The Natashas: The New Global Sex Trade

3 CRIMINAL INTENT

IN THE SOURCE COUNTRIES of Russia, Ukraine, Moldova and Eastern Europe, the illegal trafficking of women is fueled by a desperate need for a better life. In the destination nations, it is driven by an insatiable, self-indulgent appetite for purchased sex. The force that brings them together is organized crime, notorious for reacting swiftly to attractive market forces. But in this situation, unlike the illegal trade of guns and drugs, the risks for criminals are minimal and the profits extremely high.

Anna Diamantopoulou, European commissioner responsible for Employment and Social Affairs, lamented the savagery of modern-day trafficking in a speech to an anti-trafficking conference in Brussels in September 2002:

The profits are, in fact, unseemly. Interpol estimates that each exploited woman can bring in $75,000 to $250,000 a year. Pimps often brag that a woman purchased for $1500 can bring in $100 an hour… making back their investment in just a few nights. According to Willy W. Bruggeman, deputy director of the European Union–wide police intelligence agency Europol, the trade in human beings earns up to $12 billion euros worldwide every year.

The trade is also widespread. Bruggeman notes that all member states of the European Union “have reported the presence of foreign OC [organized crime] groups” in the trafficking of human beings. And it’s not just Europe. As head of the UN Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention in 2001, Pino Arlacchi observed that trafficking in human beings is “one of the most globalized markets in the world today… one that almost no country is immune from.” Arlacchi also pointed out that as the fastest-growing international crime, “it is now the third most profitable business for organized crime, behind drugs and arms.”

The outlook is sobering. Organized crime groups are increasingly moving toward large hierarchical structures. They no longer want to deal with middlemen. They want to run the schemes for themselves—from recruitment to final exploitation. According to Europol’s 2002 Crime Assessment report dealing with Trafficking in Human Beings into the European Union, this will “increase the profitability, efficiency and security of operations.” It also “reflects a desire to be more in control of all elements of the trade, perhaps indicating the elevation of trafficking in human beings within the wider portfolio of OC criminal activity.”

Urgent cables, reports and alerts from criminal intelligence– gathering agencies and police forces around the world paint a frightening picture of these heightened activities. The most formidable threat to vulnerable Slavic women today is Russian Organized Crime (ROC). Wherever women and girls from Eastern European countries are being trafficked, the iron fist of ROC is sure to be playing a hand. Their syndicates, now numbering more than 200, are active in fifty-eight countries around the world, including Austria, Germany, Belgium, Holland, Italy, Hungary, Poland, Turkey, Israel, Canada and the United States. Most have their grip on prostitution rackets, though they’re also behind huge extortion and fraud schemes.

These ROC syndicates have formed a powerful global criminal axis with the four principal powers in international organized crime: the Italian Mafia, the Colombian drug cartels, the Chinese Triads and the Japanese Yakuza. According to Italian police, in some parts of Italy ROC’s influence is already greater than that of the Mafia. The Russian mobs have also established strategic alliances with U.S. crime groups and biker gangs and with Ukrainian, Polish, Hungarian, Czech, Turkish, Serbian, Israeli and Albanian gangs.

Political leaders in that corner of the world are repeatedly citing ROC’s increasing involvement in the trafficking of women from Eastern Europe. Bulgarian Interior Ministry Chief Secretary Bozhidar Popov stated publicly that Russian criminals are using his country as a transit point to move Russian, Ukrainian, Georgian and Chechen women into Turkey, Greece and Western Europe for prostitution. Lithuanian Member of Parliament Vilija Aleknaite-Abramikiene reported that Russian goons are behind the trafficking of women for the sex industry in his country. One of the more notorious gangs under intense investigation by several European police forces is the powerful Izmailovskaya syndicate. Another group, the feared Mogilevich organization, runs strip clubs in Prague, Riga and Kyiv; the clubs are teeming with trafficked women. In Russia’s Far East, vicious gangs in Vladivostok direct the supply of women to brothels and clubs in Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, Thailand and Macao. Roughly a dozen Russian-run prostitution rings are currently operating in Israel. A November 1997 report by Israel’s Women’s Network concluded that ROC controls the sex industry throughout the nation. And police in the United Arab Emirates state that Russian crime organizations are heavily engaged in local prostitution of trafficked women.

