Faces of Gaming: Kara Napolitano – Human rights advocate and trafficking expert

Saturday, February 22, 2025 11:15 AM
  • Commercial Casinos
  • Sports Betting
  • Tribal Gaming
  • Tom Osiecki — CDC Gaming and Raving Partner

Kara Napolitano thought she wanted to work with plants (and not humans) in forestry until she came face to face with trafficked children in Africa.

Napolitano later became an expert in human trafficking and now takes that knowledge to train and spread awareness to casinos in Colorado.

She earned her first master’s degree in forestry and sustainable agriculture and ended up traveling to places like Tanzania, Cambodia and Uganda. In Northern Uganda she was exposed to the warring LRA, who invaded villages and stole children out of their beds to force them to become child soldiers.

This experience lit a fire inside of her and today she is a human rights advocate and Education and Partnerships Director for the Laboratory to Combat Human Trafficking in Colorado.

Human rights advocate
Kara Napolitano is a human rights advocate and trainer. She holds an MA in International Development with a concentration in International Human Rights Law from the University of Denver. Before completing her education, she spent eight years working and volunteering in Africa, the Middle East and Asia, working mostly with education-based NGOs in post-conflict areas. This is where she was introduced to the crime of human trafficking.

She was appointed to Governor’s Colorado Human Trafficking Council Prevention Task Force in 2018 and the Equitable Access Task Force in 2022, and she is a commissioner on the Denver Crime Prevention and Control Commission.

Getting myself into
After completing her agriculture degree Napolitano took a six-month contracted position with an Adventist group building food storge during the rainy season and teaching diversifying crops and nutrition to villages.

“When that was done, I did not want to leave Africa, so I started looking around for a job and saw a sign that said, ‘Come work in the villages of North Uganda building schools. And we need English speakers.’

“I had no idea what I was getting myself into. If you know much about what was happening in northern Uganda and South Sudan in the mid-2000s; at that time the LRA, Lord’s Resistance Army, was an extremist group that waged a war of attrition against the government from 1986 to 1994. The LRA had invaded and was stealing kids out of their beds and forcing them to become child soldiers, just like in the movie Blood Diamond,” Napolitano recalled.

Human trafficking
”Hundreds of thousands of people had become displaced, and they were all concentrated in these camps. They had no running water, education facilities, clinics or anything. It was incredibly dangerous because the LRA was still on the move. Most international aid agencies could not even be there because it was so dangerous,

“But the smaller nonprofits who were willing to take the risk could be there. I started working for a small nonprofit, and that’s when I learned about human trafficking. I learned about child soldiers and kids being forced to commit horrible crimes, and girls being forced into marriage and into sexual slavery for the soldiers. I had no idea what I was getting myself into; but I knew that I could not ever do anything else but work with people who’d experienced this kind of oppression and violence.

“I worked with child soldiers for a while, and I skipped around the globe. I would come back to the U.S. and then go back out into other contracted positions, working mostly with nonprofits who were working in post-conflict areas.

“I was working with Palestinian refugees in southern Lebanon and with Cambodian migrant workers in South Asia. All contracts touched on the topic of human trafficking; but I did not work for an actual human trafficking nonprofit until Cambodia, when I was specifically working in anti-human trafficking efforts.

“Finally, in 2013, I was pretty tired from my international travels, and I had seen a lot so there were a lot of secondary traumas. I decided I needed to come back to the U.S.

“Then my degree didn’t make any sense. I went back to school for International Human Rights Law at the University of Denver. I joined the Human Trafficking Center at the University of Denver and never looked back,” Napolitano related.

Laboratory
The Denver-based Laboratory to Combat Human Trafficking is a statewide organization celebrating its 20th anniversary on February 14, 2025. The organization has four main programming areas. The LCHT manages the statewide Human Trafficking hotline, has a training and education program headed by Napolitano that now trains about 10,000 people per year, and a research program looking at the issue locally in Colorado and leadership development program.

According to their website, LCHT has answered 5,500 hotline calls since 2018, has 50 active anti-trafficking volunteers, trained 75,000 people and has 200 leadership development alums.

Explanation
Human trafficking is a subject that is complicated, nuanced, compelling and heartbreaking. I asked Napolitano to give me an explanation of it.

“Human trafficking is when a person forces another person to work at various forms of labor or sex work through physical violence, fraudulent promises, or coercive tactics for a profit. They are forcing that person to work, and they are profiting off of their labor,” Napolitano stated.

Hollywood vs. reality
The thing about human trafficking is that most of us have a vision largely based on Hollywood films like the three Taken movies. It turns out after a little education that reality is very different.

“There is this myth of the ideal victim. Reality is different. Survivors are not only cute little girls,” Napolitano said.

Worldwide there are 50 million victims daily and 1.1 million people are trafficked in the United States. Of these, 54% are women or girls, two thirds are in labor bondage, and one third are sex trafficked. Of human trafficking cases, 75% are adults and 25% are children. It turns out forced labor is three times more prevalent than sex trafficking.

All states in the U.S. have human trafficking laws.

According to Napolitano, very few tribal nations have human trafficking laws, and most of 574 federally recognized tribal nations rely on federal laws to investigate and punish traffickers.

While there have been many documented cases of trafficking at casinos across the U.S., there is very little accessible data tracking these cases of human trafficking at casinos.

“You know, a lot of people don’t disclose trafficking. People do not ask for help because they fear they will not be believed. Many survivors will not ask for help because they are loyal to the perpetrators, i.e. moms or boyfriends,” Napolitano stated.

The shocking truth
The most amazing fact about human trafficking is that 99% of human trafficking survivors know their perpetrators.

“Approximately 99% of those who are trafficked know their perpetrators; and 70% of them know and love their perpetrators. About 30% of perpetrators are family members and about 40% of perpetrators are intimate partners: boyfriend, girlfriend, husband and wife. So, 70% are someone, not only that the victim knows, but the victim loves and probably lives with and depends on for their survival in many ways. And that’s a lot of power, right?

“The other 29% of the time, the perpetrator is someone else in a position of power: an employer, a coach, a teacher or a religious authority. Employers are the big ones in that category.

“So, it’s like knowing the vulnerabilities, honing in on those vulnerabilities, and eventually exploiting those vulnerabilities,” Napolitano said.

Demand
I asked Napolitano why casino companies are targets for human traffickers?

“I think that the nature of casinos, the fact that they attract tourists, the fact that people are coming to party and to spend money, that it can be easy to launder money through casinos, and also the fact that they are attached to hotels. People need food cooked for them, and they need their hotel rooms cleaned, and all of the other things attached to the service industry.

“There is demand for cheap labor as well. Wherever there is an increase or an uptick of demand for cheap sex or cheap labor, there will be an uptick of supply, and so people will bring the supply to those casino areas to make money. The goal of trafficking is profit. Traffickers don’t traffic people for fun. They do it for money. They go to the places where they can make money and casinos are one of those places.

“I know of a number of cases here in Colorado where pimps have brought people to the casino. They check in, they purchase a bunch of rooms, and they bring in their team. Usually, they’ve got a bunch of tech with them because most trafficking these days is happening online.

“They’ll bring a team that’s working the tech that’s selling people via various social media apps, and basically the casino becomes the venue for the sex buying and selling. In some cases, that’s being facilitated online and in other cases they have the sex workers walk the casino floors looking for people winning, trying to sell sex. If somebody is being trafficked in that situation, they’re probably being told that they have a quota to meet. They have to make a certain amount of money that day or else they’re in big trouble. They’re trying really hard to sell sex and be good at it or else they’ll be punished severely by their trafficker.

“And it’s happening 24/7 because casinos never close. It will go on until the demand stops. Once you know the weekend’s over, or the holidays are over, traffickers will then leave.”

A story of Black Hawk
Napolitano has worked with two commercial casinos and two Naïve American properties in Colorado. In the case of the town of Black Hawk, Colorado, she was invited three years ago by the proactive police chief, Michelle Moriarty. Napolitano started training the sheriff’s office for Gilpin, Colorado, and the Black Hawk Police department. She trained the EMT’s, medical professionals, the child welfare agency, Department of Human Services and then started with the casinos.

“We started with the big casinos Monarch, Ameristar and Black Hawk. Having the buy-in from the chief saying, ‘Hey, we’ve done this training, and we really think this is important to the higher ups.’ The chief always attends that training and says, ‘This is important. Listen up.’ It was important that the chief said, ‘Hey, we’re in this with you. If you have any trouble, you can call us.’

“We started with the C suite in these casinos to get buy-in from the top. We did three sessions a day for two days at each of the big casinos; and trained hundreds of staff at those casinos, including housekeeping, the people who are working the floor, and of course security and surveillance, because that’s who’s going to be communicating with law enforcement. We did that at the big casinos and then we started trickling down into the smaller casinos and started training everyone,” Napolitano explained.

Forced labor
Napolitano said, “Forced labor is three times more prevalent than sex trafficking.”

Casinos fall into the categories predominant in human trafficking such as: construction, domestic service, hospitality, service industries, agriculture, tourism, skiing, restaurants, hotels, and cannabis growers; anywhere there is a demand for sex labor, demand for cheap products, and an influx of immigration.

Casinos are always striving to fill positions and the demand never stops. Napolitano says, when it comes to working with hiring agencies, make sure you do your due diligence. The same goes for vendors such as landscapers.

“When it comes to labor trafficking, it’s about due diligence, making sure when you do hire people, that you’re trying not to hire them through a hiring agency, but hiring them directly, and that nobody else is trying to speak for them, nobody else is trying to collect their paycheck.

“If you’re hiring people through a hiring agency or through a subcontractor, which is common in cleaning crews, then you have this level of culpability.

“Are you doing your due diligence there? Are you talking to the people who are cleaning those hotels to make sure they are happy and not working 19-hour days for this person, who’s only paying them for five hours? It’s about really paying attention and preferably hiring people directly,” Napolitano stated.

Signs of human trafficking
Napolitano offered some suggestions on how to spot a human trafficking victims in your casino.

Look for signs of: basic needs withheld, injuries, people who are not licensed or without IDs, or people with stacks of IDs, excessive cash in rooms, booking multiple rooms, people scoping out the parameters of the casino looking for holes in surveillance, other people seem to be in charge of victims, paying with cash or pre-paid cards, in hotels asking for excessive additional linens or towels, booking hotel rooms overlooking parking lots and near exits, walking through the casino taking cash or slot tickets or eating scraps off of tables, people with no or very little luggage. Look for tattoos used for branding and also look for groups traveling with extensive use of computers and multiple phones.

What can casinos do
Be proactive and create a training program for management and all front-line employees. Develop protocols for all staff to follow. Develop partnerships with local law enforcement before incidents happen. Post internal signage. Train employes not attempt to rescue but to report to management. Update money laundering training to include human trafficking. Be wary of recruitment agencies and make sure they are vetted and that you know their reputation. Make sure that the National Hotline number for Human Trafficking is visible and available throughout your property.

Protocols
“The secondary piece to that is, beyond training, you have to develop protocols. It shouldn’t just be okay to understand what trafficking is. You have to get your organization to understand and know. ‘I get how complex it is. Nobody’s going to be self-identifying, nobody’s going to be asking for help. It’s going to be covert. It’s going to be hidden in plain sight. We’ve got to look for the red flags. What do we do when we find it?’

“The staff at these properties need to know who do I tell? Who do I call? What do I do next? It’s a scary thing, so building a protocol empowers people to make those identifications because they know what’s going to happen next. I go tell my manager. My manager tells security and surveillance. Security and surveillance start looking into it. Once they have enough information, they get law enforcement involved, and they know law enforcement’s been trained. They’re not going to think they’re crazy. They’ve got a protocol in place. They’re going to show up.

“Then, if somebody’s recovered, you have also trained all the victim service providers and the advocates in the region too. Not only are we talking about arresting perpetrators but also supporting survivors to make sure that they have what they need; because in that situation, they may be stuck. Their trafficker just got arrested. Well, where are they going to go? They have nowhere to live now. It’s making sure that the whole system is trained and in place,” Napolitano declared.

Lawsuits against casinos
I asked Napolitano if lawsuits tied to human trafficking at casino properties are prevalent.

“Prevalent may not be the right word, but increasingly, people are trying to seek justice in different ways, and we’re not having a ton of success with criminal justice. I mean, there are still human trafficking prosecutions and criminal justice is doing their best; but sometimes cases don’t get identified by law enforcement, or they don’t get investigated, or they can’t find enough evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that trafficking happened. So, another way for someone to pursue justice is to sue the businesses that were criminally negligent during their trafficking experience,” Napolitano said.

“A lady came up to me and asked if I needed help and for some reason I finally said yes.” — Anonymous Victim
Napolitano tells you that human trafficking is not the Hollywood version of young girls chained to beds and driven across borders. It is a crime hiding in plain sight where the victims are less likely to ask for help due to fear of violence or dedication to their perpetrator.

“Nobody was locked in a basement. None of them knew they were trafficked,” Napolitano said.

Current immigration influxes will result in an uptick of perpetrators preying on an increasingly large population of vulnerable people. Like it or not, that influx will be coming to the gaming industry. The gaming industry could be facing lawsuits and negative publicity unless training and protocols are put in place.

“Check your own bias when identifying human trafficking victims. Stop thinking of them as unworthy,” said Napolitano.

Entries in the Faces of Gaming series:

Tom Osiecki is a casino consultant who writes an occasional column for CDC Gaming called Faces of Gaming, about interesting and engaging people in the gaming industry.

Tom Osiecki is a marketing and management consultant for Raving Consulting and can be reached for consulting engagements at 775-329-7864.

If you know of a fascinating personality in the gaming industry you would like to see profiled, please send Tom Osiecki an email at tosiecki@cdcgaming.com