Getting Screwed: Sex Workers and the Law

by Alison Bass

  Furthermore, some police departments are using the increased federal funding they receive for the purpose of fighting trafficking to expand their efforts to arrest adults engaged in consensual prostitution. Sex workers’ rights advocates say this is happening in Las Vegas, San Francisco, Rhode Island, Ohio, and Alaska. In a 2012 interview published on Indybay, an online news collective for the San Francisco Bay area, Alexandra Lutnick, a researcher with RTI International, an independent nonprofit research organization, said the San Francisco police department had recently used federal trafficking funds to do a sweep of adult streetwalkers on Polk Street. “Money that is supposed to be used to prevent the trafficking of young people is being used to arrest adults,” Lutnick said.29

  Alaska’s Special Crime Investigations Unit recently set up a sting to find sex workers advertising on Craigslist and used an undercover officer to arrest a twenty-six-year-old white woman who was clearly not being trafficked by anyone. According to the April 2014 police affidavit, the woman was a drug addict with a seven-year-old son and a boyfriend serving time in jail for selling drugs.

  In May 2014, California police raided a number of Asian massage parlors in Alameda County, which includes Oakland and other cities on the East Bay of the San Francisco area, and arrested nineteen people as part of an investigation into human trafficking.30 Yet none of the sex workers swept up in the raids were actual trafficking victims, according to Maxine Doogan, founder of the Erotic Service Provider Legal, Educational and Research Project, a nonprofit group that provides services for San Francisco Bay area sex workers.

  Nancy O’Malley, the district attorney for Alameda County, which conducted the raids, disputes that contention. “Some were trafficking victims, some weren’t,” she says. “Some would not admit that’s what it was.” O’Malley says that none of the fifty sex workers picked up in the raids are being prosecuted or deported. “Anybody who was here without documentation, we worked with them to get them linked into services so they could get T visas,” O’Malley says. “We view them as victims.” (Some illegal immigrants are granted T visas if they can prove they have been trafficked.)

  The same month (May 2014), Rhode Island police raided an apartment in a run-down triple-decker in Providence and arrested two men and an undocumented Mexican woman who told police she had come to the United States of her own accord. After six years of cleaning jobs in New York, she decided to work as a prostitute to make more money. Police charged one of the men with trafficking and the other man (the customer) with a misdemeanor prostitution charge. The woman, who had been sending money home to her family, was taken to a shelter. By the next morning, she had vanished.31

  THE ZEAL TO CURB trafficking (even when it isn’t happening) may also have been the motivation behind the joint FBI–New York Police Department raid that led to Julie Moya’s arrest in 2005. As Julie recalls, that frigid January day began like any other work day for her. The temperature outside was in the single digits, and her Honduran maid, Denora, brought her breakfast in bed, bustling in with a cup of Julie’s favorite Hawaiian Kona coffee and a bowl of hot cream of rice cereal arranged on a tray. As Julie sipped her coffee and contemplated the day ahead, she thought about how much she had to be thankful for. She owned her four-bedroom house in Freeport, Long Island, overlooking the canal. From her living room windows, she could almost see the marina where her thirty-two-foot Family Cruiser was docked. Zulu and Natalie, her two African grey parrots, jabbered away down the hall, and Pamela, her brightly plumed cockatoo, cooed softly in her cage nearby.

  Julie Moya had worked hard for all of this, and at forty-six, she was still working more than twelve hours a day, six days a week. It wasn’t easy running a top-of-the-line escort business, which she liked to describe as “the nicest, friendliest brothel in New York City.” Her day often started at 11 a.m., when the phones began ringing at the office downtown, men booking lunch appointments with one or another of the girls. While Lucas, her trusted office manager, answered the phones and made appointments, Julie was always on call if a problem arose — one of the girls calling in sick at the last moment or a client insisting on a woman who wasn’t available that day and refusing to take no for an answer. Julie herself was usually on site by 4 or 5 p.m. as the evening rush started, and she often found herself settling squabbles among the women. A new girl might try the dirty hustle when a customer came in and was introduced around, running up to him and kissing him or bending down to show him her cleavage, and that would set off the other girls. Julie’s day would continue until well past 1 a.m., when the last clients left and all the girls would troop over to the office on 46th Street to get paid, order in Chinese food, and share war stories over laughter and occasional tears.