Intelligence gathered by the FBI and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police over the past decade reveals that ROC has been expanding into the lucrative American and Canadian sex markets by exporting Russian and Ukrainian women into the strip club, peep show, escort and massage parlor trade in North America. FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., has amassed impressive dossiers showing that the Izmailovskaya, Dagestantsy, Solntsenskaya and Kazanskaya Russian crime syndicates have made inroads into the prostitution rackets throughout the country. Local ROC gangs in New York and New Jersey have even tried to muscle in on trafficking and prostitution activities run by other criminal organizations. In the summer of 1998, for example, crime boss Vyacheslav Ivankov—a.k.a. “the Red Godfather” and purported head of the Solntsevskaya syndicate operations in the U.S.—unleashed his goons in an effort to gain control of dance and modeling agencies that were importing trafficked Eastern European women for the flesh market. The FBI estimates that more than a dozen of these Russian-fronted dance and modeling agencies, each employing 60 to 200 East European women, supply women to the profusion of strip bars and peep shows run by the Italian Mafia in New York and New Jersey.

ROC, as well as a host of other Eastern European crime groups, is also expanding into Canada, particularly into Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. According to the 2002 Criminal Intelligence Service of Canada report on organized crime in Canada, “East European–based organized crime groups in Canada are well connected to criminal counterparts in Russia, Europe and the United States and function as integral parts of large-scale international organized crime networks.” The CISC report notes that these crime groups are “known for their entrepreneurial and opportunistic tendencies, are quite adaptable and are strongly motivated by profit. As a result, they will engage in any type of criminal activity or attempt to penetrate any market sector they view as being vulnerable for exploitation,” including prostitution.

Canadian and U.S. police intelligence reports also reveal that control of the trafficking trade in North America remains, for the most part, in the hands of smaller émigré gangs that are loosely connected to considerably more powerful organized crime syndicates abroad. As history shows, gangsters operating in foreign countries use their criminal connections in the motherland to prey on their own. This situation is no different. The majority of trafficking victims are recruited and sold by their own people.

The ROC, however, is not the only player by far. Enmeshed in the business are Ukrainian, Polish, Israeli, Czech, Georgian, Hungarian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Serbian and Albanian gangs, as well as the Italian Mafia, Chinese Triads and the Japanese Yakuza. International police reports from virtually every capital around the globe are replete with warnings about the involvement of these groups in the trafficking of women. Yet whatever the structure or the connections, the gangsters involved in the trade have two very powerful weapons at their disposal: an army of muscle to instill fear, and lots of money to influence and corrupt.

I WANTED TO FIND OUT just how difficult is it to purchase young Slavic women for the sex trade. It is, as I discovered, really quite easy. All that’s needed is a connection and cold hard cash.

The meeting took place at an apartment in Ottawa, Canada’s capital city, on a brisk, snowy night in early January 2003. I was a bit nervous. The man I was to meet was no ordinary low-level thug. Ludwig Fainberg is a notorious Israeli mobster with a hair-trigger temper and a penchant for extreme violence. According to FBI documents, he was the middleman for an international drugs and weapons smuggling conspiracy linking Colombian drug lords with the Russian Mafia in Miami. Fainberg’s claim to fame was that in the mid-1990s, he ventured onto a high-security naval base in the far northern reaches of Russia. His mission was to negotiate the purchase of a Russian Cold War–era diesel submarine—complete with a retired naval captain and a twenty-five-man crew—for the Colombian cocaine cartel. The price tag: a cool $5.5 million. The vessel was to be used to smuggle tons of white powder along the California coast. The deal fell through.

From 1990 until he was arrested and charged in Miami in February 1997 for smuggling and racketeering, Fainberg ran an infamous strip club called Porky’s. The pink neon club on the fringe of Miami International Airport was a magnet for Russian hoods and sleazy East European émigrés with misbegotten fortunes and visions of untapped criminal proceeds.

