Mexican sex trafficker gets 15 yrs in US jail

A US federal court Friday sentenced a leading member of a Mexican sex trafficking ring to more than 15 years in prison for forcing women and underage girls into prostitution in the United States.

Paulino Ramirez Granados, a 39-year-old whose family ran a network that smuggled young women from Mexico to New York, pleaded guilty in July to threatening and using violence to coerce women into prostitution over the course of a decade.

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Prosecutors said male members of the trafficking ring, which operated out of Tenancingo in Mexico's central Tlaxcala state, promised women love and marriage to dupe them into relationships and then force them into prostitution.

One of Ramirez Granados's victims, referred only by the anonymous moniker of Jane Doe number one, said that the ring leader and a co-conspirator had "made promises that we would escape poverty if I worked in prostitution. But it never happened."

"For years, I cried in silence. I carry with me the scars of (the defendant and his co-conspirator's) abuse every day, but I can no longer be silent," she said, according to a Justice Department statement.

Ramirez Granados, who also impregnated one of the women, was sentenced to 188 months in prison and five years of supervised release.

Judge Kiyo Matsumoto of the Eastern District of New York also ordered him to pay Jane Doe number one $1.2 million in restitution.