NORMA JEAN ALMODOVAR, 2009
HELP WANTED (Anywhere, USA): Hey guys—looking for that perfect job? Something that will give you access to hot babes who are always available? You get to party at upscale hotels, unlimited free room service including booze AND you get paid to get laid! Sound too good to be true? No—I am not talking about becoming a gigolo! This is a vice cop job! But if going through the academy and walking a beat is too much work, there’s also the exciting opportunity to be a high-paid undercover police informant! You get the same great benefits of parties and girls without the risk of being shot at by real bad guys! And we aren’t talking skanky street hookers either! We got laws to round up those hos without having to say a word! Ever priced those Emperor’s Club gals? Think they are out of your league? Not when you are working for the government! We got you covered! It’s all part of the package! All we need is your testimony in court that you had sex with these poor victims and they asked you for the money. That’s it! Case closed! Not only will you have the opportunity to get laid by the same high-caliber call girls but you will be doing your community a great service by rescuing these poor gals from a life of exploitation and degradation where they get paid upward of $5,000 an hour. After their arrest and conviction, thanks to your testimony, they can find societally approved employment which is more appropriate for them, like cleaning toilets at Motel 6 for minimum wage! Call your local police vice unit for details! Get in on this exciting career now!
This help wanted ad may be fictitious, but its content is not. While sex workers’ rights activists like myself have known for many years this was happening, most people out there, including many of the women who advertise on the internet, don’t have a clue that vice cops and undercover informants can actually have sex with a suspected prostitute before the cops arrest her. Some police departments actually hire men from the community to carry out the necessary sex act to make their arrests of the prostitute stick.1
Imagine, our tax dollars going to pay some lucky guys to have sex with women who are suspected of being “victims of exploitation,” also known as sex workers. You should be warned though—if you go out there and attempt to conduct a rescue on your own, you might get arrested for solicitation and sent to your local “John School” where you will learn how awful you are for exploiting those poor gals by paying them instead of just forcing them into sex for free!2
Stopping the exploitation and degradation of women is the motivation behind the heavy enforcement of prostitution laws, according to the religious right and radical feminists who have persuaded liberal legislators to pass laws that give cops cart blanche to make their arrests. These groups of moral and social busybodies insist that all prostitutes are victims, regardless of their age or consent. In what follows, I will substitute their term, “victim,” for “prostitute/sex worker” to expose just how ridiculous the enforcement of the laws really is.
California’s liberal Democrats passed a law that allowed an undercover cop to suggest an act of sex for money and all the suspected victim had to do to get arrested was to “manifest an acceptance” of the offer, as detailed in Section 647(b) of California Penal Code. If she smiled or winked at him, that was an indication, according to the cops, that she was accepting the offer to be exploited and could then be rescued/arrested on solicitation charges. When the poor exploited victims learned they could now be rescued/arrested for just making any sort of facial or body gesture (sex workers called it the “use a smile, go to jail” law), they thought they could outfox the cops by requesting that the potential exploiter/customer drop his pants and show his genitals. Surely the cops weren’t allowed to show their dicks, were they? As many of those victims discovered after the fact, the cops could do that as well as go all the way if necessary.
Even with the ability to make an effortless arrest, cops still conduct sting operations when they want to arrest in volume. Some undercover sting operations last as long as three to five years before any arrests are made. During that time, the vice cops (or their paid civilian helpers) visit the suspected den of victims over and over again, just to make certain those women are actually prostitutes and that someone else is in charge.
Prostitution is, after all, “worse than rape or robbery” for the victim because prostitutes are often lured into a “lifetime of shame and degradation which progressively rapes their spirit, character, and self-image” … or so the LA District Attorney claimed when he appealed my probation sentence for one count of pandering a number of years ago, successfully overturning the judge’s sentence and forcing him to impose on me the mandatory three-to-six-year prison term California law required.
In Los Angeles in 2003, the LAPD conducted a prostitution sting called “Operation Silver Bullet.” According to the LA Daily News: “In one of LAPD’s largest prostitution stings in several years, vice detectives fanned out across the San Fernando Valley on Wednesday and simultaneously raided seven suspected prostitution dens fronting as legitimate businesses.” The LAPD proudly reported that “approximately 100 officers took part in Operation Silver Bullet, netting 14 arrests … which were all for solicitation, operating a house of prostitution, and residing in a house of prostitution.”3 Anyone who can do the math will figure out that if it took one hundred officers to bust fourteen suspected victims, that’s seven cops per prostitute/victim. Oh yeah, and the cops were later given an awards banquet to honor them for their heroic work in making these dangerous arrests. Makes you wonder how they can hand out those awards with a straight face.
When notorious Hollywood Madam Heidi Fleiss was on trial, I had the opportunity to sit in court every day with my friend Sydney Biddle Barrows, the equally notorious Mayflower Madam. During the trial, a number of interesting facts were disclosed, such as how the cops set up the women and what they did to signal their comrades waiting in the other room that a violation of law had taken place and it was time to make the arrests. I guarantee you that for real crimes, the police do not deploy seven officers to the scene of the crime unless it involves a bank robbery or homicide! It is crucial to reallocate the scarce police and government resources used to pursue these victims to pursuing real criminals who have real victims.
The pretend exploiter/client/vice cop will call the madam and claim to be a friend of one of her real clients, and tell her he has a bunch of buddies coming into town. He wants to arrange for her best girls to provide their services for himself and his friends, and he throws around huge numbers at the madam to pique her interest. He will also mention particular sex acts that he wants these “victims” to provide him or his buddies, which he may also repeat to the alleged “victims” over the phone prior to the assignation. A real client generally has a lot more class than that, so this should be a tip-off, but the potential payday can cloud the judgment of even the most paranoid pimp or madam. Another tip-off should be when the client/cop insists on having the madam or the victims bring along illegal drugs for him and his friends.
