Right next door in Gwinnett County

Women coerced into sex trade: Gwinnett police fight ever-evolving prostitution rings

07/23/2006 -

EDITOR’S NOTE: The former prostitute interviewed for this story has cooperated with Gwinnett County Police Department to help bring down brothels in the Norcross area. Her story is substantiated by police reports and detectives. She agreed to be interviewed for this article only if granted anonymity. Her story was translated from Spanish to English by her boyfriend during a telephone interview. Both the woman and her boyfriend requested their names and likenesses not be used because they fear retribution from others in the underground sex market. For the purposes of attribution, the woman is referred to as “Clara” and her boyfriend as “Marco.”
By Andria Simmons
Staff Writer
andria.simmons@gwinnettdailypost.com

LAWRENCEVILLE — Clara thought she was leaving behind a rural Mexican farm life for better opportunities in America when she snuck away from her family home with her boyfriend four years ago.

Although Clara, then 20 years old, had only known him for two months, her boyfriend promised to make her his wife, build them a nice house and find a high-paying job for her in the United States. It sounded infinitely better than the life she knew in her tiny village in the Mexican state of Puebla.

There, she was one of eight sisters in a family struggling to get by, working long hours in the sweltering heat to cultivate fields of corn, and milking goats and cows. Clara’s family did not approve of her leaving the country, but she didn’t care.

She escaped with her boyfriend one night and traveled to the Texas border, where he paid a “coyote,” or guide, $2,700 to shepherd them safely into a land of promise. The couple then boarded a bus bound for Georgia.

But the farther she got from her family, the more Clara began to realize things were not going as planned.

The boyfriend who had been so caring at first began to beat her. And there was no high-paying job. Instead, the boyfriend demanded that she prostitute herself to repay him for smuggling her across the border. He threatened to kill Clara’s father and the rest of her family if she didn’t comply.

Within days of her arrival in Gwinnett, a strange woman came and got Clara, put her in a car and drove her to various apartment complexes in Norcross. The woman knocked on the doors of male customers and offered Clara to them. Fearing for her family’s life, Clara did what she had to do.

Brothels enter residential areas

Clara became a prostitute in a “$30 house” — so called by police because men pay $30 to have sex with a woman in the apartment or house. Several of the brothels are located in the Norcross area and are advertised only by word of mouth, usually at farmers’ markets, grocery stores and by taxicab drivers, said Sgt. David Butler, who supervises the Gwinnett County Police Department vice unit.

Clara and other women were transported between the houses each day and watched over by “cuidadores,” male caretakers who guarded the women and the profits. The caretakers were brothers or cousins of Clara’s former boyfriend, and each was responsible for three to four prostitutes.

Like Clara, many of the women were essentially sex slaves, forced into prostitution without pay. On any given day, Clara had sex with 20 to 35 men in cramped rooms that had been divided into cubicles.

“She felt like trash,” Marco translated for Clara. “She had to take showers; she was always taking showers and washing herself.”

Trying to escape was fruitless. She knew no one, she spoke no English, and the men running the operation didn’t permit her to telephone her family. So Clara submitted. Butler thinks a countywide crackdown two years ago that shut down several massage parlors serving as fronts for prostitution has fueled a demand for $30 houses, Asian brothels and street prostitutes. The world’s oldest profession has simply found another way to do business.

Now, instead of happening inside strip malls and shopping centers, the sex trade has gone underground. Prostitution rings are setting up shop in rental houses, apartment complexes and extended-stay hotels, Butler said.

Some of the brothels, primarily the Hispanic ones, are using human trafficking to staff their operation with unsuspecting women like Clara. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, between 45,000 to 50,000 women and children are brought to the United States every year under false pretenses and forced to work as prostitutes, abused laborers or servants.

Butler estimates there are five or six $30 houses operating in the Norcross area. “These women are pretty beat down,” Butler said. “There’s no doubt their self-esteem is at its lowest. There are no resources, nobody for them to call. They are usually working off some type of debt. They are promised certain things and then they are isolated after they get here. Some don’t even know what city they are in.”

