RedHanded - Episode 192 - Operation Fort & The Truth about Modern Slavery

Episode Date: April 8, 2021

In 2019 a few hungry men went looking for food at a local soup kitchen in Birmingham; here they met an aid worker who was horrified to discover the suffering they had endured at the hands of a notorious Polish crime family. Following this encounter Operation Fort - the biggest modern slavery investigation in the history of the UK - was sparked. In this episode Hannah and Suruthi explore what people trafficking really is as they delve into the UK's prolific slavery network. Merch - 15% off for the next 4 days: www.redhandedshop.com Sources: www.redhandedpodcast.com   See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to Red Handed early and ad-free. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. So, get this. The Ontario Liberals elected Bonnie Crombie as their new leader. Bonnie who? I just sent you her profile. Her first act as leader, asking donors for a million bucks for her salary. That's excessive. She's a big carbon tax supporter. Oh yeah. Check out her record as mayor. Oh, get out of here. She even increased taxes carbon tax supporter. Oh yeah, check out her record as mayor. Oh, get out of here.

She even increased taxes in this economy. Yeah, higher taxes, carbon taxes. She sounds expensive. Bonnie Crombie and the Ontario Liberals. They just don't get it. That'll cost you. A message from the Ontario PC Party. They say Hollywood is where dreams are made.

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or wherever you get your podcasts. I can't remember how... What? Yes, hello, I'm Hannah. Excellent start. I'm Saruti. Off to a real banger. It's just been quite the few weeks, and I feel like... Welcome to Red Handed, by the way, firstly. And secondly, I feel like, welcome to Red Handed by the way firstly and secondly, I feel like we're just sort of starting to wind down. I personally am sleeping past 4am now which is a real plus.

I feel like we've just been like very tightly wound springs for about two months and I feel like we're just about unwinding now. I mean, I'm putting words in your mouth, you might be like, everything's still awful. No, no, no, I am a-okay. I woke up at just before 9am today on... Nice. What is it? Good Friday that we're recording this? Yep. So while I did wake up at nine o'clock, we are obviously still working on a UK bank holiday, but that's fine because compared to what's been going on for the last few weeks, this is completely chill. And if you're

wondering what on earth we're talking about, it's because we wrote that book we told you about last week guys it's happened the book is out there and if you would like to pre-order your copy which I would wholeheartedly recommend because I think it is quite the excellent book then you can follow the link tree that is very handily placed in the show notes description for this podcast so just click on that head on over I've tried to collate as many links as I possibly can in that link tree for anywhere I could find the book I do also know it is available at independent bookstores so if you don't like any of the links that we've provided you can definitely find it elsewhere just please go pre-order it because it would mean a lot to us and I know we mentioned this last week but so

many of you are still asking on social media we We would love to do an audiobook, guys. We would love to do that. But this was a big enough deal that anybody gave us a chance to write a book before they're going to give us an audiobook, which is a hell of a lot of work. That book is like almost 70,000 words. That would be a lifetime of editing. So before anybody's going to give us that opportunity, we've got to sell a lot of regular books. So I know it's a bit of a catch-22. So if you want the audiobook, you've got to pre-order the in-book form. On another note, if you would like to get your hands on some of the current merch that is up on the Red Handed store, then now is your chance to do so because it's going to be going away in about three weeks time. For 48 hours, starting on Thursday, the 8th of

April, we're going to be having a flash sale. So if you want to get 15% off all the merch that is currently up on the store, head on over. You don't need a code. It's going to be automatically applied at checkout. 48 hours, go get your merch before it goes away. And again, the link to the Red Handed store is also in the show notes. Okay, now notices are all over and I know that they are your favourite part of the show. We are talking about something we've never even come close to talking about on the show before. When we hear the words human trafficking or modern slavery, often we picture women being snatched off the streets of developing countries, bundled into vans and sold into brothels or nail salons. Or we think about

rich white girls stolen to be sold at human sex auctions, while Liam Neeson has very intense phone conversations. But that isn't actually what happens in the majority of human trafficking cases, and modern slavery isn't really what we think it is. We're going to tell you the story of the largest ever modern slavery case to be prosecuted in the UK, and one of the largest labour exploitation cases in the history of Europe. And in the run-up to this case, we spoke to the absolute authority on modern slavery, deep friend of the show, Emily Kenway, about her brand new book, The Truth About Modern Slavery. Emily not only helped us with this case specifically, but gave us a really clear

explanation of what modern slavery really is and what most of us misunderstand about it. And that interview with Emily is coming out next week on the 13th of April. Video will be available for $10 and up patrons on Patreon and audio will be available everywhere for everybody else. UK listeners, if you've shopped at Waitrose, Marks and Spencer's, Sainsbury's, Homebase, Travis Perkins, Argos, Wix, Tesco or Asda, then it is entirely possible that you have bought a product that was farmed or constructed by one of the victims of this case. A case in which a Polish organised crime syndicate was exposed by a police investigation known as Operation Fort. This case has hundreds of victims, so we can't tell each one of their individual stories, but we've collected some of them for you. And we're going to start with Darius. In the 11th season, which is what I've decided I'm calling the bit between the 2000s and the 20s,

Darius was having a pretty shitty time. He was in his 40s and he had just got out of prison after serving a seven-month sentence for stealing two bicycles. He had also been issued a large fine, which had left him in a desperately large amount of debt that he had little to no chance of paying off. In February 2015, Darius was approached by a man in a shopping centre in the northern Polish town of Bydgoszcz. This man told Darius that he could earn £300 a week

in England just sorting rubbish. The man and his associates said that they could sort everything out for him, his transport, his accommodation, the whole thing. And you have to remember that this was 2015, the glorious pre-Brexit years. So because of all of that sexy freedom of movement, Darius didn't even need a visa to come work in the UK. He automatically had the right to work. All Darius had to do was decide to leave his life in Poland behind. He was told that he would be able to keep £150 of his wage every week, and the rest would go on his accommodation. And that seemed like a pretty okay deal to Darius. And when he thought about leaving Poland, it didn't feel like that difficult a choice. He had no family left there, except for

an estranged sister that he didn't speak to. So this offer from a stranger in a shopping centre seemed like a reasonable opportunity to try and pay off his debt and start again. So Darius, feeling like he had nothing to lose, and potentially everything to gain, decided to take the mystery man up on his offer. And so Darius was put on a bus to the UK. The bus, which was probably of the mega variety. And if you are a non-UK listener and don't know what I'm talking about, mega buses are probably akin to a greyhound bus situation in the US. I cannot, I have only taken one mega bus in

my life and that was to Manchester. And even that, which was like maximum three and a half hours. No, awful. From Poland. Are you joking? They don't have toilets. No, no, it's stressful. I think I've got a megabus a couple of times when I was at uni. As somebody who also gets violently sick on transportation,

buses, mega or not, just not for me. I think the worst thing about getting a london mega bus is that they go from victoria coach station which is absolutely nowhere fucking near victoria station and nobody tells you that until you have to try and wander around blindly trying to find it it's fucking miles away from the actual station it's an out it is because i used to work in victoria and my office was like opposite victoria. So like you'd just be coming out of the Pret and the number of tourists that would come up to you'd be like excuse me where's Victoria Coach Station? I'd be like so far from here you are nowhere near I'm so sorry you've

been lied to. Victoria is a very confusing part of London. It is I fucking hated it. I absolutely hated Victoria. Sorry to anybody who, I don't know. No, like no one lives there. It's awful. I lived there when I was in uni. Did you? God, that's sad. I lived there for a year, yeah.