To set up high-class call girls and their madam, you cannot rent a room at the local Motel 6, so the cops work out deals with upscale hotels that agree to provide comped luxurious suites in which to conduct these stings. Although they are oppressed victims who cannot think or speak for themselves, these women are quite capable of discerning an inappropriate situation once they arrive in their exploiter/client’s hotel room, and clearly if the exploiter/client was who he said he was, there would be expensive champagne and perhaps hors d’oeuvres available! To sell this undercover operation to victims who are used to being wined and dined at the very best restaurants and hotels and paid upward of $500 to $5,000 an hour, all the accoutrements of wealth and power need to be visible. And yes, the vice cops get to partake of the food and alcoholic beverages as part of their job to deceive these wretched souls into believing they are about to be exploited/paid for having sex.
Quite often, the undercover cops will request a “double”: two victims at a time. For one thing, it speeds up the process of making the rescues/arrests but it also provides entertainment for the other cops, who may get to watch a show of the two women kissing and fondling each other. For while the vice cop acting as the exploiter/ client sets up the victims for their arrests, in the adjoining suite, his colleagues are videotaping everything so the jury will see just how degrading being a prostitute really is.4 May I remind you again that it is necessary for a multitude of vice cops to be deployed for these takedowns as the victims may attempt an escape, not realizing of course that they are better off getting arrested so they can get on with their rehabilitation and transition into the appropriate careers waiting for them in the fast food industry.
The farce continues until every last victim has been identified and caught and the sting has gone down successfully. Now the victims are herded into police cars or vans and taken to the nearest jail facility where they will be processed. Here again they will be strip-searched, given a delousing shower and matching jailhouse pants and tops, and put into lockup until they can make bail. They will also be interrogated and told that if they cooperate with the government and testify against their pimp or madam, most likely they will not be put on trial or go to jail. If they are from out of state or another country, their employer will undoubtedly be charged with violating human trafficking laws—a federal offense. Victims from other countries will be threatened with deportation if they refuse to cooperate. Regardless of their cooperation, most of these victims will still have arrest records that may prevent them from ever finding other employment. At best, they may find work earning minimum wage, which they will have to spend paying off legal bills and fines.
One could say that these laws are turning the taxpayers into johns because they are paying to get screwed. The cops are themselves turned into prostitutes, because the very definition of prostitution is getting paid for getting laid, isn’t it? How do we stop the exploitation of the vice cops who are forced into prostitution by their sergeants, lieutenants, captains, and even local prosecutors who instruct them to have sex with those poor victims so the victims can be arrested?
And what about those civilian males who are paid by the cops to have sex with suspected prostitutes/victims? Under the law, aren’t they also prostitutes? And wouldn’t the hiring of them be considered “pandering” just as it is when a madam hires a prostitute? “Pandering” in most states is a felony and defined as “encouraging a person to commit an act of prostitution.” So when the average citizen requests the continued enforcement of these laws to “protect women from being exploited,” should we arrest the cops or the taxpayers for pandering? Gets rather complicated when enforcing laws based on subjective concepts like “exploitation” and “degradation,” doesn’t it?
It gets even more complicated when cops are encouraged to use prostitution laws to recruit victims and even pimps or madams to become informants. For many police departments, such informants are invaluable. And in exchange for being an informant, they are allowed to practice their profession/exploitation without fear of being rescued/arrested. In fact, if they don’t continue being victims, pimps, or madams, they would have nothing to offer the cops by way of information on other suspected victims. But you can be sure that the cops let these individuals know that if they cease being useful, they will be rescued/arrested.
There have been so many cases of cops forcing victims to have sex with them in order to avoid being rescued/arrested that it is considered by many to be a cost of doing business. Occasionally the cops get caught, such as the Long Beach, California police officer Bryon Ellsberry, who was charged with rape after he continually coerced a victim/prostitute to have sex with him. She filed a complaint and was given an opportunity to wear a wire to record their conversation the next time he extorted her for her sexual favors. He was arrested and convicted, but given a probation sentence rather than sent to jail.5
I can understand why a man might want to be an undercover agent—especially men who like to brag that they “don’t have to pay for it,” even though everybody does pay for it, one way or another. And as long as society looks the other way at whatever cops have to do to “stop the exploitation” of women and children, there will be guys who seek out such work. They tell themselves that they are helping the poor victims escape a life of degradation. So don’t be surprised if someday soon you see a real help wanted ad just like the fictitious one above. But also don’t be surprised that we “victims” are fighting back any way we can.
NOTES
1. As detailed in Commonwealth v. Sun Cha Chon 983 A.2d 784 (Pa. Super. Ct. 2009). https://www.criminaldefenselawyer.com/resources/how-do-police-uncover-prostitution-rings.htm.
2. Almodovar’s work at PoliceProstitutionandPolitics.com includes “Operation Do the Math,” in which she compares arrest rates and solve rates for reported rapes, and arrest rates for prostitution and solicitation. A major takeaway from her research is that local police departments make many more arrests for sex work than they do rape.
3. Ryan Oliver, “Cops Hit Suspected Prostitution Dens,” Los Angeles Daily News, June 26, 2003, https://www.policeprostitutionandpolitics.com/images/images_px_3/operationsilverbullet.jpg.
4. Hidden camera footage of undercover stings is now readily available on YouTube through archived news stories. Due to the fact that people who are caught up in these stings are often identified by photo and legal name, none will be referenced here.
5. “LONG BEACH: Officer Gets Probation in Sexual Battery Case,” Los Angeles Times, January 18, 1995, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1995-01-18-me-21375-story.html.