Rabbi Mel Hecht was born July 8, 1939 in Detroit, Michigan. At the age of five, his family moved to Miami, Florida where they had a large, extended Jewish family, complete with relatives who were hazzans and mohels. Soon after moving to Florida, his parents bought a hotel in Hialeah, a city 10 miles outside of Miami, where Hecht spent the remainder of his childhood.

Jack Kaufman (September 3, 1935-August 2, 2015) was a Las Vegas lawyer and judge. Kaufman was born in Cleveland September 3, 1935. He graduated from the University of Arizona where he earned his Bachelors in engineering. He also attended Westminster College in Salt Lake City, Utah where he received his Masters in business. Kaufman completed his education at the California Western School of law where he was awarded with a Juris Doctorate. Kaufman moved to Las Vegas in 1965 as a government lawyer for the Nevada Test Site.

Hattie Canty was born and raised in St. Stephens, Alabama. She moved to California as a young woman to seek employment, and married and started a family. Canty's family moved to Las Vegas, Nevada in the late 1960s and she found work as a maid for the Thunderbird Hotel and later the Maxim Hotel and Casino. Canty became a Culinary Union Local 226 member. Over the years, she became involved in securing better salaries for women and increasing the number of African Americans in high-paying positions in the casino industry.

Don Brinkerhoff of Lifescapes International designed features of Las Vegas casinos such as the Mirage volcano, the Bellagio conservatory, the Wynn Las Vegas mountain, the Encore Casino gardens, and the surroundings of the Welcome to Las Vegas sign on the Las Vegas Strip. He grew up in the southern California suburb of El Monte.

Mayra Salinas-Menjivar’s tenacious spirit has given her confidence from a very young age. She was six years old when she boarded was on a plane from El Salvador to Los Angeles. Her companion was a woman she did not know and was not related to. All Mayra knew was that this woman would be the friend who would reunite her with her mother. This one life episode is part of the framework of attorney Salinas-Menjivar and her ability to explain the difference between child trafficking and a companion.

Dorothy Frassmann was born October 29, 1931 in Brooklyn, New York. Right before her parents divorced while she was five, Frassmann moved to Canada to live with her great aunt. She moved back to the United States when she was ten years old because World War II started. She met her husband, Lewis, when she was 15 and he was 20 or 21; they married only a month after meeting each other in Texas. After a series of turmoil between Frassmann and Lewis, they got divorced less than a year later. She was left to support herself in Hubbard, Texas at the age of 15.