The Natashas: The New Global Sex Trade

7 FOR A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS

CORRUPTION IS THE GRAPNEL of the vast, brutal trade in women and girls. Trafficking thrives because of it, and could not exist to the extent that it does without it. Cash and free sex are the driving forces. As long as there are government officials with their hands out or cops with their pants down, the trade will continue to flourish.

To make money, brothel owners and pimps have to make their victims readily available to clients, night in and night out.

It is virtually impossible, therefore, to run an underground sex-trafficking enterprise. Johns have to know where to find these women whenever the urge strikes. Their quest has to be simple. They’re not about to enter into a complicated game of cat and mouse and at the same time risk confrontation with the law. So it stands to reason that if lustful men can readily zero in on the traffic, the police with their investigative abilities and high-tech equipment should be able to stop the trade. Yet they don’t. Why?

Gary Haugen knows the answer. As head of the International Justice Mission, a Christian-based human rights agency in Washington, D.C., he’s kicked down the doors of numerous steamy Third World brothels to rescue girls from sexual slavery. Haugen’s field experience has taught him one crucial lesson:

Martina Vandenberg, an adept, dauntless researcher who has investigated the trade for Human Rights Watch in trafficking hot spots like Bosnia, Israel and Greece, shares this view: “The human rights violation of trafficking in persons cannot flourish without the complicity of indifferent and corrupt state officials.” Vandenberg has spoken to hundreds of trafficking victims and the human rights workers who work closely with them. She has heard numerous distressing stories of police and state complicity and corruption:

Vandenberg’s sentiments were echoed in February 2002 at a trafficking conference organized by the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights in Vienna. During two days of intense meetings, human rights activists repeatedly raised concerns about the role of state authorities in the trafficking cycle. Participants reported several examples of corruption, complicity and complacency on the part of government officials, police, border guards and court officials in many countries of origin, transit and final destination. The sordid tales also involved UN peacekeepers and the staff of numerous international aid organizations.

In one abhorrent incident cited at the Vienna conference, border guards in Poland participated in the abduction of two Ukrainian women. The guards forcibly removed the women from a bus and turned them over to traffickers in a waiting car. The women were taken to a hotel near Warsaw, where they were sold at an auction held under the protection of the local police station.

Another human rights worker at the conference recounted an informal meeting with police officials in Moldova, where corruption linked to trafficking is entrenched at the highest levels of government. The worker was warned “mildly and diplomatically” by police not to put too much hope or effort into anti-trafficking campaigns and activities. They will fail, she was told, “because important and powerful people are involved in this business.”

Corruption in the trafficking trade is so well established that it can constrict the efforts of those who work with rescued women. This was made clear at a June 2002 seminar on trafficking held in Portoroz, Slovenia. At the close of the proceedings the delegates sent an urgent letter to the Council of Europe, which sponsored the event:

In myriad reports compiled since 2000, the U.S. State Department has identified a litany of former Soviet states and East Bloc nations where corruption is a way of life. In its Country Reports on Human Rights released in March 2002, it found that in Belarus “there is existing data to the effect that corrupt militiamen are involved” in trafficking women and girls. Another on Bulgaria says, “Women do not trust the police in cases where they need to report forced prostitution and trafficking. Profits are so huge that police may be bribed.” The report notes that corruption has reached “massive proportions” in that country. The same report on Georgia points out that citizens “do not trust the police because of the very high level of corruption among policemen. For example, they are aware of the districts with prostitutes and are aware of under age prostitution, but do nothing to stop these activities. They work in collaboration [with pimps] and profit themselves from the business.” The Country Report on Moldova cites “widespread corruption and the connections of government officials and police with organized crime groups” in the trafficking chain.

Corruption in Russia has been cited repeatedly in numerous reports as a key factor behind the trade. They note that Russian women “cannot find the courage to approach police with complaints against the agencies that recruited them once they are back in Russia. The reason for their passivity evidently lies in the fear of organized crime and a general lack of trust in Russian law enforcement organs.” The same is true in Ukraine, where “local militia and border guards received bribes in return for ignoring trafficking.” Some reports allege that “local public officials abetted or assisted organized criminal groups in trafficking women abroad.”

