In an old home movie, young Natalie is laughing and running around with a soccer ball. She’s around 12 years old, and she looks at the camera and says, “When I grow up, I would like to be a doctor.” But a few years later, that laughing, carefree young girl was sold for sex allegedly through the website, Backpage.com. She estimates she was paid for sex over 100 times, and she firmly believes that the site made it possible for her pimp to post ads offering her for sex over and over again.

Chino hits the ground. He was led to the edge of the wall by two polleros. The smugglers helped him jump. But they wouldn’t be joining him on the other side. “You have a phone?” the polleros had asked when they picked him up earlier that day. “Yes, I have a phone,” he told them. “Look, this is really easy,” one of them explained. “You have to jump and run. You are going to see some houses at the end, you have to run toward the houses.”

Journalists at The Associated Press knew that labor abuses in Thailand's seafood business were an awful but open secret. They wanted to tell the story of an industry rife with human trafficking, abuse, slavery and murder. And they wanted to make the world pay attention. The best way to do that was to find those captives and follow the fish they caught on its journey to American tables, said Martha Mendoza, a national reporter at the AP and a Pulitzer Prize winner.

In Thailand thousands of "sea slaves," held captive in shoddy fishing vessels, trawl for cheap forage fish used in canned pet food. In Pakistan, children as young as five are sold or kidnapped and forced to stand knee-deep in water, packing clay into molds to make bricks. In Ghana, poisonous dust and exposure to toxic chemicals and mine collapses threaten the health and safety of children who work in the artisanal gold mines.

A 25-year-old Hungarian man will spend the next 11 years in prison after being convicted of running a horrifying gay sex slave operation out of New York and Miami. Andrew Vass was sentenced this week to more than a decade behind bars for his part in an elaborate scheme in which he and two others lured young men from Hungary to the United States under false pretenses then forced them have sex on webcams and prostitute themselves to strangers for up to 20 hours a day for months on end.

In California, some gun smugglers use FedEx. In Chicago, smugglers drive just across the state line into Indiana, buy a gun and drive back. In Orlando, Fla., smugglers have been known to fill a $500 car with guns and send it on a ship to crime rings in Puerto Rico. In response to mass shootings in the last few years, more than 20 states, including some of the nation’s biggest, have passed new laws restricting how people can buy and carry guns.

It's a saga ripe for a movie plot involving shady dealings, misplaced allegiances and millions of taxpayer dollars either fruitlessly squandered or well-spent in the name of justice. (Nov. 9)