We arrange to meet in a coffee bar close to Glasgow railway station that same afternoon.
The trade in sex-slave women first hit the headlines in early 2000 when three Russian gangsters linked to a top Lithuanian crime syndicate were jailed for smuggling women into Britain and forcing them to work as prostitutes in brothels in north and west London. Zilvis Paulauskas, Tomas Kazemekaitis and Alenas Ciapas lured four poverty-stricken women from Lithuania, promising that they would be able to earn thousands of pounds after they had paid back the cost of their air fare. On arrival the women were kept prisoner, charged hundreds of pounds a week in ‘rent’, and told that their families would be attacked if they tried to escape.
The racket – which generated tens of thousands of pounds for the trio – was broken when police launched an undercover investigation after spotting a card in a telephone box advertising a ‘blonde Russian kitten’. The investigation threw up alarming information about the numbers of trafficked women involved in the capital’s sex trade. A police survey of flats used by Soho prostitutes found that 60 per cent were occupied by women of Eastern European origin.
But the criminal gangs behind the multi-million-pound industry now believe the capital is too well policed to be viable and in recent months have begun establishing new operations in the regions, where profits are almost as high but the risk of detection is minimal. Despite the massive growth in the number of massage parlours offering foreign girls, police forces outside the capital seem ill-equipped to deal with the problem: neither Liverpool, Manchester nor Glasgow have a dedicated Vice Squad, and all admit they do not consider the field a priority because they receive few complaints from the public.
In the heart of Manchester’s Chinatown, one newly launched massage parlour offers a selection of British and Oriental women. The brothel is run by a Vietnamese man who obtains his Thai women via Triad gangs in London. Close by is another new brothel, situated above a popular restaurant, which caters exclusively for Oriental customers and is run by the man reputed to be the head of Manchester’s Wo Sing Wo Triad.
In Glasgow, the sauna where Sandra and Mei work is registered to the name of a prominent Chinese businessman. Local law-enforcement sources say that the man is known to be a pawn of the Triad gangs. One of his business contacts, ‘Dan’, is in charge of bringing the women from Bangkok. Dan recently returned from the Thai capital, having travelled out to find a batch of new recruits, whom he intends to establish in a series of new properties across Glasgow.
According to Sandra the girls are ‘bought’ from the gangs for £15,000 each, then charged £17,000 for their passage once they arrive. ‘The reality is that they make that money back in a few weeks, but because of all the expenses they have to pay, their debt stays the same, no matter how hard they work,’ she says. ‘The Thai girls are popular when they first arrive – all the customers want something different. But after the clients have been with them once, few go back. The problem is that they don’t speak English, so they can’t talk to them. They start off making loads of money but it soon slows down, and they end up with a huge debt that they can never pay back.
‘The Scottish girls have a choice about working, but the Thai girls can get trapped. If they don’t pay off their debts within six months, they’re left with nothing. They become sex slaves. It’s appalling.’
It’s a problem that is repeated all across the country. In June 2003 Thai sisters Bupba Savada and Monporn Hughes were jailed for running a suburban prostitution ring that brought in more than £1 million per year. The pair ran a network of brothels operating in Wimbledon, Surbiton, Harrow and other London suburbs. They paid traffickers just £6000 for each young woman lured from Thailand on the promise of earning a substantial sum as a domestic servant in Britain. Once in London, as illegal immigrants, the women were told they owed Savada and her colleagues £22,000 and were coerced into working as prostitutes. They were taken to a flat in Wimbledon and kept under close supervision as they were ‘trained’. The women were then ‘sold’ to other prostitution rings or sent to work at a string of brothels in the suburbs. Many women had to earn £44,000 before they were allowed their freedom.
The sex-slavery trade is also emerging within the Asian community, another group associated with heroin. Gangs operating under the cover of the Bollywood film and music business are forcing teenage girls to work as prostitutes. The business revolves around a traditional form of Indian dance called
mujra.
