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Modern day slavery in New York
allen griggs
Member Posts: 35,695 ✭✭✭✭
Couple's Downfall Is Culminating in Sentencing in Long Island Slavery Case
NYTimes.com
By ERIC KONIGSBERG
Published: June 23, 2008
MUTTONTOWN, N.Y. - With their courtship complete and their arranged marriage only a few weeks old, Mahender and Varsha Sabhnani set out for New York from India in 1981, leaving behind their wealthy families and households with live-in servants.
By American standards, they did not have much money. But they started a perfume company and embarked on a typical exurban migration - from Queens to Hicksville to Muttontown, where they moved into Muttontown Knolls, a new subdivision of 88 half-acre plots that offered three models of houses.
Theirs was a modern Long Island chalet: about 5,900 square feet, with diagonal cedar siding, a sharply sloping roof and two bronze lions standing guard before their front stoop.
Working from home and selling fortified-strength fragrances to customers in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, the Sabhnanis made millions. "It started in our basement and just kind of grew from there," said Pooja Sabhnani, 23, the oldest of their four children. "My parents worked incredibly hard."
Eventually, they brought servants from Indonesia, where Varsha Sabhnani had been raised. On May 13, 2007, the police were called to a Dunkin' Donuts in Syosset, N.Y., where one of the domestic workers had turned up. Her face was bruised and she wore only pants and a towel.
When the Dunkin' Donuts employees tried to talk to the 51-year-old woman, identified as Samirah - like many Indonesians, she uses only one name - she made gestures of hitting herself and uttered what sounded to them like the word "master."
Immigration officials who searched the Sabhnanis' house found Samirah's co-worker, Enung, then 46, hiding in a closet.
Speaking through an interpreter, the two women described for authorities an existence on Long Island that sounded very much like slave labor. They spoke of starvation, beatings and torture. Their compensation of $100 a month for working 17-hour days with no days off amounted to a wage of roughly 20 cents an hour.
Mr. Sabhnani, 52, and Mrs. Sabhnani, 46, will be sentenced on Thursday and Friday, respectively, in federal court. They were convicted late last year on 12 counts, including forced labor, peonage and harboring aliens. Lawyers involved in the case estimated last week that Mrs. Sabhnani, who was found to have physically harmed the workers and is now in jail, might receive 12 to 15 years in prison. They said that Mr. Sabhnani, who is under house arrest, might be sentenced to five or six years.
Last month, a judge reprimanded Mr. Sabhnani and the security firm that was guarding him for violating the terms of his confinement by allowing him to attend business dinners in Manhattan that kept him out past 1 a.m.
The Sabhnanis may also have to forfeit their house and pay back wages estimated at more than $1 million to Samirah and Enung.
The Sabhnanis' lawyers managed to get their sentencing dates pushed back several times, but on Friday, Pooja Sabhnani said she was resigned to prison terms for her parents. "For months, we tried not to talk about the sentencing, but you kind of have to talk about it now," she said, adding that she, her father and her siblings have taken turns visiting her mother four days a week at the Nassau County Correctional Center. "We're trying to prepare to take hold of the business ourselves."
The Sabhnanis maintain that they are innocent, and plan to appeal. In court, their lawyers tried to portray the domestic workers' claims as fabrications hatched to extort money from the family or to gain American citizenship.
The trial testimony painted the Sabhnani household dynamic as less upstairs-downstairs than a case of third world feudalism transposed to Long Island. The jurors were repeatedly moved to tears. Samirah and Enung, who are staying in the United States on visas for trafficking victims and are living in a group home, told of being cut with a knife and burned with boiling water. Samirah said she was forced to eat bunches of hot chili peppers and spoonfuls of chili powder until she vomited. Then, she was made to eat her own vomit.
`I Was Beaten Up'
In a locked cabinet in a closet off the master bedroom, investigators found a photo of Samirah drinking milk from a carton. At trial, Samirah explained that one day she had not been permitted to eat by 3 p.m. - the workers testified that they were sometimes starved and often ate out of the garbage - so she took a sip of milk from the refrigerator. One of the Sabhnanis' daughters, Dakshina, saw her.
"And Dakshina told the mother, `Samirah took milk without using a glass,' " Samirah testified. "And immediately I was beaten up by the missus."
Mrs. Sabhnani gathered the children to watch as Samirah was forced to recreate her transgression for the camera. If she ever "stole" food again, she was told, her children would receive the photograph. "And then my children would be embarrassed that the mother was the thief," Samirah said.
