The Natashas: The New Global Sex Trade

5 DARING SOULS

FOR TRAFFICKED WOMEN and girls, there are few roads to freedom. There is rescue and there is escape. The first requires luck— whether in the form of a caring john willing to stick his neck out or as the result of a police raid. The second road—escape— demands incredible daring and courage. In one such case, a Ukrainian girl held in a brothel in Bosnia heard the rumble of heavy trucks from her second-floor prison. Looking out the window, she saw the Russian flag and the UN insignia. She jumped from the balcony and, dressed only in her underwear, ran screaming toward the military convoy. An armored personnel carrier stopped. The heavily armed peacekeepers weren’t about to be intimidated by the thuggish bar owner. They immediately gave the girl some clothing, placed her in a jeep and later helped her return to Ukraine.

Luck or rescue, however, is not the common path to freedom for most trafficked women. Tragically, for them release comes as the result of disease, insanity or total depletion. In the end, some give up and kill themselves.

When Canadian police officer Gordon Moon signed on in June 2000 to work for the United Nations as an international cop in the renegade Serbian province of Kosovo, he had no idea what he was in for. The strapping, forty-year-old Ontario Provincial Police detective had enlisted for a stint with the UN to help restore law and order in this tiny war-ravaged Balkan region. He had barely gotten over his jet lag when he found himself investigating serious crimes—murders, vicious assaults, grenade attacks and bombings. Criminals had infiltrated every aspect of life, and Moon realized that law enforcers faced a long and difficult struggle to gain the upper hand.

While posted in Pristina, he noticed a disturbing trend— young women, mostly from Moldova, Romania and Ukraine, were showing up at the station complaining they had been kidnapped and forced into prostitution. It didn’t take long for Moon to figure out that this was more than just a random occurrence. But what troubled him even more was the age and condition of these women. He decided to do something about it.

About that time a spate of bad press erupted. The local news media accused the UN command of crass indifference toward hundreds of young Slavic women being raped daily in bars and brothels across the province. In response, the UN commander called Moon and gave him the green light to move in and hit hard. The officer formed the Trafficking and Prostitution Investigation Unit and went straight to work. Backed by peacekeeping troops, his small unit began kicking down doors and raiding flesh pits.

“I would say well over 95 percent of the women and girls we pulled out of those places were trafficked,” Moon recounted. “Only a very small percentage were there of their own free will.”

For Moon, the level of inhumanity these women were forced to endure while in captivity was difficult to fathom. The married father of three had seen his share of crime working in the OPP photographic and video surveillance unit back home, but this was the stuff of nightmares. His unit found teenage girls chained in mud cellars. Many bore the telltale signs of torture—cigarette burn marks on their arms, welts on their backsides and bruises covering their bodies.

“The living conditions of the girls, in the majority of the cases, were appalling,” Moon said, his voice rising in anger. “The girls were locked in cell-like rooms. They weren’t properly fed. They didn’t have clean clothes. They didn’t have shower facilities. Their hygiene was disgusting. It’s hard to imagine how they survived.”

Moon remembered one nineteen-year-old Ukrainian university student he’d rescued from servitude. She had answered a newspaper ad to be a nanny in Italy.

At first, Moon thought he was making a difference. But then the disturbing reality set in. As fast as his unit pulled the girls out, they were replaced.

What stunned him most was how two groups, who only months earlier had been killing each other, were now setting aside centuries-old differences to capitalize on these women and make a quick buck. “What it all boiled down to was that the Serbs and the Albanians, who hate each other and are sworn mortal enemies, were able to communicate and get along when it came to organized crime and trafficking women,” he said.

Moon left Kosovo in the spring of 2001, satisfied that he had done important, groundbreaking work. Still, he understood that much more had to be done to put a significant dent in the teeming flesh trade in that pathetic corner of the world.

In just six short months, the unassuming detective from the small Ontario town of Orillia had raided fifty bars and brothels in Kosovo and, together with his squad, rescued almost 300 young women. Sadly, his effort often felt more like tossing a tiny life preserver into a sea of drowning women. But Moon has a lot to be proud of. He saw a problem that had been shamefully ignored and tackled it with unrelenting determination. He made a difference.

ALTHOUGH RARE, there have been times when cries for help from far-flung places have paid off in dramatic rescues. Workers at La Strada—the nongovernmental organization dedicated to fighting the trafficking of women in Kyiv, Ukraine—received a frantic phone call in early 2000 from a mother whose daughter and several friends had been forced into prostitution in the Serbian province of Montenegro. In this instance, enough information came to light to launch an all-out emergency rescue.