Publicised almost entirely by word of mouth, performances take places after normal closing hours at a small number of venues in the heart of the Asian community.
A typical show will involve up to sixteen women, all wearing traditional costume, dancing one at a time on a stage area to the soundtracks of hit Bollywood films. The audience is exclusively male. Threats of violence are used to force the women to co-operate. As the evening progresses, they come down from the stage and perform private dances for the men and offer them sexual services for between £75 and £100. All the money earned has to be passed back to the organisers and the top promoters are said to make profits of up to £10,000 per night. The women are usually smuggled into the country on the pretext that they are involved in promotional work. Many have been lured away from their homes on the promise of well-paid jobs as dancers or actresses and only learn the truth about what they are required to do when it is too late.
One regular attendee who spoke to me anonymously said, ‘There was always an element of suggestiveness in the
mujra
tradition – like all dance to some extent – but nowadays it’s all sex and no art. Today going to a
mujra
is basically just like going to a brothel. Sometimes they do away with the dancing altogether. The girls wear tight clothes, lots of makeup and are very friendly. You are served drinks first, then the madam comes over and asks you to pick out a girl that you like. She is then introduced to you and that’s when you start to negotiate over the price.’
A police source who has studied the trend in trafficking foreign women said he believes that, unless action is taken, the problem – and the violence associated with it – will get even worse, because the profits are enormous compared with the risks. ‘If you get caught smuggling cocaine, you’re looking at twenty years,’ he said. ‘If you smuggle women, the profits can be just as high, and if you get caught the only thing you’re looking at is living off immoral earnings. The most you’ll get is three years. If you’re a criminal, the choice about which to go for is pretty simple.’
Little wonder the fastest growing and most brutal Mafia in Europe has moved in on the act.
Her real name was Ileana but by the time she was rescued it had been so long since anyone had used it that she had nearly forgotten it.
At the age of twelve she was sold for £600 by a relative to a gang of criminals in Skopje, the capital of Macedonia in the former Yugoslavia, who forced her to work as a prostitute. She was taken to a strip club and made to have sex with dozens of customers each day as well as dance. A few months later another gang bought her for £2300. She was taken to Albania and then by speedboat to Naples where she was again forced to work as a prostitute. She was just fifteen.
It was then that she met Albanian Mustapha Kadiu. At first he seemed different from the men who had used and abused her all her life. He took her to Rome, then said that she should come with him to the UK and start a new life away from prostitution. He gave her a false passport and paid for a trip that took her via Brussels and Ostend to Harwich, Essex, and then by train to Victoria station in London. Kadiu travelled independently to ensure that if Ileana was stopped he would not be caught with her. He took Ileana to his house in Harlesden, where he lived with his cousin, Edmond Ethemi, and a twenty-two-year-old woman who was Ethemi’s girlfriend; she was also a prostitute.
But the promise of a new life away from the world of vice was nothing but a lie. After four weeks Kadiu made Ileana work in saunas in Tottenham, King’s Cross, Camden, West Hampstead and Chalk Farm. He would drop her off in the morning and pick her up in the evening, at least twelve hours later and often more. She was to charge thirty pounds a time and had to earn at least £400 a day. She worked seven days a week, week in, week out. Kadiu, police later noted, was making as much money from pimping just one girl as he would from drug-dealing.
Leaving was not an option. She had no money, no papers and little idea of where she was. She knew that if Kadiu caught her she would be beaten severely. Kadiu convinced Ileana that if she went to the police they would simply hand her straight back to him. Having spent all her life in countries where police corruption was rife, and having been abused by one man after another, she knew no better.
Eventually she plucked up the courage to tell one of her regular clients of her plight and he tipped off Scotland Yard that a girl was ‘in difficulty and needed help’. Police took her to a safe-house then launched a surveillance operation against Kadiu and Ethemi before arresting them.