Fainberg’s rise through ROC ranks is the stuff of Hollywood B-movies. He was born in Odessa, Ukraine, in 1958. When he was thirteen he and his parents immigrated to Israel. Later, he tried out for the Israeli Marines, wanting to become a Navy Seal. He flunked basic training. Then he wanted to become an officer in the Israeli Army but failed the exam. His over-inflated ego bruised, he decided to try his luck elsewhere. In 1980 he packed a suitcase and headed for Berlin, where he earned his stripes as a street-level goon in extortion and credit card fraud. Four years later he set out for the United States—a land he fondly refers to as “the Wild West because it is so easy to steal there!”

He settled in the Brighton Beach area of Brooklyn, which had become the seat of the Organizatsiya, as the Russian mob is often called. There he linked up with the mob and specialized in arson—torching businesses competing with those that were Russian owned. In 1990 he moved to Miami to run Porky’s. Nine years later he was convicted on racketeering charges and sentenced to thirty-seven months in prison. Since he had already spent thirty months in jail awaiting trial, Fainberg was deported to Israel. The next year he turned up in Canada with dreams of making it rich in the flesh trade. Not long after his arrival he married a Canadian and moved into a comfortable apartment along the Ottawa River with his new bride and his ten-year-old daughter from a previous marriage.

I entered the well-appointed two-bedroom flat and Fainberg stared hard into my face as we shook hands. He’s a burly man with a thin goatee and short-cropped hair, and he was clearly sizing me up. I must have passed. He gripped my hand firmly and escorted me to the living room, which was outfitted with the latest gizmos in video and audio entertainment. I sank down into a soft, black kid-leather couch while he retreated to the kitchen to get a couple of imported beers.

“You can call me Tarzan,” he began as he burst back into the room. With a proud boyish grin, he tossed me one of his business cards. The cover of the custom-made two-fold card sported the caricature of a mop-topped muscular man under the name Porky’s. The inside featured a cartoon of an ample nude woman bending over in knee-high, stiletto-heeled boots. Underneath was his name—“Tarzan Da Boss”—and on the opposite side “Welcome to Planet Sex, Land of Fantasy.” According to Fainberg, he was nicknamed Tarzan because he once sported a wild mane of hair and acted as though he was straight out of a jungle. These days, for travel and immigration purposes, he’s known as Alon Bar. The former strip-club owner legally changed his name during his last pit stop in Israel.

The man is a consummate braggart. For the better part of the evening he crowed about his illicit escapades and nefarious underworld connections and boasted that his life would make a spectacular Hollywood movie. He even talked about penning his memoirs. “It would be number one on the New York Times bestseller list.” But there’s one aspect of his life he probably wouldn’t want revealed in any book. Fainberg relishes putting women in their place. In one violent incident in Miami, under-cover agents with the FBI and U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency watched from a safe distance as he chased a stripper out of Porky’s and slammed her head repeatedly against the door of his Mercedes until the car was covered with blood. In another episode, he beat a dancer in the parking lot outside the club and then made her eat gravel. Clearly he was no gentleman, and every woman in his club knew it. Incredibly, he attributes this mean streak to his upbringing: “In Russia, it’s quite normal for men to slap women. It is cultural. It is part of life.”

Fainberg prefers to see himself as an astute businessman, and if there’s a business he firmly grasps, it’s the flesh trade. “It can make you a millionaire in no time,” he said, winking. His Canadian dream was to open a strip club in Gatineau, Quebec. The club, across the bridge from the nation’s capital, would feature imported talent—Russian and Ukrainian strippers and lap dancers. When I met with him he was shopping for a Canadian partner and trolling for an infusion of cash. I asked Tarzan what he would bring to the deal. He recited his knowhow and his unique expertise in importing entertainment.

After an hour I shifted the conversation to the issue at hand: buying women. With an earnest, businesslike expression, Fainberg said flat-out that it was an easy feat—he could bring women in from Russia, Ukraine, Romania or the Czech Republic. “No problem. The price is $10,000 with the girl landed. It is simple. It is easy to get access to the girls. It’s a phone call. I know the brokers in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Kyiv. I can call Moscow tomorrow and show you how easy it is. I can get ten to fifteen to twenty girls shipped to me in a week.” Clearly, he had done this many times before.

“They know exactly what they’re being hired to do?” I asked. “They’re not being forced?”

“They know why they are coming and what they are going to do. They will not be any trouble,” he assured me.