I know. That's where almost all of my following home incidents happened. Oh, well, why does that not surprise me even in the absolute slightest? But anyway, let's get back to Darius on his megabus from Poland to the UK. So Darius took this bus through the Channel Tunnel and then up to Birmingham, where he was taken to his accommodation. The man that Darius had met in the shopping centre was a member of a notorious gang who were funnelling vulnerable people from Poland to England,

where they would be kept as slaves and forced to work for little or no money at all. The house Darius was taken to by gang members was a two-bedroom house in an unassuming part of the West Midlands, and it already had five other grown men living in it. These men, like Darius, were all vulnerable and all Polish. They too had been tempted to Britain with the offer of gainful employment, 150 quid a week to keep and a fresh start. They already knew and Darius was about to find out just how little of that offer was the truth. The men in Darius's house were all crammed onto dirty mattresses on the floor. The conditions were worse than squalid. As soon as Darius arrived, he was forced to sign

bank documents. No one explained why or what would happen next. He was only told that he had to report to a job agency the next day. Darius went to the job agency, as he was told, and we don't know for sure whether he was escorted or not, but given that he had been in the UK for less than 48 hours, didn't speak English, and would have had no idea where he was going, I think we can safely assume that Darius was taken to the job agency by someone else and that someone else was a gang member.

It might be really easy sitting from the outside to be like, well, why did this person get there, see how horrible it was and then continue to go through with it? Because the point is of how they are vulnerable because of how little they had, how little they had in their previous lives, that they were willing to take such a risk and possibly be okay with enduring such horrendous circumstances in the beginning

because they have so little to go back to. There was no other option for many of these people. And they also have no idea what life in the UK is really like. We know, having lived here for the majority of our lives, what it's like and what the quality of life is and blah, blah, blah. But if you've never lived here, how would you know apart from information that you receive from other people? I can imagine there was a certain amount of, well, this is just how it is here. And speaking of how it really is here, job agencies for menial labour in the UK are absolutely everywhere. Why? Because nine times out of 10, an agency worker will be cheaper and

less effort for an employer than a full-time employee would be. And there are a lot of reasons for this. Permanent full-time employees are the employer's responsibility in a lot of ways. If you have permanent staff you're legally required to make contributions to their pensions, you have to pay them a living wage, your tax situation gets more complicated, and the list goes on and on and on. Agency workers present none of these problems. They are cheap, easy, low stress, low responsibility, and in our fast-moving, not giving a huge shit about actual people economy, job agencies can be a breeding ground for what we are calling modern slavery. It's the same reason startups have endless freelancers working for them basically full-time. Freelancers are less hassle than permanent employees. You can treat them worse

and they can't HR you. Obviously while people working in startups as freelancers aren't necessarily being exploited to the extent that these people like on farms are, it's a similar concept just it being good slash bad economic sense for the business. So if you're a farmer or operating in quite a seasonal business, then you don't want to be paying for a full time, full load staff all year round when you don't need that. You just want people to come and go as you need them. And these kind of like menial labor agencies are perfect at just giving you a bunch of people and then taking them away when you don't want them anymore. It's just such a sad, like, anonymous workforce image that pops into your mind at how much we, and when I say we, I mean, like, the collective society, just doesn't care about these people, how anonymous they are. And

I think that's going to become a repeating theme throughout this episode. Yeah, it really does feel like an out of sight, out of mind situation, which we all already knew. We all knew that we choose not to confront it because it's very inconvenient for us. And including ourselves in that, to be honest, like literally everybody in the entirety of the UK. So the job agency placed Darius on a farm called Sandfields near Pershaw. He got up every day at 5am and was driven to the farm to start work at 7am. At the farm, day in day out, Darius had to carry 20kg crates filled with spring onions from the back of vehicles into a storage building, where they could be wrapped in Asda and Tesco branded packaging and sent on their oniony way. This type of repetitive, heavy-lifting job is not one anyone wants to do for minimum wage.

Seven other people, who had also been trafficked from Poland by the gang, were also working on the farm. These kind of cases have hundreds and hundreds of victims, and Darius's experience is in no way a one-off. Here's where it gets even worse. Darius never received a penny for any of this intense labor that he was doing. And this wasn't because Sandfields the farm never made their payment. It was because no one verified the bank account details that had been provided. So no one realised that the wages for Darius's labour were being paid into another man's account.

Darius's entire life became controlled by the men who had brought him to England. He was not allowed to leave the house alone, not even to go to the shop. And just to make things extra menacing, one of these men, one of these gang members who were guarding them, carried a machete. Everything Darius had been promised was a lie. He was told by the men keeping him under constant guard that if he even thought about escaping, that he would be dumped in a shallow grave in the forest. He had been lured into employment with false promises and met with unimaginable

exploitation. And this is what modern slavery looks like. And it happens in Britain all the time. And not just on spring onion farms in the black country. Do we explain the black country? Yes, actually, I was thinking about that when I was reading the notes. The black country is essentially what we call like the West of England. No. No? It's like very specifically the boroughs around Birmingham, like Walsall, like places like that. Oh, okay. I just thought it was the whole of the West.

Okay. No, that's the West country. That's different. That makes more sense. It's called the black country. I think it's one of those things that people have disputed. But the general idea is that it's because there's things that people have disputed but the general idea is that it's because there's a lot of coal under that's what I thought that part of the country

so it was very sooty in the industrial times in like the 1800s so that's the first recorded time of it being referred to as the black country but I did think when because we haven't covered that much of the midlands they're calling places like the midlands and the black country it just we are we are lord of the rings like this country is so ridiculous like we we completely deserve every label we get from other countries like we just we are in a fair where are the dragons i love it though so whimsical i love saying the black it is whimsical it's great so like we said this this isn't just happening on these kind of spring onion farms. This criminal enterprise would become the largest conspiracy of its type ever known in the UK. Victims were found building sheds for companies like Wix and Homebase

and working in large recycling plants like Biffa, with their wages being siphoned off again into someone else's pockets. I actually believe that Biffa are being sued for their involvement in this at the moment. They should be. They should be held accountable for not investigating that the people they're paying are the people that are actually fucking working for them. Yeah, I just think saying we had no idea is not really good enough when you're a company that massive. Not even in the fucking slightest.

