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Somebody's Daughter
The Hidden Story of America's Prostituted Children and the Battle to Save Them
Julian Sher
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eBook - ePub
Somebody's Daughter
The Hidden Story of America's Prostituted Children and the Battle to Save Them
Julian Sher
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About This Book
They are America's forgotten children, the hundreds of thousands of child prostitutes who walk the Las Vegas Strip, the casinos of Atlantic City, the truck stops on interstates, and the street corners of our cities. Many people wrongly believe sex trafficking involves young women from foreign lands. In reality, the majority of teens caught in the sex trade are American girls--runaways and throwaways who become victims of ruthless pimps.
In Somebody's Daughter: The Hidden Story of America's Prostituted Children and the Battle to Save Them, meet the girls who are fighting for their dignity, the cops who are trying to rescue them, and the community activists battling to protect the nation's most forsaken children. Author Julian Sher takes you behind the scenes to expose one of America's most underreported crimes: A girl from New Jersey gets arrested in Las Vegas and, at great risk to her own life, helps the FBI take down a million-dollar pimping empire. An abused teenager in Texas has the courage to take the stand in a grueling trial that sends her pimp away for 75 years. Survivors of the sex trade in New York, Phoenix, and Minneapolis set up shelters and rescue centers that offer young girls a chance to break free from the streets. "The sex trade is the new drug trade, " says one FBI special agent, and Somebody's Daughter is a call to action, shining a light on America's dirty little secret.
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PART ONE
Innocence Lost
1
The Girl from Jersey
LITTLE GIRLS don’t dream of growing up to become prostitutes. Maria dreamed of becoming a pastor at her local Methodist church. Dreams are important if you come from a working-class community like Maria’s, not far from Atlantic City’s casinos, that sees little of the gambling wealth. Simple homes with sparse lawns line the streets. It’s a hardscrabble place, but the people make do. On one road leading into the town, a blue welcome sign is adorned with a small rainbow. There are no rainbows on the two signs near the local school that boast the building is not only DRUG FREE but also WEAPONS FREE.
Not far from the school, a stained-glass window and a brown wooden cross dominate a church on Main Street. This was where a young Maria once came to sing every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday with her mother. “I wanted to be in choir,” she says.
She was the dutiful youngest daughter of two loving and hardworking parents. She never saw much of her father; he held down two jobs in the service industries. Her mom stayed at home to raise their children. Maria was the baby of the family, with older sisters. “I used to sleep with my mom every night. And I used to hold her every night,” Maria says. “I was my mother’s little girl.”
She was pretty enough to be featured as a model in advertisements for some local stores, wearing cute little dresses and hats. In school, she was attentive and industrious. “I was a great kid,” she says. “I was on the honor roll.”
But as Maria grew older, the inevitable tensions with her parents set in. She felt a certain unbridgeable distance between her and them. They were traditional and conservative Hispanic; “really old school” is how Maria puts it. And, though loving, they were never very demonstrative. “My parents didn’t ever really hug me or kiss me,” she says. “It is not like they didn’t show me love. The way they showed love was really different.”
The differences and distance came into play after Maria, headstrong, tested her boundaries one afternoon to a breaking point. Prostituted children are made, not born, forced onto the streets by myriad circumstances beyond their control, usually some kind of trouble at home and often a trigger event that pushes them over the edge. For Maria, it began in May 1998, when she had just turned twelve. Feeling hemmed in by her parents’ rules, she was looking for adventure. “I was never allowed out of the house, ever,” she says. “I just wanted to be independent.”
She called up her cousin’s eighteen-year-old boyfriend, whom she had met a few times at church. “I just wanted to hang out,” she recalls. “I wasn’t really supposed to go in cars with guys. But he was my cousin’s boyfriend. I didn’t think he was going to do anything.”
