Tall Americano, Hold the Paycheck

When Abdenasser "Sammy" Ennassime returned home to visit his family in Morocco six years ago, he could brag of a bustling coffee shop, a baby son, and an American wife to show for his more than two decades in the United States. In this light, Ennassime's suggestion to bring his adolescent niece, Lamyaá, to his home in Tacoma to help with the new baby—in return for enrolling her in school and guiding her toward U.S. citizenship—was seen as the magnanimous gesture of a generous uncle.

"I was happy that I was going to see a new country and go to school in America," says Lamyaá. "But I was so young and, of course, I didn't want to leave my family."

But for Lamyaá's family, with four children all supported on her father's salary as a maintenance person for Royal Air Maroc, the decision was obvious: Lamyaá would go to the U.S. with her uncle and become an educated American.

Initially, it seemed that everything was on track. Lamyaá's mother accompanied her to Tacoma for the first few months to help her adjust, and she was placed in a junior high where she immediately took to her studies and began to learn English.

But there were warning signs from the beginning. Lamyaá was given a small 5- by 10-foot room with the window blocked out to sleep in. She was denied a house key, and all of her papers and identification were taken from her. She was required to work long weekend hours at the Ennassimes' Lakewood coffee shop, Lake City Perk, and her list of chores at the Ennassime home was overwhelming.

"At first, Sammy always said, 'I'm gonna take care of you, treat you like a daughter,'" recalls Lamyaá, pushing her black bangs from her forehead as she sips a fruit smoothie through a green straw at a Tacoma downtown Starbucks. "He promised me that I was going to go to school and have a good life."

But Lamyaá's diary sparked a rapid escalation in her uncle's efforts to control her. "In high school, I started keeping a diary about my life and all of the things they were doing to me, and you know, about boys, too," she says. "Sammy read it and got really angry; he called me spoiled and said I didn't appreciate what I had."

In an alarming turn, Ennassime pulled Lamyaá out of high school in the middle of her freshman year, claiming to authorities that he wanted her home-schooled in an effort to preserve her Muslim culture. Lamyaá, who had comforted herself with the promise of an education, was devastated. Without the escape of school, Lamyaá's life became entirely dictated by her aunt and uncle. At first she was forced to work one shift a day seven days a week at the coffee shop, but she soon began regularly working double shifts of 12 to 14 hours without monetary compensation. Back at the Ennassime home, she was expected to care for the Ennassimes' young son and continue cooking meals and cleaning for the family, afterward falling onto a mattress in her solitary dark room, wondering if this was all America had in store for her.

Preoccupied with the thought of Lamyaá attracting male attention, Sammy forced her to wear baggy clothes, forbade her from wearing makeup, and ordered her not to converse with customers. And back at the Ennassime house, the computer was locked despite Sammy's claims to officials that he had bought home-schooling software. All outside communication was forbidden, and when Sammy learned through caller ID that Lamyaá had, in a moment of defiance, called a co-worker, he struck her across the face with a telephone, according to court documents.

"I wasn't a real teenager," she says. "I didn't have a cell phone or friends—nothing. I would try and be good, but [Sammy] was always angry about something."

But the abusive uncle would get his comeuppance: In December 2005, Ennassime was charged with one count of forced labor and concealing and harboring an alien. In September, he was convicted of these charges, and last month, Ennassime, who declined to comment for this article, was sentenced to 240 hours of community service, three years probation, six months home detention with an electronic monitoring device, and responsibility for $65,000 in back wages to be paid to his niece. Ennassime still owns and operates Lake City Perk, and at his sentencing last month, he stated simply, "I'm sorry I broke the law."

"This was a crime in which a child was misled and mistreated," says Ye-Ting Woo, the federal prosecutor in this case. And to the feds, that crime was part and parcel of human trafficking, a term that is more likely to conjure images of human cargo in forgotten shipping containers and young women languishing in underground brothels.

Human trafficking is now tied with arms dealing as the second largest criminal business in the world, and is growing faster than any other. It first became an issue in Washington state in the late '90s, when several reports of abused and murdered mail-order brides in the area hit the news. Though under current law few mail-order brides qualify as trafficking victims, the cases raised awareness of the vulnerability of new immigrants in the state and the abuse that often befalls them.