LORETTA LYNCH US attorney yesterday.
Three Mexican brothers have been extradited and charged with running a vicious sex-trafficking ring that lured girls as young as 14 to the US with promises of love and a new life — only to smuggle them into New York to brutally pimp them out, federal officials said yesterday.
The brothers — Benito Lopez-Perez, 32, José Gabino Barrientos-Perez, 51, and Anastasio Romero-Perez, 39 — began targeting three girls who later were forced to work as prostitutes in the Big Apple when the children were just 14 and 15 years old, Brooklyn federal prosecutors allege.
Prosecutors also announced charges against a fourth man linked to another Mexico-to-New-York prostitution pipeline — and the reuniting of a child with her Mexican sex-trafficking-victim mom after they were kept apart more than a decade by the kid’s pimp dad.
“Few crimes are more repugnant than the trafficking of innocent women and girls for sex,” said Brooklyn US Attorney Loretta Lynch, whose office cooperated with the Mexican federal police and Mexico’s attorney general on the cases.
“The defendants lured young women into the world’s oldest profession using the world’s oldest ruse — the promise of a committed relationship and a better life.”
All four defendants face a mandatory minimum sentence of 15 years in prison if convicted of sex trafficking.
The three Perez brothers allegedly began grooming the girls as far back as 2003 by enticing them into intimate relationships by promising them marriage.
The girls then were forced to work as prostitutes in Mexico after being beaten and sexually assaulted — as well as by threats to harm their families if they ran away, prosecutors charge.
In July 2005, the brothers allegedly began smuggling the girls into the US, where they were driven each day to locations in New York and other states for sex.
The brothers had the girls wire their earnings back to Mexico, to relatives of the brothers, according to authorities.
The fourth defendant extradited in recent weeks, Antonio Lira-Robles, 37, is charged for his alleged involvement in a similar ring that also included the participation of his cousins — the brothers Eleuterio and Samuel Granados-Hernandez.
Both of those brothers have already pleaded guilty in the case and are awaiting sentencing.
The Granados-Hernandez ring operated from 1998 until last year, prosecutors said.