An Iota of Epstein-Attention

If an iota of the attention that’s gone to Jeffery Epstein’s activity had made its way to the trafficking of indigenous women and girls across North America, I would not be writing this. I would not have been dragged into the disturbing underground (but right in front of you) world of sex trafficking in Indian Country that’s aided and abetted by Indian gaming and across US and Native governments.

Perhaps it’s a collective fascination with ‘celebrity’, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous writ large in the constant media flow. Maybe there’s an understanding that justice hasn’t been served in the head-on-platter way we think it should be or at all; that we’ve been cheated out of both the spectacle and, perhaps, that there are hundreds of rape victims, hundreds of children that have been raped—and they should have justice.

In the trafficking network that I was brought into in 2017, there are potentially hundreds of rape victims daily. Girls and young women who have been lured into or disappeared into regular, forced sex for the financial benefit of others; for as many men as can use them until they are no longer useful. One on one encounters, group encounters, recorded encounters that can be sold over and over again. Perhaps we don’t perceive these ‘regular’ men as powerful as the one’s whose heads we’d like to see on the proverbial platter. However, the power they hold over the victims during and long after the rape are the same as is the level of protection they’re given by the willful blindness and manipulation of others. In addition, those who have disappeared the girls and women hold even more power via threats of death, control over living conditions and addictions.

Most of these girls and women are brown-skinned, come from impoverished indigenous communities across the Americas. Migrant or not, they are manipulated by others into forced prostitution, sold from one ‘dealer’ to another when it’s convenient, and their existence is right in front of anyone that frequents Indian casinos across the US and Canada. They have long been vanished from the majority consciousness and consciences and that makes them easier fodder for greed.

Las Vegas is known for The Mob’s role in the old days and Russian gangster influence these days. In Indian gaming, across the US and Canada, the Sinaloa cartel is the gang to contend with.

At the time the first legal Indian gaming center, a high-stakes bingo hall, was built in Seminole Country in 1979, Rafael Caro Quintana was still getting his weed imported from Washington State and Oregon. He had yet to begin the mass cultivation of sensimilla that later became what other growers and sellers tried to emulate. He and his cohorts were becoming the Guadalajara cartel, not yet the Sinaloa cartel of fame and infamy.

By the time that the first casino was built in Arizona in 1984, though, historical commercial relationships had been strengthened on the foundation of marijuana and cocaine movement from Mexico into the US. In 1993, when the first Desert Diamond casino was built on the Nogales Highway, the thoroughfare was a primary avenue for moving those drugs. The relationship between the Sinaloa cartel and the Tohono O’odham had been an informal, familial one, cultivated over the course of 700 years, when Arizona was merely another expanse of hot air, lots of sand and scarce water without invisible lines surrounding it. There were no borders to be crossed, only the fluidity of movement.

That informal relationship-one not confined to the American SW or the O’odham-became a different one in the mid-90s when someone realized that casinos are a brilliant way to launder the massive amount of cash that the Sinaloans were wrangling. Why stash it if you can multiply it? In addition to the ease of laundering money, casinos offered a readily available and eager audience to consume the drugs and sex and feelings of power or displaced empowerment that (mostly) men were seeking. Sex and drugs and high-rolling or grandiose ideas of being a high-roller fueled an industry that was contagious, moving like a virus across the continent. As it grew, it became institutionalized by casino management and staff, Indian country leadership and law enforcement (who largely had their hands tied) and, until it was too late in my opinion, federal law enforcement.

Though my involvement with this contagion of greed-fueled fear is specific to the endangerment and murder of women and girls related to procurement and distribution for sexual purposes within the context of Indian gaming, it’s easy to see how, when a multinational cartel has been given entré into one aspect of disempowered communities it can take hold across all of them.

If one dares to look closely, the historic underpinnings of displacement, forced and later enforced poverty, lack of resources all entwined with the history of tribes stealing women and children for labor has become this modern iteration.

Others had been looking closely. Ancestors have been watching this unfold from the get-go, they’ve sought the attention of many, many, many people for decades and their pleas for intervention fell on deaf ears. I was just the naive one who followed where I was led, despite my initial kicking and screaming: right into that damn lion’s den.

And, to their credit (because I have a will continue to rail about federal law enforcement and intelligence services inaction) the FBI was actively investigating from at least one casino while I was in the desert in 2017. I knew it because I knew them—not personally but they were identified to me in the same way everything else has been. I also had the distinct impression that if I could know who they were, others could as well. I don’t know if that was true but I made an end-run around bureaucracy and headed straight to the FBI-PHX SAC and told his assistant what I knew. That phone call brought two consequences: First, the FBI made a phone call to DARPA. I’m guessing that phone call was to ask, “WTF? Is this possible?” Second, the agency doubled-down on the surveillance I was under which meant that I was surveilled by the FBI as well as people from the group that were controlling the sex trafficking across the Phoenix metro area. Electronic and personal surveillance that included drones by the bedroom window and probably entrance into the house I was staying in (although that was never confirmed). Even a naive, middle-aged white woman knew what was happening because once you see it, you can’t unsee it or ignore it.

Everyone at that level wanted to know how it was I knew what I knew. Blessedly, the cartel and The Fuckery (what I call the partnership between the Indian gaming and government with the Sinaloa cartel), didn’t get close enough to ask personally. But I sure as shit wanted (and still do) some law enforcement investigator to do just that. Instead of jumping though the hoops for a warrant then and now (that’s for you Agent Williams), all anyone needs to do is knock on the door or pick up the phone.

I once had someone tell me that this ‘mission’ isn’t ‘real spirituality’. He was so wrong. This is where all things spirit conspire to bring the Absolute Goodness of the Earth to the practical world of justice.