Inna Shvab, a manager at La Strada, recounted that a Serb and his Ukrainian wife living in Montenegro had invited a group of eight Ukrainian women to work as waitresses at their restaurant in Podgorica. The women, ranging in age from nineteen to twenty-two, arrived in October 1999, but instead of tending tables, seven of them were sold to a nightclub owner— a former employee of the local police and a notorious thug. The eighth girl was sent to the nearby town of Budva and put to work at a dive called the Black Mont.

During the day, the bar owner kept his girls under lock and key in a cold, damp cellar. They were fed once a day and forced to service bar patrons at night. By sheer luck, one of the clients happened to have a cell phone, and one of the braver girls managed to sneak out a call to her family in the impoverished Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine. Panic-stricken, the mother turned to La Strada for help. They contacted Ann Jordan of the International Human Rights Law Group in Washington D.C., another NGO. Jordan, in turn, called U.S. Congressman Christopher

H. Smith, who was then chairman of the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (the Helsinki Commission). An outspoken champion of human rights, Smith was a driving force behind the U.S. government’s tough anti-trafficking legislation. The politician didn’t waste a second. Knowing full well that police and government corruption were rife in that part of the world, he fired off an “URGENT” fax to the prime minister of Montenegro, requesting his “immediate assistance.”

Smith supplied Montenegrin authorities with all the salient details, and early the following morning a special squad of police pounced on the bars. Seven of the eight girls were rescued; the eighth had been sold to an Albanian trafficker the day before. Police also recovered a Romanian woman and two Moldovan girls. They were all transported to Belgrade and a few days later returned home. Incredibly, one of the Ukrainian women identified several of the police officers who carried out the raid as her former clients. It’s not surprising that in such situations, trafficked women are reluctant to seek protection from local authorities or police.

The rescue operation was hailed as a success, but the disappearance of the eighth woman deeply upset her friends.

The authorities had no idea where she was being held. Four months later she suddenly returned home. She had been smuggled from Albania into Italy by speedboat over the Adriatic Sea and forced to work as a prostitute on a highway outside Rome. Her pimp let her go because she’d become pregnant and was of little use to him. The woman, severely scarred by the ordeal, went back to her hometown. She could not bring herself to have an abortion and decided to have the baby.

HIGH WALLS AND CHAIN-LINK FENCES surround a sprawling compound on the Adriatic coast near San Foca in the stiletto heel of southern Italy. The place is like a fortress. Video cameras scan the grounds. Armed guards patrol the perimeter and a determined security force mans the electronic gate. No one is allowed in without a nod from the person in charge—Don Cesare Lo Deserto. On any given day, this bear of a man with a round, bald head and thick farmer’s hands can be spotted strolling about the property talking urgently into a cell phone. Dressed in a drab gray suit and black shirt, he has the slow, deliberate stride of a nightclub bouncer. He wears aviator-style glasses and possesses an intense stare that can at times be unnerving.

The heavy security is in place because Don Cesare has had his life threatened several times. A lot of Albanian gangsters want to see him dead or, at least, permanently out of their way. Don Cesare has upset their criminal order by taking “goods” they believe don’t belong to him, and on a few occasions they have attempted to take their property back. The don, however, is not afraid, and has no intention of giving in to their demands. Safely ensconced in a half-dozen bungalow-style units at the north end of the compound are ninety young women from Eastern Europe, mostly from Moldova, Romania and Ukraine. All had been smuggled into Italy by Albanian pimps to work the streets. That is, until Don Cesare found them and shepherded them to his compound. Throughout the region, the women are known as Don Cesare’s girls, and the place they now call home is Regina Pacis.

It is a safe house. Don Cesare is a Roman Catholic priest, and his mission in life is to rescue women from the seedy streets of Italian cities. It is a calling that, more than once, has brought him in close range of losing his life. Albanian mobsters don’t take kindly to holy people relieving them of their livelihood. On one occasion, early in February 2001, two thugs showed up to persuade the priest to butt out of their affairs. Don Cesare was out on an evening stroll along the beach across from his compound when the two Albanian men emerged from the nearby woods.

Their message was clear.

Concerned about the length of time the priest had been gone, a team of Carabinieri officers from the center set out to look for him. As the officers came near, the culprits made a run for it.

Recounting it months later in his sparse office at the center, Don Cesare doesn’t seem the least bit flustered. The way he sees it, he is doing God’s work, and who better to have on your side for protection? Today, however, whenever he ventures outside the compound three armed bodyguards are never far from his side.

