would say only that the facts are difficult to confirm now because the facility closed three decades ago. Heo Gwi-yong Avonte Maddox Youth Jersey , a spokesman for the Busan Metropolitan Police Agency, said he couldn't confirm any details for the same reason.

The owner of Brothers, Park, received two state medals for social welfare achievements and sat on a government advisory panel. His version of his story even inspired a 1985 television drama about a man's heroic devotion to caring for what were called "bottom-life people."


Park eventually served a short prison stint for embezzlement and other relatively minor charges, but not for the abuse at Brothers. When the facility was at last raided in 1987, investigators found a vault in Park's office filled with the current equivalent of about $5 million in U.S. and Japanese currencies and certificates of deposit.


In his autobiography, in court hearings and in talks with close associates Alshon Jeffery Youth Jersey , Park has denied wrongdoing and maintained that he simply followed government orders. Repeated attempts to contact him through family, friends and activists were unsuccessful.


The AP, however, tracked down the former second-highest management official at Brothers, Lim Young-soon, who bristled in a telephone interview at descriptions of corruption, violence and slavery at the facility. Lim Jordan Hicks Youth Jersey , a Protestant pastor now in Australia who is the brother of Park's wife, said Park was a "devoted" social worker who made Busan better by cleaning its streets of troublemakers. He said Brothers' closure "damaged national interests."


Lim acknowledged beating deaths at Brothers, but said they were caused by clashes between inmates. He attributed the facility's high death toll to the many inmates he said arrived there in poor physical and mental health.


"These were people who would have died in the streets anyway," Lim said.


___


"I DIDN'T LIVE AS A HUMAN"


While Park raked in the money, the death toll mounted and the inmates struggled to survive.


On his second day at Brothers, still dazed from his brutal rape the night before, Choi waited with other children to be stripped and washed. He said he watched a guard drag a woman by her hair and then beat her with a club until blood flowed from her head.


"I just stood there Nelson Agholor Youth Jersey , trembling like a leaf," Choi, 46, said. "I couldn't even scream when the platoon leader later raped me again."


Another time, Choi recalled, he saw seven guards knock down a screaming man, cover him with a blue blanket and stomp and beat him. Blood seeped through the blanket. When it fell away Sidney Jones Youth Jersey , the dead man's eyes had rolled back into his head.


Death tallies compiled by the facility claimed 513 people died between 1975 and 1986; the real toll was almost certainly higher. Prosecutor Kim interviewed multiple inmates who said facility officials refused to send people to hospitals until they were nearly dead for fear of escape.


"The facility was Park's kingdom, and violence was how he ruled," Kim said of the owner. "When you are confined to a place where people are getting beaten to death every day, you aren't likely to complain too much about forced labor, abuse or getting raped."


Most of the new arrivals at Brothers were in relatively good health, government documents show. Yet at least 15 inmates were dead within just a month of arrival in 1985, and 22 in 1986.


Of the more than 180 documented deaths at Brothers in 1985 and 1986 Derek Barnett Youth Jersey , 55 of the death certificates were issued by a single doctor, Chung Myung-kuk, according to internal facility documents, interviews and records compiled by Kim. Chung, now dead, mostly listed the cause of death as "heart failure" and "general weakness."


Life at Brothers began before dawn, as inmates washed and got ready for mandatory 5:30 a.m. prayers Jay Ajayi Youth Jersey , transmitted by loudspeaker from the facility's Presbyterian church. After a morning run, they ate breakfast and then headed to factories or construction sites.


When city officials, foreign missionaries or aid workers visited, a select group of healthy inmates worked for hours to prepare a sanitized version of Brothers for the guests. Guards locked everyone else in their dormitories. Choi said inmates watched hopelessly as these clueless do-gooders trooped through.


"We were trapped in a prison. But who could help us? No one," Choi said.


Once the doors were locked at 6 p.m., Choi said, the guards unleashed "uncontrolled violence" upon the 60 to 100 kids in his dormitory Fletcher Cox Youth Jersey , including frequent rapes.


A principal at a Busan school who once taught at Brothers acknowledged that inmates were held against their will, and even called the facility a massive concentration camp. However, the principal, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was worried about his reputation, staunchly defended its practices. He said severe violence and military-style discipline were the only ways to run a place filled with thousands of unruly people who didn't want to be there.


Park Sun-yi, who had been snatched by police at age 9 from a Busan train station in 1980, was one of the few to escape.


She had watched as the guards reserved their most ruthless beatings Zach Ertz Youth Jersey , the kind where inmates sometimes didn't recover, for those who tried to run. But after five years, she said, she became "consumed with the thought that my life might be like this forever and that I might die here."


She and five other girls used a broken saw from the ironwork factory to file away bars on a second-floor window at night, little by little, reattaching them with gum each morning. At last, they squeezed themselves out Nick Foles Youth Jersey , scaled a wall embedded with broken glass and fled into the hills.


When she finally walked through the door of her family home in Munsan, she said, her father fainted.


___


"JUST WAITING TO DIE"


The unraveling of Brothers began by accident.


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