During his trial at Southwark Crown Court Kadiu claimed Ileana willingly went into prostitution and denied harming her. After hearing Ileana’s evidence the jury decided he was lying. He was convicted of raping and indecently assaulting her, and of living off immoral earnings. He was sentenced in December 2002 to a total of ten years in prison. Ethemi, twenty-one, was jailed for six and a half years for living off immoral earnings and possessing cocaine. Ileana is now rebuilding her life and studying at college under a new identity.
The plight of Ileana is an example of the growing power of Albanian vice gangs in London and beyond, and of the booming sex trade involving girls and women from Eastern Europe smuggled to the West. Most of those who end up in the vice industry are victims of some form of deception. The gangsters advertise in local newspapers abroad offering jobs as maids, nannies, bar and catering staff, receptionists, clerical staff, dancers and entertainers. Even the women who knowingly get involved in vice are told they will be able to keep their profits. Some gangs even pay women to return to their home countries to tempt others with false tales of wealth and happiness.
The gangs use extreme violence to control their victims. In some instances, women have been killed and their bodies dumped in public places as an example to others.
The number of Albanian vice barons in London is rising fast and they now control 75 per cent of all prostitution in Soho. Walking along Baker Street early one Monday morning, I noticed that three men in front of me were acting oddly. Two were looking this way and that, making sure the coast was clear, while the third quickly nipped into a nearby telephone-box, then emerged without having had time to make even the briefest of calls.
It was only when I reached the box myself that I realised what had been going on. A small card had been stuck beside the telephone with a picture of a naked young woman holding her breasts, a mobile-phone number and the words ‘New 18-year-old blonde’. The men were ‘carders’, working on behalf of the vice gangs to advertise the services of the prostitutes they control.
I moved closer and it soon became clear the trio were Albanian. When they noticed me staring they approached, worried that I was a police officer. I assured them that I was far more interested in the girls they were advertising and was waiting to see if they had any more cards. They did not and I made good my exit. When I called the number the following day I discovered it had been blocked by British Telecom – an increasingly common tactic to disrupt the activities of the carding gangs.
In Europe, Albanian gangs have first established themselves in the vice trade, then moved into other areas of criminality, including heroin-trafficking. They have a fearsome reputation for violence, and police fear that unless they can nip the gangs in the bud, there will be bloody clashes with the Turkish and Pakistani gangsters who currently control the UK heroin market.
There are signs that another Albanian criminal speciality – kidnap – is also on the rise in the UK. Many of the girls who are brought to work as prostitutes are literally snatched off the streets. In some rural areas of the Balkans, the fear of kidnap is such that families keep adolescent girls at home rather than send them to school or work.
But when it comes to Britain, women are not the only targets.
KIDNAP
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
At first he thought he had left one of the downstairs windows open and that a cat had sneaked into the house. Then, his heart sinking fast, he realised the sounds of movement coming from downstairs were people. Had they been burglars that would have been bad enough but as Clive Hobbs, a manager at a Lincoln Sainsbury’s store was about to discover, they were something far worse.
It was just after three a.m. on 19 April 2000 when the gang of four hooded men, led by convicted drug-dealer Gary Skinner, burst into the Hobbs home forcing Clive, his wife Suzanne and their two-year-old daughter from their beds.
‘We went to sleep after a normal, quiet day together and the next thing I remembered was being woken up with a hand clamped around my mouth,’ Suzanne said later. ‘There were dark figures moving around the bedroom. I tried to struggle but I could not move my arms. I was being held down, I was panicking, it was difficult to breathe. I looked at Clive and he seemed paralysed. I was absolutely terrified.’
Suzanne was gagged and tied, then she and her daughter were forced to lie down in the back of a car and driven the ten miles to a derelict farmhouse near the village of Bardney where the gang had prepared a makeshift ‘cell’. The tiny cupboard under the main stairs had been soundproofed and kitted out with two mattresses, cushions and a bucket for a toilet.