Law enforcement officials involved in the case theorized that some of Mrs. Sabhnani's behavior may have stemmed from her own complicated relationship with food. She had been extremely overweight most of her adult life. Then, three years ago, she went on a diet that brought her weight down to less than 150 from more than 300 pounds
NYTimes.com
By ERIC KONIGSBERG
Published: June 23, 2008
MUTTONTOWN, N.Y. - With their courtship complete and their arranged marriage only a few weeks old, Mahender and Varsha Sabhnani set out for New York from India in 1981, leaving behind their wealthy families and households with live-in servants.
By American standards, they did not have much money. But they started a perfume company and embarked on a typical exurban migration - from Queens to Hicksville to Muttontown, where they moved into Muttontown Knolls, a new subdivision of 88 half-acre plots that offered three models of houses.
Theirs was a modern Long Island chalet: about 5,900 square feet, with diagonal cedar siding, a sharply sloping roof and two bronze lions standing guard before their front stoop.
Working from home and selling fortified-strength fragrances to customers in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, the Sabhnanis made millions. "It started in our basement and just kind of grew from there," said Pooja Sabhnani, 23, the oldest of their four children. "My parents worked incredibly hard."
Eventually, they brought servants from Indonesia, where Varsha Sabhnani had been raised. On May 13, 2007, the police were called to a Dunkin' Donuts in Syosset, N.Y., where one of the domestic workers had turned up. Her face was bruised and she wore only pants and a towel.
When the Dunkin' Donuts employees tried to talk to the 51-year-old woman, identified as Samirah - like many Indonesians, she uses only one name - she made gestures of hitting herself and uttered what sounded to them like the word "master."
Immigration officials who searched the Sabhnanis' house found Samirah's co-worker, Enung, then 46, hiding in a closet.
Speaking through an interpreter, the two women described for authorities an existence on Long Island that sounded very much like slave labor. They spoke of starvation, beatings and torture. Their compensation of $100 a month for working 17-hour days with no days off amounted to a wage of roughly 20 cents an hour.
Mr. Sabhnani, 52, and Mrs. Sabhnani, 46, will be sentenced on Thursday and Friday, respectively, in federal court. They were convicted late last year on 12 counts, including forced labor, peonage and harboring aliens. Lawyers involved in the case estimated last week that Mrs. Sabhnani, who was found to have physically harmed the workers and is now in jail, might receive 12 to 15 years in prison. They said that Mr. Sabhnani, who is under house arrest, might be sentenced to five or six years.
Last month, a judge reprimanded Mr. Sabhnani and the security firm that was guarding him for violating the terms of his confinement by allowing him to attend business dinners in Manhattan that kept him out past 1 a.m.
The Sabhnanis may also have to forfeit their house and pay back wages estimated at more than $1 million to Samirah and Enung.
The Sabhnanis' lawyers managed to get their sentencing dates pushed back several times, but on Friday, Pooja Sabhnani said she was resigned to prison terms for her parents. "For months, we tried not to talk about the sentencing, but you kind of have to talk about it now," she said, adding that she, her father and her siblings have taken turns visiting her mother four days a week at the Nassau County Correctional Center. "We're trying to prepare to take hold of the business ourselves."
The Sabhnanis maintain that they are innocent, and plan to appeal. In court, their lawyers tried to portray the domestic workers' claims as fabrications hatched to extort money from the family or to gain American citizenship.
The trial testimony painted the Sabhnani household dynamic as less upstairs-downstairs than a case of third world feudalism transposed to Long Island. The jurors were repeatedly moved to tears. Samirah and Enung, who are staying in the United States on visas for trafficking victims and are living in a group home, told of being cut with a knife and burned with boiling water. Samirah said she was forced to eat bunches of hot chili peppers and spoonfuls of chili powder until she vomited. Then, she was made to eat her own vomit.
`I Was Beaten Up'
In a locked cabinet in a closet off the master bedroom, investigators found a photo of Samirah drinking milk from a carton. At trial, Samirah explained that one day she had not been permitted to eat by 3 p.m. - the workers testified that they were sometimes starved and often ate out of the garbage - so she took a sip of milk from the refrigerator. One of the Sabhnanis' daughters, Dakshina, saw her.
"And Dakshina told the mother, `Samirah took milk without using a glass,' " Samirah testified. "And immediately I was beaten up by the missus."
Mrs. Sabhnani gathered the children to watch as Samirah was forced to recreate her transgression for the camera. If she ever "stole" food again, she was told, her children would receive the photograph. "And then my children would be embarrassed that the mother was the thief," Samirah said.
Law enforcement officials involved in the case theorized that some of Mrs. Sabhnani's behavior may have stemmed from her own complicated relationship with food. She had been extremely overweight most of her adult life. Then, three years ago, she went on a diet that brought her weight down to less than 150 from more than 300 pounds
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