He had other things in mind. “He raped and beat me. For two days. Then he kept me in a closet,” Maria says. “I pissed on myself and shat on myself. And then he left me on the road.” She made it home after two days, but initially she did not tell her parents what had happened, the first of many secrets. They assumed she had just run away briefly. She overcame her shame two weeks later and finally told the truth about the assault. By the time police were called in, scant physical evidence remained. It was her word against that of her assailant. He was not forced to serve any jail time and got off with probation.
Maria was angry and hurt, but then things got worse. At least in the eyes of a troubled twelve-year-old, her family seemed to react to the attack not by showing concern and compassion but by blaming her. They chastised her for misbehaving, for leaving the house without permission, for being wild. The rape never would have happened if she had stayed at home like she was supposed to, they said. Why couldn’t she be a good girl?
“They never understood,” she says. “My mom never talked to me about it. She was so old-fashioned. It is just the way she was raised. I think that is why she was so sad. I was her little girl and she didn’t know what to say.”
Deep down, Maria knew that her parents cared about her and that in their own way they were trying their best to cope. They sent her to a psychologist and had doctors pump her with the antidepressants Paxil and Prozac.
For the next year, Maria’s turmoil deepened. She turned thirteen, still searching for easy answers to life’s complications, in many ways no different from most struggling adolescents. Except the shadow of the rape hung over her. She didn’t want drugs to make the pain go away; she wanted acknowledgment of her pain. “What I needed was a hug,” she says, “and somebody to tell me that they loved me. That was really all I needed.”
She thought maybe she would find that love and acceptance on the street. She ran away from home a few times after the rape but never for more than a day. She first got the idea to leave home when she was watching a movie on the Lifetime Channel, sort of a teenage version of Pretty Woman, the Julia Roberts fairy tale about a prostitute who finds romance and riches. Maria sat transfixed as the story of a sixteen-year-old girl played out on the screen before her.
“This little girl was a hooker, and I saw how much money she made,” Maria remembers. “Her mom was looking for her. And I think I kind of wanted my mom to look for me. I wanted her to show me more love. You know what I mean?”
Three days shy of her fourteenth birthday, Maria ran away again. This time for good.
Maria was not alone. Every year, more than one and a half million children run away from, or are kicked out of, their homes in the United States. Thankfully, most return within hours or days. But as many as a third of them, perhaps more, end up selling their bodies to survive.
For Maria, the gambling and tourism haven of Atlantic City was just down the road.
THE GAMING capital of the Northeast is a cheesier Las Vegas. In the Nevadan city, the sparkle and glitter goes on for miles; the down-in-the-gutter sleaze is pushed to the extremities. In Atlantic City, the sleaze is in your face. On one side of Atlantic Avenue lies a concert hall for the likes of Barbra Streisand and Neil Diamond. On the other side is a bar that promises “sTopless GoGo,” with the T capitalized to make it clear the nudity is nonstop as well. GIRLS ON A SWING and OVER 25 GORGEOUS DOLLS, other signs boast.
Although the city’s permanent population is only thirty-six thousand, more than thirty million tourists come here each year. The billboard that greets them announces WELCOME TO ATLANTIC CITY. ALWAYS TURNED ON. The sexual allusion is deliberate. Many of the male tourists hope to get “turned on” by paying for sex, and women of all ages seek to satisfy, parading in front of the casinos or behind them on the Boardwalk, which runs between the hotels and the waters of the Atlantic Ocean.
By the summer of 2000, Maria had found a new home.
She had deep, dark eyes and black hair set in braids that ran halfway down her back. She turned heads along the Boardwalk and Atlantic Avenue, and she liked it. One night, outside the Flamingo casino, she met a young woman named Princess. “Skinny and really pretty” is how Maria remembers her.
“How do you keep warm?” Maria asked her, looking at Princess’s skimpy outfit.
“Hos never get cold,” Princess replied with a laugh. Maria was entranced.
“Oh, yeah,” Maria repeated with delight. “Hos don’t get cold.”
