A Russian immigrant has admitted locking five Latvian women in a suburban apartment and forcing them to work as strippers for his profit - in part by threatening them with Russian organized crime retaliation.
Alex Mishulovich pleaded guilty in Federal court Friday to charges involving keeping people in servitude, says the Associated Press. He admitted in a written statement that he lured the five Latvians to the United States, kept their passports, controlled their activities, and sent them out to work the strip clubs six nights a week, with their earnings going into his pockets.
The AP says he even threatened to kill them and have the reputed "Chechen Mafia" murder their families if they did not do as he ordered.
Mishulovich faces up to nine and a half years in federal prison. He faces sentencing April 28. The AP says he's expected to be a government witness at a trial set Monday for co-defendant Vadim Gorokhovski, accused of housing the five Latvian women in earl 1997 after they fled from Mishulovich.
Mishulovich is a naturalized American citizen who recruited the women from Riga, the Latvian capital, in 1996. He promised to pay them up to $60,000 a year if they worked for him as exotic dancers; Latvia's average monthly income, by comparison, is reported at about $250 a month, making his offer very enticing.
He helped them obtain immigration papers, but once they landed in Chicago, he took the papers and locked them in the apartment, beating and threatening to kill them to keep them under his thumb, according to the FBI.
He admitted that he refused to let the women leave the apartment unescorted and kept most of their earnings, the AP says. When they escaped to Gorokhovski, he split a portion of their earnings with him. Mishulovich's statement also indicates he sent some of the women back to Latvia two years ago to keep the police from learning of the scheme and discovering them.
But the AP says authorities found them after an American Embassy official noticed many of the women had shown the same address where they would stay in the United States and called authorities.
