SUFFERING IN SILENCE

By Jill Smolowe

They seem to be part of the subways of New York City, walking meekly up and down the cars, handing out pens and key chains, along with frayed business-size cards that read I AM DEAF. Then they scurry back, ricocheting from post to post as they silently gather up their cards and wares, their cocked heads appealing for riders to buy the pitiful $1 trinkets. Most people ignore them.

However, four of these vendors ventured nervously into a police precinct at 4 a.m. on July 19 with a three-page letter that hinted at the silent netherworld they inhabited. Following them to two houses in Queens, police discovered 57 Mexicans, most of them deaf-mute illegal immigrants, crammed into two top-floor apartments. Alternately signing and writing, the shabbily dressed immigrants--among them pregnant women and children and infants--described themselves as exploited laborers held captive by the Paolettis, a Mexican family whose deaf members had enticed them with promises of a sweeter life, then confiscated their identity documents to make flight nearly impossible.

Under threat of physical and sexual abuse, the vendors claimed, they were forced to sell trinkets up to 18 hours a day, seven days a week, for roughly 74[cents] an hour. Of the $400 each worker was paid monthly, $200 was siphoned off for rent. In a locked room off the areas scattered with mattresses, sleeping bags and bunk beds, police found evidence of their hard labor: $35,000 in cash, $10,000 of it in $1 bills. Within hours, five Paoletti clansmen and two others were arrested, but U.S. and Mexican authorities were still hunting for clan patriarch Jose Paoletti Moreda, 59, who allegedly masterminded the "mattress mill," and his son Renato Paoletti Lemus, 20, who allegedly ran it.

"Some were beaten; some were mentally abused," says Dr. Frank Estrada, one of the physicians who examined the freed immigrants. Three young women told doctors that they had been "touched in their private parts on a daily basis for almost two years." Several spoke of being punched, threatened with death and locked out of the Queens apartments if they returned home from a day's work with less than $100.

The neighbors described a nightly horror show of barefoot women, clad only in nightgowns, fleeing from the houses with men in pursuit; of babies crying, their squalls unattended; of walls vibrating from slamming doors and pounding fists. George Friebolin, an advocate for the deaf at the Lexington Vocational Services in Queens, who knew some of the immigrants from a Bible-study program, said one man told him last week that his son had been kidnapped. "They told him that the baby was placed in a convent or a church in Manhattan," says Friebolin. "He says he's been searching for the child since."

In Mexico acquaintances said the elder Paoletti, who lost his hearing after a childhood bout with measles, worked hard and made a comfortable living as an artist for the Communications Ministry. He and his wife, who is congenitally deaf, threw many parties, and he earned enough to provide private instruction for his two sons and daughter Adriana, all of whom are deaf. Upon retirement, Paoletti and his family began traveling throughout the U.S. Frank Coenan, a Long Island postal worker who met Adriana in 1993, married her soon after and then divorced her last year, told reporters that the business really got under way in 1995. Coenan claimed that Adriana, now 29, used his credit cards to purchase trinkets for $3 a dozen from a Rhode Island novelty company. Then, he said, she and one of her brothers began smuggling Mexicans through California, luring them from impoverished villages near Mexico City with promises of high-paying jobs. Coenan was arrested last Friday and charged with being part of the ring himself.

Recruits were easy to find: being disabled themselves, the Paolettis knew the desperation of Mexico's deaf, who receive special education only through junior high school, have few job opportunities, and are often rejected by their families. Says Jose Badillo Huerta, director of Mexico City's National School for Deaf Mutes, where Adriana is believed to have studied: "There are dozens of families like the Paolettis in Mexico who exploit the deaf." Last Friday, U.S. immigration agents raided two houses in Sanford, N.C., and rounded up 17 similarly indentured deaf Mexicans. And on Saturday, agents in Chicago cracked still another smuggling operation involving 11 deaf Mexicans, and arrested two deaf illegal aliens who, officials said, were also involved with the New York ring.

For now, the immigrants in all three locations are in federal custody. Despite their ordeal, many want to remain in the U.S. When told that most of their captors had been captured, the deaf immigrants responded with a universal symbol: thumbs up.

--Reported by Elaine Rivera/New York and Brendan M. Case/Mexico City

With reporting by ELAINE RIVERA/NEW YORK AND BRENDAN M. CASE/MEXICO CITY