Retired minister Todd Sloggett is an imposing creature. At six feet, eight inches tall, the giant of a man can be intimidating, despite a reasonably slender build.
And that’s just what he wants, as he devotes more and more of his time to the intense—and often dangerous—task of rescuing human trafficking victims. Of course, Sloggett has dealt with issues like these for a long time.
Sloggett has been involved in ministry from the time he was 26 years old. Coming from a homeless and drug-addicted youth, Sloggett used his knowledge and street cred to help share the gospel with some of society’s most forgotten and ignored groups.
After settling in Sapulpa nearly 20 years ago, Sloggett and his family started a ministry called “Holiness Missions to America.” HMA began creating ministries to reach even more people. “We started homeless missions, drug rehabs, battered women’s shelters, and children’s shelters,” Sloggett said.
The ministry eventually bought the old LaFevers Building at 619 E Dewey and turned it into a thrift store and made it the national office for HMA. When Sapulpa Times interviewed Sloggett for the first time in 2020, the ministry was overseeing seven hundred ministries and outreaches, along with several churches, in eighteen states and five countries.
Over the years, the nature of the store changed, though its mission remained the same. “It was supposed to be a thrift store so that our guys from our drug rehab and different people we were working with had somewhere to go during the day and things to do,” Sloggett said. “And it evolved over many years into a furniture store and then eventually into a very specialty rustic furniture store.” The store has now been a rustic furniture store for 13 of the 18 years the ministry has owned it.
Now, after almost two decades, Sloggett is selling the furniture store and using the proceeds as he moves his ministry in a whole new direction.
Two years ago, Sloggett got involved with rescuing human trafficking victims, “kind of by accident,” he says.
“(We were) dealing with some addicts and some homeless people, and we ended up finding out about some people who were missing. We looked into it, and I was able to find a couple of them and bring them home. And so I continued to do that.”
Sloggett said eventually the State of Oklahoma got involved. “They had some concerns with the way I was going about it, and who I was going about it as,” he said. “I was just a minister trying to do good, and they pointed out that there were a lot of situations I could get into that I would need more training.”
So he got it: “I actually went back to school at 52 years old and took classes for a little over a year.” Through those courses, he was able to get CLEET certified, received medical training, got certified in tactical weapons, and eventually gained an Oklahoma state investigator license and became a private investigator. He turned that into what is now known as Elite To The Rescue, and has become a force for good in the seedy underbelly of human trafficking—and business is, unfortunately, booming.
“In the beginning, I was getting calls from family members, from law enforcement, from different agencies,” Sloggett said. “We were going out and finding and bringing these kids back. We have a huge network of (confidential informants) that we’ve been building for many years.”
Sloggett said that in the beginning, Elite was handling two or three rescues a month. Those numbers have recently risen to the tune of 8 to 10 rescues a week. “We’ve done, I think, 205, 206 rescues in the last two years,” he said.
According to the U.S. Department of State’s 2024 Trafficking in Persons Report, 50,815 human trafficking victims were identified in the United States for 2023–2024. Sloggett says they’ve done rescues in India and in Mexico, as well as in the states of Michigan, Florida, Tennessee and California. But most of what Sloggett says he’s seeing these days is happening right in our backyard.
“The majority of what we’ve done lately has been in Creek and Tulsa Counties,” he said. “Younger kids, 12 or 14 years old, as young as eight, that are running away, and as soon as they do, they get right up into a situation where they get taken.”
Sloggett says that these human trafficking networks are “far, far more prevalent than anybody wants to acknowledge or recognize or believe.”
“These are sex trafficking networks that are run by the cartels and financed by the Chinese government,” Sloggett says. “And everyone on the street knows it. As soon as you see a ten or eleven-year-old girl or boy wandering like they’re lost or ran away, they’re being snatched up and they’re immediately finding the bottom of the rung connection to these sex traffic networks and they’ll get just a little money for them now and then the next person gets a lot more money for them, and the big dog gets a whole lot more money for them.”
Sloggett says that not every call they get is for a human trafficking victim, but they try to work out the real situation “very, very quickly.”
“We get into all situations. We have found people, whose family says they have been missing for weeks or months or days, and we find them and find out they’re over 18 and they don’t want to be found and they’re fine. And that’s a closed case. We finished the case and didn’t take anybody. We just told the family, ‘they’re good, they’ll contact you if they want to.’ It’s a little bit of everything.”
Still, Sloggett says most of the time, it’s a real human trafficking situation, and he says that he didn’t know the full extent of these networks in the beginning, but it didn’t take long at all to find out.
“As soon as we started doing these things, it became really, really obvious that this is far, far bigger and way more extensive and deeper than what even we thought,” he said. “I mean, I’ve worked the streets all my life, so I had a pretty good idea, I felt like, and I didn’t even have a clue.”
The obvious need for Sloggett’s rescuing services is what eventually led him to hand off HMA to another minister and focus exclusively on Elite to the Rescue, including selling the store. “I didn’t think it would become this huge thing, but it is and it has,” Sloggett says. “I had to choose one thing or the other, and I don’t think I’d ever get a full night’s sleep again for the rest of my life, if I decided that some eight-year-old girl was never going to go home, that her family’s never gonna see her again just because I want to sell more sofas.”
Watch the full episode
We talked even more in-depth about the reality of how these massive human trafficking networks operate, and Sloggett shares some shocking truths about what he’s experienced in the last two years since he began rescuing victims.
The Rustic Furniture Saving Place Sale
The Rustic Furniture Saving Place is currently selling off its inventory and building. Sloggett recommends going to rusticfurnitureclosing.com and signing up for the email list to get the inside scoop on what’s being sold and when.
Learn more about Elite to the Rescue
Elite to the Rescue provides extensive background, bodyguarding, and rescue services for all types of situations. Learn more about this organization and contact them at elitetotherescue.com. You can also support their mission with private donations via PayPal.