Before we go on, let's define modern slavery properly. In the UK, it is defined by the government as the recruitment movement harbouring or receiving of children, women or men through the use of force, coercion, abuse of vulnerability, deceit or other means for the purpose of exploitation. Emily Kenway defined it in her interview with us as an umbrella term for a range of exploitative circumstances. There's no specific legal definition of modern slavery. The circumstances that come under the umbrella term are trafficking, which is the movement of people to exploit them. Exploit is the very important word there. We'll come back to that. Forced labour, which is working under threat. Servitude, which is forced labour but in a house. And the UK brought in the Modern Slavery Act in 2015. As a part of that act, companies that turn over 36 million quid and

upwards a year have to publicly publish what they're doing to prevent modern slavery in their own supply chains. I found Sainsbury's one. It's like exactly what you would think it would be. It's like a lot of pictures of happy people in fields being like, we check everything. And the big companies are not actually legally required to carry out due diligence checks. The Act has been pretty widely critic criticized as being completely toothless by a lot of people oh absolutely i mean if you're saying that there is no legal duty on companies to check their supply chains and therefore there will be no legal comeuppance or consequences if they are found to be saying that there is no modern slavery in their supply chain but actually there is

then all they have to do is sit on fucking like Google Docs and create a template for a policy in which they just like insert random smiling people on cornfields and say that everything is okay. That's it. That's what it seems like is the maximum that is required. I think supply chains are opaque by their very nature. As a singular consumer, it is impossible if you're buying, say you're buying spring onions from Tesco. You have absolutely no way of knowing whether that was produced in an exploitative situation. So therefore, it rests on the companies to check. But they're not being made to do it with any real weight, it seems.

Absolutely. And, you know, I don't want to fucking like, you know, spunk my modern slavery load too early in this episode, but why the fuck not? I'm just going to give it away. Basically, this is the problem, is that our government insists on forcing the responsibility back onto the individual consumer.

And this isn't just with modern slavery, it's with everything, like from recycling, say. It's just always said like, oh, well, you know, everybody needs to take more responsibility. It's about personal responsibility and you should check, blah, blah, blah. But when we're told that these organizations and these companies are free of modern slavery, what more can we do than believe that? We cannot get on a plane and go to Ethiopia and check, hey, are these coffee beans really being produced in a safe and ethical manner? And are these people really being paid properly? There's no way that we can know that. We have to

trust what the companies are saying to us. But their problem is that the government places no responsibilities legally or legislatively on these big corporations to take responsibility. And therefore, they don't. So they can say whatever they want to us. And as an individual consumer, just like you said, Hannah, we cannot know. So really, the point, the fracture point in this entire problem isn't all of the responsibility being put on the heads of individual consumers and us all shaming each other and fucking yelling about, oh, you bought this brand, blah, blah, blah. Like, that's a very, like, small part.

That's like a fucking drop in an ocean. What needs to be happening is we need to be putting pressure on the government to force corporations to take responsibility for this because they won't do it out of the goodness of their hearts. And they don't even have to do it to use it as a PR gimmick because they can just say it. And this is the problem. Let's talk about the national referral mechanism.

That's the name of the official system by which victims of modern slavery are identified and provided with whatever support is available, which, to be honest, from a government point of view, isn't loads. A lot of the people who are really caring for people who are victims of modern slavery are charities. They're not government run. That's not a blanket statement of all the time, but it seemed from the research I've done from this episode, it seems to be the people helping

victims of modern slavery and trafficking victims negotiate the benefit system in this country, giving them places to live, etc, etc, etc. It seems like the massive amount of the work being done is being done by charities, not by the government itself. You might have heard that there are more slaves now than there have ever been, which may well be true. But due to the nature of slavery itself, it's pretty difficult to know the true extent of the problem. Having said that, however, in 2019, it was reported that there were 8,429 people who the government had, quote, reasonable grounds to believe were victims of modern slavery. And there we're talking about here in the UK. I think we can all agree that while they've pulled this very specific 8,429 number out of somewhere, that even one person is already far too many. And the problem is that modern slavery is on the rise. The UK has seen a 52% increase in

modern slavery victims in recent years. And when there is such a drastic increase in something, the cause is usually a bit more systemic than just a few bad criminal eggs, as we're often told. And I think at this point, another term we should get our heads around is that of human trafficking, which according to the United Nations is the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of persons for the purposes of exploitation. Again, here, exploitation is the most important word. The vast majority of trafficked people are, like Darius, seeking livelihood options because they have limited employment opportunities previously. Maybe there are no jobs where they're from.

Maybe they can't earn enough to sustain their families. Maybe they've been in prison and therefore they're from. Maybe they can't earn enough to sustain their families. Maybe they've been in prison and therefore they're prevented from working. These people are trafficked because they fall victim to deceptive employment offers. Darius was definitely a victim of trafficking. And the gang that trafficked Darius trafficked hundreds of others. Here's what we know about these hundreds of people and how they were exploited, kept like animals, and worked to provide our commodities that we can buy at mainstream supermarkets. The hundreds were crammed into disgusting houses like Darius was, where they slept on filthy mattresses or on the floor.

Some were forced to claim benefits, which of course were paid into accounts they had no access to. These accounts were opened in the victims' names at high street branches like Lloyds, TSB, Barclays, etc. After the accounts were opened, the debit cards would be seized and kept with the pin written on the back, so gang members could withdraw any money that would be paid into the account from the employers, like Sandfields Farm. The only country I've ever opened a bank account in is the UK. But it is quite a difficult process. You need to be there in person. You need proof of address, crucially, which a lot of people who've only just got here is difficult to get hold of. It's not a simple process. Any modern slavery documentary you watch interview airport security workers who talk about looking out for people who look as if they're

being escorted against their will through the airport, which the vast majority of people who are trafficked into this country are not coming through airports for a start. But secondly, banks must surely have a similar protocol. Like, surely there must be something in place in banks. There must be some sort of trading of, like, someone is being coerced into opening an account that they don't know anything about. And if banks do do that, which I'm sure that they do,

then this gang of experts are getting around it because they don't know anything about. And if banks do do that, which I'm sure that they do, then this gang were experts at getting around it because they did it hundreds of times. And apparently the banks were even slow to close the accounts once they were alerted by police that they were being used for trafficking. The banks took ages to close the accounts down, so there's definitely something else there that's not been fully explained. The people who were the victims of the trafficking who were given some wages by the gang,

were given as little as £10 a week to survive on. The tiny amounts of food that were provided in the houses in which they were kept were tinned and out of date. Some of the properties that the operation used to house its slaves didn't have toilets, heating or running water. There's reports of some of the victims having to use canal water to wash and others were so hungry that they had to eat out of skips. It feels weird consistently referring to them as the victims, but not only are there hundreds of them, even if we knew all of their names, how could we say it all at once?