Guardedly I mentioned that while surfing the internet, I had tripped on FBI and U.S. State Department documents that said he “likely trafficked in women.” That got his attention. As he shifted to the edge of his seat, Fainberg’s eyes flashed in indignation. “That is bullshit. I never trafficked in women. I don’t need trafficked women. Agents in Russia are overwhelmed with women who want to do this voluntarily. If you look at their living conditions in Russia, there is no way of surviving. They live in poverty. At least this way, they can make a living. When people need to eat, what are you going to do?”

“Given what you’ve just said, they’re not really prostitutes,” I interjected.

Fainberg paused for a moment, mulling over my words. Then with a laugh, he shot back: “My opinion is a prostitute is someone who is selling herself. From that point of view that is what they are. It is true they definitely do not want to do this. They are being pushed by their social level of their life. They’re getting pushed by necessity. They’re being pushed to survive. Then maybe they’re not really prostitutes.”

He even held himself out as a Good Samaritan: “The girls come here and they send some money home and the family lives. If they don’t come to work here or in Germany or England, their family suffers. I give the girls a chance to earn money. For me, it is a business transaction, plain and simple, but I am also helping these women out.”

“I’ve heard that a lot of these women have no idea they’re going into prostitution when they accept these so-called job offers to work abroad,” I countered. “In fact, I’ve read that a lot of them think they’re going to be waitresses or hotel cleaning staff.”

Fainberg held his fire.

He grudgingly conceded that some of these women are duped. “I think 10 percent don’t know what they’re getting into. Ninety percent know exactly what they’re going to do. What they may not know exactly is the conditions or how much money they will get.”

“You don’t have a problem with pushing women who are absolutely destitute into prostitution?”

“Look, that’s what they can offer. Life is a business. It’s a trade. You want to give something for nothing? You can help once or twice. But then ten, twenty or forty times? For that you want to get something in return.”

“What kind of money are we talking here?” I asked. “How much will it cost to bring a woman over, and what kind of profit can be made?”

“If it is run the proper way, the clean way, you can have a good clientele and make a lot of money. You can buy a woman for $10,000 and you can make your money back in a week if she is pretty and she is young. Then everything else is profit.”

I asked about getting the women into Canada or the United States.

“It is so simple, so very simple,” he bragged. “You know after 9/11 how difficult it was supposed to be to get into the United States? I will show you right now how easily we can get into the United States and then come back, and nobody will ever know we were in there.” He went on to hint that certain Russian mobsters have connections with Native gangs whose reserves straddle the Canada–U.S. border.

A couple of days later, Canadian Immigration authorities swooped in and arrested Fainberg in his comfortable Ottawa lair. He was labeled a threat to national security and public safety, and ordered deported to Israel.

THE EASE WITH WHICH criminals like Fainberg enter the flesh trade is not only sobering; it’s absolutely astounding. Take the classic trafficking case in Chicago that began in September 1996.

Alex Mishulovich, a thirty-eight-year-old unemployed insurance broker, was approached by Serguie Tcharouchine, a

Russian cab driver, with a no-lose, moneymaking business proposition: fly to Riga, the capital of Latvia, to recruit beautiful young women as nude dancers for local strip clubs in the Windy City. Serguie had a silent partner willing to put up the cash. Mishulovich was the ideal front man because he was a newly minted U.S. citizen and could travel freely to the former Soviet Union. He was also the perfect person to manage the women once they were in the States, largely because of his persona: he was a thug. It didn’t take much convincing, and a month later he set off for Riga.

Mishulovich was no fool. He knew he needed help with the sales pitch; his demeanor was a little too intimidating. He was heavy-set, wore thick black-plastic-rimmed glasses, sported a goatee and had a shaved head. Soon after his arrival he hooked up with an obliging associate—a twenty-one-year-old leggy blue-eyed blonde named Rudite Pede. After cementing the deal, the duo set off to troll the streets for pretty women.

Rudite was the perfect lure, introducing her conquests to her “American businessman” partner. Passing himself off as the owner of a sophisticated, exclusive “gentlemen’s club,” Mishulovich said he was looking to hire dancers for his Chicago establishment. He stressed that no sex, no nudity and no touching was permitted. His dancers danced in a bikini, he assured the dubious women, never topless or nude, and they made $60,000 a year. In Latvia, where the average monthly income is about $250, the offer was just too enticing to turn down. In no time at all the pair had reeled in five young hopefuls: all in their early twenties, all blondes and all striking.

