Camden has always had an air of anarchy about it, and so our little business did not look out of place. The building looked suitably seedy from the outside. Inside, we had set up a reception area and a heavily scotch-guarded chaise longue had been ordered. Fruity air-freshener polluted the air to give it the authentic bordello aroma.
On the second floor was a double bedroom, and located on the third floor was a secret studio we would use to covertly film the goings-on and record every word spoken.
It was an uncomfortably proud moment when the makeshift sign announcing our name and phone number was erected outside. The pavement directly outside the door was painted blue and the sign had white text on a sky-blue background to tie in with our Mediterranean theme. As I surveyed my empire from across the street, through the traffic of Kentish Town Road, I felt like a proud business starter, fresh from some government scheme and full of entrepreneurial spirit. What would my old school principal, Mother Perpetua, make of me now?
I couldn’t help having a giggle at the inappropriateness of the BBC financing its own brothel with licence fee money. It wasn’t quite what Lord Reith had in mind when he created the corporation to ‘educate, entertain and inform’. Of course we had no intention of actually taking any paying clients – this was our way of getting the pimps and traffickers to talk to us in person and it would give us the opportunity to film them relatively safely.
This business is a gangster’s licence to print money. Another brothel just around the corner, which was open 24/7, was reputedly turning over £1 million a month. It appeared to be easy money, as long as you weren’t one of the girls forced to work there.
The point of this investigation was that many of these girls were being given no choice, and were effectively being used as sex slaves. In the most extreme cases, the trafficked women were being bought and sold like second-hand cars and were treateded a great deal worse. They were being forced to have sex with up to 12 men in a shift and often endured beatings and ritual humiliation. Most of the women came from the poorest parts of the world and were easy prey for traffickers who promised a fresh start and a good job in a wealthier country.
Nearly a million women are believed to be trafficked every year. I met Russian-born Sophie on a research trip to Prague. She had been promised a secretarial job in Germany, and the lure of accommodation and a good wage proved too tempting for her to resist. When she met the men at the airport, she knew she had made a mistake.
‘As soon as I saw them, I realised they are gangsters. You can tell immediately from the way they look,’ Sophie told me. I asked them what kind of work will I be doing. One of them told me I will be working as a prostitute. I said I won’t do it.
‘They told me that I would have to submit if I didn’t want to be beaten up or killed.’
She was beaten and raped and, still only in her twenties, she now looks twice her age. Tears fell down her cheeks as she revealed her pain to me.
Later, I met Tibor. He looked like an ageing nightclub singer in his flared trousers, red smoking jacket and open shirt. The obligatory gold medallion completed the picture. It was a kind of Goodfellas chic, if there is such a thing. We were tucked away in the alcove of a seedy bar, surrounded by his gun-toting henchmen. Tibor is one of the biggest sex traffickers in the Czech Republic. He was completely frank about his business.
‘Where do you get your girls from?’ I asked him.
‘All over Europe … mainly [they are] Czech, Slovak, Polish, Hungarian, Spanish,’ he told me in a matter of fact tone.
I could have been asking him how many sugars he wanted in his tea.
‘They are being offered to me. We have a meeting, they put some photographs on the table and I choose what I like. It is a kind of network that I have with these people.
‘If someone calls me right at this moment to go and get some girls from Spain, I’ll send some people immediately and I’m ready to do business,’ he said.
He didn’t need to let me know who was boss, but he couldn’t help himself.
‘I work alone down here. I control everything here.’
‘If the women are difficult, how do you manage them?’ I asked.
‘If she doesn’t obey me, then I get rid of her or something.’
‘And if she disrespects you?’ I asked.
‘I give her a smack, I punish her. The next time, I punch her in the face. Sometimes it’s necessary to shoot her in the leg or arm for warning. When I talk to someone in a situation like this, I’m always calm and polite. But when it comes to some bitch getting on my nerves, then I’m not so nice,’ he said.