And also we don't know their names because a lot of it is still classified. So that's why we're doing that, not for any other weird reason. The victims were often told that their families in Poland would be hurt if they didn't comply. One of the victims had come to the UK because he needed to pay for his daughter to have heart bypass surgery and there were no jobs where he was from. When one victim died, gang members ordered that his ID be removed from his pockets before the paramedics arrived so there would be no chance that anyone would come looking for him. The victims lived in their rat infested houses under the constant threat that if they tried to escape they would be physically harmed or even killed. One man was even

stripped naked in front of the other people he lived with, doused in iodine and told by enforcers that they would remove his kidneys if he didn't keep his mouth shut. And this is all like really, really typical gang activity, like that exploitation, the fear mongering, telling them you're going to kill other members of the family, just these constant threats and keeping people in a terrified state, in a confined state, and also keeping them hungry and exhausted from work. And this is the thing. Don't you always find it interesting? Because I'm not that interested really in organized crime,

you know, mafias and gangs and all that. Like it's not that interesting to me. And I always find it really like bizarre how like we romanticize them so much. I guess it isn't that weird because we also like romanticize serial killers. But we romanticize like organized crime so much. Honor and family and they're just doing. And I'm like these people are fucking the massive business most of these organized crime syndicates are in is human trafficking. That is a fact.

And we romanticize it so much. We make film after film about these kind of like gentlemanly hero types who have strong morals. I'm like, no, they fucking don't. They are the scum. They are the scummiest of the scum. And I hate that kind of glamorization of organized crime and like the mafia. And I also think one of the reasons that organized crime cases are more difficult for a show like us to cover and potentially it's a more difficult story to tell is because usually the schemes go on for years if not decades and there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of victims. And when you start getting to big numbers like that telling an

engaging story about people gets more difficult because you can't do them all. But we're going to keep trying so stick with this. We were really fascinated by everything we came across during the research for this, which is why we did want to take a bit of a risk and do a different type of case. But I think that this is a story that is so worth understanding because it is so intertwined with how we live our lives in the West in modern society. And so it wasn't just men who were trafficked by this gang. Women were trafficked too. Usually the women were not just sent to farms or dumps or to build sheds.

They were kept as domestic servants in the homes of the gang members, which I think is probably much closer to what most of us would associate with the idea of modern slavery. But the problem is if we only associate modern slavery with housemaids and sex workers, then we are not examining the supply chain issue on which our fast-paced economy rests. And as we'll see later on in this episode, that's exactly what the government wants. They want us to stay focused on this idea that it's just like people being snatched off the street and forced into brothels and like forced to be like sex workers against their will. They don't want us to think that it is everything else we've just told you, that it's

people just being lured by deceptive job offers and then being exploited in the way that they are. So another individual story we have come across is that of Moroslav Liman, who was 38 when, like Darius, he was tricked into coming to the UK from Gdansk. Moroslav was forced to work as a painter-slash-decorator renovating houses and gardens for up to 13 hours at a time. He was told by gang enforcers that he needed to pay off the debt that he had racked up for his transportation before he could receive any of his actual wages. Again, a super classic tactic used

by these gangs. They'll bring people from Poland to the UK and then tell them, well, that costs this much. So until we're paid that back, you don't make any money. And another tactic that the gang would use to deceive vulnerable people onto buses to England was to tell them that they only had an hour to make up their minds. Again, it's like almost like cultish behavior, you know, just forcing people, forcing people into a corner to make up their minds. And that's what happened to Peter and Martha. They aren't their real names, because again, like Hannah said, a lot of these cases are very confidential, but that's what we'll call them. So when they got to England, Peter and Martha were forced to sleep in a house with nine other people in the Midlands and were paid £20 a week for working 12 hours a day. The couple were so desperate they had no choice but to ask their traffickers for loans which of course put them deeper in debt and forced them further under the

gang's control. Martha was told that if she didn't work off her debt, then her bones would be broken. I mean, just take that in. You're dragging these vulnerable people into the UK, giving them no money for working 12-hour day shifts, and then telling them, well, you can borrow money from us if you need to. The victims of the gang were kept in the dark about how the UK works, the importance of NI numbers, which is your national insurance number. Without a national insurance number,

you basically don't exist. It's so difficult to get access to healthcare, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It's so important. They weren't told about their immigration status. As we said at the top, this is like pre-Brexit. So the gang are telling these people, you have to stay with us because you're here illegally when actually they're not they're completely legally allowed

to be in the UK to live to work they weren't told about tax codes or their right to remain and they weren't told their actual addresses so all of the bank accounts are being set up are used like bogus addresses and I think that as I was saying before about the like oh this is just how it is here like I read one account of one of the trafficked people from Poland. The first time he was ever shown one of his like payslips, he was shocked by how tiny the amount was, obviously. And then the gang members are saying, oh, well, that's just how tax works in UK. That's how they have a free health service. That's why the schools are so good.

And that's why the roads are like this, like their taxes are so high. And I can truly believe someone who's never been here before believing that. Because how would you know? It's not like they've got like the internet in these slum landlord houses, is it? Like how are they able to verify any of this information? They're also, again, picking people who are incredibly vulnerable with no, limited to no options back where they came from. So they are trapped, they're completely stuck. And it reminds

me a bit of cases of things like, say, Colleen Stan, where Cameron Hooker kept her as a fucking sex slave in his basement for decades. And what he would tell her was, well, you think I'm bad. If you escape and run off and tell other people, there are people out there who are far worse than I am. And they'll throw you in a detention center they'll throw you in jail they'll deport you and I think one of the key things to think about here is what's happening to these people is so unbelievably exploitative and horrendous but yet they are still scared to go to authorities even if they had the opportunity obviously they're being guarded all the time with like people with fucking machetes but even if they had the opportunity would they, they're being guarded all the time with like people with fucking machetes. But even if they had the opportunity, would they say something? And it's because

these people really are so lost and invisible to the whole of society that they don't even feel like going to the authorities would enact any change. And that is the most heartbreaking thing about this entire sort of case. And how would you even know to do it when you don't know who the authorities are? Of course. The really key thing is these people are not stupid. I truly think that anyone put in that situation with no relevant information in a country where they don't speak the language, it would be exactly the same for them too. It's not because they are stupid. No, they are vulnerable and they are being exploited and they are placed in an impossible and terrifying and isolating situation. The good news is that we know Darius and Maris' love stories because they made

it out. Darius escaped in March 2015 just before his shift began at Sandfields Farm. He made a break for it with a few other people from the house that he lived in. Once he had escaped he had no choice but to live on the streets and one day he wandered into a soup kitchen, where he was approached by a Polish-speaking support worker from an organisation called Hope for Justice. After hearing Darius's harrowing story, Hope for Justice tipped off the West Midlands police, and this started the biggest modern slavery investigation ever in the UK, which was called Operation Fort. Which sounds very fancy, but when you consider that modern slavery as a term has only been kicking around for about 10 years, it's not actually as impressive as it sounds. Nevertheless, Operation Fort was definitely a big job. It was

so secret that the ins and outs of it still aren't really accessible to us duvet detectives, but here is what we do have. We know there was 4,000 exhibits, 250,000 lines of communication, 80 handsets, 88 personal victim statements, 1,500 statements and 40 pieces of live evidence, whatever that means, were collected by the West Midlands Police. Only four detective constables worked this case.

