Classified Information
Local weeklies profit from prostitution ads
By David Lewis |
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The most agonizing part of a sting operation is the waiting. Waiting for the prostitute to show up is terrible, especially when she is nearly two hours late. Then, later, waiting in the bushes while her enormous pimp drives slowly up the road, furiously looking for you in the dark - well, that's terrible in a very different way.
Our story about human trafficking made me realize that one person's greed can lead to a night of fear and depravity for another human, a night of sucking desperation that leads a woman to the bottom of what her mind can handle; to a place where the numbing of a drug is the only thing keeping her unraveling thread of human dignity from snapping forever. But how easy is it to hire a prostitute in Columbus, Ohio? Do you have to drive through the slums after midnight? Must you know someone who knows someone? Or can you spend a night hopping strip clubs, throwing cash around like a sultan until you catch the attention of a dancer desperate for a line?
It's not even that difficult. Just open up your favorite local newspaper. Chances are, commercial sexual exploitation is advertised in the classified section as cheerfully as any '93 Pontiac sedan.
The not-so-well-coded blurbs regularly use language such as "full service" for the "escorts;" many are labeled "in-call or out-call," and a few are even more blatant, using phrases such as "no limitations." But how do you know when it's a prostitute, and not just a stripper, or a call girl?
614 Magazine decided to investigate. After securing the necessary supplies (a six-pack of Miller High Life, a pay-as-you-go telephone for anonymity, a pouch of Bugler rolling tobacco, some pork rinds, and a bag of Gummi Bears) I headed to a seedy South End motel and checked in under an alias, making sure the room was located on the first floor in case a hasty exit became necessary.
It didn't take long to rig the room up with a small HD video recorder, or to rearrange the place to seem as though I had been staying in it for the weekend. The pork rinds were a classy addition around the half-eaten pizza in a greasy box on the dresser, and the Gummi Bears were delicious; however, the sugary confection did little to quiet my bleating stomach. I placed a few cigarette butts in an empty beer bottle and sprinkled a little of the tobacco on the bed, and then rolled around in it in my dirty, sweaty clothes . . . and the room was ready.
I had done some research the weekend before. The suspected prostitute had advertised in both the Columbus Alive! and The Other Paper.
A reverse look-up revealed that the phone number listed was registered to an "entertainment company" located at a vacant warehouse on Dublin-Granville Road. Just a few clicks from there, I found a myspace.com profile for someone with the same name who lives in the area. That person's profile status proclaimed that he "trafficks guns and whores." While an online boast is hardly conclusive courtroom evidence, I decided to take some precautions anyway, and removed the screw holding the tiny bathroom window shut back in my motel room.
Using the video camera to document each action, I dialed the number on a pay-as-you-go cell phone and held my breath as it rang. Finally a breathy voice answered.
"Hello?"
"Is this 'Misty?'" I asked.
"Yes, this is she," she cooed.
"Are you busy tonight?"
"No, honey, I'm all yours. Do you want to come see me, or should I come see you?"
"Misty" said that it would cost $150 for her to come see me, or $100 for me to come to her, and gave me her physical description. I asked her if oral sex came with the $150.
"Well, I can't really discuss it, especially on the phone, but it's full service..." she said in a low voice. "You're going to love it. I'll get you off."
I gave her my motel and room number; she called the motel office and verified that someone was there under the name I had given her. She then called me back and said she would be there in half an hour. I hung up the phone and waited. And waited.
I tried to watch a movie on my laptop, but found myself unable to focus. I checked the room again, making sure everything was as ready as possible. I checked the positioning of the camera repeatedly, making certain the battery was fully charged. I paced, I smoked, I drank, and I waited...
Finally, after two hours and several text messages, I heard the shave-and-a-haircut knock at my door. Apparently, that is the code-knock for "There's a large pimp at your door," because Misty wasn't alone.
Her "driver" was about 6'5" and sported a shaved head, and insisted that I pay him. (He also did not have change for a twenty-dollar bill, which I found a little silly.) He took the money and stood outside the motel door, smoking a cigarette, while Misty entered the room and surveyed her new territory. Her ample black dress was topped with a shock of blonde hair, all of which was anchored by fervent blue eyes that darted ceaselessly around the room, fixing on visible items of worth such as the computer on the desk and the cash in my hand.
Misty explained to me that there were two types of 'girls' you could call: there are independent girls, who don't have a driver. They charge a flat rate; they are "icky" and sometimes have diseases.
And then there are girls like her.
