Human trafficking a growing crime in the U.S. - USATODAY.com

Human trafficking a growing crime in the U.S. - USATODAY.com

"DETROIT — A University of Michigan janitor. A Ukrainian nightclub owner. A Detroit man nicknamed "Gruesome."

The three men, authorities say, are all tied to a growing crime: human trafficking.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, human trafficking has become the second fastest growing criminal industry — just behind drug trafficking — with children accounting for roughly half of all victims. Of the 2,515 cases under investigation in the U.S. in 2010, more than 1,000 involved children.

And those are only the ones we know of. Too often, authorities say, victims stay silent out of fear, so no one knows they exist.

That's why President Obama declared January National Human Trafficking Awareness month.

The National Human Trafficking Resource Center estimates it's a $32 billion industry, with half coming from industrialized countries.

Over the last decade, numerous human trafficking cases have been prosecuted in Michigan. The court dockets detail the horror stories: Children being sold for sex at truck stops, servants held in captivity and forced to clean for free, and women forced into the sex industry, forfeiting their earnings.

Several human trafficking cases are now making their way through state and U.S. District Court.

Jean Claude Toviave, a former University of Michigan janitor and part-time tennis instructor, is federally charged with trying to pass off four African immigrants as his own children, giving them fake names and birth dates to sneak them over in 2006. Documents accuse him of abusing them for years in his Ypsilanti home, which he got through Habitat for Humanity, and forcing them to do housework.

His so-called children told authorities they were deprived of food and beaten with broom handles, a plunger, electrical cords and an ice scraper when they didn't finish chores or homework. They detailed the years of abuse in journals, which police confiscated, and said Toviave threatened them if they tried to leave.

The "children" weren't a big secret. Prosecutors say he enrolled the three youngest — 21, 20 and 15 — in a public middle school.

The students reported the abuse to counselors, triggering an investigation.

Toviave, 42, was arrested in May and is behind bars on human trafficking and forced labor charges.

In state court, six defendants are facing human trafficking charges in two separate cases brought by Michigan's new human trafficking unit, formed in 2011 by state Attorney General Bill Schuette."