And it’s not just the former Soviet states and East Bloc nations that wallow in corruption. The kind of money, power and influence that organized crime generates from the sex industry makes it easy for criminals to target greedy government officials and cops worldwide. International reports and studies are filled with such accounts wherever trafficked women end up. Without doubt the worst kind of corruption involves the police, whose job it is to serve and protect the people, and the weakest link in this chain of command is usually the cop on the beat. The violation of duties ranges from passivity— ignoring, tolerating or avoiding action—to deliberate obstruction of investigations, including warning criminals of impending raids and accepting bribes and sexual favors. And two countries that should know better from a human rights perspective and that have come under severe international criticism for police corruption in the trafficking trade are Greece and Israel.

Greece has been rocked repeatedly by allegations of rampant police corruption. For the procurers of an estimated 20,000 foreign women—mostly from Ukraine, Russia, Moldova, Bulgaria, Romania and Albania—paying for police protection is a normal business transaction. The women are smuggled in right under the watchful eyes of Greek border guards and police to work as unregistered prostitutes in brothels, bars and massage parlors. The result: Greece has become a magnet for sex tourism. Before the fall of the Iron Curtain, it had no more than 2000 so-called illegal prostitutes, mostly locals. Today, the visibility of the street trade is truly staggering.

Gregoris Lazos, a professor at Athens’ Pantheon University who headed a decade-long study of prostitution trends, concluded that Greece has become a major global “processing center” for East European prostitutes. He found that many of the women trafficked into the Greek trade are re-sold on the flesh market to pimps in Turkey, the Middle East and throughout Europe. And the main factor behind the trade’s astonishing success “is the corruption. You can’t operate illegal enterprises this big and this complex without corrupt officials.”

Dimitris Kyriazidis, president of the Pan Hellenic Confederation of Police Officers, stunned the nation in April 2001 when he publicly acknowledged the involvement of the police “in networks which traffic illegal women” in Greece. Then came more international embarrassment.

In July 2001, when the U.S. government waded into the human trafficking debacle with its first annual worldwide report card, it ranked twenty-three nations, including Greece, at the bottom of the barrel. The State Department report pointed out that Greece had not made significant efforts to combat trafficking, failed to acknowledge publicly that trafficking is a problem, failed to implement comprehensive anti-trafficking legislation, rarely prosecuted traffickers and awarded light sentences to punish traffickers when they were tried. It also cited corruption in the police and border control as “a major problem.”

Not long after this report was released, Human Rights Watch issued a blistering forty-one-page Memorandum of Concern on the problem of trafficking of women in Greece, noting that the trade “often involves the complicity of the police and corrupt immigration officials. In fact, many believe that the international phenomenon of trafficking in women for forced prostitution could not exist at any level without the involvement of such officials.”

Greek newspapers have documented numerous incidents of police participation, including the issuing of fake residence and employment permits to women who work illegally under appalling conditions as virtual sex slaves for Greek and Albanian gangs throughout the country. In one embarrassing incident in late October 2000, police in the northern Greek city of Thessalonica raided a strip club suspected of harboring trafficked women. They pulled out six girls. A few hours later the cops discovered that the Tutti Frutti club was a hefty advertiser in the police union’s bimonthly magazine.

Two months after that came a screaming headline in the daily Eleftherotypia: the police department’s Internal Affairs had uncovered a major prostitution procurement ring allegedly run by officers in the central region of Thessaly. According to the leaked confidential report, the operation—known locally as the “meat machine”—had trafficked some 1200 Eastern European women into Greece to work as prostitutes and raked in more than $100 million in criminal proceeds over a ten-year period. Police of varying ranks in the towns of Karditsa and Trikala were involved in the ring, as well as respected businessmen, an employee of a prosecutor’s office who allegedly tried to extort money from the racket and two personal security guards for an influential Member of Parliament. One of the women purchased and used by the ring told a judge that police officers frequented the club where she worked. By day they would come in uniform to check that the club’s papers were in order. They would return at night in street clothes for “gratis” services.

In one particularly scandalous incident, a police officer and a retired cop were arrested during a 1998 raid on an Athens apartment where two Ukrainian women were imprisoned and forced into prostitution. Neighbors told officers with the Aliens Bureau who conducted the covert operation that the women were constantly beaten into submission. Although the neighbors had repeatedly complained to the local police station about the screams emanating from the flat, no action was ever taken. The police officer arrested in the raid worked at that station, and investigators found an album containing photographs of the man, often dressed in parts of his uniform, in bed with various young women.

In the 1998 suicide of Irini Penkina cited earlier, police also received several complaints from residents of the apartment building in which she and three other women had been held. All the calls went unanswered. There was even an anonymous phone call to the police station in Thessalonica the day before she killed herself. Again, the police failed to respond. Just a few months earlier, three officers in the same precinct were arrested on charges of protecting prostitution rings in that town.