Just fifty meters from the center, the azure waters of the Adriatic cascade rhythmically onto the shore. Don Cesare gazes out into the distance, wondering what the sea will bring in the coming nights. Just beyond the horizon, across the narrow Straits of Otranto, only forty-four nautical miles separate Italy from Albania. On the other side lies Vlorë—the staging dock for a modern slave trade that crisscrosses Europe. Every night, under the cloak of darkness, with the Cape of Otranto lighthouse as a guide, Albanian smugglers leave the town on their scafi—motorized rubber dinghies. They race across the strait, hoping to elude the Italian coast guard. Italy’s long and winding coast is almost impossible to patrol. In fact, the government has called for greater international coordination to combat the smuggling and what it has described as “one of the most dangerous organized crime networks operating in the Mediterranean.”

For the past decade, Albanian smugglers have continued to outrun the Italian coast guard. When they’re being hotly pursued, the scafisti resort to unimaginable maneuvers. To evade capture, they toss their human cargo overboard. With the coast guard scrambling to rescue the women from the choppy waters, the smugglers retreat to the relative safety of the Albanian coast. Even more tragic, numerous boats have capsized in sudden storms, leaving victims’ bodies washing up on shore.

Shaking his head in disgust, the forty-two-year-old priest finds it difficult to understand the depth of cruelty to which men will sink in order to make money off another human being. Don Cesare is not a preachy man. A tiny cross dangling below his white collar is the only sign of his vocation. The veteran of missions to Brazil, Rwanda and Madagascar is lowkey. He never pushes religion on the rescued women.

In the mid-1990s, returning to his native Puglia province, he witnessed the boats of misery disgorging their human cargo daily off the shores of Italy—a flood of refugees fleeing war-ravaged Yugoslavia and countries beyond. In 1995 he founded Regina Pacis in a former children’s summer camp compound and flung the doors wide open to the poor and destitute.

Four years later tens of thousands of UN peacekeepers arrived in Kosovo and Bosnia-Herzegovina and the mass exodus abated. The priest, however, began to notice a disturbing change in the human cargo smuggled onto Italian beaches—thousands of young, attractive women from Moldova, Romania, Russia and Ukraine. He was shocked when he learned their true fate, and decided, then and there, that he wanted to help. Walling off an annex of the compound, he set out to give these young women another chance. By his own count, Don Cesare has saved more than 1000 women from the clutches of Albanian flesh dealers over the last ten years. Most had crossed the Adriatic after a forced trek through the Balkans, having survived Serbian breaking grounds before the final dash to the West. By the time they reach the boats, they are no longer girls. They have been hardened for the streets.

When you meet them, now safe, at Regina Pacis, most look like fragile, frightened children. For them, happiness is a faded memory. Their innocence is shattered, their pale, gaunt faces etched with the lines of incredible suffering and humiliation. Yet when they see Don Cesare, they always manage a smile. To them, he is their savior. To the priest, they are heroines. They are the ones who reached deep inside and found the courage to run, to escape from their captors. They are the ones who survived a hellish journey and are now trying to rebuild their lives. The priest has a fondness for a special group: those who have had the courage to give birth to babies conceived in prostitution and rape. More than three dozen children have been born at Regina Pacis. Several boys have been christened Cesare, and one Moldovan girl is called Cesaria.

Don Cesare has heard the laments of each and every woman who has come through the gates to Regina Pacis. He knows and understands their reality and dismisses any suggestion that some may have chosen to walk the streets. “Most of them leave home without knowing,” he said. “It is true that some know, but knowing does not mean wanting.”

DON CESARE INVITES ME for a stroll through the compound. As we enter the area where the women live, the priest is greeted with warmth and adoration. Every woman receives a kind word and a sympathetic ear. He doesn’t rush and his patience seems endless.

One woman stands by a doorway sobbing into her kerchief. The priest approaches slowly and asks what is wrong. She says she misses home but is too ashamed to go back, convinced that her family and friends will shun her and call her a whore. Taking her hand, Don Cesare tells her she needs time to heal and, until she’s ready to return home, her home is here.

Every woman at Regina Pacis has survived a hundred nightmares. They walk close together, clinging to each other for support. They talk in furtive whispers. They jump at sudden noises and stare at strangers with dread. Most times, though, they simply sit in silence, lost in their thoughts.

Don Cesare introduces me to Irina, a twenty-year-old raven-haired Romanian. She has been at the center for almost a year and will be returning to her family in Bucharest soon. She speaks fluent Italian, Moldovan and Ukrainian. Her hair is shoulder-length and her complexion ashen. Her green eyes emit no emotion. Her expression is hard and untrusting. Yet, she is polite and helpful, asking that I wait outside the bungalow that houses five other women while they put on a fresh pot of coffee.

