By Scott Bridges
and Natasia Gascon
Federal agents last week arrested the owner of a Culver City massage clinic on charges related to human trafficking. The alleged crime would be the most significant incident of human trafficking in the U.S. history.
Pranee Tubchumpol, 44, who operates Five Senses Spa Thai Massage at 4349 ½ Sepulveda Blvd., was served a warrant at her Gardena home and arrested by FBI agents, her ex-husband, Al Molinar, told the News.
According to the U.S. Government’s indictment, Tubchumpol was the director of international relations with Global Horizons Manpower, Inc., who acted as a liaison between workers, the Department of Labor’s H2A guest worker program and Thai authorities.
The indictment describes Global Horizons as a company that “recruits workers from foreign countries under the [Department of Labor’s] guest worker program to work in the United States agricultural industry.”
Molinar told the News that his ex-wife had been in a managerial position with the company, readying passports and paperwork, but left the company about four years ago to start her own business and fulfill her “whole life’s dream.”
According to the indictment, Tubchumpol is one of six people being charged in a conspiracy to “hold approximately 400 Thai nationals in a condition of forced labor” after promising the “impoverished, rural farm workers” three-years of high-paid employment in the U.S.
The workers paid “substantial” recruitment fees to participate in the program and were then sent to melon and pineapple farms on the islands of Oahu, Maui, Hawaii and Kauai, and were allegedly stripped of their passports and threatened with physical abuse, arrest and deportation, the indictment charged.
According to broadcast reports, four of the six alleged traffickers have been taken into custody and the other two have fled and remain at large in Thailand.
If convicted, Tubchumpol faces a maximum of 70 years in prison. The massage clinic was closed for a couple of days, but has since re-opened with a smaller staff.