* * * * *
In the months before we opened our establishment, our researchers visited over a hundred brothels, masquerading as concerned brothers looking for their missing sisters who they believed had been trafficked. Using this ruse, the researchers explained that they just wanted to talk, in the hope that the young women would open up about their predicament.
The girls were reticent at first and found it very difficult to trust a man after what they had been through. But after a number of visits, many revealed the horrific truth of their circumstances.
As we trudged from saunas to massage parlours – brothels in all but name – we were hoping to find women who felt able to accept our help to escape this world. But we were not naïve, and understood the complex psychological chains that keep these girls in this terrible life.
Eventually, one of our undercover team reported that a dark-haired girl of about 19 or 20 had been opening up to him about being forced into prostitution by a group of Albanians in Manor Park, North London. A blond fifty-something Madame introduced her as Eni from Greece.
‘I’m not Greek. I am Albanian; I swear to God. I am in college,’ she told the researcher. She said that she had been smuggled into the UK and was being forced to have sex up to five times a night and then to hand all the money over to her pimp. ‘I have nowhere to go but I can’t call the Police, because I have just one brother and he is smaller than me. If I go to the Police, [my pimp] said he will kill my brother.’
The Albanians work in clans: families, cousins and friends from the same village create a kind of network and they operate together.
Eni’s pimp was also her boyfriend and he was forcing her to earn cash for him by working in the sauna. According to Eni, many of his friends were doing the same.
We waited outside the sauna to watch her pimp pick her up. We noticed that his car was for sale, so the next day we phoned him and arranged to meet up on the pretext that we were interested in buying it. Over a drink, he introduced himself as Zamir and we chatted for a while.
We casually dropped into the conversation that we were opening a sauna in Camden and his eyes lit up. ‘We are the same. I am [here with] four brothers and one cousin and we each have working girls,’ he said. ‘We are looking for a new place for work.’ He took out a photograph of Eni from his wallet and showed it to us. We asked him how much she earned for him. ‘£300 a night, sometimes £200, sometimes nothing,’ Zamir said, laughing. We didn’t buy the car but we kept in contact with him.
After that, Eni went missing from the sauna for over a week. When she eventually came back to work, she explained her absence: ‘My boyfriend hit me. I told him I not working any more, and he hit me,’ she said, pointing to her face. She seemed at her wits’ end.
She didn’t know that we had already met her boyfriend.
It took a number of visits before our researcher felt able to reveal who he was and what his true intentions were. When he finally told her the truth and asked her if she wanted help, she said that she needed to think about it. We gave her the number of a solicitor to call for advice and hoped that she would call us after she had spoken to her. In the end, the solicitor contacted us and told us Eni had decided that she wanted to get out of the situation she was in.
She packed her bags and left the home she shared with Zamir. We had her under surveillance and followed her as she made her way to the T
ube and on to the arranged meeting point.
I first saw Eni coming towards me with Stratford Tube station behind her. She passed through here every day on her way to the sauna. We were tracking Zamir’s movements, worried that he would scupper the rescue plan. I went over to her after she talked to the lawyer and introduced myself. She was very vulnerable and nervous but brave enough to trust us.
On the way to the safe house, we drove past the sauna. ‘I don’t want to look,’ Eni said. ‘He punched me many times. [He said,] “I kill your family and your brother.” Some who do sex are nice with customers. But after I have sex, customers go to maid and say, “She is pretty but she is no good.” The maid says, “Sorry. Next time chose another girl.”’
She tried to talk more, but was too upset. It was awkward being a man in these circumstances and I couldn’t help but feel ashamed of my sex.
We phoned Zamir, pretending to be from the UK Border Agency, and told him that Eni was being held in custody pending deportation proceedings. We kept the cover story short and kept conversation to a minimum, hoping that this would buy us some time. Within half an hour he had called Eni 31 times.