Sitting at the table with two other women—Stefa, a black-haired seventeen-year-old Moldovan, and Lesia, a striking nineteen-year-old Ukrainian—Irina pours everyone a cup of coffee. Lesia starts telling her story but is quickly overwhelmed with emotion. She grabs a cigarette and shakes her head frantically, saying she can no longer continue. Irina now turns to Stefa.

Holding her hand, Irina asks her what had happened to her. Stefa takes a sip of coffee and stares down at the table. There is a deep sadness in her eyes and a quaver in her voice. She too is clearly uncomfortable and the memories, although still fresh, are difficult to summon on command. In a barely audible whisper, she begins her tale.

Stefa’s horror began eight months earlier in Chisinau, the capital of Moldova, the poorest country in Europe. She was just sixteen, straight out of high school. All she wanted was a job as a waitress or maid so that she could help out her family.

“I was with my girlfriend Katrina. We went to Romania with her boyfriend to look for work. He told us he knew a man that could give us a job cleaning rooms in a hotel.”

Instead, the girls were sold to a trafficker.

Stefa’s eyes began to well up with tears.

Stefa’s hands begin to shake uncontrollably as she describes him. “He was a short, hideous man with a red face, rotten teeth and terrible breath.” She pauses for a sip of coffee and a long, hard drag on a cigarette. The room is deathly quiet. The women sharing the quarters weep in silence, reliving their own private hell in their thoughts.

When the pimp was finished, he tossed her a sheet of paper bearing words and phrases in Italian for sexual acts she was required to perform and the price for each act. He instructed her to memorize them. He also told her she was to be on the street at seven every night of the week whether it was raining, snowing or sweltering, and she could not leave until she had earned him $500 a night.

Stefa suddenly stops and gets up from the table. She apologizes and lights up another cigarette. She needs a moment to recover. Four of her roommates gather around her and they all hug. She returns and pours herself another espresso, sits down at the table and resumes her story.

“I wanted to escape but I was scared. Geko was very mean and told me he would find me and kill me if I tried to leave. I had no one to turn to. I didn’t know where to go. I didn’t know the language. My life had become this black existence.”

Every day was a bad day for Stefa, but sometimes there were really bad days.

Every single night Stefa cried while standing on street corners, praying that she’d be rescued, but it wasn’t to be. “Once a man saw me crying and told me to go to the police. He thought it was so easy, this solution. I was afraid of the police. I was afraid of everything. Geko told all the girls the police would do terrible things to us in the jail if we were arrested. He said they were corrupt. That he had paid them off. So every time I saw them, I ran away.”

Then one day, Stefa felt she could no longer take it. She decided anything was better than this life, even prison. She mustered what little courage she had and went to the local police station. Standing in front of a long, wooden counter, she could sense the indifference and condescension in the police officer’s eyes.

“I was told by this officer that he couldn’t help me. He said, ‘You can’t come here and tell us this.’ I didn’t know where to go, where to turn, what to do and I started to cry. The policeman then told me to go to Milan where there was the Moldova consulate. I left the police station. I had no money so I hitchhiked to Milan.”

When Stefa finally arrived at the consulate, the resident counselor was indifferent to her plight and curtly told her there was no money in the budget to send her back home. Stefa broke down. The bureaucrat nervously riffled through his in-basket, picked up the phone and placed a call to Regina Pacis. A few hours later Stefa was on a bus bound for Lecce. She had finally escaped.

“I was on the street for four months in all,” she said. In that brief period, she was used by hundreds of men and figures that Geko made at least $60,000 off her body.

When Stefa settled into Regina Pacis, her greatest fear wasn’t getting tracked down by her pimp. It was calling home.

Something else continues to trouble Stefa.

Many times, I’ve thought about Katrina. When I arrived at Regina Pacis, I called her home. Her parents were frantic.

They hadn’t heard a word from her since she left. They asked me if I knew anything. I froze. I did not know what to say. So I pretended the line went dead. I was afraid to tell her parents what had happened to their daughter.

Stefa gets up from the table, tears rolling down her cheeks. She goes into her room and falls onto her bed and sobs.

ON A STARLIT EVENING, as the smugglers in Vlorë are readying their speedboats on the Albanian side of the Adriatic, Don Cesare flings open the gates of Regina Pacis and leads a small procession of women across the narrow road to the edge of the rocky beach. They stand, silently facing the sea they had crossed. The priest raises his arms, blesses the rolling waves and begins to pray. The women stare out onto the water, their lips moving in prayer for the victims who have yet to be rescued.

A couple of nights later, as I was driving along Via Solaria outside Rome, the “nighttime butterflies,” as they are called in Italy, were out in full force. On the edge of the bustling thoroughfare, in the dark side roads, their pimps sat watching their property in secondhand cars through tinted windows. For these young women, escape will not come easily.