"There's a lot of girls who do this that have some kind of drug problem," she confessed in a whisper. "But I don't do none of that stuff."
"I've got morals, but you're really hot, and so there went all my morals," she giggled.
Before my simmering attractiveness went to my head, she explained that the girls of "her type" usually get "tipped" in the room because their "drivers" take the cash.
"That's how we make our money," she said.
She gave me her phone number so that, in the future, I could "call her on the side" for $100 and leave the driver out of it, and advised me to give her my $100 Visa gift card in lieu of a cash tip, as I did not have enough cash to tip her the $200 she wanted on top of the driver's fee.
Her skills were those of a highly trained auctioneer. When I pulled the gift card out of my pocket, her eyes fixed on it like lasers, and she told me that, if I gave her the money, she could even convince the pimp to leave.
"What else do you have?" she said in a hungry voice, quickly shifting to a purr for, "It all contributes to our session."
I offered her a beer.
"I typically get paid up front," she insisted; I pointed out that she hadn't mentioned that on the phone.
"Well, I'm here now," she replied. "Sometimes we stay with people for a while, and sometimes it's ten minutes, you know . . . "
She said that she could tell I was a good person, and informed me that she was a great judge of character.
"I'm cool with staying here with you and letting you pay me later as long as you promise to tip me," she said. "You're going to love me, but you have to promise before I let him go. He could be making money with one of the other girls, so he'll go . . . "
An example of the classifieds running in local publications papers and websites
As I continued to avoid promising more cash, she became visibly skittish.
"Whoa, there's a window in here," she said nervously from the bathroom. "You definitely need to take that shirt off so I can make sure you are not a cop. Put some music on."
I continued trying to stall her. I was out of money, and I had no music on my computer, but I wanted one last confession. Her tone had become wheedling and insistent, and I knew I was close.
"Come on . . . so we can get naked . . . just promise me you'll tip me, and then it's on," she said. "I promise you'll love it."
At that point, the transaction went a little weird. It soon became apparent that I was neither a cop nor a hopeful "john", which was putting all of us in a rather awkward position. She began edging toward the door, assuring me that she was going to tell her pimp that she was going to stay. She opened the door and said, "I'll be right back, this will just take a second."
She shut the door and I heard a car engine start up; I cracked the door in time to see them drive away in a white four-door sedan.
I hurried to start packing up my equipment. After a few seconds, the white four-door sedan pulled back into the motel driveway and stopped, blocking the entrance to the cul-de-sac parking lot. I was calling the motel office phone to inquire as to the sedan's occupants when I saw the pimp get out and begin to walk towards my room, at which point I exited through the bathroom window. Landing in some shrubs, I broke into a full sprint, thorns catching in my tweed suit and slowing my progress through the thick undergrowth behind the motel. I clambered over a fence and started down an alley when I saw headlights behind me. Ducking behind a bush, I saw a white sedan drive past me and stop half a block up the road. Keeping my head down, I stuck my head around the bush and saw that the car was still running, but no one got out. After a few minutes, the driver shut the engine off, but no one exited the vehicle. I ran the other way down the alley and climbed over a fire-escape handrail to boost myself over another piece of chain-link fence, and ran to safety.
Having found the overall experience . . . unsatisfying, I decided to delve back into the trusty classified pages of the local weeklies.
Although both the Alive! and The Other Paper have disclaimers that prohibit ads for illegal activities, there seems to be little monitoring. Ad after ad boasted services like "Radiant Red Head, Affordable Prices," "24 Hour Full Service," "Super Busty Female That Does Everything You Want and More. In/Outcall," or even more direct, "24/7 No Rip Off."
Calling several more numbers listed in the Columbus Alive! classified section, I found the language the girls used to be nearly identical. I was asking for specific information, explaining that a girl and her driver had recently ripped me off. I inquired whether I could at least be guaranteed a blowjob if I was going to drive all the way there, and whether I would need to bring any extra money for a tip.
"It's $85 half an hour or $150 for a full hour, no rip off; I promise you, it's full service," croaked one. Another said "It's $150 per hour, and it's full-service, honey. I can't talk about it on the phone, but I promise you, you'll be completely satisfied."
While online classifieds website, Craigslist.org, has recently come under fire for the prostitution advertising that occurs in its erotic or adult services sections, Backpage.org contains far more explicit adult ads, according to a CNN.com report from May of this year.