  While Julie was starting to think about retiring and turning things over to Lucas and her son Jerry, she knew retirement was still a few years off. She had a taste for expensive cars, and her hobby — rescuing abandoned or neglected pets and getting them the care they needed until they could be resettled in loving homes — didn’t come cheap. In addition, Julie was sending money to her now-grown daughter, who had been born with a heart defect and remained in fragile health. Julie’s mother and daughter lived together in Cincinnati, in the same house that Julie had run away from at the age of fourteen. When she could, she also helped out her older son, Tommy, who lived in Cincinnati with his wife and four children and worked for an oil company. With all these expenses, Julie knew she hadn’t saved nearly as much as she needed to retire — not yet anyway. But she had time. This was the year of the rooster, according to the Chinese zodiac, her year, Julie thought, as she set aside the tray and swung out of bed.

  Two hours later, showered and dressed, Julie and her son climbed into her black Cadillac Escalade. Before they headed into Manhattan, they had to drop off Earl Grey at the vet — the old tomcat had feline AIDS and needed surgery — and run a few other errands. So it wasn’t until around 3 p.m. that they drove into midtown and picked up Julie’s longtime assistant, Patrina, at one of the 49th Street brothels. Patrina was a hard-working single mother from Guyana, whom Julie was training to help out in the office. She had worked as a maid at Julie’s brothels for years, and even though customers occasionally asked for her — she had fine features and a curvaceous body herself — she always said no.

  They parked in their usual spot at the 51st Street garage and started walking down the street to Julie’s favorite Thai restaurant for a late lunch. But at the last moment, she felt a craving for shrimp mofongo, so they turned around and walked up Ninth Avenue to El San Juan, a Puerto Rican eatery. Only later would Julie realize how serendipitous her change of heart had been. The police, she later discovered, had been waiting for her at the Thai restaurant, and they would have arrested her right then and there.

  When her shrimp mofongo came, Julie ate quickly, anxious to check in and see how things were going at work. But when she called the office on her cell phone, there was no answer. She looked at her watch; Lucas should have picked up. “That’s weird,” she said. Julie hadn’t installed a landline at the 49th Street apartments for security reasons; she didn’t want police tapping the phones. Instead, she punched in the number for Beverly, who lived at the 46th Street brothel and looked after that location, but there was no answer there either. Julie’s heart began racing. This was beyond strange. Beverly was almost always around in the afternoon. She tried the 46th Street number again. No answer. Finally, she called home, waiting for Denora to pick up. But the phone kept ringing and ringing.

  Julie threw some cash on the table and pulled on her parka. “Let’s see what’s going on,” she said and hurried out of the restaurant, Patrina right behind her. (Jerry had left the restaurant before she started calling; he said he was going to buy a CD and would meet them at the office.) They turned down 49th Street, and the Mexican guy who owned Spoiled Brats, a tiny shop that sold stuffed animals, poked his head out the door and said casually, “There’s a party going on up the street. You might want to go back.�
�� Julie could see dozens of men clustered outside the entrance to the two buildings where her apartments were.

  “If we turn around now, they’ll notice,” Patrina whispered. “Put your hood up and keep walking.” So Julie threw her hood over her head and continued walking as if she owned the street, as if what was going down at 336 and 326 49th Street was no concern of hers. As they passed by, she could see the FBI and New York Police Department logos splashed across the back of the men’s jackets, and she was sure they could hear her heart thundering in her chest. But none of them even glanced her way. She and Patrina kept walking until they reached the end of the block, and then they turned the corner. Julie collapsed against a wall, breathing heavily. It looked as though the Feds and New York’s finest had teamed up to raid her business. They had, no doubt, already busted into the 46th Street office and her home on Long Island, maybe even the brothel on 35th Street.