There was a bit of a twist in getting the girls into the States. Mishulovich claimed he had a connection at the U.S. embassy in Riga, which made it easier for him to get tourist visas. He coached the girls on what to say to the official and helped them fill out their visa applications. But as the departure date neared, one of the women got cold feet. She felt that something wasn’t quite right and tried to pull out. Mishulovich went berserk. Screaming like a madman, he pulled her aside and threatened to cut up her “pretty face” so that no man would ever want to look at her again. He also warned her that he had many friends in the feared Chechen Mafia, a notorious crime organization, who would be “happy” to kill her family. The terrified woman duly boarded the plane bound for the U.S.

Upon arriving at Chicago’s O’Hare airport the girls were picked up by Serguie, who relieved them of their travel documents and return airline tickets. They were taken to the Mount Prospect suburb, where they were locked in a one-bedroom apartment. Serguie became their constant guard. Once on American soil, Mishulovich informed the women that they each owed him $60,000 for the airline tickets and arrangements to enter the U.S. They would have to pay off their debt by dancing nude in a strip bar. When one of the girls flat-out refused, he slammed her head into a wall. The woman sustained a concussion and was left bedridden for days. Worried about raising suspicions, her new owner refused to take her to a hospital or call in a doctor. Another woman who balked was hit in the head with Rollerblades, given a black eye and punched in the nose.

Throughout their ordeal the women were governed by strict rules enforced by verbal tirades and random beatings. They couldn’t leave the apartment without Serguie in tow. When he left his post he locked them in and took away the phone. But Mishulovich was the real enforcer. He swaggered around the apartment toting a rifle and a pistol. When the girls talked back or didn’t make enough money on a given night, he took them to the garage and brutally beat them.

On one occasion, when the girls were preparing dinner, he grabbed one of them, put a gun to her head and boasted how easy it would be to pull the trigger. On another, he put a knife to a woman’s throat, threatening to slash her face. He repeatedly warned them that if they happened to get themselves arrested and deported to their homeland, he would track them down and would enlist the help of his Chechen Mafia connections in Riga to rape and kill them and their families. To emphasize his point, from the neck of one of the girls he snapped a locket that contained a picture of her mother, bellowing that now it would be easier for his mob associates to hunt the woman down and kill her if the need arose.

Mishulovich was also a consummate pig. He constantly made crude advances. He would paw the women, masturbate in front of them, watch pornographic videos when they were around and barge into the washroom when they were showering and demand that they perform oral sex on him.

Within a couple of weeks he managed to get them all California driver’s licenses and fake social security cards. Then he drove the girls to an audition at a local strip club, presenting them as experienced dancers with expertise in Florida and the Windy City. But the club manager could see that these women were pathetically inept at exotic dance, and they were shown the door. Mishulovich exploded in rage. He dispatched Serguie to the local video outlet to rent the movies Striptease, starring Demi Moore, and Showgirls, starring Elizabeth Berkley. The girls were forced to watch them over and over, while practicing bump-and-grind techniques in the living room under the watchful eyes of their controllers.

Once they had their dance routines down pat they were farmed out to local strip bars—the Skybox, the Crazy Horse and the Admiral Theatre… and the money came rolling in. Every evening Mishulovich or Serguie drove them to work, picked them up afterward and collected the cash. Each girl brought in $200 to $500 a night. Mishulovich took virtually all their earnings, leaving them with no more than $20 a day. He also went through their purses and threatened to strip-search them if he suspected they were hiding cash. He then split the proceeds with his partner. Times were good.

In no time at all, Mishulovich elevated his status in Chicago’s Russian-Jewish émigré community and in the process became a big spender, fond of untold luxuries and the finer things in life. He shopped at upscale shops, wore designer suits, dined at exclusive restaurants and drank expensive liquor.

Then came the first sign of trouble. In January 1997 Serguie was nabbed while shoplifting at a Mount Prospect jewelry store. He was convicted, and since he didn’t have permanent resident status in the U.S. he was deported to

Russia two months later. With Serguie out of the picture Mishulovich found himself visited by what had, until now, remained his silent partner—a twenty-something, bookish-looking man, wearing small wire-rimmed glasses. He had short, curly dark hair and a baby face. Formerly Vadim Gorokhovski, he now went by the name of Vadim Gorr, and he wanted to protect his investment.

