In August 2010, Leonys Martin and his family snuck to the shores of Cuba, hopped in a car, moved to a truck, got out and trudged on foot to a 45-foot yacht, sped across perilous waters to Mexico and took a 15-minute van ride to a house where they believed freedom awaited them. Instead, according to a lawsuit filed by Martin, they were introduced to two gun-toting men named Eliezer Lazo and Joel Martinez Hernandez.

"You are worth a lot," Lazo told Martin, according to the suit. "I am not going to let you go."

An explosive civil lawsuit Martin filed a year ago details that harrowing day and many more to come. According to Martin, as they waited more than half a year for a Major League Baseball team to lavish the 22-year-old center fielder with a big-money contract, Lazo, Martinez Hernandez and a host of others kept him captive in Mexico and confined his family members to a house in Florida.

At least a dozen other people, including multiple baseball players, were entangled in a web similar to Martin's, according to an indictment unsealed Wednesday by the U.S. Attorney's office in South Florida that charged Lazo, Martinez Hernandez and a woman named Yilian Hernandez with conspiring to smuggle, kidnap and extort Cuban defectors including Martin, now a 25-year-old center fielder for the Texas Rangers. Lazo currently is serving a 63-month sentence at Adams County Correctional Center in Mississippi for Medicare fraud and money laundering. Martinez Hernandez is 2½ years into a seven-year sentence for the same crimes. Hernandez was arrested Thursday morning. One source with knowledge of the FBI and Immigration and Customs Enforcement investigations that led to the indictments told Yahoo Sports more people could be charged.

Neither Lazo nor Martinez Hernandez could be reached for comment about Martin's lawsuit. Yilian Hernandez, who is not named in the suit, pleaded not guilty to the federal charges Thursday and was released on $160,000 bond.

Martin's case provides perhaps the clearest view yet of the murky, illegal and wildly moneyed world of Cuban defectors leaving their homeland with an eye on the major leagues. Dozens of players have settled in countries around the Caribbean, South America and Mexico to avoid rules that force Cubans into the MLB draft, in which signing bonuses are limited, if they defect directly into the United States. The elite get paid with the top dollar usually reserved for free agents. Martin signed a five-year, $15.5 million deal. Dodgers star Yasiel Puig received a guaranteed $42 million before playing a single game in North America. And on Oct. 29, the Chicago White Sox handed a six-year, $63 million contract to first baseman Jose Dariel Abreu, whose agent, Bart Hernandez, played a significant role in Martin's story, according to the lawsuit.

The indictment could have a wide-ranging impact on MLB, forcing the league and players' association to confront an issue that for years has vexed them. The smuggling of players was no secret. Puig failed to defect a number of times, and despite his rise in the second-biggest city in America, the full story of how he came to the United States remains unclear.

Martin's frightening tale of defection dovetails with other stories bandied about in the Cuban baseball community, which has grown to accept smugglers auctioning players to prospective agents as a standard business procedure.

"It's shocking how simple it is," Joe Kehoskie, a former agent to Cuban players now working as a consultant, told Yahoo Sports. "You would think it's something they'd be embarrassed to say or be clandestine about it. But they say they control or own this guy – they use a bunch of different euphemisms – and they want a ransom. They came up with an asking price. It was almost like going on eBay or Amazon.com. It was a buy-it-now price, and you're buying human beings."

Martin told his story in a countersuit filed against Estrellas del Baseball, a Mexico-based corporation that sued him Aug. 16, 2012. In its complaint, EDB alleged that Martin owed $450,000 after agreeing nearly two years earlier to pay the company 35 percent of his baseball salary. EDB said Martin already had paid $1.2 million, and it was owed more for providing food, clothing and shelter for him and his family.

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