The brothels are difficult to shut down, because police must prove money was exchanged for sex. Even if they find condoms lying everywhere in the house, scantily clad women and waiting customers, investigators often cannot make a case, said Detective Jason Rozier, who has investigated several of the Hispanic prostitution houses. Finding tangible evidence to put before a jury is exceedingly difficult, Butler added.

So far, only one $30 house has been shut down at Highland Walk Apartments off South Norcross Tucker Road. On July 9, two men were arrested there after officers found four prostitutes inside and questioned several customers. Most of the customers admitted to police that they were there to have sex with a prostitute, according to police reports. Silvestre Gonzalez-Hernandez, 29, and Jorge Martinez-Rivera, 50, both of Norcross, were charged with one misdemeanor count of keeping a place of prostitution.

Police believe the houses all operate in a similar fashion. They are usually open from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. seven days a week. The women receive no pay. Fifty percent of the profits go to the house and the remaining half go to the woman’s handler.

The women are transported back and forth from a house where they all live together to $30 houses and are kept under guard by the caretakers, according to police reports. The caretakers that Clara encountered were all brothers or cousins of her former boyfriend.

Same business, different method

Other types of prostitution are also springing up.

Gwinnett police are also combating an Asian prostitution ring which operates differently than the Hispanic brothels. The Asian suspects are advertising openly in foreign-language publications.

Several alleged Asian prostitutes were arrested earlier this summer during undercover police busts — twice at a single-family dwelling on Samia Drive and once in Alara Pleasant Hill apartments at 2500 Pleasant Hill Road in Duluth.

Despite police efforts, it has been difficult to chase the Asian prostitution ring out of Gwinnett, said Detective John Dougherty, who is assigned to the Gwinnett Police vice unit. “We arrest them, but then someone bonds them out and they’re back at it again,” Dougherty said.

Dougherty said unlike some of the Hispanic prostitutes, most of the Asian hookers he encounters are willing participants in the sex trade. They typically charge $150 to $200 for their services in contrast to the $30 price of Hispanic prostitutes, Dougherty said.

A second chance

Clara spent 3 1/2 years in quiet desperation before she managed to escape from a brothel in December 2005 with the help of a female friend. The friend allowed Clara to temporarily move in with her, but Clara said she was constantly gripped by fear that the caretakers would find her.

For a brief time, she slipped back into the only lifestyle she knew. She began selling her body again — this time keeping her profits. But then she met a man who was different than the others.

One day at a drug store in Norcross, Marco, a 40-year-old man who had just moved to Georgia from New York to begin construction work, approached Clara and asked for her phone number.

They talked by phone several times over the next few weeks, and eventually Clara confessed to Marco about her checkered past. He was unfazed, and the couple fell in love quickly. Clara then moved in with Marco at his house in downtown Atlanta.

Instinctively protective of her, Marco refused to let Clara see her old friends who were still involved with prostitution. He even took her with him to work at construction jobs. It was evident to Marco that she had been mistreated.

“She was very quiet,” Marco said. “She never looked at my face, she was looking down all the time and afraid I would scream at or beat her. She never smiled.”

However, in the past six months Clara’s personality has changed dramatically, Marco said. He encourages her to express herself and be open with him.

“Now there is a big difference,” Marco said. “She smiles, now we are kidding each other. We make jokes.”

And it was Marco who gently prodded Clara to go to the police with her story. He knew that she still spent many nights crying and feared for her family’s safety.

Clara said she hopes that by cooperating with investigators, her experience won’t be repeated by others. She also plans someday to return to Mexico and see her family, whom she has not spoken with since she left the country four years ago.

She will not face prostitution charges, just as the four women whom police encountered at the $30 house at Highland Walk Apartments were allowed to go free, said Butler. Police want to focus their investigative efforts, which will continue mainly with undercover stings conducted by the vice unit, on the human traffickers and prostitution ringleaders.

“Some of these women are victims themselves,” Butler said. “We try not to victimize the girls again.”