Marube suggested we move to a picnic table on the quad, so we chose a sunny spot and settled in for a multi-hour interview, during which he unraveled his long, complicated story.
In March of 2010, after a few years competing internationally in Europe, Asia, and Australia, Marube traveled for the first time to the United States to run in Arkansas’s Little Rock Marathon. He had a temporary visitor visa and an open-ended return ticket with what he thinks was a six-month window. Upon arrival, he discovered that the race offered no prize money. He won anyway, but with nothing to show for his victory, Marube resolved to stay in the United States longer than he’d planned, accepting an invitation from a friend and fellow Kenyan to board with the man’s family outside Dallas.
When the house began feeling crowded, the friend suggested Marube travel to Minnesota to train with another Kenyan expat, named William Kosgei, founder of a successful running club that managed and facilitated the travel of East African runners. Kosgei agreed, and Marube boarded a bus for the comfortable Minneapolis suburb of Coon Rapids.
He stayed in Kosgei’s house for nine months, during which time, he says, the manager confiscated his passport and visa, pocketed all but a fraction of his appearance fees and winnings, and prevented him from communicating with the outside world via phone or internet. For lack of money, Marube says, he was forced to run in dozens of races, but he didn’t retain enough of his own race income even to consistently afford food, which Kosgei did not provide. Marube says he was forced to share a single room with many other runners. When we first spoke, he told me he couldn’t remember their number or sleeping arrangements; later, he said it was five to seven runners, with some on mattresses on the floor.
While under Kosgei’s management, Marube says, he overstayed both his return ticket and the duration allowed by his immigration form. His visa may also have expired—he can’t remember for sure—but he was definitely in the country illegally. He feared arrest if he tried to leave or approached authorities about his treatment. Anyway, he says, Kosgei so closely monitored his athletes’ comings and goings, there were few opportunities for escape.
One day, Kosgei allowed several runners to accompany him to a grocery store. There, in a brief unsupervised moment, Marube befriended a Kenyan truck driver who was also shopping, and he memorized the man’s phone number. Later (possibly the next day, possibly several days later—Marube has said both), he tricked Kosgei into returning his passport and immigration documents (he has given conflicting explanations as to how). Then he used a neighbor’s phone to call the truck driver and explain his plight, and the sympathetic driver offered to meet him at a nearby truck stop and drive him to Texas.
On the appointed night, Marube told me, he snuck away from the house, together with a runner who I’ll call Faith (she has requested anonymity), who also sought to escape Kosgei’s abuses. Away from the house, the two runners split up. Marube rendezvoused with the trucker, who delivered him out of Minnesota.
In Texas, he lived for months with Kenyan acquaintances; he was broke and slept on a bedbug-ridden mattress. In late 2011, he wrote to organizers of the Santa Barbara Marathon, which he’d won the year before, racing under Kosgei. The race’s organizers offered to fly him out (elite runners are often paid fees and expenses to register, to raise a race’s profile), but with his immigration status expired, Marube requested a bus ticket instead. Then, en route to Santa Barbara, at a checkpoint on the Texas–New Mexico border, Marube’s Greyhound was boarded by officers from the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol. They detained him after checking his expired documents, but Marube says they were so inspired by his story, they let him go free, admonishing him to get his paperwork in order and then driving him over an hour to return him to his bus.
“They told me this,” Marube said in a 2016 documentary about his trafficking. “‘You are a special case. We have never let anyone free.’”
The next day, Marube won the Santa Barbara Marathon and set the course record. At the post-race party, he approached one of the race’s organizers to ask if he could receive his winnings in cash; the organizer was Dan Campbell, who’d come to Santa Barbara to assist the race’s founder, a native Mainer he’d coached years before. Campbell was moved when Marube told him of his desperate circumstances back in Texas, and he invited the runner to move to Maine, to live with him, his wife, and his daughter. So in early 2012, Marube came to Auburn and moved in with the Campbells.
During that first interview, Marube and I talked at our picnic table until the sun began to set. Here and there, throughout our conversation, Marube paused to greet fellow undergraduates walking by.
“They call me ‘grandfather,’” he told me and beamed. More than one journalist has described his grin as “infectious.” Many students, he said, come to him as a mentor and a confidant—a shoulder to cry on when a relationship ends, an inspiration when coursework seems stressful. When he came in second in the Maine Marathon in 2016 (he won in 2014), he was greeted at the finish line by a throng of UMF students, some of whom he works with as a volunteer coach for the school’s cross-country team. They waved signs with slogans like UMF BEAVERS LOVE MONINDA, and some wore T-shirts promoting his anti-trafficking, anti-obesity campaign, The Moninda Movement.
Before we finished, I asked Marube for some details that would help me flesh out the story and contact other sources. Where was the truck stop where he’d met his rescuer, and what did it look like? Marube said he was no longer sure. What was the truck driver’s name, and could I contact him? Marube told me he’d long since forgotten. What were the names of other runners who were with him in captivity in Coon Rapids? Marube said he couldn’t remember any, except that of the woman he escaped with, which he came up with later, in a follow-up call.
