The Sad Natashas

The Sad Natashas- Gangs tap former Soviet Union for sex trade workers `I can get 10 to 15 to 20 girls shipped to me in a week' VICTOR MALAREK SPECIAL TO THE STAR With the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, democracy swept over the republics of this once oppressive Communist empire. It was a time of immense change and upheaval, yet the majority of the populace seemed up for the challenge. For many, it was the realization of a lifelong dream. They could speak their own language, practise their own faith and, most important, govern themselves. Then reality marched in. The move toward market reforms that was to shepherd these countries into the fold of the global economy saw a massive flight of capital instead. Law and order were compromised by corruption, greed and graft. In no time, the economies of the new republics collapsed and the social safety nets that had provided a minimum standard of living for the bulk of the population were torn to shreds. In the chaos that followed, tens of millions of people were abandoned, left to survive as best as they could. Who could they turn to? Certainly not the government. The ruling class had emerged as the moneyed class. While families worried about their next meal, politicians and top-level bureaucrats lined their pockets until they were bursting at the seams. For them, Mercedes and cell phones became a way of life, their only concerns "how many?" and "which ones?" The population had to fend for itself. It didn't take long before the loss of control and the newly porous borders attracted another formidable force. As the once impregnable Iron Curtain disintegrated in shambles, organized crime rushed in ... and replaced the Curtain with a cheap plastic zipper. The black market skyrocketed and remains endemic today. It also didn't take long for the mob to zero in on the fledgling republics' most valuable assets: beautiful but desperate women and girls educated, well mannered, with no future in sight. With the social structure in disarray, families broke down. Children were abandoned in the street. Husbands sought solace in the bottle and alcoholism became an epidemic. Violence against women and children soared. By this time, however, the unemployment rate for women had ballooned to roughly 80 per cent. There were simply no jobs to be found. Enter the "saviours," promising endless varieties of what, for these women, was nothing less than salvation. Jobs as nannies in Greece ... domestics in Italy and France ... maids in Austria and Spain ... models in North America and Japan. In each case, the recruiters painted alluring pictures of well-paying jobs in glamorous lands. For this generation of young women, many of whom grew up nursing romantic fantasies of the West, these were more than just dream jobs. They were a way out. Without giving it much thought, they jumped at the chance, only to find themselves trapped in a cycle infinitely worse. The Natashas have been shipped all over the world. They are the latest "It Girls" in the burgeoning business of sex. They line the streets of the red-light districts in Austria, Italy, Belgium and Holland. They stock the brothels in South Korea, Bosnia and Japan. They work nude in massage parlours in Canada and England. They are locked up as sex slaves in apartments in the United Arab Emirates, Germany, Israel and Greece. They star in peep shows and seedy strip clubs in the United States. To the casual observer, they blend in seamlessly with the women who have chosen to exchange money for sex. In their cheap makeup, sleazy outfits and stiletto heels, they walk the same walk and talk the same talk. They smile, they wink, they pose and they strut, but they do it because they know what will happen if they don't. Day in, day out, the Natashas are forced to service anywhere from 10 to 30 men a night. The money they make goes to their "owners." They live in appalling conditions, suffering frequent beatings and threats. Those who resist are severely punished. Those who refuse are sometimes maimed or killed. Most people have no idea that these women even exist. Except for the street trade, they are largely invisible, held behind locked doors in apartments, brothels, massage parlours and bars. To their clients, they are nothing more than an interchangeable body. It doesn't matter that they're enslaved; sex for money is a business transaction. To their owners and pimps, they're perishable goods to be used to the fullest before they spoil. And to the gangs who traffic in these women and girls, they are one of the most profitable forms of business in existence today. Trafficking in human beings is now the third-largest moneymaking venture in the world, after illegal weapons and drugs. In fact, the United Nations estimates that the trade nets organized crime more than $12 billion (U.S.) a year. At a roadside coffee bar outside Rome, an Albanian pimp boasted, "I paid $2,500 for her. I made my investment back in a few days." According to the international police organization Interpol, a trafficked woman can bring in anywhere from $75,000 to $250,000 a year. From a profit-making perspective, it's the perfect business. Returns are incredible. The goods are plentiful and cheap. And once a woman is spent, or no longer in demand, she's discarded and replaced by a younger, fresher face. The number of victims is staggering. In its 2003 trafficking report, the U.S. State Department points out that "no country is immune from trafficking" and estimates that approximately 800,000 to 900,000 people are trafficked across international borders worldwide. This figure doesn't include internal trafficking, which some observers estimate would raise the number to more than 2 million. Sadly, the report adds that "human trafficking not only continues but appears to be on the rise worldwide" and that the overwhelming majority