Leader of ‘gay sex slave’ ring sentenced to 11 years in jail
The leader of an organisation which trapped gay men in apartments and forced them to have sex around the clock has been sentenced to 11-years in prison.
Andras Janos Vass was sentenced on Thursday by a Miami Dade judge to 11 years in state prison for human trafficking.
He had faced up to 155 years.
It is the first time since a tougher human trafficking law went into effect in Florida in 2012 that a prison sentence has been handed out for trafficking gay men.
26-year-old Vass was charged with human trafficking and racketeering in April.
Vass has been prosecuted for running a company called Never Sleep Inc, where young men in their early 20s were forced into sex slavery for up to 20 hours a day.
Several of the young men had been lured from Hungary to the sex slave ring in the US in 2012 – and were freed shortly after Vass and two other captors were arrested.
They were raped, forced to have sex with men around the clock and made to do webcam shows.
Court documents stated that Vass met three of his victims online, and told them they would earn between $300 and $5000 a month working as male escorts, and had believed they would return home to Hungary after just a few months.
However, as soon as the men arrived in the US, they were coerced into a cramped one-bedroom flat with up to eight other male prostitutes, and forced to work around the clock without pay.
Their travel documents were confiscated by Vass to prevent them from escaping, and they were threatened with death when they asked to leave.
The operation was discovered after the victims were moved from New York to Miami, where neighbours reported unusual behaviour.