On a number of points, in fact, Marube was vague on details—some of those above he filled in or clarified in follow-up interviews. At first, he told me he was holding back certain information to someday publish in an autobiography. But when I pressed him on a few points, he admitted that his memory simply failed him in many cases. This is not uncommon among trafficking survivors, as I later heard from Annalisa Enrile, a clinical associate professor at the University of Southern California who specializes in the experiences of trafficking victims. “There’s a lot of trauma and PTSD there,” Enrile says. “In a lot of ways, you exist in someone [else’s] psychology even after you’re removed from the situation. So you have a shifting narrative—your natural defenses keep you in denial.”
Marube and I agreed to talk again a few weeks later. We shook hands, and he gave me one last infectious smile.
* * *
Human trafficking is among the planet’s most pervasive crimes. It is also one of the least understood. It is not the same as human smuggling, which the United Nations and U.S. Department of Homeland Security define as the illegal transportation of people. It is also not the same as unfair or exploitive labor practices—paying less than minimum wage, say, or ignoring safety requirements, breaching child labor laws, or permitting workplace harassment.
Human trafficking is the forceful or fraudulent recruitment of someone for his or her labor. It is coercive servitude—a form of modern-day slavery that generates billions of dollars each year for those who perpetrate it. It is often delineated into two separate forms: sex trafficking and labor trafficking. Of these, the former has received the most attention in this country, which can make the latter all the more difficult to identify.
Because human trafficking is also one of the planet’s most underreported crimes, it’s hard to put firm numbers to its extent. Globally, experts say, human trafficking likely counts at least 27 million victims at any given time. In the United States, the majority are trafficked in the sex industry, but not all—fully a third of trafficking victims are exploited for other forms of labor, things like felling trees, washing dishes, or braiding hair.
“There’s this image of trafficking victims as women chained in basements or held in shipping containers, but that
’s not what we see,” explains Daniella Cameron, director of Anti-Trafficking Services at Preble Street in Portland. “Really, the only demographic trafficking victims share is that they often come from vulnerable populations.”
In states like Minnesota and Maine, dominated by industries with transitory labor forces like tourism and agriculture, seasonal turnover can make it easier for trafficking victims to go unnoticed. In 2011, the year after Marube says he was trafficked, Minnesota’s Department of Public Safety identified more than 50 trafficking victims in that state, working in everything from landscaping to retail to child care. Advocates suggest the actual number of victims is exponentially higher.
No agency or organization in Maine keeps official statistics on labor trafficking. What data about trafficking does exist comes by way of a recent study commissioned by the Maine Coalition Against Sexual Assault. It estimates that, in a state with a population of just 1.3 million, more than 200 people are victims of sex trafficking annually. Only about 14 percent of those ever report the crimes committed against them.
“For many trafficking victims, there’s a great risk in reaching out,” Cameron explains. “Some worry there will be retaliation against them or their families, or they don’t have legal status.”
Many of those trafficked don’t even realize they are victims of a crime. That was true in one headline-making scandal last year, which uncovered high school students from countries including Paraguay and Nigeria brought to New Jersey under false pretenses to play basketball. The foreign students arrived without the necessary immigration approval, were bounced between people posing as their guardians, and were denied basic needs like winter clothing and allowances for food. Similar stories of trafficking for athletic purposes have emerged from Arkansas, Arizona, Georgia, and elsewhere, where international basketball students have been found living in abusive conditions, not enrolled in schools, or without proper clothing and personal supplies.
Thanks to language barriers, cultural differences, and the transitory nature of competition, the arena of international pro sports can be especially difficult to police. Last year, in a joint investigation, three European news agencies reported on the routine exploitation of professional Ethiopian runners in oil-rich nations seeking athletic prestige. The head of the International Association of Athletics Federations, track and field’s governing body, described the abuse as trafficking and called for an investigation. (An IAAF spokesperson referred me to the organization’s independent ethics unit for details of that investigation; the unit didn’t respond to multiple contact attempts.)
Bridgette Carr, who directs the Human Trafficking Clinic at the University of Michigan Law School, has worked on cases resulting from foreign-student basketball scandals. She isn’t aware of any trafficking cases involving runners, but she believes they might be out there.
“Whether it’s sports or any other industry, trafficking is horrible,” Carr says. “But at the end of the day, it’s also just powerful people taking gross advantage of unpowerful people—and that’s a lot more common than we’d like to admit.”
* * *
William Kosgei denies that he is a human trafficker. Marube’s story, Kosgei says, is false, and he finds it “very wrong and morally sickening.”
Last October, I flew from Maine to Minnesota to visit Coon Rapids, some 10 miles north of Minneapolis proper, hoping I could see firsthand some of what Marube couldn’t remember and get the details I’d need for a story. I hadn’t planned on contacting Kosgei, in part because I wasn’t sure whether he was dangerous. It was only a 24-hour trip, during which I hoped to get a look at the house where Kosgei lived with his runners—and maybe, if I was lucky, find one outside the house who’d talk to me. I wanted to see the suburban blocks where his neighbors were evidently unaware of a trafficking operation in their midst, as well as the streets where Marube would have taken his training runs. I wanted to find the truck stop where he’d made his dramatic rendezvous. And, if I’m being honest, I did hope to observe William Kosgei.