That is a lot of data entry. My God. That is. And I think that, obviously, I know we keep going on about this, but how can we not? four detective constables worked this case that is a lot of data entry my god that is and i think that obviously i know we keep going on about this but like how can we not the idea that darius escaped from that farm as if he was escaping from like what we would imagine to be like a fucking north korean prison camp this happened in the fucking midlands this happened on a farm in pershore yeah we so conveniently just want to put out of our mind the idea of like, oh, well, you know, that's the kind of thing that happens in

fucking China or North Korea or in Russian gulags. It's happening in Pershore. And it's like down to those spring onions that I sprinkled on my fucking stir fry last night. And again, I'm not here to be like, we as individuals need to like fucking figure everything out and don't shop at Sainsbury's. Like, where can I shop? Like, I have to shop somewhere. And these spring onions

are being grown on farms that are being sent to every single fucking supermarket. Nowhere is safe. Nowhere is free as a consumer for you to know. This needs to be something that the government fucking tackles.

But obviously, they have no ambition for something like that. He was hip-hop's biggest mogul, the man who redefined fame, fortune, and the music industry. The first male rapper to be honored on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Sean Diddy Cone. Diddy built an empire and lived a life most people only dream about. Everybody know ain't no party like a Diddy party, so. Yeah, that's what's up.

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Listen to The Rise and Fall of Diddy exclusively with Wondery Plus. You don't believe in ghosts? I get it. Lots of people don't. I didn't either until I came face to face with them. Ever since that moment, hauntings, spirits, and the unexplained have consumed my entire life. I'm Nadine Bailey. I've been a ghost tour guide for the past 20 years. I've taken people along with me into the shadows, uncovering the macabre tales that linger in the darkness. And inside some of the most haunted houses, hospitals, prisons, and more. Join me every week on my podcast, Haunted Canada,

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a seductive city where many flock to get rich, be adored, and capture America's heart. But when the spotlight turns off, fame, fortune, and lives can disappear in an instant. When TV producer Roy Radin was found dead in a canyon near L.A. in 1983, there were many questions surrounding his death. The last person seen with him was Lainey Jacobs, a seductive cocaine dealer who desperately wanted to be part of the Hollywood elite. Together, they were trying to break into the movie industry. But things took a dark turn when a million dollars worth of cocaine and cash went missing.

From Wondery comes a new season of the hit show Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder. Follow Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of The Cotton Club Murder early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery app, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of the Cotton Club murder early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus. Operation Fort discovered the inner workings of the gang that trafficked all of the people like Darius.

It turned out that the gang controlled 32 rental properties, all of which were what we call HMOs, so houses of multiple occupancy, which means that the landlords of those houses also very, very likely also knew what was going on. To have an HMO license is a difficult process. It's a complicated thing. There are lots of bars you have to meet, like having a fire alarm in every room, for example. That's the law to have in an HMO. There's a lot of hoops to jump through for HMO,

so their landlord has to be super involved with what's going on there. Yeah, absolutely. So a total of 92 victims of the slave gang were identified by officers. But it's believed that there were at least 400 vulnerable people that were trafficked by this particular gang from Poland to the Midlands and enslaved. The youngest that the police discovered was 17 and the oldest was in his 60s. So who were this gang? Well, they were a criminal network that operated all across Poland from 2012 to 2017. Operation Fort revealed 13 major players led by the Brzezinski family. Over their years of operation, the gang had made 2.46 million pounds off the wages of their trafficking victims. And we have a feeling that this is probably just the tip of the iceberg. Stacks and stacks of debit cards were also discovered with hundreds of different names on them. Gang member Juliana

Chodowski actually worked in an employment agency in Worcester. So it was super easy for her to slip the people that her associates had trafficked right into reputable high street supply chains. This is the thing. These gangs are super fucking committed. This isn't just like a side hustle. This is their bread and butter and this is why I suspect that maybe some of the banks I don't know how easy it would have been but like I think they've obviously clearly slipped people into employment agencies maybe even banks to just make the whole process a lot fucking easier for them to do their nasty business because Juliana she can just slip them straight into her workflow. No problem. If

she's the one, if she is the one the employment agency employ to check whether people are being trafficked and she's like, no, definitely not these guys. Now they look good. It looks great. Rub a stamp. Off we go. And another man in the gang, Marek Brzezinski, his job was to travel to Poland and recruit the most vulnerable people he could find. Often he would go for homeless people or people who were alcoholics, maybe even both, but generally the type of person they were looking for were people with limited options. And another man, Marek Czałnyk, was the quote-unquote respectable face of the gang, often charming banks, employment agencies and landlords into

looking the other way, or simply believing his lies. Ignacy Brzezinski was in charge of all of the bank accounts, and his wife Justyna is reported to have held a matriarchal role within the gang, welcoming new arrivals into her own home, making them tea and feeding them, all the while knowing exactly what awaited them once they were taken to their squalid accommodation to lead a demi-life of poverty. Another one of the gang members that we would like to tell you about lived on the infamous James Turner Street in Birmingham. And if you're wondering what makes that street so infamous, if you're in the UK and you ever watched Channel 4's Benefit Street, you will know that this was the street that featured on that show.

For those of you who don't know what Benefit Street is, it's a poverty porn documentary. That's the only way I can describe it. Basically, James Turner Street was chosen to be the subject of Benefit Street because 90% of the people who live on that street claim benefits. But I don't think that this particular member of the gang who lived on James Turner Street was much in need of benefits because he was living on James Turner Street driving around in a fucking Bentley. I'd like to recommend a TV show actually

that I am halfway through season two of and I started it two days ago. It's really good. It's called Save Me. Have you watched it? No, I've really not been keeping up with the TVs. No, this is super old. I think I think it's like at least five years old, but I just found it on Sky and I've been watching it and it's really good. A lot of people did actually recommend it on the Facebook group. And it kind of ties in quite well with this show because it's about this man. It's about this like a whole community who live on an estate in London. So they are very like working class. They're clearly like, you know, obviously people

have jobs and stuff, but I think it's like, it's an impoverished estate that they're living on. And I think that the show does a really good job of showing these people as like real people who love each other, who support each other. And it's not just like, look at all these horrible people living on an estate. Aren't they awful, awful people? Which is what so many shows do. Essentially, the reason it also links to this is because a girl goes missing and it's all like organized crime and sex trafficking and like sex auctions and stuff like that.

So it is more of the like other side of what we think of trafficking and I know not what we're trying to impart in this episode, but I'd recommend it. It's quite good. So the 13 key members of the Brzezinski gang stood in three separate trials, but Ignacy Brzezinski managed to skip the country and return to Poland despite the electronic tag he was wearing. Excellent. Excellent.

Yeah. He was convicted in his absence, and his sentencing is dependent on his extradition from Poland, which, as far as we know, hasn't happened. Entirely possible that it has, and we don't know about it. Darius was a key witness at the trial. All 13 members of the gang who stood trial were convicted on various charges. If we read them all out, you'd all expire from boredom, so we're not going to bother.