She didn’t realize it, but she was being recruited. Although Maria had already started sleeping with men for money, she didn’t yet have a regular pimp.
Princess gave the young girl her cell number. “Call me if you want to choose up,” she said, using the street slang for choosing a pimp. But Maria, a Boardwalk ingenue, had no idea what Princess meant.
“I thought it was just her way of talking,” she says. “I didn’t know she had a pimp. I didn’t even know what a pimp was.”
Maria called Princess the next day, and the older woman sent a cab to bring her to the Red Roof Inn on the outskirts of Atlantic City. They hung out together all day. Princess told Maria how great her “Daddy” was, how generous he was, and how cute. His street name was Tracy, and Princess couldn’t wait for her new friend to meet him.
Maria learned her first lesson about pimps right then: they have their own time. It was hours before Tracy showed up, and when he did he had a friend, a business associate named Knowledge, in tow. Partners and sometime rivals, the two men could not have been more different in appearance. Tracy, whose real name was Demetrius Lemus, was “the pretty pimp,” as people described him, a handsome Puerto Rican of average height and build with a trim goatee and a pencil-thin moustache. Knowledge, on the other hand, was a hulking presence, a tall African American with a close-cropped beard, deep-set eyes, and a defiant stare. To the impressionable Maria, Tracy was “adorable,” while Knowledge was “ugly and fat.”
“So, who do you want to be with?” Tracy asked. Maria had already fallen hard for him. “He was Spanish and that kind of reminded me of my dad,” she says. “Tracy was sexy and young.”
“Let me talk to you real quick in the bathroom,” he instructed her.
The pimping world has its own language and laws, and Maria was about to learn both very quickly. In “the life” or “the game,” as the prostitution trade is called, the women, known as “bitches,” have to submit to a single “Daddy” pimp. They become part of his “stable” and call each other “wives-in-law.” A pimp usually chooses his most trusted and experienced woman, called his “bottom girl,” to keep the others in line. The golden rule is that when a woman is “in pocket” with one pimp, she is obliged to keep her head bowed in the presence of another pimp and never look at him. “If you got eyes, you got action” is how Knowledge liked to explain it.
In the bathroom, Tracy laid down the law. “This is what you got to do,” he said. “When you go out there, you got to put your head down.”
Maria was confused. “I got to put my head down?” she asked. “Why?”
“You have to put your head down from now on every time you see any other man ‘cause you’re in pocket now and you can’t disrespect me.”
“OK,” said the fourteen-year-old.
And she was Tracy’s girl. Maria, lonely and shunned by her family, thought she was in love with a man who would shower her with money and affection. Her submission had begun. All the pieces had fallen into place: a traumatic trigger event that tore her from her family, the luring by a “Princess” leading an enchanting and exciting life, a teenage crush on a handsome man.
Maria could not have known then that Tracy was already married with two children. She did not know that he had a vicious, violent streak. She could never have imagined how much Tracy and, especially, Knowledge would soon dominate and eventually threaten her life.
Maria had just joined the underworld of domestic sex trafficking; she had become one of America’s prostituted children. “Nobody reports them, nobody is looking for them, and nobody cares about them,” says Dan Garrabrant, the FBI agent who would eventually devote two years of his life to rescuing Maria and hunting down her pimps.
“They’re the forgotten children.”
In the beginning, Maria craved the attention, the slinky clothes, and the fast life. Right after their first encounter, Tracy drove his new recruit to New York City, the center of the operation he and Knowledge ran.
“How old are you?” he asked when they got to his home on Rochambeau Street in the Bronx.
“Sixteen,” Maria said.
Tracy had to know she was lying. By her own admission, Maria “looked like a baby.” Two days later, she told her pimp the truth. “I’m fourteen,” she admitted.
Tracy didn’t care. If anything, her youth made her more marketable. The street name he gave her was Baby Girl.
Tracy initiated his new Baby Girl into the business in one of the toughest prostitution...