucks  39:15  
So illicit massage parlors are also known as Asian massage parlors. Most of these, historically, in the United States, are run by Asians. Okay, it's people coming from China, South Korea, Vietnam, Asian continents and stuff. A lot of the victims start like they would in they start in Asia as a human trafficking victim, because somebody says, hey, I'll let you. I'll give you a job and a place to stay. If you come here to the US, you can make money with me at my place. And then the family willingly sends them, and they come here, and then as soon as they end up landing, basically one or two places. You see, most these victims land four. Seeing New York or coming out of Los Angeles, then they end up into a circulation, run into this pipeline, somebody who supposed to receive them here in the US, basically takes their identification and hey, you're going to live in this house with these girls. You're going to work this massage parlor. You're going to give massages to these guys, and you do whatever they want. If you don't do it, then you will not get paid. That type of thing. Most of these are storefront, like you said, storefront operations, when you look at it, a massage parlor, imp or amp is absolutely different than the spa that you may take your wife to or something like that. Like, I've taken my wife to spa retreats, but when I look at these spa retreats, I don't find the actual listing for it on something like rub maps or imp reviews, you know, illicit massage problem reviews, most of these places are cash only businesses. Men walk in, and it's 100% men. They walk in, they're generally, they're listed as the business. They'll say, like $120 for the fee. Well, the $120 basically like your entry fee. Okay, you go in, they'll start doing some crapping massage on you. They tell you for an hour. After about 30 minutes, they'll tell you to flip, and that's where they will start to negotiate sex acts, whether it's oral sex, straight up sex, they use acronyms for everything from girlfriend experience to all kinds of just off the wall craziness. And then from there, once the male's doing that, he's already laying there naked, he is paying them and giving them a tip for whatever sexual services they are. So they're very prevalent. They're very hard to deal with because there's very much a language barrier. Again, if I look at the percentage of officers that speak Spanish, maybe 2% if I dig down into somebody speak some Asian dialect, especially like Mandarin or something like that, which is one of the major languages that we see with the victims at these massage parlors, less than 1% of police. So now you've got to work on some form of a translator out there. And so basically a man goes in, pays money, pays that house fee up front, goes in, they start a massage. They go back to a private room somewhere, and after about 30 minutes, they call it the flip that's when the woman will try to start coaxing and trying to give tips and stuff like that from them, and then they'll end up having sex with them. It's very, huge, prominent, if you think about Fayetteville, but the the girls, they're often kept there and they're moved. If you see girls there for a period of time, on average, at the most, I've seen them leave the victims at one location for about 21 days, they'll start just moving. They may go Fayetteville and all sudden, boom, they go to Raleigh. Boom, Charlotte. Yeah, absolutely. Then they'll go into Rock Hill, South Carolina. Then they'll hit Greenville, South Carolina, and they'll start hitting other states and big cities. A guy will go in there. He'll get naked. He'll go through the process while he's down getting massaged. Somebody standing on his back. She's probably in a pair of thongs, just rubbing up and down his back and stuff like that. And then someone else is looking at his wallet, knowing his name. And then when they start talking and saying, Hey, like, it's gonna cost you $120 or $80 or $100 for this, he's like, No, and she's like, TED ANDERSON of 112 Main Street. Yes, it is gonna be, Oh, they've already rifled through the ID gotcha and looked at it. They won't. They're not gonna say, Hey, I'm gonna report you, because they would be telling on themselves, essentially. But they'll try to let them know, Hey, we've already looked at what you have going on there. And unfortunately, we learned that in undercover operations, doing those operations from my own aspect, like it's weird seeing on camera, you're laying there, and another masseuse comes in and starts rifling through your undercover wallet. And I'm like, what? Who is she? And I'm like, wait, we just learned something today.

