The Daily Beast
by Kate Briquelet
In a clever sting operation, the feds nabbed creeps looking to buy ‘sex slaves’ for their home dungeons.
In March 2014, Steven Currence gave undercover agents a grand tour of the dungeon hidden inside his Montana home.
The subterranean hellhole contained a heavy wooden cross and a smattering of chairs. The walls were covered in whips, chains, and torture devices. Currence boasted of blacking out the windows to dash any hopes of escape.
Here was the sinister lair where the 65-year-old planned to lock his sex slaves. One kidnapped woman would sleep in the basement torture chamber, while the other would be chained to his bed—with a chain long enough to reach the bathroom.
Currence believed he would soon purchase the women from the agents, who posed as human traffickers. The creep previously told the agents that he wanted a “housekeeper with benefits” who would “take care of things, clean the house, take care of me,” court records reveal.
“These slaves will never leave,” Currence said. “I’m not looking for love, they’re just going to be in here and they are going to be serving.”
But Currence wouldn’t be the one doing the shackling. Instead, the feds cuffed him two months later when he traveled to Arizona to buy two women at what he believed was a slave auction.
In September of this year, Currence was sentenced to seven years in prison.
He was one of four men nabbed in an FBI sting operation targeting an extreme slice of the human trafficking underworld: people seeking sexual and domestic slaves.
Court papers paint a disturbing picture of the lengths all four fiends went to keep their would-be slaves hidden. They outfitted their homes with things like soundproof boxes, window coverings, and even a 500-pound therapeutic bed with chains.
One man hired a contractor to turn his BDSM “playroom” into a dungeon so secure visitors wouldn’t know someone was inside. Another ordered a “date rape” drug from China to knock his victim out as he transported her across state lines. …
… After his arrest, Kandl tried telling law enforcement that although he knew the women weren’t consenting, he wouldn’t have purchased anyone who refused to go with him.
“Kandl was asked why he didn’t call the police and Kandl replied that he should have but his curiosity was piqued,” one FBI memo found in court papers read. According to the document, Kandl planned to interview the women to see if they were willing to go home with them. He told investigators he wanted to explain he could provide them with a better life.
When asked what that meant, Kandl said he’d provide a room, food, and clothes. He also planned to introduce his slave to the BDSM lifestyle, which he’d been engaged in for three years, according to the FBI document.
Kandl said the whole thing was a “bad idea” and that he “shouldn’t have done it.” He told investigators that in his life, “I did everything right until this stupid thing.”