Michael Allen Lee recruited homeless men from the streets of Orlando or other cities to work in Florida's citrus fields with promises of good wages. However, instead of the US$35 to $50 a day that workers in the citrus industry could normally expect, Lee's workers were rarely paid more than $10 a day despite working from dawn to dusk.

Lee would deduct the cost of food, a place to sleep and other "expenses", such as charges for the sacks they used to collect the fruit, from their wages. One worker had $110 deducted from his weekly wage for food and rent alone. This despite the fact that the official charge for the bunk or mattress where they slept was $30 a week and that they only received between $5 and $10 a day for food. Those who complained or tried to escape were threatened with violence.

One worker, George E. Williams, did escape and went to the police. Williams had previously been beaten unconscious by Lee, dragged to a pick up truck and taken to another location where he was beaten again. Lee then made Williams wipe his own blood off the walls.

Seven months after Williams' escape he and more than a dozen other workers filed a lawsuit, with the assistance of Florida Rural Legal Services, against Lee and the company that hired him, Beville II Inc.

Lee cooperated with the authorities and therefore a charge of "conspiracy to injure, oppress, threaten and intimidate" was limited to his treatment of George E. Williams. However, in carrying out the prosecution officials also made use of the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution, adopted in 1865 to bring an official end to slavery, which is still used in a surprising number of US court cases. Lee was sentenced to four years in prison and a further three years of supervised release. An accomplice, William Oscar Smith, was sentenced to four and a half years in prison. Beville agreed to settle in 1999, but George E. Williams died of cancer about the time Lee was charged.

This is not an isolated case. The National Worker Exploitation Task Force, which was set up to combat modern day slavery, cautions that the problem is more common than people think. In 1999, a total of 10 people were convicted for using slavery in two separate cases. In one case Mexican women and girls were forced to work in brothels in Florida and the Carolinas. The other case involved using Guatemalan and Mexican farm workers for forced labour in South Florida.

The Florida Rural Legal Services noted that it was difficult to bring cases of this sort as few workers were willing to make formal complaints about their treatment.

Information taken from the article For slavery, man to serve four years by Thomas C. Tobin. Published in St Petersburg Times, 16 August 2001.