Gorr and Mishulovich continued farming the girls out and raking in the cash—day in, day out. But by early summer the duo got worried that U.S. immigration authorities might stumble across their scheme. Reluctantly, they decided to release the girls. Three of them immediately returned to Latvia. The other two remained in the U.S., hooking up with love-struck clients.

But Gorr and Mishulovich knew they had latched on to a good thing and didn’t want to let it go. And so in November 1997 they flew to Minsk intending to recruit a second batch of women. This time, however, their ruse slammed into a brick wall when an astute visa officer at the American embassy smelled a rat and summarily rejected the women’s applications.

Back in Latvia, the official at the American embassy in Riga who had cleared the original tourist visas for the Latvian women ran into one of the girls soon after she had returned home. The young woman relayed her incredible story. Enraged, the officer filed a full report with the U.S. State Department, and the matter was passed on to the FBI.

The case was assigned to special agent Michael Brown, a six-foot-two, 225-pound detective straight out of central casting. The agent, who had been working on the Eastern European Crime Squad, immediately ran a trace on Mishulovich and Gorr. The trace showed that both men, now naturalized American citizens, had emigrated from Russia in the early 1980s with their parents.

“They came at the time there was a huge influx of Russian Jews into the United States,” Brown said. “Both families sought and obtained refugee status, claiming they were persecuted by the Soviets because they were Jewish.”

With the evidence in place, the partners were picked up and charged in September 1998. Following their arrest, Gorr “lawyered up” and kept his mouth shut. Mishulovich was another story. He just kept yapping.

“I talked to him at length,” Brown recounted. “He’s a very intelligent, well-spoken man. There’s no doubt about it. He was not an idiot. I deal with mostly gangs and drugs and uneducated and ignorant people. His English was phenomenal. But if you look at the facts, well, he’s one repugnant person.”

What bothered him most was that Mishulovich wasn’t the least bit remorseful about the way he had treated the women. “If anything, he acted like he’s almost aristocracy. He’d say ‘They’re scum. They’re peasants. Spit on them. Don’t take their word for anything. They’re Baltic whores.’ That was the term he used to describe them.”

Mishulovich was a manipulative sleaze to the very end, hoping his cooperation would net him a lower jail sentence. Clearly, his objective was to foist the brunt of the blame on

Gorr, who he maintained was the brains behind the entire operation. Gorr, meanwhile, planned to paint himself as a naive bit player.

According to Brown,

The FBI’s case rested largely on the shoulders of one key prosecution witness—the twenty-two-year-old Latvian woman who had recounted her story to the U.S. embassy official in Riga. As Brown recalled,

Brown said he interviewed all the girls. A couple of them decided not to cooperate. “There were a lot of reasons—fear for their families back home, distrust of law enforcement. Be mindful of the climate over there. It’s a former Soviet state, and there’s a high level of corruption over there. They equate the FBI with the KGB [the much-feared former Soviet secret police].”

After a ten-day trial in December 1999, the jury found Gorr guilty on four counts of visa fraud for helping to get the Latvian women into the U.S. under false pretenses. Wiping tears from his eyes, a jubilant Gorr hugged his attorney. He was acquitted of the far more serious charges of forcing the women into involuntary servitude. In late December 2001, the twenty-nine-year-old was sentenced to three years in prison and fined a measly $5000.

On February 13, 2002, Mishulovich stood before a judge for sentencing. He read a fifteen-minute statement, claiming that while he was guilty of being involved in “a horrible, disgusting, stupid business,” it was Gorr, not he, who had been the brains behind the scheme. The former “businessman” begged for “a second chance.” The court didn’t buy it. Having pled guilty to a raft of charges, including involuntary servitude and conspiracy to defraud the United States, he was sentenced to 112 months in the penitentiary.

THE CHICAGO CASE is a frightening example of just how easily low-life thugs can jump on the trafficking bandwagon. But it’s not only gutter trash like Mishulovich and Gorr who leech off naive and innocent women. The shocking arrest of a London doctor in 1999 showed just how widespread the trade has really become.