Unsurprisingly, there's multiple counts of human trafficking, money laundering, conspiracy to control a person, etc, etc, etc. We already know slavery in itself is not a legal term, so you're not going to be convicted of being a slaver. But they were convicted of lots of other things. They were handed sentences from 3 to 11 years. Altogether, they were sentenced to over 55 years collectively. But considering there were 13 of them, that average doesn't feel justifiable.

Oh my gosh. I know, isn't it nuts? What is the average sentence, maths woman? Maths queen? Super maths? Well, it'd be about like five years. So the sentences themselves are pretty short, but when they are released, they will have slavery trafficking prevention orders imposed upon them for nine years,

which similarly to being put on a sex offenders list, restricts what they can do after they get out. And I found a list of what these people will be prohibited from doing when they are released from prison. They can't work with children or vulnerable people. They can't be housed with vulnerable people. They can't organise transport or accommodation for anyone else. They can't advertise for staff. They can't retain travel documents or be a sponsor for visa applications or be something called a gangmaster, which I was like, well, duh, no one's allowed to be a gangmaster.

It's illegal. But I looked it up. It's like a foreman is what a gangmaster which I was like well duh no one's allowed to be a gangmaster it's illegal but I looked it up it's like a foreman oh is what a gangmaster is I mean I could be wildly wrong there but that's my understanding yeah what it's a real term for like a person who's like in charge of other people yeah weird right well now we know operation four was as we said kept out of the press for ages due to the delicacy of the operation, but now it's looked upon as a landmark case that made changes to the way the UK safeguards people against modern slavery, or at least says it does.

With the at least says it does being the important part of that sentence. The Modern Slavery Act showed up, like we said, in 2015, and along with it came the role of the Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner. Currently, this post is being held by Dame Sarah Thornton. And if you're looking for where to find this Dame Sarah Thornton in the wild, well, you can find her usually on Sky News asking people to consider that prices may be unbelievably cheap, but it could mean that someone is being unbelievably exploited. Yeah, I think the key, obviously, we've had a pretty explosive report come out this week in the UK, which we'll be talking about under the duvet.

But if you are a commissioner in this country, it generally means that you have previously been in the police force. Dame Sarah Thornton has been a constable and now she's a commissioner. So there is always going to be an element of marking your own homework when someone is a commissioner, even if they are called independent. Yes, yes, yes, yes, very much so. Let's save that for more Under the Duvet chat, which you can come listen to immediately after this episode on Patreon for all $5 and up patrons. So before Operation Fort, the way modern slavery was discussed in the press, in classrooms and in homes, conjured an image of sweatshops in faraway lands that were too distant geographically to feel that worried about.

People died building the World Cup Stadium in Qatar because their working conditions were so unsafe. FIFA didn't really do anything about it. And no one seemed to mind all that much either. Operation Fort proved that modern slavery happens all the time, right under our noses. It's just too inconvenient for us to see it. And one of the biggest, biggest forms of modern slavery

that I am just personally aware of is Indian migrants who are taken to like the Arab countries to buy and stuff, to like build skyscrapers. They are paid nothing. They are kept in appalling conditions. Just absolutely horrendous. And there are some videos on YouTube which I just like couldn't even watch of how horrendously these people are treated. There is one video that I have seen of someone throwing a migrant worker out of a window. And I just, I just couldn't cope. It just felt like, what is this world? Just, I can't dwell on it too long or we will get completely sidetracked and I will probably start crying.

But yeah, it's out there if you want to go see it. So the only way to solve the problem, let's talk about that, is of course to pay people properly. But of course, this would mean that goods would become a lot more expensive, which is of course deemed unacceptable to most in our society. Dame Sara recommends that the eradication of modern slavery should be integrated into a long-term strategy led from the top. Which sounds very nice, doesn't it? That's fine. I'm on board with that. As long as people actually do it. Which is the hard part.

Labour unions are probably the most effective way for workers to protect their rights. But they are few and far between the further down the supply chain you climb. Operation Fort has also proven that no supply chain is safe, not even ones that produce something as innocent as spring onions. Every high street company that was implicated in Operation Fort, we've read them out the top of the show, you know, Wix, Asda, Sainsbury's, etc, all said that they had no idea modern slavery was a factor in their supply chains, and they probably didn't, but they weren't exactly looking effectively either.

Everyone is complicit, especially landlord Kashmir Singh Binning, who is the owner of several of the properties in which the Brzezinski gang kept the people they had trafficked. He too has been given a slavery and trafficking risk order, which means he can no longer accept cash payments from tenants, he has to carry out property inspections with the local authority every quarter, and he has to provide the council with all of the occupants' names, which are all things that he should have been doing anyway. I don't understand why those things have to be put upon him

by a trafficking and slavery order when they're literally already the law. Like, I don't understand why those things have to be put upon him by a trafficking and slavery order when they're literally already the law. Like, I don't understand that at all. They should already be carrying out property inspections or they are at risk of being massively fined because they hold a HMO license by their local authority. And they already have to provide all of the fucking occupants' names. Why is this person not just in jail? I don't understand. Yes, why isn't he in jail? I just find that the fact that they haven't been like,

you can't be a landlord anymore is completely shocking. Yes, why has his HMO license not just been revoked rather than being like, you remember that thing that was in the license that we gave you years ago that said you had to tell us who was living there? You didn't do that. You're in the license that we gave you years ago that said you had to tell us who was living there you didn't do that you're on breach of that so you're not allowed to operate as a HMO landlord anymore what the fucking fuck I honestly I hate local authorities honestly I really do and not just because they're shafting me on my council tax well the Hackney council's

just broken like their whole website is just a 404. It's an absolute joke. Outstanding. As far as we know, Darius is now working as a kitchen porter somewhere in the north and he seems to be doing all right. But that isn't the story of all of the people who are trafficked to the UK. If the police suspect that a person could be a trafficking victim or a victim of modern slavery, they refer them to the ingeniously named national referral mechanism that we mentioned at the beginning. Sometimes the national referral mechanism, or NRM for ease, is called the single competent authority, which makes it sound like there are no other competent authorities. There is only one, which, you know, maybe that is the truth. Amazing.

Once a person is referred to the NRM, the NRM decide whether there is grounds for a modern slavery investigation or whether there isn't. If the NRM decide that there are no grounds for a modern slavery case, the person is just returned to the police. If, however, there are grounds for a modern slavery case, then the person is referred into, quote-unquote, support, which currently usually means the Samaritans. If someone has been trafficked, the government sees them as being at high risk of being trafficked again. So while the investigation into their modern slavery case is underway,

that person cannot be deported. But that doesn't mean that they can't be put into a detention centre. And detention centre doesn't sound fun. And that's because it's not. And to give you an idea of how not fun they are, the people living there have to buy soap. They are not given soap. Possibly the most basic of all basic things that one should be given. Even during a fucking pandemic where we're constantly being told to wash our fucking hands.

