Free Republic

SAN FRANCISCO — Many of San Francisco's Asian massage parlors — long an established part of the city's sexually permissive culture — have degenerated into something much more sinister: international sex-slave shops. Once limited to infamous locales such as Bombay and Bangkok, sex trafficking is now an $8 billion international business, with San Francisco among its largest commercial centers. San Francisco's liberal attitude toward sex, the city's history of arresting prostitutes instead of pimps, and its large immigrant population have made it one of the top American cities for international sex traffickers to do business undetected, according to Donna Hughes,...

Golden Venture Survivors Face Another Hurdle NEW YORK (1010 WINS) -- Few Americans have lived through the kind of adventures that brought Arming He to the United States from his Chinese homeland. Seeking a better life, he made a dangerous escape across a mountainous border, traveled by ship to Africa, where he was marooned for months, then crammed into the hold of a rusted freighter carrying 295 other refugees. His ordeal didn't end when the ship, the Golden Venture, ran aground in Queens in 1993 in an ill-fated attempt to unload its battered and starving human cargo. Ten people died trying...

NEW YORK -- A Chinatown businesswoman who prosecutors described as one of the biggest "snakeheads'' of all time was sentenced to 35 years in prison Thursday for her role in organizing human smuggling schemes, including the doomed Golden Venture voyage in 1993. Cheng Chui Ping, 57, pleaded for more than an hour for a lenient sentence, saying she was but a simple, hardworking immigrant who loved America and had been terrorized by Chinatown gangs. U.S. District Judge Michael Mukasey listened patiently, then dismissed the speech as ``simply incredible'' and gave Cheng the maximum penalty allowed by law. Evidence at the...