South County prostitution ring busted.

The smoking gun in this case wasn't a gun at all. It was the large volume of condoms that investigators found in the trash. 

"It’s hard to deny prostitution was going on with the amount of evidence in their garbage," Sheriff Steve Bernal told reporters at a press conference Thursday regarding a bust of an alleged prostitution ring. 

Multiple law enforcement agencies began investigating a tip in September and served search warrants on Tuesday on five locations in King City, Greenfield and Gilroy. That led to five arrests on charges of pimping, soliciting prostitution, and aiding and abetting prostitution.

Five men were arrested in South County. They are Jose Romero Matias, aka "Don Emilio"; Deybi Gomez; Hollman Giovanni Zelaya; and Simon Guevara, all in their 30s and 40s. A 16-year-old boy was also arrested; his name has not been released because he is a juvenile. 

Law enforcement officials say they also identified 46-year-old Alexa Margine Lopez Ortez as the madam of a house of prostitution, but she was not on the scene when they made their arrests, and sheriff's deputies have been unable to locate her.

Bernal says officials believe women were trafficked from Nicaragua and Mexico by coyotes, then expected to perform sex acts to pay off their debt to traffickers. 

However, no charges in connection to human trafficking have been filed; at this time, it's investigators' best guess. 

"I don’t know that we have solid evidence they’re actually smuggling human beings into the country," Bernal says. 

Three women, all immigrants, were identified during the bust as prostitutes, but officials haven't yet settled on whether they are victims or criminals or some combination of both. They were not arrested.

Assistant District Attorney Jeannine Pacioni says her office will review the evidence and decide whether to file charges against those women for prostitution. 

"If the victim is coerced, it’s not prosecutable," Pacioni said. "If they’re voluntarily participating in a business transaction, that’s a little bit different, and they will be treated differently based on the facts.

"We’ll take a look at the conditions they were living in, and whether their freedom was restricted in any way." 

In the course of serving the search warrants Tuesday, officials also seized about $10,000 in cash and five weapons including a 40-caliber semi-automatic handgun. 

They also seized some 15,000 counterfeit DVDs from a self-storage unit in Gilroy, worth an estimated $60,000 in resale value.

Matias and another accomplice who was not arrested are alleged to have been storing and selling the DVDs for extra cash. 

The whole investigation launched in mid-September on a tip that came from King City PD. The team of law enforcement agencies that collaborated on this bust includes the sheriff's office, Gonzales PD, Soledad PD, the FBI, parole agents, the California Department of Justice's United Narcotics Enforcement Team and the Monterey County District Attorney's Office. 

Conspicuously absent from that list is King City PD itself, where a warrant was served, and where the original tip on this case originated from. 

Bernal launched a South County task force earlier this year, but recently required all participating law enforcement agencies to sign a memorandum of understanding to participate in the joint force. So far, only Soledad and Gonzales police departments have signed and returned the MOU.