In 1994 Oksana Ryniekska graduated from medical school in Ukraine. At twenty-six, she soon realized that her life as a doctor in her native land didn’t offer the money or lifestyle she wanted and felt she was entitled to. She opted to leave and headed for England. But soon after her arrival the silver lining turned to lead. The money just wasn’t rolling in, and so she devised a plan to make handfuls of quick and easy cash. The newly minted doctor set up not a clinic but a brothel over a London dry-cleaning shop. For staff, she turned to the young women of her homeland, importing nine of them to work for her. Ryniekska told the women that she would help them obtain visas in order to enable them to study English. The only English they learned, however, was the sexual terminology required to understand and service their steady stream of clients. Needless to say, the money came rolling in, both from “in service” and from “home visits.” In only eight months, before being busted in an undercover sting, Ryniekska had raked in more than $210,000.

At her trial in London in September 1999, the repentant doctor told the judge she felt “deeply ashamed.” The judge was appalled at what Ryniekska had sunk to, calling it “nothing short of outrageous.” The scam, the judge said, was particularly offensive given that she was a qualified medical doctor.

Nonetheless, Ryniekska was sentenced to a mere three months in prison, with a recommendation for deportation immediately upon release.

THE MASSIVE PROFITS from trafficking women into prostitution have also attracted gangs such as the Hell’s Angels in Hamburg, Germany. In January 1999 the Hamburg biker chapter moved heavily into the prostitution racket. In no time it controlled more than 200 East European women in twenty-six brothels and “hour hotels” in the port city’s Sankt Pauli red-light district, as well as two popular Hamburg strip clubs called Pascha and Eros. Their enterprise, however, was uncharacteristically short-lived. Seven members of the gang were arrested in a well-orchestrated sting operation in early November 2000.

According to the 529-page indictment, the bikers trafficked hundreds of Eastern European women into Germany to work as prostitutes in their brothels and fleabag hotels. The women were in the country illegally, were regularly abused and were forced to service clients seven days a week. The operation turned out to be incredibly successful. In the raid police had seized $350,000 in cash, a Lamborghini Diablo, three luxury Mercedes, five other high-end vehicles, a dozen customized Harley-Davidson motorcycles, several handguns and a grenade. The property was recovered from the posh Hamburg district of Elbchaussee from a supposed car mechanic, a photographer, a heating engineer, an electrician and a salesman. Based on the evidence, German police estimated that the bikers’ sex proceeds totaled $17 million.

The bikers were charged with people smuggling, assault causing grievous bodily harm, pimping, blackmail and violent extortion. Their trial began in early August 2001 and was expected to last at least two years. Then, a half-day into the proceedings, echoes began to ricochet in the courthouse corridors that a plea bargain had been reached between the prosecution and the Angels’ high-priced legal team. Two months later the accused gathered in court for sentencing, having pled guilty to a raft of charges. Despite the sheer gravity of the offenses, the bikers received anywhere from one year and four months to four years and eight months—an undeniable coup for the defense team. One biker’s sixteen-month sentence was suspended because the court felt his chances of “reintegrating into society” were high. The gang members were also ordered to pay $5.5 million in fines. Later that day, out on the steps of the courthouse, the biker whose sentence was suspended beamed at the spectators, describing the judgment as “marvelous.”

LIKE MOST CRIMINAL ENTERPRISES, trafficking in women for prostitution has become increasingly territorial. Any infringement on ROC’s turf, for example, is met with swift retribution. ROC syndicates have been known to kill at the slightest hint of trouble. The trade is also resulting in an escalation of unprecedented violence against potential competitors and trafficked women alike. Albanian gangs are particularly notorious for their cruelty, terrorizing and torturing their victims and killing uncooperative girls. In some cases, gangs tattoo their “property” the way cowboys brand their cattle. The Yakuza in Japan have murdered women attempting to escape. The Turkish Mafia and Serbian gangsters have thrown girls from high-rise balconies for refusing to comply.

And when these gangs do kill, they often do it to send a message—as was the case in a brutal double murder that occurred in the Siberian city of Vladivostok on June 24, 1994.