Her new home would be on the other side of the city, away from Zamir and his brothers. I hoped she would settle down and be able to get on with her life.
* * * * *
With Eni safe, we continued with the preparations at our own brothel in Camden. The traffickers were excited to have a new customer and were eager to do deals with us.
‘Ron’ entered the brothel with a swagger, bringing two young Russian women with him. He was dressed all in black and had Michael Bolton-style hair that did him no favours. He and his sidekick sat down on the red sofa and the women were directed to the room upstairs while negotiations took place.
‘One is a brunette. She is going for £7,000. We can barter. And the other is blond and £9,000,’ he told us. Ron said that we could rent the girls, but that it would be better to buy them outright. ‘You feed, you clothe – they work.’ He also offered his own girlfriend for rent. Naturally, I would pay the rent to him and not her. He gave me some advice about their diet: ‘When they work, they have no time for cooking. Maybe buy a burger, or if you want to be more nice, take to a cheap restaurant. Don’t worry: they don’t take much feeding,’ he assured me.
‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ I said.
Later I went up to speak to the women alone. They seemed completely lost and confused. We chatted about nothing in particular for a while, but they were clearly nervous and aware that they were being traded.
‘I have never done this before. I have no money,’ one of them said.
‘How many punters?’ the other girl asked, looking concerned.
‘Five,’ I told her.
‘OK,’ she replied, downcast.
We told Ron that we would close the deal as soon as we were fully open for business. Instead, we handed the information over to the Police and Ron and his cronies were investigated for prostitution, assault and trafficking. We never saw the girls again.
* * * * *
Salvation proved to be a lonely place for Eni and she was left with many issues to sort through. She contacted me to say that she wanted to meet her pimping ex again, to confront him over what he had done to her. I called Zamir and we arranged to meet at a café in Chiswick.
‘You beat her and made her work as a prostitute. Why?’ I asked.
‘I am jealous for her,’ he said, shrugging his shoulders and taking a drag on his cigarette.
‘Why don’t you get work as a rent boy?’ I asked him.
‘I never heard of such a thing,’ he said.
‘I haven’t come to put you in jail. I just want an explanation.’
It was a bizarre situation: I was caught halfway between journalist and marriage counsellor.
‘Where did you hit her? In the face, the head, the back?’ I asked him.
Zamir’s head dropped.
‘I sometimes slap in the face and punch.’
‘How can you behave like this?’
‘They can put me in prison for 15 years. I accept everything,’ he said.
Eni was relieved to at last hear some kind of admission of guilt, but if she had been expecting contrition, she would be disappointed.
‘I am what I am,’ he said.
He put on his knee-length black leather jacket and walked onto the high street alone. Thankfully, Eni refused to go with him.
Over the next couple of years, Eni managed to eke out an existence for herself away from the sex trade. She was fighting to stay in the country and I was called to a final immigration appeal at an office near Heathrow, to give evidence about her life as a sex slave. I told the officials that she had gone through hell. By breaking away from her boyfriend and telling her story, she had given courage to other sex slaves and she would be in grave danger of retaliation if she were to be repatriated to Albania. There are some days when you feel proud of your work, and this was one of those days.
Against the odds, Eni was reprieved and was granted leave to remain in the country on humanitarian grounds. After that we met up occasionally for coffee and I was always delighted to hear about the progress she was making with her new life. She would send me cards every now and then and congratulated me when I got married. We had a trust: I was someone she could rely on and I was happy to support her in whatever way I could.
About three years later – five years after the programme was made – I received a call from the Police in relation to the investigation. The officer said that he wanted to talk to me regarding a murder inquiry and a person he thought I had interviewed for my sex traffickers documentary. My first thought was for Eni: by telling her story to us, she had made a fistful of enemies.
‘Oh, she’s alright,’ the officer told me. ‘The victim is a 24-yearold male. He was stabbed in a hostel for vulnerable tenants.’
