Eight members of Mexican sex trafficking enterprise plead guilty to racketeering, sex trafficking, related crimes
Prosecution Dismantles Transnational Sex Trafficking Organization that Compelled Women and Girls into Prostitution for Over a Decade
Eight members of an international criminal organization, known as the Rendon-Reyes Trafficking Organization, entered guilty pleas in federal district court in Brooklyn, New York, this month to Racketeering and other federal charges arising from their scheme to force young women and girls from Mexico and Latin America into prostitution. For over a decade, the defendants smuggled their victims into the United States, then used force, threats of force, fraud, deception, and coercion to compel them to engage in prostitution for the defendants’ profit, generating criminal proceeds which the defendants laundered back to Mexico.
The eight defendants were charged in July 2015 in a 27-count indictment in the Eastern District of New York with Racketeering and Racketeering Conspiracy involving predicate acts of sex trafficking by force, fraud, or coercion, sex trafficking of minors, money laundering, alien smuggling, and interstate transportation for prostitution, in addition to parallel substantive charges.
The defendants were arrested simultaneously in the United States and Mexico in November 2015 as part of bilateral enforcement action. Five of the defendants were apprehended in Mexico by Mexican authorities and later extradited, and three were arrested in the United States by the specialized Trafficking in Persons Unit of the New York Office of the Department of Homeland Security’s Homeland Security Investigations.