With every embarrassing scandal, Greek politicians vow to champion a campaign to ferret out the rotten cops and bureaucrats and shut down the illicit flesh trade. In their effort to stem the public furor, they promise swift action and concrete change. A series of stage-managed raids are carried out on known bordellos. Trafficked women are rounded up and deported. Pimps and corrupt police are arrested and charged, and then all goes quiet as the cases end up being mired in the judicial process, which has been described by the U.S. State Department as “slow and inefficient.” In Greece, criminal cases usually take just under eighteen months to come to trial, a little before the maximum pretrial detention period expires. It takes an average of eight years for cases to be finally decided. Given the situation, it’s no wonder the trafficking trade repeatedly springs back into action once the spotlight is off.

POLICE CORRUPTION is also at the very core of the trafficking trade in Israel. But despite the countless allegations against serving and retired cops, this sordid situation hardly causes a stir in political and government circles. At her tiny office in Tel Aviv, Nomi Levenkron rattled off an alarming number of cases she’s documented that expose police involvement.

Sigal Rozen, who heads the Hotline for Migrant Workers in Tel Aviv, said that in some cases police “receive discounts due to their good relations with the brothel owners.” She added that “the most extreme cases we know about are those of policemen who were actively involved in buying and selling women or policemen who returned arrested women back to their pimps for a proper amount of money.”

Sitting at her desk piled high with files on rescued trafficking victims, Rozen told the story of a young Russian woman named Larissa whom she met in spring 2001 during a visit to the Neveh Tirza prison for women outside Tel Aviv. What alerted her radar was that the authorities were making a special effort to speed up the woman’s deportation.

Larissa’s story is similar to that of many of the Natashas in Israel. She answered an ad in a local Russian newspaper offering work to young women as au pairs. She contacted the recruiter, who explained that Israeli law forbade her to work in the country legally and that the agency would have to prepare forged documents for her and smuggle her into the country via Egypt. Desperate for a job, Larissa agreed. She was flown to Cairo and transported overland through the Sinai Desert to a desolate area close to the Israeli border. From there, she—along with several other women—was led on foot by Bedouin smugglers to an Israeli border town, where she was picked up by a Russian Jew who drove her to Tel Aviv. Once in the city, Larissa learned her true fate. She was sold to an Israeli pimp who told her she would have to work as a prostitute. According to Rozen,

Larissa claimed that the police officer who took her into custody escorted her out of the police station, placed her in squad car and drove to Jerusalem where, Rozen said, “He sold her to another pimp for a fistful of dollars.”

Unrelenting in her mission to stop the traffic in her home-land, Nomi Levenkron made headlines in May 2001 when she filed an unusual petition with the Israeli High Court of Justice.

She asked that it order the police to listen to the testimony of four of her clients and to investigate the allegations they were making against their pimps.

“We claimed that the police appear to be systematically ignoring the requests by foreign women who are under detention and want to supply information that might incriminate their Israeli pimps,” she said.

The petition also asked that the police explain their approach to trafficked women, bluntly suggesting that their inaction “may be due to the possibility that the owners of the brothels where the women are employed are on friendly terms with police officers, and also to the fact that policemen are among the clients of the brothels. Some policemen come to the brothels for services in uniform.”

Levenkron highlighted the case of one of her clients, a twenty-four-year-old Ukrainian woman who was smuggled into Israel in December 2000 from Egypt over the Sinai Desert. She had been promised work as a waitress, but until her arrest in March 2001 she had been forced to work for an escort service in Tel Aviv. Levenkron’s petition states:

The owners were identified as two brothers, David and Meir. The victim did not know their family name. The petition goes on to say that during the time the Ukrainian woman worked at the brothel “it was constantly visited by policemen in uniform, who seemed to her to be on friendly terms with the owners. David even boasted to the women on a number of occasions that they had no reason to be afraid that they would be arrested, as he had ties with the police that constituted an ‘insurance policy’ against being arrested.” That insurance marker came into play in March 2001, the petition noted, when three of the women who worked in the brothel were arrested but returned later that same day to their pimp.

The lawyer also cited the harrowing experiences of three other women—an eighteen- and a twenty-two-year-old from Moldova, and a twenty-one-year-old Ukrainian. They were all smuggled into Israel overland from Egypt and put to work in a brothel in the town of Be’er Sheva. Over a period of several months, the women were “forced to take an average of eighteen clients a day. When they were not working, they were locked inside the apartment. Among the regular clients were policemen, who showed the women their ID.” Moreover, the women “identified the policeman who came to arrest them as a client who had visited the brothel two or three days earlier. The policeman who interrogated them at the station and took their fingerprints visited the brothel, as a client, on the morning of the arrest.”