I tried to see what Backpage.com offered in Columbus, but the site redirected to the Columbus Alive!'s online adult classified section, which shows full nudity and contains far-less-veiled offers of prostitution. One ad even advertises a website, eroticmp.com, that lists reviews of local erotic massage parlors and can educate readers on such details as whether or not the masseuses "go down" or give "happy endings," as well as other "extra services."
As online classified websites come increasingly under fire for erotic advertisements, some expect alt-weeklies to experience a resurgence in their own personal-services advertising; many industry experts think it could even revitalize an industry that, in recent years, has been foundering.
Last year, Miami police arrested ad sales personnel from one weekly, charging them with racketeering after the paper permitted undercover police (openly claiming to be prostitutes) to buy classifieds. The case was settled out of court, with 18 charges dropped in exchange for the paper's agreement to cover the cost of the investigation and to cease running adult ads.
How do the papers get away with advertising an illegal service? According to the Columbus Police Department's Lieutenant Steven Hope, head of the Columbus Police Department's vice section, the advertisements themselves aren't illegal.
Lt. Hope said that the police are aware that many of the classified ads run in the Columbus Alive! and The Other Paper are for illegal prostitution, and regularly investigate ad buyers, but with the vague language typically used in the ads such as "full service," or "in call/out call," the papers weren't committing a crime.
An example of the classifieds running in local publications papers and websites
"There's not much we can do about that; that's a paper policy," he said. "Even though we know what it means, they are going to say that is not what it means. [The papers] are going to accept what they accept."
Hope indicated that the papers are enabling pimps and prostitutes to advertise the wares to a broader audience than they might be able to otherwise.
"If they didn't advertise it in the papers, it would be much harder to get their information to the public," he said. "Not that they wouldn't find other ways, but I guess it does make it easier.
Nadia Lucchin, State Director of Not For Sale Ohio, and Theresa Flores, Director of Development for Columbus' Gracehaven House program, agreed that such advertising helps keep pimps in business, making it easy for them to reach regular people.
"They are promoting prostitution," said Theresa of the papers' classified sections. "It forces you to question the reliability of their fact-checking; there's no monitoring, no accountability."
Andrew Schotz, Chairman of the Society of Professional Journalist's ethics committee, said that newspapers, and their publishers, have to be careful.
"It's more of a business ethics issue. I think that newspapers and print media need to have an ad policy and some type of oversight that enables them have at least some sense, or give readers some sense, that they are trying to pass along [services that aren't illegal]."
Schotz remarked that real estate advertising often has warnings prohibiting discriminatory loaning practices, but noted that the same policing does not appear in print next to the "personal services"-type of advertisements.
"This seems to be a gray area that a lot of newspapers fall into, especially the alternative weeklies," said Schotz. "They tend to be very permissive with what they allow in the advertising.
"At the same time, you are making a statement to your readers if you are turning a blind eye to it," he continued.
Schotz noted that editorial content and advertising should be kept separate, but said that conflicts of interest should be avoided.
"If a publisher wants to protect advertisers, he or she might direct the newsroom not to write about possible illegal activities behind those ads," he said. "That's where there could be overlap."
"Certainly, there's room for challenge, if they are allowing this," concluded Schotz.
Katie Wolfe, publisher of the Columbus Alive!, said that she thought it was a matter for the classified section's director, and agreed to get back to me, but had not at the time of print. Roy Biondi, publisher of The Other Paper, declined to comment on the ethical ramifications of advertising illegal services, hanging up the phone during our interview. Later that day, The Other Paper's website reposted an article from December of last year in which they admit to running the ads, along with many other alternative weeklies, citing First Amendment rights.
Lt. Hope, of the CPD vice section, believes challenge to the ads could only come from one place.
"I guess the community would have to put pressure on them to stop doing that, because there is nothing we can do legally that I am aware of," said Hope.
Some advertisers expressed discomfort with the illegal services advertised in those papers' classifieds, too.
"The paper's making money off that, right? I'm not cool with that. Especially something that kids can get their hands on..." said Thomas Smith, part-owner of and chef at the Worthington Inn - and an advertiser with the Columbus Dispatch and Columbus Alive!. "I'll bring it up to my partners and see what they think about advertising with them. I had no idea that it was going on."
Rachelle Loraine, Senior Director of dating service, It's Just Lunch, advertises in The Other Paper; she said she thought the "personal services" ads were "scary."
"I really love The Other Paper and its concept, I just wish they would be a little more discriminate," she said. "It's nice that the newspaper is making money off something, but if it's not a reputable source, it's taking bad money," she said, concluding, "I think it brings down the morality of the paper."
Originally Published: October 1, 2009