Mark Bridgeman  44:11  
Yep. So what are some of the red flags communities look for? All right,

Bill Loucks  44:16  
number one, massage businesses. Massage businesses, if you're thinking about it, in the legitimate spa aspect, you generally see male and female customers, and they're oftentimes unless it's like foot rub places and stuff like that. You'll see those in, like, malls, inside of malls and stuff. If you see just dudes, men only coming in. That's a clue. If the dudes are pulling up to the business instead of pulling into the business, say the store's here, but they pull into the tiger Marc Exxon gas station two doors down, and they park in front of the store, then get out and then walk through there. That's another clue. Okay, you walk by the darn thing and it says men only on the door. Well, another huge clue to look at. So that's the biggest thing, nothing but dudes. They're parking in unique places. You're going to see the same time patterns of them going in, you know, 30 to 90 minutes on average 60 Minutes. Here's their timeframe and stuff. But the other thing is, bunch of dudes parking to different places, and they can't just walk straight in. They like, have to get buzzed in. I've seen some places where I've walked up buzzed in at the door. Lady opens the door, she looks at me, looks left to right, and it goes and it closes door and makes a motion for me to go around, and I have to go into the back door the business. No pun intended, and I'm like, wow, okay, there's nothing shady about that. Then I guess. So those are things to constantly look for there. So are these

Mark Bridgeman  45:53  
massage parlors, like franchises? Are they aren't? Are they under control, under like, one group? Or they could be or they could they be independent, or both

Bill Loucks  46:03  
they, some of them are independent. Most of them have, like, some Nexus, like the controlled substance world has the nexus to the cartels or transnational criminal organizations. Most of these imps or amps are run by the Asian criminal organizations. That is the version of the cartels for, you know, Asia and the money laundering realm of the cartel. So they are basically run by the Asian criminal organizations, and they are headquartered, if you take the US draw a line straight down the map the left side west coast, is headquartered in Los Angeles, California. The right side is headquartered flushing New York, so there's always a continuous money network that's going on. Very few of them are independent. The independents don't seem to stay in business a whole lot. But a lot of these places too, they're getting away from the little bit brick and mortar kind of stuff. They're moving into morphing to what they call Asian apartment massage parlors. So instead of you going to that business class, and now you're going to have to kind of do some follow up and prove who you are. So for our business, from the undercover aspect, you've got to have something, and they're going to like show work ID, saying I work for Johnston construction company. They're going a phone number. They're going to be Googling Johnston construction company. They're going to be calling Johnston construction company to verify you're actually working for Johnston. And then they'll start telling you an area to drive to. When you get to that area, drive to. Then they'll dial you into an apartment complex, and then they'll put you in, tell you which apartment to actually go into. And they call it a better setting. The more what they call it, G, F, E, girlfriend experience, more intimate. A lot of the victims in there are younger. They're not like what they classify are called mama sans the older ladies who are basically the running the businesses. These are usually younger girls, stuff like China, South Korea and stuff like that, between ages of like 20 and probably 30 on average.

Mark Bridgeman  48:17  
Interesting how these businesses survive repeated complaints.

Bill Loucks  48:21  
It's hard to investigate these, because if to do an actual undercover case on one of these, this becomes a unique operation, because you are not going to be able to go in and propose like, get to the point where you're about to have them try to offer you sex. You're sitting there in your underwear. Okay? So this means in an undercover role, this becomes a very dynamic thing, because it's the undercovers you're naked. Okay, so think about me coming to you as a vice unit. You're my captain, saying, Hey, we're gonna do an investigation night and illicit massage power, just to let you know, six of my guys could be naked as a captain, you're gonna be like, hold up, Bill. What? No, no, no, hold on. Okay, so the DA has got to be on board. My undercovers have to be specifically trained. So to even get to that point, it takes a little bit. So we try to look at them from a regulatory aspect. In state of North Carolina, you have to have a license. BMS, okay, there is a regulatory board that comes out looks at that, but there's one guy for the state that'll go in and actually pose for that regulatory board like he's an actual sex buyer, one guy that does that. So that's how they. Scave under complaints, because we go in and we're like knocking on doors, please, please, business check, yeah. Unless you're hearing sex actually happened, you're not going to see anything. So and a lot of cops don't understand. A lot of cops are actually getting into these. Places, a few of them are doing business checks. And they're like, Well, I went to the counter and talked to them, I didn't see anything. And I'm like, ain't nobody having sex at the counter, right? It's back in those rooms. Yeah. Did you go back while you're wearing your body camera to collect that evidence? Kind of shot a line around and see where all of that stuff is going, which is going to be in the trash can. That's the number one thing. So that's why we miss this a lot of times on these complaints, because nobody knows actually where to go. They stop at the counter, or they do a quick walk through and I'm like, What did you see? Oh, saw some rooms of tables. You look at the trash cans, you look at other things that are going on there. Yep. Well, no, I'm like, why not say you're going to see the same thing as strip clubs if we're going in to do business checks and stuff. That's another aspect of human trafficking, where the stuff goes on. If I'm putting uniform cop in there, I want them to get into that deep, dark room where those private dances are as quickly as possible and try to look for that evidence. And most of the evidence is going to be sitting out in trash cans and stuff like that. You know.