All the cases cited in the petition became moot with the deportation of the women.

On several occasions Levenkron raised the issue of policemen visiting brothels as clients to the chief of police, as well as to the commander of the division that investigates police conduct at the Ministry of Justice. “The answer was always the same: there is nothing to be done. Although this behavior might not become a policeman, it is still not a crime.”

THE CONTEMPTIBLE ACTIONS of even the lowliest of bureaucrats can have dramatic repercussions. This was the case with a particularly nasty trafficking network that had its genesis in Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic, and reached into the United States.

One hazy August morning in 1996, Michael Bayer, a strapping six-foot-one special agent with the visa fraud section, U.S. State Department Bureau of Diplomatic Security in Washington, sat back at his desk, switched on the computer and saw he had mail. It was an urgent dispatch from a security officer at the American embassy in Prague: a Czech police officer had visited the embassy the day before with a tip about a gang of thugs smuggling young women into the United States.

Bayer promptly wrote back that he’d see what he could find out on his side of the ocean. But before he could fire off any queries he got another email the very next day from the anti-fraud section of consular affairs in Washington. Its job is to monitor immigration fraud trends targeting the U.S. That email alerted him to the recent arrival of a number of young, single Czech women at New York’s Kennedy Airport. They had valid U.S. entry visas, but there was something suspicious about the travel documents. They were all filled out in a very similar manner—a telltale sign of fraud.

“That, with the other tip, well, bang, zoom, I knew something was going on,” the agent recounted.

Bayer’s investigation kicked into overdrive. The consular section in Prague started pulling all the visa applications in a hunt for a pattern. It wasn’t long before they found it.

“All these applications were filled out with a common destination in New York City, which was a hotel up around 10th Avenue and 49th Street, kind of the seedier side of Times Square,” Bayer said. “It was an area known for prostitution. So it was pretty clear that we had a prostitution ring going straight into New York City.”

The area was staked out by a team of undercover cops, but nothing came of it.

“It was busy and we really couldn’t tell who was doing what. There were so many people around. So that didn’t really work out that well. But we knew young Czech women were coming into the States and where they were going once they got here.”

Intelligence amassed by Czech police revealed that the women were departing Prague in groups of three or four at a time, and that over a four-year period as many as 200 may have been illegally smuggled into New York.

“We actually saw some of the groups coming in and pretty soon it became clear who was involved and what was going on,” Bayer said.

Two Czech expatriates named Ladislav Ruc and Milan Lejhanec were meeting the women at Kennedy Airport. Ruc, then thirty-eight, was the mastermind. He was a big man who enjoyed playing the role of a Mafia don. His look was intimidating. A body-builder buff, he wore his gel-slicked hair in a ponytail. He dressed in skin-tight T-shirts, cowboy boots, cheesy sharkskin suits and flashy jewelry. On one occasion, he arrived at a Czech wedding in Queens in a Rolls-Royce chauffeured by Lejhanec, his trusted lieutenant. Lejhanec was very much the lackey. At twenty-seven, he was a career criminal with a record in the Czech Republic for transporting stolen cars. He was also convicted for attempting to sell plastique explosives that had been stolen from an army storage depot. There were a number of other Czech expatriates in the gang, but Ruc was the ringleader.

With the key players identified and the pattern established, Bayer decided it was time to turn up the heat and asked the New York police for assistance.

“They fixed me up with some vice cops in lower Manhattan who were also organized crime cops. They were the cream of their crop. I started telling them the background of this thing when a detective cuts in and says, ‘You know what, I just arrested a woman for prostitution who I think ran away from this same gang.’”

The agent jotted down the particulars and set up a meeting.

What Bayer learned from his Jane Doe was the inner workings of the gang’s criminal enterprise. She described how the women were recruited through ads placed in local Czech newspapers for dancers, waitresses and models. They were met by the recruiters at the main train station in Wenceslas Square in Prague. The women didn’t have to venture into the U.S. embassy with a concocted story and hope for the best—the gang members simply directed them to a specific employee in the visa section who rubber-stamped their applications. Within days they were bound for New York. Ruc and Lejhanec picked them up at the airport and took them to one of three cockroach- and rat-infested apartments in Queens, where the women lived out of their suitcases and slept on mattresses on the floor.