So after exploring Coon Rapids and searching in vain for anything in town that might be described as a truck stop, I drove to the address I’d found online for Kosgei and his Duma Runners Club. In a tree-shaded neighborhood full of cul-de-sacs, I spent less than an hour parked outside the duplex townhouse before a car pulled into the driveway and Kosgei stepped out. I recognized him from photos on the web: fit, in his forties, his head shaved or bald. He went inside and came out again a few minutes later, wearing a tracksuit. Then he got back in the car and drove off.
I followed, and I soon found myself pulling into the parking lot of Coon Rapids High School, where I knew from some web sleuthing that Kosgei is an assistant cross-country coach. I watched from the lot as he greeted and then ran through some warm-ups with a group of gangly teenagers. A few minutes later, a pair of adults in workout clothes, who I pegged for Kenyan runners, showed up in their own cars—evidently unmonitored and unescorted—and started training with the high school kids. For over an hour, I watched the practice unfold. Sprints. Stretching. Kosgei seeming to joke around with his runners. The whole scene just seemed so normal.
When it was over, after I’d watched Kosgei drive off and the man and woman who I presumed to be his runners leave separately, I texted Kosgei at a number I’d cribbed from the web. I wrote that I was a journalist and asked whether I could meet with him and his club the next morning, before my return flight.
Kosgei wrote back immediately. He apologized: he had to work early the next day (as a tech at a lens manufacturer, I would learn) in order to leave early for cross-country practice in the afternoon. However, he wrote, his wife and the runners who stayed with them would be happy to host me at the house. With some hesitation, I accepted the invite.
The next morning was cool and rainy, and I spent the better part of it in the kitchen in the Kosgeis’ townhouse, sitting around a large table with seven elite Kenyan runners from the Duma Runners Club. Nicole Kosgei, a polite native Minnesotan and real estate agent, welcomed me in before apologizing that she had to take her kids to a dentist appointment. She invited me to stay as long as I’d like, then left me alone with the runners.
The kitchen was steamy and smelled a bit like a locker room. The runners shared with me a traditional Kenyan tea, hot and sweet and poured from a blue plastic pitcher. Among them were several extremely accomplished athletes, including a world champion marathoner. I was still cautious about the circumstances and told them only that I wanted to know about their experiences training as international runners with Duma. A few had run with the club for several years, and they told me they tend to spend six months in the United States during the race season, then six months back in Kenya—two of them are police officers there. They showed me the two rooms they stayed in, which reminded me of places I’d lived in college. Everyone agreed the house was too small for everyone to be comfortable and that seven runners was probably too many at one time. They also said they were making the most of their cramped quarters. I asked whether they held their own passports—they said they did—and whether Kosgei was a fair manager. They told me he was.
I watched some of the runners scroll through Facebook and exchange texts with their families back home—most had their own cell phones—and others make plans with friends to go into Minneapolis that afternoon. If their movement or communication was restricted, I saw no indication of it. Before I left, a couple of them asked if we could take selfies on the couch. By the time I was back in my car, they’d texted me the images.
* * *
Back in Maine, I called Kosgei and came clean about my reasons for visiting. We spoke at length. He denied Marube’s accusations, gave me permission to use his name in this story, and insisted he has nothing to hide.
Kosgei also put me in touch with Faith, the runner with whom Marube told me he escaped Kosgei’s house. She currently lives in Washington State with her husband, another Kenyan runner. Over the phone, Faith denied several of Marube’s claims. K
osgei never held her passport, she said, and she didn’t flee his house with Marube but stayed in a different house altogether and left Duma both amicably and some time later on. Her training and treatment in Coon Rapids, she said, were favorable.
I also spoke by phone with Richard Kandie, who now lives in Wisconsin and trained with Duma Running Club for years, starting in 2008. Kandie and his wife, runner Rael Murey, were also among the runners at Kosgei’s house with Marube in 2010. He too says Kosgei treated them fairly, that he remembers no restrictions on phone or internet usage, was in no way prevented from coming or going, always held his own passport, and has no memory of Marube mentioning his immigration documents being withheld. And although he admits he wasn’t privy to Kosgei’s arrangements with other runners, Kandie says the manager took 15 percent of his race income, the industry standard (Marube says Kosgei took a 20 percent cut), plus a reasonable amount for expenses.
When I called Marube some weeks later, I told him about my trip to Coon Rapids, and what Kosgei and his two fellow runners had said. “Okay,” he said, without hesitation. “I think what you are trying to dig into has a lot of tribal stuff going on.” At Kosgei’s, Marube explained, he had been the only member of his Kenyan ethnic group. He’s a Kisii; Faith belongs to the Kikuyu, and both Kandie and Kosgei to the Kalenjin. In Kenya and abroad, there is enmity among these groups. Tribal prejudice, Marube said, likely explained Faith’s and Kandie’s denials.
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