http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 03259.html

Area Police Try to Combat a Proliferation of Brothels
2 Dozen Probed in Recent Years in Montgomery

By Ernesto Londoño
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 20, 2006; B01



On one of the coldest nights this winter, an informant walked toward two suspected brothels operating out of garden-style apartments in Wheaton.

In what has become an increasingly common routine, two Montgomery County vice detectives waited in unmarked police vehicles outside the apartment complex near Wheaton Regional Park for the informant to tell them what he saw inside.

"One doorman, one girl," Detective Thomas Stack told his partner, Leland Wiley, on the radio after being briefed by the informant, a recent immigrant from El Salvador who has helped them obtain search warrants for similar brothels. "Thirty dollars for 15 minutes."

Such brothels, law enforcement officials and authorities in human trafficking said, have proliferated quietly in recent years in Washington and other metropolitan areas with large pockets of Hispanic immigrants, many of whom left their spouses in their home countries. They operate in an underworld invisible to most -- a subculture that local and federal authorities have started to unravel only in recent years.

The brothels, which have surfaced in several recent federal indictments, cater exclusively to immigrants from Latin America and charge about $30 for 15 minutes of sex.

Vice detectives in Montgomery said they are prioritizing such cases because the establishments attract violent crime to residential neighborhoods, and many employ women who authorities suspect were trafficked into the country.

In recent years, Montgomery detectives have investigated about two dozen brothels. Other local jurisdictions, such as Fairfax and Prince George's counties, say they have investigated similar brothels, but the problem does not seem to be increasing in those areas.

"Some people say: 'Leave these girls alone. . . . This is a victimless crime. Nobody's getting hurt,' " said Stack, who, with Wiley, has been asked in recent years to speak to Maryland lawmakers and vice detectives along the East Coast about a trend in which they have inadvertently become experts. "But when you look at the whole picture, this is not a victimless crime. You have robberies, and there's human trafficking, and there's the quality-of-life issue."

Stack returned last week to the Wheaton apartments with search warrants. The occupants had moved days before, detectives learned, almost certainly to resume their business in a new location. Investigators found used condoms in garbage cans -- an indication that they were on the right track, but no arrests were made that night.

The case, which was investigated for several weeks, underscores some of the challenges vice detectives face in shutting down the brothels, known as "cantinas" in law enforcement circles.

They are highly profitable, with low overhead and growing client bases, said police and authorities in human trafficking. Owners can move on a whim, and most people who are charged with prostitution face light punishments, police said.

"We could get search warrants every week, arrest people and charge them with misdemeanors," Stack said, noting that police do not have the legal tools to confiscate the brothel owners' assets. "You have to hit them where it hurts the most: the money. They're all doing it for one reason. They're doing it to make money."

A recent Montgomery case involving an alleged family-run prostitution ring wound up in federal court late last year and is expected to go to trial next month. Elsy Aparicio, 43, her mother, two siblings and three unrelated men were charged in November with conspiring to transport illegal immigrants across state lines with the intention of having them work in brothels.

On Nov. 15, two days before the indictment was unsealed, Montgomery police happened upon an armed robbery at a Wheaton brothel while looking for a carjacking suspect. Police said they found four members of the violent Central American gang Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13. Two of the men were charged with raping the prostitute after robbing the other men in the brothel at gunpoint, police said. Stack and Wiley said that the brothels are robbed and extorted routinely but that most of those crimes probably go unreported.

"Of course they're not going to call the police," Stack said. "It's not like you're extorting a bakery."

The crime that shrouds the brothels has also hampered nonprofit organizations that reach out to trafficking victims.

"There's only now beginning to be more law enforcement activity in the Latino networks," said Derek Ellerman, co-executive director of the Polaris Project, a Washington organization that helps trafficking victims. "Our ability to do outreach in those networks is very limited because of the violence."

In 2001, police said, Korean-operated brothels that operated under the guise of massage parlors were the scourge of vice detectives in Montgomery and other Washington area jurisdictions. Montgomery closed most of them by enacting codes barring people who were not licensed as masseuses by the state or county and by authorizing local authorities to inspect them at will to enforce occupancy regulations that prohibit people from living in businesses. Other jurisdictions copied the county's strategy.

Montgomery detectives say they have been able to close all the Korean-run brothels that operated out of commercial locations in the county. Other Maryland counties, including Charles, have gone after them by enforcing health department codes.

Some Korean-run brothels that operate as massage parlors continue to operate in the District and some Virginia counties, according to Web sites where patrons exchange tips and information about them.

The cantinas' method of operation makes them more difficult to shut down, police said.

Most have doormen who communicate with security guards outside using two-way radios. Owners advertise by word of mouth and by handing out fake business cards that promote sales of such innocuous items as cowboy boots or tamales.

According to police, doormen give clients a poker chip, a playing card or a glass bead, which the clients give to the prostitutes to prove they have paid. The women, many of whom are based in New York and New Jersey, spend week-long stints at the brothels. At the end of the week, they turn over the chips, cards or beads in exchange for a share of the profit -- usually $15 per client.

The women tend to be 17 to 35 years old. When their week at a brothel is up, they are either driven back on Sundays to the New York area or to another establishment. In the Aparicio case, the network used vans to transport the women, court documents show. Others take Greyhound buses, detectives said.

Women whose names and cell phone numbers were listed in court documents in a case related to the Aparicio investigation told The Washington Post that they simply used the vans for transportation between the New York area and the Washington region.

Montgomery detectives say the overwhelming majority of the prostitutes are undocumented women from Latin America; most are from Mexico.

Despite a recent push by Congress and the White House to combat sex trafficking, local police who investigate these cases said they often find it hard to discern between victims and perpetrators of trafficking in the fog of police busts, which are strained by language and cultural barriers.

"Sometimes it takes five or six interviews to break these girls, to let them know we're the good guys," said Stack, noting that many have an inherent distrust of law enforcement officers. "We haven't gotten any trafficking victims from these cases. It's not because we haven't spoken to them. It's not because we're not trying. It's just very difficult to make these girls flip."

In recent years, the Justice Department has made prosecution of trafficking cases a priority. Between 14,500 and 17,500 people are believed to be trafficked into the United States each year, said Bradley J. Schlozman, deputy assistant attorney general for the department's civil division. But most cases might be going undetected, he said.

"It's likely we're only getting the tip of the iceberg," Schlozman said. "There's a lot more trafficking than we've been able to prosecute. It's one of those things where we don't know what we don't know. I wish these cases were easier to find. We're pouring a lot of resources into this issue."

In 2000, Congress passed a sweeping trafficking bill that stiffened penalties for traffickers and introduced a visa category for undocumented victims of trafficking who were willing to assist prosecutors. According to the Justice Department, during fiscal 2004, federal prosecutors convicted 43 people charged with trafficking crimes -- a fourfold increase over 2000.

But lawmakers appear to have miscalculated the number of victims they would be able to help. Although Congress set a yearly cap of 5,000 visas for trafficking victims, as of this year, immigration officials had signed off on fewer than 600 temporary visas for such victims.