of victims are women and children. The international bazaar for women is nothing new Asian women have been the basic commodity for years, and armies of men still flock to Bangkok and Manila on sex junkets. Over the past three decades, the world has witnessed four distinct waves of trafficking for sexual exploitation. This latest traffic from Eastern and Central Europe has been dubbed "the Fourth Wave," and the speed and proportion are truly staggering. Just a decade ago, these women didn't even register on the radar screen. Today, they represent more than 25 per cent of the trade. The first wave of trafficked women came from Southeast Asia in the 1970s and was composed mostly of Thai and Filipino women. The second wave arrived in the early 1980s and was made up of women from Africa, mainly Ghana and Nigeria. The third wave, from Latin America, followed right behind and comprised women mostly from Colombia, Brazil and the Dominican Republic. It is a booming industry, run with ruthless efficiency by powerful, multinational criminal networks ... These are not casual criminals. They run well-funded, well-organized, influential organizations. They know their business inside out and respond to changes in the market with a speed unmatched by even the most competitive corporations. Their expertise and their ability to exploit the market are surpassed only by their disregard for human life. Women are bought, sold and hired out like any other product. The bottom line is profit. Pimps often brag that a woman purchased for $1,500 can bring in $100 an hour ... making back their investment in just a few nights. The outlook is sobering. Organized crime groups are increasingly moving toward large hierarchical structures. They no longer want to deal with middlemen. They want to run the schemes for themselves from recruitment to final exploitation. According to Europol's 2002 Crime Assessment report, Trafficking in Human Beings into the European Union, this will "increase the profitability, efficiency and security of operations." It also "reflects a desire to be more in control of all elements of the trade, perhaps indicating the elevation of trafficking in human beings within the wider portfolio of (organized) criminal activity." Urgent cables, reports and alerts from criminal intelligence-gathering agencies and police forces around the world paint a frightening picture of these heightened activities. The most formidable threat to vulnerable Slavic women today is Russian organized crime. Their syndicates, now numbering more than 200, are active in 58 countries around the world, including Austria, Germany, Belgium, Holland, Italy, Hungary, Poland, Turkey, Israel, Canada and the United States. Most have their grip on prostitution rackets, though they're also behind huge extortion and fraud schemes. I wanted to find out just how difficult is it to purchase young Slavic women for the sex trade. It is, as I discovered, really quite easy. All that's needed is a connection and cold hard cash. The meeting took place at an apartment in Ottawa on a brisk, snowy night in early January, 2003. I was a bit nervous. The man I was to meet was no ordinary low-level thug. Ludwig Fainberg is a notorious Israeli mobster with a hair-trigger temper and a penchant for extreme violence. According to FBI documents, he was the middleman for an international drugs and weapons smuggling conspiracy linking Colombian drug lords with the Russian Mafia in Miami. Fainberg's claim to fame was that in the mid-1990s, he ventured onto a high-security naval base in the far northern reaches of Russia. His mission was to negotiate the purchase of a Russian Cold War-era diesel submarine complete with a retired naval captain and a 25-man crew for the Colombian cocaine cartel. The price tag: a cool $5.5 million. The vessel was to be used to smuggle tonnes of white powder along the California coast. The deal fell through. From 1990 until he was arrested and charged in Miami in February, 1997, for smuggling and racketeering, Fainberg ran an infamous strip club called Porky's. The pink neon club on the fringe of Miami International Airport was a magnet for Russian hoods and sleazy East European émigrés with misbegotten fortunes and visions of untapped criminal proceeds. Fainberg's rise through Russian organized crime ranks is the stuff of Hollywood B-movies. He was born in Odessa, Ukraine, in 1958. When he was 13, he and his parents immigrated to Israel. Later, he tried out for the Israeli Marines, wanting to become a Navy Seal. He flunked basic training. Then he wanted to become an officer in the Israeli Army but failed the exam. His over-inflated ego bruised, he decided to try his luck elsewhere. In 1980, he packed a suitcase and headed for Berlin, where he earned his stripes as a street-level goon in extortion and credit card fraud. Four years later, he set out for the United States a land he fondly refers to as "the Wild West because it is so easy to steal there!" He settled in the Brighton Beach area of Brooklyn, which had become the seat of the Organizatsiya, as the Russian mob is often called. There he linked up with the mob and specialized in arson torching businesses competing with those that were Russian owned. In 1990, he moved to Miami to run Porky's. Nine years later he was convicted on racketeering charges and sentenced to 37 months in prison. Since he had already spent 30 months in jail awaiting trial, Fainberg was deported to Israel. The next year he turned up in Canada with dreams of making it rich in the flesh trade. Not long after his arrival, he married a Canadian and moved into a comfortable apartment along the Ottawa River with his new bride and his 10-year-old daughter from a previous marriage. Interpol estimates exploited woman can bring in up to $250,000 a year I entered the well-appointed two-bedroom flat and Fainberg stared hard into