I have extremely strong feelings about detention centres. They're essentially prisons. They have not been convicted of a criminal offence and they're being kept in there like rats with no means of being able to keep themselves clean and safe during a fucking pandemic like no wonder detention centers are crawling with covid no wonder because there's nothing being done to keep those people safe and alive that is happening in this country and we need to confront it absolutely detention centers are like our government haven't bothered to like you know have it off site somewhere like fucking Guantanamo Bay. Just in our country, randomly dispersed around the nation, there are these detention centres that we all just like don't even know what's going on. There was a Channel 4 expose that came out a couple of years ago on the Yarlswood Detention Centre, which when you saw it, the secret cameras that they smuggled in

to see the conditions that people were being kept in by the government, but also by like private contractors that they had outsourced this to, was unbelievable that that was happening in this country. I've been to Yarlswood and it was one of the most surreal day. Like I't even know how to because I've protested a lot

I fucking love a protest I've never been physically confronted with the thing I was protesting and what I didn't realize when I went was that I would be able to see the people inside at the windows and it was heartbreaking there are people with like obviously they're not given pens and stuff like that so they're writing with like eyeliners or whatever they can find, like their numbers being like, please call this person and tell them I am here. Oh my God. I will never, ever forget it. And that girls would is like an hour and a half outside of London. Yeah. It was when Theresa May was the home secretary. There was a big like graffiti on the side of it that said deport May. And maybe we should just deport Priti Patel as well. Just deport both of them onto an island where they can hold hands for the love of god let's

please do that and if you're not familiar with like uk politics pretty patel who we've talked about a lot on this show she's the she's the home secretary she came into power and they decided to describe the way that we were going to deal with immigration as a nation as being a quote-unquote hostile environment which is just the most fucking apocalyptic nasty miserable way in which a government can set about those policies. A hostile environment. Sounds like you're going to be shot on sight. And like something Emily said in the interview that we did that's coming out next week, she was like, under what Priti Patel wants to enforce in this country, in terms of like immigration and border policy, Priti Patel's own parents would

not have been allowed to migrate here under her terms. She's been confronted with that and she's like, yeah, I know, whatever. She'd probably deport her own mum. If anyone's going to deport their own mum, it's Priti Patel. We're on a campaign to get her to block us on Twitter, so please go nuts. So yes, as we have described to you, detention centres are not fun. Priti Patel is not fun and our hostile environment here in the UK towards immigrants is also not fun. So getting backel is not fun. And our hostile environment here in the UK towards immigrants is also not fun. So getting back to what we were talking about, once the investigation

has been concluded by the national referral mechanism, even if the case conclusion is 100% that this person has been a victim of modern slavery. That doesn't mean that they have a right to remain in England either. Sometimes the person may be offered leave to remain, but it's entirely discretionary. More often than not, the person is offered something called voluntary return, which means that the Home Office pays for their flight back to their home country. Some victims of modern slavery and human trafficking are flat out deported. Obviously, if you are deported, that means you cannot come back to that country again in the future.

So these are people who may have been found by an investigation to have been unwitting and complete victims of human trafficking are getting deported out of this country. And I think the key thing with Operation Fort, like I know I keep banging on about this, but because all of the victims in Operation Fort were Polish nationals and it was in 2015, they would not have been at risk of deportation because of the freedom of movement, which we no longer have. If that were to happen today, I don't think Darius would be working as a kitchen porter in the north.

He'd be back in Poland. A hundred percent. But you won't hear much about what happens to people once they have been rescued from exploitative situations like the ones we heard about today. Again, this is why it's very difficult to put together a single narrative or a single story about one such victim because so much of this information is suppressed. One of the reasons we don't hear much about what happens to these people after they've been quote-unquote rescued from these exploitative situations is because the focus has never been on our system. Modern slavery and human trafficking are referred to constantly by politicians, charity leaders and broadcasters as an evil crime or a virus sometimes that must be stamped out. But modern slavery isn't a pathogen to be eliminated. It's an inevitability of the

system we have lived in for hundreds of years. Emily Kenway made the point that incessantly referring to modern slavery as criminal makes it seem like it can be solved by simply taking out the bad guys. But we're literally all the bad guys. And I'm sure you all remember the lorry that was found in Essex in 2019 with 39 Vietnamese people inside it who had died, they'd suffocated. Priti Patel and others in the commons were screaming human trafficking from the rooftops within hours of that discovery. But it wasn't actually human trafficking, legally speaking. In order for a case to be deemed human trafficking there has to be evidence of exploitation which in that particular case

there wasn't it was smuggling smuggling is moving people illegally across borders not exploiting them and if you're thinking that they must have been headed into an exploitative situation if they're in the back of the lorry well well maybe they were, probably even, but maybe nor probably are not good enough for lady justice. That's not a criminal conviction. And Priti Patel damn well knows that. There was no evidence of exploitation in that particular case, so it wasn't a human trafficking event. The reason people smuggling, as a phrase, isn't thrown around as much as human trafficking is, is because people smuggling draws attention to border policy killing people. Just a month after the tragedy of the 39 people dying trying to get into the UK, 10 men were found in the back of a lorry struggling to breathe again in Essex.

Those men were slapped with illegal immigration charges and arrested on the spot. The only difference between those two cases is people being alive and people being dead. And I bet you hadn't heard about the 10 men who were arrested, have you? You've only heard about the Vietnamese people who died and what a tragedy that was and how terrible human trafficking is. But we're not getting to the root of the real problem which is why is is you know the majority of people trying to get into the uk why are they having to do it in the back of lorries it's because there aren't safe legal options there's fruit and veg rotting in fields yeah in the uk because of brexit and because like we don't have enough migrant workers now who want to come here and

pick our fruit and veg. And a lot of that just can't be done mechanically or with machinery. And when there are people who want that work and we have that work, just it is mind boggling to me that we're letting this just happen, that we're letting produce rot in the fields because we just don't want people to come here. We have to really look at things like this and we have to ask why there aren't more safe and legal ways to find employment here. Why aren't there more ways of people looking to come and work here to check that their employment is legitimate? Because that's the big problem with, you know, in Darius's case is the deceptive employment offer and there are currently almost no ways for someone to check that their offer is legitimate.

And also, why is Priti Patel pushing for it to be impossible for people who enter the UK illegally to claim asylum? How else are they supposed to claim asylum? Big questions, big questions. We don't have the answers to them. Emily Kenway has some answers. Just because we don't have a simple answer to these questions doesn't mean we shouldn't be thinking about them. But someone who isn't thinking about them is Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab.

In 2020, he stood in the Commons and announced that there would be additions to the Modern Slavery Act in response to the forced labour camps discovered to be full of Uyghur Muslims in China. He condemned this savagery. But instead of saying that there would be sanctions on goods coming in from China that had been proven to be associated with forced labour, which other countries like the US have done, he instead said that companies would now be fined for not publishing their anti-modern slavery policies. Not that it would be a criminal offence not to publish it, just you'll get a bit of a fine. And all you have to do is publish a policy. You don't actively have to prove that you've been checking your supply chain for where that's come from. You just have to have a policy on it.