  As Julie was later to discover, the New York police had not forgotten the time she had asked their help in getting the two Russian sex workers away from traffickers. Indeed, when news of the raid on Julie’s brothels hit the local papers, there was speculation from police sources that she was involved with trafficking Russian virgins. The Daily News reported that “authorities are investigating possible links to kidnapping and human smuggling in which children were brought to Julie for the specific purpose of taking their virginity. . . . A source familiar with the case said the girls were of Russian descent.”32

  Julie Moya was never charged with trafficking, but that didn’t stop the media circus. That afternoon, all she could think about was that the moment she had long dreaded had finally, irrevocably, arrived. After calling Jerry and warning him off, Julie threw her cell phone away (she knew the FBI could track her by its GPS), grabbed a cab to her bank, where she withdrew $10,000 in cash, and bought a prepaid phone. She then hid out for a few days, meeting with her lawyer and sending her mother to collect clothing and other items, whatever was left after the raid on her Long Island home. She also parceled out some of her beloved pets to friends and relatives. Her older son, Tommy, took the two aging pit bulls she had rescued from animal shelters. Julie’s younger brother took Gucci, her yellow-naped Amazon parrot, and she gave the two African grey parrots to a friend of hers who had a big aviary on Long Island and sold exotic birds. There was nothing she could do about Earl Grey, who was recovering from surgery, except to hope that the vet would take care of the old tomcat.

  On January 31, four days after the raid, Julie Moya walked into the 7th Precinct on the Lower East Side, her lawyer by her side, to give herself up. As she later wrote on her blog, “It was a terrible time and it only got worse. . . .”

  From Bad Laws to Bad Cops and Violence against Women

  Like Julie Moya, Elle St. Claire remembers the months before 9/11 as the calm before the storm — but for very different reasons. By the summer of 2001, Elle was living openly in Worcester, Massachusetts, as a transgender single parent, raising two sons and making a name for herself in the local community. She volunteered with a parenting group at the school her sons attended and was active in a local antipoverty organization known as the Worcester Community Connections Coalition. The Worcester County District Attorney’s Office had asked her to serve on an antigay bullying committee it had set up. A few folks had even suggested that she run for a position on the Worcester City Council. While some knew that she worked in the adult entertainment industry, modeling and doing films, she didn’t advertise the fact that she was an escort.

  Better yet, Elle was in love. She had recently become engaged to Carmen Rudy, a young woman who, like herself, was single and raising two children. Carmen carried an outsized zest for life within her deceptively petite 5'2" frame. One of nine children born to a French Canadian mother and a Puerto Rican father, she was an attractive woman with billowy black hair — “the wild child” of the family, according to her older sister, Jackie Rudy. “Carmen was a force of nature; she was the one who would try new things out,” says Jackie, who lives with her five children on the second floor of a dilapidated three-story row house in Worcester. “When she was a teenager, she started hanging out with the wrong friends, and they introduced her to heroin.”

  Carmen married young (at age seventeen) but became addicted to heroin after losing her brother and best friend in separate car accidents. In time, the addiction destroyed her marriage and resulted in temporary loss of custody of her son and daughter to the state. But by the time she met Elle, in the spring of 2000, Carmen, then twenty-seven, had kicked her habit and regained custody of her children.

  Carmen and Elle had recently moved their blended household into Elle’s cramped two-bedroom apartment on Eastern Avenue, and Elle was working hard to expand her film business so that they could afford to move into a larger place — either that or find Carmen and her children some subsidized housing nearby. “Our kids weren’t getting along well and I wanted to get them separated,” Elle recalls. “My apartment was a very small area and there was lots of clutter.”