When Natalie Samosalova walked by, heads turned in Vladivostok. The statuesque nineteen-year-old had tumbling blond hair and bedazzling azure blue eyes. In the summer of 1993 she got what she thought was an amazing break—her first opportunity to travel abroad. She was recruited to work as a dancer at the Skylight Disco in the gambling resort of Macau. Her application was expedited by an employment agency—the Society of Support to the Enterprises of Macau. Before she knew it, she found herself with another woman on a long train ride through China. When she finally arrived in Hong Kong she was met by a man called Valhiev. Natalie couldn’t help noticing the jagged scar bisecting the man’s face.

Valhiev, it turned out, was a Russian gangster with a reputation as “the most notorious pimp in Macau.” In fact, he was one of ten known Russian pimps registered with the Macau government as working in local nightclubs as “pianists.” It was safe to assume that none of them could strike a chord. Valhiev escorted the new arrivals to a flat shared by several other Russian women and explained in no uncertain terms what was expected of them. Dancing in nightclubs was not an option unless it was with a paying client. The next day Natalie was taken to a government office, where she was issued an identity card and a six-month work visa. That evening, she joined the ranks of 120 Russian women, most from Vladivostok, working in the enclave as call girls.

Natalie was extremely popular with high-spending clients and fetched a spectacular fee—$1000 to $3000 a night. The Russian gang that controlled her quickly realized her worth. She was a valuable asset, raking in a cool $55,000 a month. In April 1994 she met Gary Alderdice, a dashing lawyer from New Zealand who was renowned for defending members of the Hong Kong Triads. Alderdice was instantly smitten. It was a scene right out of Pretty Woman, except in this case the heroine belonged to the mob.

After a month-long sex-fest (which cost Alderdice $48,000), he professed his love to the glamorous hooker and she decided she wanted to be his. The haughty Natalie told Valhiev she wanted out. Skylight management complied, swiftly withdrawing its support for her visa. Her visa and work permit were summarily revoked, and the very next day Natalie found herself on a plane heading home.

Distraught, she phoned her lover in a panic. Alderdice promised to get her back. In late June he flew to Vladivostok, purportedly with a briefcase containing $150,000 in cash to negotiate her freedom from the mob. Natalie met him at the airport and they headed for her flat. They climbed three flights of stairs to her apartment and she ushered him in.

The very next day, Natalie’s mother dropped by her daughter’s apartment. When Natalie didn’t answer, she knocked louder and harder. Again, nothing stirred. The woman enlisted the help of a neighbor and together they forced open the door. Lying in the hallway was the blood-soaked corpse of a man. He had been shot in the eye at what was clearly close range. In the living room Natalie lay stretched out on the floor, hands tied behind her back with a rope. She too had been shot in the head.

Earlier that morning, at about three-thirty, the neighbor who helped open the door had been jolted out of sleep by noises coming from Natalie’s flat. She couldn’t put her finger on it but it reminded her, she said, of the sound of “people chopping wood.” The neighbor called the police, but her concerns were summarily dismissed. She was told to call back “if something serious happens.”

The ensuing investigation was anything but thorough. Police quickly labeled it a “robbery,” hoping to close the case. The prosecutor’s initial hunch was that Alderdice was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Vladivostok, after all, is a naval port, a city known as the “Wild East” where crime and corruption are known to run deep. The prosecutor figured a couple of two-bit thugs saw the dashing, well-dressed lawyer, assumed he was carrying cash and followed him into the decrepit building. But the facts didn’t add up. There was no forced entry. Natalie had been clearly tortured. And the murders were carried out execution-style. From what the investigators were able to piece together, the couple arrived at the apartment but didn’t stay very long. According to the neighbor across the hall, they left a short while later and returned again around 11 p.m. There were at least two other men in tow. The rest remains hazy, but for Alderdice’s friends and colleagues back home, the motive is clear.

“I know how the Russian vice operators work,” says long-time friend Mike Prew, who is also a former chief of Interpol in Hong Kong. “They’re the worst. Once the girls get involved in the syndicates, they don’t get out or they get murdered.” Prew firmly believes the Russian Mafia was behind the slayings and that the couple were victims of a deliberate and professional gangland execution. The message was simple: this is what you can expect if you leave. No doubt it rang loud and clear for the girls still working in Macau. They snapped back into line.