The women were immediately put to work in grueling ten-hour shifts at peep-show parlors near Times Square. The main two were the Playpen—a narrow, sleazy bar with blacked-out windows at street level—and the Playground, on the second floor above a hard-core porn shop on Eighth Avenue and packed with peep-show stalls.

“I was told by vice cops that the Playpen and Playground used to be notorious for having drug addicts, the real kind of bottom-of-the-barrel type of product,” Bayer recounted. “Then they said these two places started getting all these beautiful

Czech women and other beautiful foreign women coming in, and all of a sudden they’re raking in the dough.”

At the peep-show parlors customers would enter a closet-like room and feed quarters into a slot. A motorized metal screen would rise for about a minute before dropping down. In a flesh pit on the other side were naked women. For a price, the voyeurs could reach in and grope them. But before they touched, the girls were required to ask for a tip.

“That was the kind of the language for the transaction,” Bayer explained. “Well, there was an actual price for touching each part of the body. Sort of like a meat chart. The going price was $2 for the breast, $3 for the buttock and $5 for genital contact. So the customer would reach through the hole in this peep-show booth and that’s how contact was made.”

Under New York law, this sort of sexual activity is illegal and falls under the statute dealing with prostitution. However, the club owners figured they could get away with it by instructing the women not to charge a fee but to ask for a gratuity.

While Bayer built his case against Ruc and Lejhanec, the investigation in the Republic zeroed in on the crooked embassy employee—a female Czech national. American investigators, with help from the Czech police, set up a sting to nail her.

“We sent in a young Czech policewoman pretending to be one of these women clients and it worked beautifully,” Bayer said. “The employee confessed right away when confronted and agreed to cooperate with our investigation. She told us she alone issued more than a hundred visas for $100 apiece. She was hoping to make enough money to buy a bar in Prague.”

Her information led to the arrest of a number of key players in the Czech Republic, including Lejhanec’s mother and brother and a “businessman” who operated out of the town of Partibitsa about an hour outside Prague.

“This was the actual center they worked out of and recruited women,” Bayer explained. “What they were doing there was placing advertisements in one of the Czech national newspapers for waitresses, models and nannies.”

Back in New York, the agent pressed forward with the case. “As time goes on—and this thing is going on over a lot of months—I’m asking my primary contact to fix me up with other girls who’ve run away. So over a period of a year she leads me to three others. So now I have four women telling me the same stories.”

The takedown was set for March 12, 1998. A team of officers from the NYPD, the State Department diplomatic security and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) hit the Playpen and Playground.

“We had 150 cops and agents ready to roll. We had good knowledge of the best time to raid—that was, believe it or not, around five o’clock, at rush hour when all the businessmen got out of work. That’s where a lot of them go before they head home to their families.”

The raids recovered thirty-nine women from the Czech Republic and Hungary. Apparently another gang, headed by a thug named Zoltan, was handling the Hungarian trade. In the club offices the police found $250,000 in cash, along with drugs and a few handguns.

Arrest teams also went after the two main suspects in Queens. They nailed Lejhanec at his home and found a cache of weapons—Russian- and Israeli-made automatic pistols—as well as passports, visas, airline tickets and a ledger detailing the money taken from each of the women. Ruc wasn’t home at the time but police found a pile of incriminating evidence. A few days later, the gang leader turned himself in.

At their trial in June 1999, Ruc and Lejhanec pled guilty and were each sentenced to sixty months in prison with an order that they be deported as soon as they completed their time. Still, five years for trafficking and brutalizing so many innocent women is hardly a deterrent. The court could have sent a much stronger message, one that would make traffickers think twice about getting into this business. As for their victims, most were deported or returned, disgraced, to their homes in the Czech Republic.

STORIES OF SYSTEMIC COMPLICITY, complacency and corruption abound on the trafficking scene worldwide. It is a wonder sometimes that any women are rescued at all. And when they are, most are treated as whores. The reason is simple: if a cop were to admit that he’d used any of these women, he’d also have to face the fact that he’s guilty of rape.

To most trafficked women the “enemy” includes police, border guards and immigration officers. But there is yet another formidable foe among those in uniform: military men. In war-torn regions under control of UN peacekeepers and U.S. soldiers the words “democracy” and “peace” ring hollow for thousands of trafficked women imprisoned in bars and brothels adjacent to military bases. In these far-flung, out-of-sight hovels, fifteen-year-old girls are fair game… and rape is just another word for rest and recreation.