Rescued From Sex Slavery

48 Hours Goes Undercover Into The International Sex Slave Trade

(CBS)  48 Hours arrives at Matei’s shelter after midnight. Nicoleta gets a change of clothes and a hot meal.

How does Nicoleta look? "She is tired, obviously. Not well taken care of," says Matei. "She doesn’t have self-worth, self-respect, self-esteem."

Matei says it will be months before Nicoleta trusts her enough to tell her the truth, but she isn't optimistic. "My first opinion is, it will be very difficult to work with her."

48 Hours says goodbye to Nicoleta, promising to check back in a few months.

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While Nicoleta is just beginning to deal with what she's endured in Romania, another young woman, more than 6,000 miles away in southern California, has spent years recovering from her dark journey.

48 Hours talked to Olga, 25, who's also a survivor of a million-dollar sex slave trafficking ring in Russia. Her ordeal began in 1999, in her hometown of Moscow, a growing supplier of sex slaves to the United States.

She was the perfect target for traffickers. Both her father and boyfriend had been murdered by the Russian mob. She was scared and desperate to get out.

A friend introduced her to a man named Alexander Rashkovsky, who was looking for girls to work in America. Rashkovsky offered Olga a chance at a new life: a job as an assistant and transportation to the United States.

"The only thing that I knew: that America is really secure, a person has rights," says Olga. "And everywhere would be pretty much safer than being in Moscow."

Jolene Smith, executive director of the Free the Slaves Foundation, says Rashkovsky's come-on is a typical tactic for a slave trader. "And then the harsh reality sets in. There are threats. And that's where the person realizes, 'I'm trapped. And there is nothing I can do.'"

After Rashkovsky spent the money on the plane tickets, he made it clear there was no backing out. "If anybody try to run away, he's not going to deal with you," says Olga. "'I'm just going to cut your head off.'"

Olga got on the plane with four other Russian girls. In that instant, they became the personal property of an international slave trader. Olga's plane, however, was headed to Mexico. Rashkovsky was planning to smuggle the women across the notoriously unsupervised border between Mexico and the United States. He brought the women to a hotel in Tijuana.

Olga, a consultant to 48 Hours on this report, returned to Mexico to retrace her steps. "It’s just old memories," she says. "The older I get, the more scarier it is to think about what could happen to me."

Girls like Olga are sometimes put to work in Mexican strip clubs before heading north. But Mexico is more than just a transit country and training ground for Eastern Europeans. In its own right, Mexico is the no. 1 country providing slaves to the United States, accounting for the majority of federal trafficking cases.

Many girls come from the central Mexico region of Tlaxcala, an infamous haven for modern-day slave traders. Two years ago, Rosaria was kidnapped. She was 20.

"They had me working overnights. It was worse than prison," says Rosaria. "No freedom. Doing things I had never done before. It was like hell on earth."

Rosaria recently escaped from a Tijuana brothel before she could be taken from the border. "They told me they will kill me. They even threatened me with hurting my family, if I tried to escape," she says. "They told me that I was going to work in the United States. They had girls working over there already."

Many of those girls never return. 48 Hours met Elsa, one of the mothers of the missing. The last time she saw her daughter was on her 20th birthday, in June 2001.

Elsa claims that the people behind her daughter’s disappearance are allegedly members of an well-known family of slave traders called the Carretos. She alleges that members of the Carretos abducted her daughter on her way to work, and eventually brought her daughter to the United States.

But first, Elsa says they brought her daughter to Calle Santo Tomas, one of the many brutal training grounds in Mexico where traffickers "break in" new girls like Rosaria.

Rosaria said she was beaten: "They just looked at me and told me to go to work. I was so scared of being killed, I did everything they wanted me to."

"One of the key tools that modern-day slaveholders today use is to break the person's will as soon as possible," says Smith. "The sooner the will is broken, in many cases, it's easier to transport that person. It's easier to force that person to work."

On Calle Santo Tomas, you can find dozens of girls, day and night, parading in a slow circle. A crowd of clients stands around them, while a vendor sells snacks. The pimps overseeing matters are suspicious of outsiders, but 48 Hours got in with hidden cameras.

The girls bring their clients into a warehouse-like structure, and the sex takes place inside filthy curtained cubicles. Elsa says her daughter was helpless: "They threaten the girls. They say, 'If you leave, I will kill your family. I will kill you and cut you to pieces.'"

But for Olga and the other Russian girls, a different version of the "training process" took place on their first night in Tijuana.

Rashkovsky brought some men to the hotel and began putting his new slaves to work. Olga convinces them she is too sick to perform, but she now sees a horrible future ahead of her. "He [Rashkovsky] wouldn't care at all," she says. "We could die, and he would probably step over us and keep walking.”

And now, just as Elsa is determined to free her daughter, Olga is determined to escape. "This is my chance," says Olga.

The border crossing between Tijuana and California is the busiest land border in the world. Rashkovsky was behind the wheel, and Olga and another Russian woman were passengers on the road to becoming Rashkovsky's newest sex slaves in America.

But first, they had to pass the last obstacle: getting through the border checkpoint.

Olga, who at the time didn't speak any English, was given a two-word crash course in English by Rashkovsky: "Yes. U.S." It was something she would have to say at the border.

"I knew that it wasn’t easy to cross the border, so as soon as I get there, I should try to escape," says Olga.

When the car pulled up to the border guard, Olga made her move. "I just hope they were going to stop our car," she says.

She began speaking in Russian, and says Rashkovsky was furious. But her gamble worked. Everyone was ordered out of the car by the border patrol, and detained. Rashkovsky was questioned on video, and tried to convince his interrogators that he had just met the girls in Tijuana.

But it didn’t work. "An older gentleman in the company of two young females who had heavy Russian accents, you know, just didn't pass the litmus test," says Special Agent Mike Unzueta, who worked the Rashkovsky case for the Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as "ICE."

Rashkovsky was arrested for attempting to smuggle human beings across the border.

"He was basically a monster," says Olga. "Really a monster. That's him."

Investigators later learned the ugly truth: Rashkovsky had raked in more than a million dollars, trafficking young Russians into the Los Angeles area.

"The money that they were making was going right into Rashkovsky’s pocket," says Unzueta. "These women basically were going to be treated as slaves."

Olga was taken to a safe house in San Diego and placed in protective custody. She was one of the lucky few to be saved before she was forced into slavery.