Drew Pavlou 🇦🇺🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼@DrewPavlou
This is the mansion that New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino grew up in before her parents were indicted for a massive human trafficking scheme that basically involved forcing Filipino migrants into slavery.
Her parents trafficked hundreds of immigrants into the US, then threatened them with deportation if they spoke out against abusive living conditions and extremely predatory loans that basically forced the migrants into a form of indentured servitude or modern day slavery.
Her parents ultimately stole almost $2.8 million USD in fraudulent visa fees before being indicted on 40 counts of money laundering, conspiracy to smuggle immigrants, and visa fraud.
According to court records, the fraud worked like this:
The Tolentino family took school administrators on free trips to luxury beach resorts in the Philippines.
In exhange for the luxury holiday, school administrators would then ''interview'' Filipino teachers and agree to hire them to their school district.
At first, the school district promised to employ 55 teachers.
With this preliminary order, the Tolentino family charged each of the teachers $10,000 for a non-refundable deposit and extracted a promise to pay up to 50% of their US salaries for their first few years of employment.
Before even making it to the US, most teachers were therefore placed in debt roughly equivalent to two years of median family income in the Philippines.
This debt quickly became crushing because the Tolentino family business Omni Consortium worked with a predatory loan shark company called Blue Pacific to deliver loans at an annual interest rate of 60%.
Blue Pacific required that each “recruit” have a co-signer in the Phillipines: co-signers were threatened with jail-time if “recruits” were unable to make monthly payments.
The Tolentino family failed to secure employment for many of the teachers once they arrived in the US, so many of them failed to make their monthly payments.
If "recruits" failed to make a payment the Tolentinos would charge an additional 10% penalty to the loan payment, plus an additional five-percent 5% interest.
At least one victim of the Tolentinos filed for ''T nonimmigrant status'' which is a temporary immigration benefit for victims of human trafficking.
While ultimately unsuccessful in their overall ''T nonimmigrant status'' appeal, US Citizenship and Immigration Services DID determine that the victim had been a victim of human trafficking at the hands of the Tolentinos: ''Upon review, the applicant has established that she has been a victim of a severe form of trafficking in persons, and and that her physical presence in the United States is on account of a severe form of human trafficking in persons.''
So a DHS agency determined that the Tolentino family engaged in a severe form of human trafficking that basically involved forcing migrants into a kind of modern slavery.
After a lengthy trial, lawyers hired by the Tolentinos secured a ruling of mistrial on a technicality because two of the jurors read some newspaper articles about the case.
They ultimately pleaded to conspiracy to defraud the US government and received 3 months' probation each, not prison.
According to the El Paso Times reporting on the August 2008 sentencing, the Tolentinos ultimately forfeited:
- A $1.75 million house in Houston
- $80,000 from five different bank accounts held under the names of parents and grandparents
- A 1996 Mercedes Benz
- A 1999 BMW
- Real estate properties in Houston and McAllen
Her mother Angelica Tolentino had her charges dismissed in August 2008 specifically in exchange for agreeing not to contest the forfeiture order.
Jia's mother avoided prosecution by letting the assets go, which suggests the family treated the forfeiture as the real cost of the case rather than the criminal sentence (which was just 3 months' probation each for father Noel and grandmother Florita).
