Mexican sex trafficker gets 15 years in US prison

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.

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.

A handful of other men were charged in November with participating in the sex trafficking ring.

At the time, prosecutors said the young women were first isolated from their families and then taken to Mexico City, where they were forced to prostitute themselves to 20 to 40 men per day in the La Merced neighbourhood.

After being trafficked to the United States, the women worked in New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia and other eastern states.