my face as we shook hands. He's a burly man with a thin goatee and short-cropped hair. "You can call me Tarzan," he began. With a proud boyish grin, he tossed me one of his business cards. The cover of the custom-made two-fold card sported the caricature of a mop-topped muscular man under the name Porky's. The inside featured a cartoon of an ample nude woman bending over in knee-high, stiletto-heeled boots. Underneath was his name "Tarzan Da Boss" and on the opposite side "Welcome to Planet Sex, Land of Fantasy." According to Fainberg, he was nicknamed Tarzan because he once sported a wild mane of hair and acted as though he was straight out of a jungle. These days, for travel and immigration purposes, he's known as Alon Bar. The former strip-club owner legally changed his name during his last pit stop in Israel. For the better part of the evening he crowed about his illicit escapades and nefarious underworld connections and boasted that his life would make a spectacular Hollywood movie. He even talked about penning his memoirs. "It would be number one on the New York Times bestseller list." But there's one aspect of his life he probably wouldn't want revealed in any book. Fainberg relishes putting women in their place. In one violent incident in Miami, undercover agents with the FBI and U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency watched from a safe distance as he chased a stripper out of Porky's and slammed her head repeatedly against the door of his Mercedes until the car was covered with blood. In another episode, he beat a dancer in the parking lot outside the club and then made her eat gravel. Fainberg prefers to see himself as an astute businessman, and if there's a business he firmly grasps, it's the flesh trade. "It can make you a millionaire in no time," he said, winking. His Canadian dream was to open a strip club in Gatineau, Que. The club, across the bridge from the nation's capital, would feature imported talent Russian and Ukrainian strippers and lap dancers. When I met with him he was shopping for a Canadian partner and trolling for an infusion of cash. After an hour I shifted the conversation to the issue at hand: buying women. With an earnest, businesslike expression, Fainberg said flat-out that it was an easy feat he could bring women in from Russia, Ukraine, Romania or the Czech Republic. "No problem. The price is $10,000 with the girl landed. It is simple. It is easy to get access to the girls. It's a phone call. I know the brokers in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Kyiv. I can call Moscow tomorrow and show you how easy it is. I can get 10 to 15 to 20 girls shipped to me in a week." Clearly, he had done this many times before. "They know exactly what they're being hired to do?" I asked. "They're not being forced?" "They know why they are coming and what they are going to do. They will not be any trouble," he assured me. Guardedly, I mentioned that while surfing the Internet, I had tripped on FBI and U.S. State Department documents that said he "likely trafficked in women." That got his attention. As he shifted to the edge of his seat, Fainberg's eyes flashed in indignation. "That is bullshit. I never trafficked in women. I don't need trafficked women. Agents in Russia are overwhelmed with women who want to do this voluntarily. If you look at their living conditions in Russia, there is no way of surviving. They live in poverty. At least this way, they can make a living. When people need to eat, what are you going to do?" Fainberg even held himself out as a Good Samaritan: "The girls come here and they send some money home and the family lives. If they don't come to work here or in Germany or England, their family suffers. I give the girls a chance to earn money. For me, it is a business transaction, plain and simple, but I am also helping these women out." "I've heard that a lot of these women have no idea they're going into prostitution when they accept these so-called job offers to work abroad," I countered. "In fact, I've read that a lot of them think they're going to be waitresses or hotel cleaning staff." He grudgingly conceded that some of these women are duped. "I think 10 per cent don't know what they're getting into. Ninety per cent know exactly what they're going to do. What they may not know exactly is the conditions or how much money they will get." "You don't have a problem with pushing women who are absolutely destitute into prostitution?" "Look, that's what they can offer. Life is a business. It's a trade. You want to give something for nothing? You can help once or twice. But then 10, 20 or 40 times? For that, you want to get something in return." "What kind of money are we talking here?" I asked. "How much will it cost to bring a woman over, and what kind of profit can be made?" "If it is run the proper way, the clean way, you can have a good clientele and make a lot of money. You can buy a woman for $10,000 and you can make your money back in a week if she is pretty and she is young. Then everything else is profit." I asked about getting the women into Canada or the United States."It is so simple, so very simple," he bragged. "You know after 9/11 how difficult it was supposed to be to get into the United States? I will show you right now how easily we can get into the United States and then come back, and nobody will ever know we were in there." He went on to hint that certain Russian mobsters have connections with Native gangs whose reserves straddle the Canada-U.S. border.A couple of days later, Canadian Immigration authorities swooped in and arrested Fainberg in his comfortable Ottawa lair. He was labelled a threat to national security and public safety, and ordered deported to Israel. Excerpted from The Natashas: The New Global Sex Trade, by Victor Malarek, published by Viking Canada, a division of Penguin Group (Canada).