  In September 2001, Elle attended a meeting of the Worcester Community Connections Coalition and noticed that a top official with the city’s Department of Social Services (DSS) was there. She decided to ask the woman about the possibility of subsidized housing for her fiancée. The bureaucrat’s response filled Elle with foreboding. “When I mentioned Carmen’s name, she smirked and said [Carmen] wouldn’t be needing any housing,” Elle recalls. When asked why, the DSS official told Elle that Carmen was going to lose custody of her children. Elle was shocked. “For what?” she asked. “I know she’s had issues in the past, but she’s doing great now. She’s clean and going to a methadone clinic, and she’s in counseling.” The woman responded, “Oh, she has a long history.” She paused and then said, “Trust me, you’re going to lose your kids too.”

  The DSS official was right. In January 2002, state officials accompanied by police picked up Carmen’s ten- and twelve-year-old children at Belmont Elementary School and took them into state custody. Carmen and Elle began fighting to get them back, but three months later, while Elle was on a business trip to Los Angeles, trying to find investors for her film production business, her own two sons, then nine and eleven, were taken away the same way. DSS officials levied a string of accusations against Elle — all of them unsubstantiated and later dropped. During the protracted battle over custody, Elle’s sons were bounced back and forth between their maternal and paternal grandparents and a series of foster homes. After a five-year battle, the state dropped all charges against Elle and opened the path for her to regain custody. But by then, the boys had embarked on new lives and chose to stay with their grandparents.

  Elle’s sons are now grown and have a close relationship with her, especially the older son, T.J., who moved back in with Elle for a time when he was eighteen. (When I met T.J. in 2010, he said he had no problems with Elle’s transgender identity or her sex work, although he still refers to her as his father. “I think my dad is a wonderful parent. He’s nice and easy to talk to. I can go to him about problems. If I need help with school, he helps me,” T.J. said. “My dad is there for me.”)

  To this day, Elle believes the state’s action against her and Carmen was motivated by politics and gender. “I was becoming a strong political figure in Worcester, and I believe that was the reason I was targeted,” she says.

  For Carmen, the loss of her children proved devastating. As both Elle and Jackie Rudy recall, Carmen slipped back into using drugs, and by August of 2002, Elle had had enough. She has a rare blood platelet disorder that causes her blood to clot and that, if left untreated, can be deadly. After being diagnosed with the condition while hospitalized the previous October, Elle had been prescribed medication to thin her blood, which she initially self-injected using hypodermic needles.

  “I caught [Carmen] stealing my shots, emptying them out, and selling them to drug addicts as needles so she could raise money on the sly to get drugs herself,” Elle says. “I didn’t n
eed the meds anymore; I was keeping them on hand and taking pills. The thing is that every hypothermic needle is marked and tagged, so that’s how I discovered my needles were ending up on the street.”

  Elle confronted Carmen and ended up throwing her out. “I had tried everything I could to get her clean again, but nothing was working,” she says. “It broke my heart, but I had to do it.” Carmen went to live with friends, but Elle says they were in touch almost every day. Then in late September 2002, Carmen Rudy suddenly disappeared. She was twenty-nine years old. Elle knew immediately that something was wrong.

  “She disappeared on a Monday, and she was supposed to give me a call that day. She didn’t, and I called the house where she was staying with roommates and they said she would call me when she got back,” Elle says. “Tuesday was the first day I had visitation with my children after they had been removed, and she was supposed to meet up with me in downtown Worcester and be with me and my kids. She never showed up. We had a court date on Wednesday [on the custody issue], and she never showed. I knew without a shadow of a doubt that something had happened to her.”

  The next day, Elle went to the police station to report Carmen as a missing person, but the police refused to take her statement or allow her to file a report. They told her that only relatives could file a missing person report. So Elle called Jackie Rudy, who had remained close to Carmen. According to Jackie, Elle drove her to the police station, where she filed a missing person report. Jackie too sensed something was wrong. Carmen, she says, never went four days without talking to her. “I gave the police a picture of Carmen, but they didn’t question me about her disappearance,” Rudy says. “They didn’t question anyone. They didn’t care.”