Mark Bridgeman  51:03  
Now, where's the money flowing anywhere USA, depending on which side of the Mississippi. So it goes to either Los Angeles or flushing New York, and then China gets pushed right so all cash until it gets to

Bill Loucks  51:16  
Flushing, and then they start moving their courier systems. And that's a whole separate schematic of money laundering and money movements.

Mark Bridgeman  51:26  
So Steph, when the Feds go after these massage parlors, what type of cases are they making?

Bill Loucks  51:33  
If you look at it, if I take 100 federal what's supposed to start off as a human trafficking case, unless it massage parlor. They end up as prostitution. It's not. We don't do a lot of leg work. A lot of these victims this when you comes to the Asian community, the Asian community is different than, say, my gangsters, my gangsters on the street. You know the whole concept of snitches get stitches. Yeah, well, you tell on everybody, man, you go get you go get put down. Everybody rolls on the streets in this community, if I've sent you to the US, even if you're working in that, they won't tell because it brings cultural shame. And this is the way it's been explained by only two people that I've ever seen interview and actually talk about it. So culturally, people just don't break I have seen out of all these federal cases, one time, one victim successfully talk. The rest of time, they're just like, No, no, no, no. I've actually watched a case in South Carolina, actually reviewing the video is investigators, because I got to train these guys as they were starting up the case. And the investigator that I trained just the boy crapped in a swinging bucket. Best way to put it, he starts the investigation looking at a listed massage parlor just after I taught in his class. Within two weeks, he already has HSI involved, and they already have a money flow into Beijing China. Nice, because as I'm talking him on phone, he was like, man, there's a white Porsche just showed up. It's got New York plates on. And I was like, is it got just one guy in there? And he goes, Yeah. And I was like, bro, just sit there. Take pictures. Take pictures. Follow that guy for a little bit. So he goes in and stays in there less than five minutes and leaves just go walk out with a bag in his hand, some money. Man, that man running the money. He's just going state, state, state, state, pick up, pick up, pick up, goes to a place, dump some money, wherever financial institution or whatever remittance method that they're using, and it just funnels right back into there. But as they were in there, working that case, even with Feds standing there, the lady who was rested, she'll come back. Here. You come back. I give you, miss. I'm literally trying to pull the body armor off of one of the feds. It. But ended. But there was five victims in there, and none of the girls talked, not there. So that one is those are kind of hard, because it is very, it's a very hard group to penetrate within the Asian community. It's very language restrictive. And it does bring a there's a cultural piece where a lot of people just don't, won't do anything. And I could tell you, I've seen five human trafficking victims. Had them in hand, 2011 in Nashville roadside on a bus that originated from a phone call from Lush at Flushing New York with Oriental Pearl Express. And we were looking at from a money laundering aspect, and we recovered like $227,000 out of the bus. But there was five human trafficking victims that I know now were actual human trafficking victims. Had zero idea. Had them in hand. I couldn't tell you their status, where they're at but I know those girls, 100% were sex trafficking victims. Victims down to the mama song, who was controlling every bit of their movements

David L. White  55:05  
next time on behind the thin blue line.

Bill Loucks  55:07  
When you look at labor trafficking, it's generally somebody of foreign descent against another non American citizen, like the 16 men that I dealt with that were all Hispanic. It was an Asian male who had been locked in a restaurant so a lot of people don't want to get involved. May look racial or something like that. You know, if you see something, say something that's all, that's all you got to do.

David L. White  55:31  
Sponsored by the North Carolina gang investigators Association,

Buzz Burbank  55:38  
an ironick media production. Visit us at i r, O N, I C, K, media.com, you.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai