'Beer drivers' are now being enlisted in the fight against sex trafficking - The Dallas Morning News

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Texas is opening a new front in the war on sex trafficking, and it’s a move that should be supported in Austin and expanded across the country.

The Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission has started training its agents and vendors to spot and report warning signs in the bars, clubs and restaurants it licenses — things like accounting discrepancies and girls or women living on the premises. TABC is in a unique position; it has access to more than 50,000 licensed establishments in ways that other law enforcement doesn’t.

“We don’t need a subpoena to walk into a permitted location, ask to see the books, and inspect the facility,” TABC Executive Director Bentley Nettles told us.

TABC employs 200 agents, 45 of them in a Special Investigative Unit tasked with peering into offenses like trafficking and organized crime. But the agency’s efforts go beyond its own employees. TABC has created a training course for distributors, or “beer drivers” in industry parlance. The agency has conducted awareness training with 69 beer driver employers and seen a 175% increase in the number of trafficking complaints since the program started, Nettles said.

In a video dated Jan. 23, 2020, TABC Chairman Kevin J. Lilly estimated that about 5% of TABC license holders are fronts for criminal activity.

In one example, a sports bar just outside San Antonio, Nettles said a beer driver complaint led to an investigation that exposed a decades-old network that smuggled underage girls across the Mexican border to be sold for sex to patrons of the bar.

In 2020, TABC referred 120 such victims to support services and, importantly, canceled liquor licenses on 100 businesses.

Tom Spilman, president of the Wholesale Beer Distributors of Texas, said this effort is unique in scope.

“I’ve been representing beer distributors for 28 years. We’ve partnered with organizations on other topics like alcohol awareness but not on a scale like this,” Spilman said.

But more can be done. Nettles recounted a case in which TABC worked with the Bexar County Sheriff’s Department to raid a strip club that employed underage dancers. TABC canceled the club’s permit to sell alcohol, but the next day the business opened as a BYOB. Nettles said he would like to see the Texas Legislature act to close that loophole.

What’s remarkable here is the extent to which Texas is leading the way.

“There was no model for an alcoholic beverage commission to combat human trafficking until we built it here in Texas,” Nettles said. “No other commission out there does this.”

In fact, a national association of beer distributors has encouraged expansion of the TABC training nationwide, according to Nettles.

“Other states are calling and asking how we did it and if they can model it,” Nettles said.

We applaud TABC’s efforts here. This is important work because it adds pressure to traffickers, raising the cost of engaging in this crime.

We agree with Nettles that the Legislature should close the BYOB loophole in 2021, and we encourage other agencies, including beverage commissions from other states, to follow TABC’s lead.

December 30, 2020 at 03:01PM
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'Beer drivers' are now being enlisted in the fight against sex trafficking - The Dallas Morning News

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