Eni had been staying at the same hostel as the murdered man. The victim was a manager at a health-food store and was well liked, by all accounts. They had known each other for some time and had become close, according to the officer. He said Eni had been doing some cleaning work and studying English part-time.
‘But how is Eni involved?’ I asked
‘She has been charged with the murder.’
‘What?’ I said. ‘That can’t be.’
‘Well, she has already confessed to it.’
‘She is no murderer,’ I said.
‘We don’t believe it either, but we need her to tell the truth, and that’s where we believe you can come in.’
It was like something out of Crime and Punishment.
Apparently, Eni was having sex with the victim when her brother walked in on them. He became incensed that she was with a black man and stabbed him before fleeing the scene. To this day her brother has not been found and remains on the run. Eni had gone on the game to protect him from her pimp who had threatened to kill him and he had repaid her by killing her boyfriend and disappearing.
I was told that Eni was in Holloway Women’s Prison and the Police felt that maybe I could persuade her to change her story and stop protecting her brother. The prison that once held Oscar Wilde and Constance Markievicz now held my friend, Eni, remanded in custody for murder. I was stunned.
I contacted her lawyer immediately but was told that Eni did not want to speak to me. I wrote to her, but still she wouldn’t engage. Then, after about three months, she called me from prison, in tears. ‘I am so sorry. It’s a mess. It’s all my fault,’ she said. We tried to arrange a visit but the governor of Holloway wouldn’t give me permission because, he said, of an investigation I had done into corrupt prison officers at Wandsworth Prison the previous year. The Home Office refused to intervene, despite the fact that the Police knew that I could help to persuade Eni to tell the truth.
In the end, after much cajoling, she took my advice and that of her legal team and told the Court what had happened, admitting that she had lied to protect her brother. The murde
r charge against her was dropped, but she was convicted of perverting the course of justice. Her brother was convicted in absentia of murder. Eni was released after serving 11 months of a 16-month sentence.
‘Her one enduring regret is that a decent man lost his life because of an engagement with her that night,’ her lawyer told the Court.
The judge said that the victim was a totally innocent man whose family may have been deprived of justice because of Eni’s actions. He said that DNA and fingerprints might have been on the blood-soaked weapon that she had wiped clean.
‘He was a hard-working, well-respected man who had done nothing wrong.’
After Eni was released, we met over coffee near the Cutty Sark, in the shadow of Tower Bridge. She talked about going to college and starting a new life, but she still blamed herself for everything. I tried to convince her that she was wrong to do this, that she was another victim who had become trapped in a destructive series of events.
‘It’s like waking from a bad dream. I wish I could turn the clock back,’ she said. I was devastated for her. She was broken and distressed over the tragedies that seemed to follow her through life.
The journey that started with choosing wallpaper for our bordello had ended with a horrific, racially motivated murder. We followed the story of a single sex trafficking victim in one city, and had seen the devastation that had cascaded tragically through the lives of many. People like Eni deserve our sympathy and protection, and the sorry truth is that she is just one of the thousands of hidden victims of this industry in Ireland and Britain.
Eni’s view of the circle of violence she found herself caught up in is soul-destroying in its sense of resignation: ‘That’s life sometimes,’ she said. ‘That’s life.’
13
HOW TO GET MUGGED – IN ONE EASY LESSON
With the A40 White City flyover to my right and the BBC buildings behind me, two hooded men appeared out of nowhere and jumped me. They wrestled me to the ground, grabbed my belongings and left me sprawled on the tarmac. As the robbers ran off, I spotted one of the BBC postmen looking on. He was shocked and came over to assist me. He had just seen one of his colleagues getting mugged outside work and was visibly concerned for my well-being. Then I saw his shock turn to terror as the muggers doubled back and returned for seconds. They approached me and slapped me on the back, saying: ‘Well done, Macker. That’s the rehearsal; let’s see if you’ve got the balls for the real thing.’
Hitman, Gangsters, Cannibals and Me Page 17