What that really means is that publishing what you are doing as a company to ensure there is no exploitation in your supply chains is not mandatory. Effectively, you can just pay to not do one. That's all a fine is. Yeah. You can just pay to not have to bother to check that your supply chain is free of modern slavery. That's all you have. You could just be like, we could do it. Or we could just say that we're doing it. And then if we don't even say that we're doing it, we'll just have to pay a fine. That's it. And I bet the fine is a lot less than it would cost to actually check your supply chains. Absolutely.

So we have to remember, people are at the heart of this. People like Darius and Marislaw, who came to the UK completely legally, pre-Brexit, looking for a better life and honest work. They were exploited in unimaginable ways by criminals. But as long as supply chains stay as opaque as they are, modern slavery will continue to exist. And on that institutional note, can major companies really say that they aren't actively involved in modern slavery if they are not actively checking for it. Marislaw told the press that his experience was, quote, impossible to forget. It just stays with you. It's inside of

you. And that's the thing you can talk about like, oh, well, at least Marislaw and Darius are now free and they are somewhere else not being exploited anymore. the trauma that these victims, that these hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of victims have endured is never going to go away. That's something that the human cost of this is also ginormous even after they've been rescued. So Steve Howard, who works for Hope for Justice, the organisation we came across earlier, or at least he did when he said this, said, quote, We are incredibly proud to have worked alongside West Midlands Police

and other partners to help identify victims in this modern slavery case and to bring those responsible to justice. And Hope for Justice continues to support many victims of trafficking and modern slavery here in the UK, making sure that they have access to accommodation, benefits and basic human rights. They also help victims to secure a settled status in the UK. But immigration policy, like we mentioned, again means that this can be an extremely tough job to pull off,

thanks to that hostile environment. Even pre-Priti, government support systems are difficult to negotiate for anybody, but especially trafficking victims. Firstly, there's usually language and cultural barriers. Benefits and welfare structures are difficult to understand most of the time. I personally have had a meltdown in the job centre and English is my first language. It's complicated and it feels like nobody is trying to help you. Secondly, anyone who has been through an exploitative situation as horrific as modern slavery is going to come out of it with a pretty reasonable mistrust of authority which can make things even more

difficult to negotiate. Hope for Justice and multiple other charities are doing really great work but it's limited and it treats the symptom not the cause. All that was abolished in 1833 was the right to own another person. The economy that is built on astronomically high delivery rates and cheap high street retail prices survive. Using the term modern slavery to refer to exploitative situations turns heads and grabs attention. What was never abolished was severe exploitation. Our economy has always existed on it.

The abolition of slavery in the 1800s meant that plantation owners shipped Chinese and Indian people into the colonies to work on plantations under exactly the same conditions. Enslaved people who were technically emancipated were redistributed as apprentices and not paid. Modern slavery is a product of our neoliberal, consumer-driven society, not the criminal prerogative of a few bad seeds.

It's not a problem that can be eradicated by harsher policy and supply chain investigations. If our border policies were different and there were more resources enabling people to check whether jobs they were being offered were legitimate, then crime rings like the one exposed by Operation Fort would have a far diminished chance of thriving somewhere like Britain. No one gets into the back of a lorry if they have a more viable option, just like nobody puts their child on a boat unless it is safer than the land. And in the words of Queen Bee Emily Kenway, the thing we need to stop buying is the bullshit. So check out our interview with Emily Kenway and follow her on all of the stuff buy her book

called the truth about modern slavery you can find it everywhere it completely changed the way I think about stuff I previously thought I was like yeah I know what that is nope I had no idea absolutely so that is a bit of a different episode but I think that you will all walk away having learned a lot from it and we hope that you enjoyed it whatever you know what i mean if you would like more red-handed content you are in luck because you can get your hands your ears your eyes on so much more content if you head on over to patreon.com slash red-handed we've done a big revamp of the tiers as well guys there is a lot of new exciting stuff in there it's all been rewritten anew for your delight so go check it out see if it takes your fancy and if it does then we will

see you in all the various patreon content that we have coming up and here are some lovely people who have done exactly that so thank you very much abigail h Hodgson, Anna, Kelsey Jones, Kimberly, Sarah Bridge, Roxanne Koopman, Varee Motherwell, Eva O'Ninsky, sorry, Sarah Phillips, Meg Rice, Sarah Konzuminius, Anna Banowski, Anna Bachman, Berber, Amanda Hutchinson, Morgan O'Brien, Callie, Carly Pennington, Erica Oliver, Afrik O'Reilly, Elise Johnson, Alicia, Jess Main, Katrina Espinosa, uh elise johnson alicia jess main katrina espinosa uh ruth carol o'connor nancy flowers holly elizabeth christina mckenzie lee murphy julia buchinga gnar john's daughter uh chantelle Peter, Chantelle McKillop, Jason Joseph, Kaylee Noakes, Emma Egan, Grace Ritchie, Jeremy Lucas, Jessica, Selena Millington, Alexa, Brian Callaghan, someone called Emmy Fox, whoilla Samoji, Sophie McDevitt, Becca Gemendel, Bethany Rhiannon-Evan, Alina, Jack Mulley, Lauren Buckby, Anna Whiten,

Pauline Foreman, Gary England, Jessica Clark, Samora Lacour, Simone, Caroline Keishon, Yemma Francis, Ali Burleson, Kira Robinson, Heather Wheeler, Emily Huddleston, Thank you ever so much for supporting the show. Quick reminder that we're sneaking in at the end so people won't be upset. After last week, if you signed up before last week on Patreon, you will get your name read out on the show. If you do afterwards, unless you are a $20 patron, you will not. We cannot keep doing this. For us, it's bad. For us, it's bad. For you, it's a thing.

We just can't keep delivering it, so we have to take it off. It's not fair. Going forward, it will be $20 and up patrons who will have their names read out on the show. Thank you ever so much for all of your support, and we will see you under the duvet. Goodbye. Bye.

Harvard is the oldest and richest university in America. But when a social media-fueled fight over Harvard and its new president broke out last fall, that was no protection. Claudian Gay is now gone. We've exposed the DEI regime, and there's much more to come. This is The Harvard Plan, a special series from the Boston Globe and WNYC's On The Media. To listen, subscribe to On The Media wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jake Warren,

and in our first season of Finding, I set out on a very personal quest to find the woman who saved my mom's life. You can listen to Finding Natasha right now exclusively on Wondery+. In season two, I found myself caught up in a new journey to help someone I've never even met. But a couple of years ago, I came across a social media post by a person named Loti. It read in part,

Three years ago today that I attempted to jump off this bridge, but this wasn't my time to go. A gentleman named Andy saved my life life i still haven't found him this is a story that i came across purely by chance but it instantly moved me and it's taking me to a place where i've had to consider some deeper issues around mental health this is season two of finding and this time if all goes to plan we'll be finding Andy. You can listen to Finding Andy and Finding Natasha exclusively and ad-free on Wondery+. Join Wondery in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.