Motel Money Murder Madness: Sex Slavery in the Balkans
by William Roderick Richardson
According to the director of the OSCE office in
Fear
Time was crawling through me. It was
Danailov had warned us not to antagonize them, but we had put our hand in the hornet’s nest. Vladimir Danilov works for the International Organization for Migration (known as the IOM) in
Indeed.
Western Macedonia (WM) is off limits for the IOM. It’s simply too dangerous. This is not Kosovo, where heavily-armed peace-keepers mean hands off foreigners. The IOM know where the bordellos are, but they are forbidden to investigate. Journalists can. Now we were as close as you would care to be to becoming victims ourselves, unarmed in the middle of the night and without even a cell phone. Something had gone seriously wrong. Yet, we didn’t dare to contact the local police. It’s a lottery. Mafia payoffs are rampant in the sex trade. A local Albanian “warlord,” Leku, keeps the authorities at bay by buying them or threatening a new rebellion if his fiefdom is invaded. War has been good business for the mafia. Apart from the massive drug trade, there are estimated to be 1000 sex slaves in sparsely populated WM and now more brothels in Macedonia (FYROM) than in notorious Kosovo. The Albanians seem to be retrenching in wilder friendlier territory beyond the reach of NATO and the UN. . .
Konrad and I waited.
If we were caught we would most likely be tortured for weeks before being killed, a special investigator from the Ministry of Interior in
“Buy a Gun:” a Briefing in
“We are a very small team of four people,’ says
“Igor,” who is the main case-worker for the IOM in
Girls are trafficked from
According to Igor, most girls come to IOM after escaping, using the help of a client, being rescued by a police raid or after a police check of documents. Igor meets the girls at the airport. Igor is responsible for hiding girls in shelters in the countryside, where they can stay as long as they like. Says Igor: “This is slavery of the worst kind. Trafficking destroys the girl’s personality. They lose a sense of self-worth. They don’t leave a space for any humanity. It is total ownership. The psychic abuse is perhaps worse than the physical kind. To me it is comparable to survivors of the holocaust. I have been working with survivors of the holocaust in
“Buy a gun,” he said.
Smuggler’s
I followed the trail from
Macedonians and Albanian minority live in an atmosphere of tension and distrust that the elections may have done little to reduce. The tension is especially palpable in the streets of WM in towns like Tetova, where the main part of last year’s war took place. Just outside Tetova on the
Sexual slavery produces about seven billion dollars in revenue annually for Balkan mobsters. In
The
Two Americans stuck out like a sore thumb in the September streets of Ohrid. We spent the first night in the so-called Playboy Club on the edge of town with a bunch of tough-looking locals and whirling strippers. Nothing happened. The girls wouldn’t talk to us. Maybe things were cool in Ohrid, I thought. We were tired and disappointed. Maybe we were wasting our time. The next day something happened. That afternoon I met “Paul” by the small harbor in Ohrid just outside a restaurant called Don Vito’s. Paul is a local driver, tourist guide and middleman for prostitution. Within ten minutes of talking to him and after a little subtle prodding, he was describing services he could provide. He could take us to clubs, where we could meet prostitutes. There were many beautiful girls. Last summer he often took NATO soldiers to Valesta, a nearby town, notorious for its slave brothels. But the business wasn’t so good now. “The soldiers don’t come so much anymore.” The Americans were the best customers, he said. They liked to spend a lot of money. The British soldiers just like to drink and fight. Paul had fallen on hard times, it seemed. As we sat on the bench talking, a young man swaggered by. “He is the son of the most important man in Valesta,” Paul said. I saw a skinny punk with gelled hair and rat eyes. I said Valesta sounded interesting. I would like to go there. “No. No. You don’t understand. Valesta is a crazy town. Too many Albanians. It’s dark and only for fucking.” he said.
“I’m not scared of the dark,” I said. “I’d still like to go. It sounds like fun. Besides I might like to buy a slave girl.”
“Really?” he said without missing a beat. “You can do that. It will cost you about 2000 Euros.”
“Bargain basement,” I said.
“I’ll take you somewhere tonight,” said Paul “But not Valesta—that’s not for you.” Ohrid may be the tourist mecca of Macedonia, but it suddenly seemed that you didn’t have to look much beneath the surface of this seemingly innocent little town—a UNESCO preservation site—to find enough dirty linen to fill a laundry basket the size of the Ministry of Interior.
Never Saw A Woman So Alone
Nobody checks into the Hotel Astor on the outskirts of Ohrid. At first glance it seemed an ordinary strip club. Same lights. Same strip-tease. Same dull-eyed stares from the assembled women. Yet, the atmosphere was obviously different from the Playboy Club. The girls performed with a kind of expectancy. Like they were waiting for something to happen. Girls sat at tables with clients. The girls disappeared with their johns for an hour or so. Every thirty minutes or so there would be a parade: a dozen girls wiggling in the middle of the room to something asinine like Bon Jovi. Shaking their wares in a ritual both irritating and erotic. This was the time to pick your “slave.” A mini-auction. Very organized. We’d been there about two hours. It was after
“Do you see anyone you like?” Paul asked. He knew all the girls. One young girl caught my attention. She danced with style to Tina Turner’s Private Dancer. She wore her hair in strange pig tails, streaked with silver. I wanted to talk to her. I had a feeling about her. You have to go on hunches. Eventually I arranged for her to sit with us by purchasing a long and very slim drink for 15 Euros. She came to the table. She was smiling. Her eyes had an unnatural glow. Amphetamine?
“Are you a soldier? Nato?” she asked right off, speaking pretty good English.
“Yes,” I lied.
“Ah, you are big and strong, my darlink,” she said. “Let me feel your arm.”
I made a muscle of a proud soldier with my left arm, and she felt it. It wasn’t as good as it might have been.
“Like a rock,” she flirted.
I laughed and said: “That’s from the beer.”
She sipped her drink and we talked. Smooth-skinned, she looked younger than 20—the age she gave. As a teenager she had studied dancing in
“You like my hair? I did it myself,” she asked.
“Yes,” I said. “It is very unique.”
Over the next couple of hours, “accidentally” spending about 100 Euros, I managed to get her story. Let’s call her Lulu. Lulu is from near Chisinau in
“You are a nice guy,” she said after I complimented her dancing.
“I knew you were different when I saw you. There is something honest about you.”
There was also something dishonest about me. I was talking to her under false pretences, but then I didn’t have a choice, any more than she did.
“Do you like me?”
“Yes, but not like the others. I just want company,” I said.
“Me also,” she said, still smiling. She moved her hand on my leg. Every now and then, Konrad would interrupt our conversation. Each time—he told me later-- the boss had come to stand very close behind me trying to eavesdrop on our conversation. I was being careful though: Paul also was trying to listen. He probably just couldn’t understand why I was talking to the girl instead of having sex with her in some love room in the hotel. For that matter neither could she. Six months ago Lulu signed a contract to work as a dancer in Greek Cypress. She left
She whispered this last, smiling the whole time. A slave’s subservient grin. She was trying to explain an absurdity. I played dumb. What did she mean?
“I can’t leave,” she whispered. Then I saw it. In her eyes I saw the fear, animal and poignant, behind the false merriment. She was terribly frightened. I kept buying drinks. We had our heads together. Her hand was on my knee. Lulu was doing well. I was a foolish American buying some of the world’s smallest and most expensive drinks. I wanted to make her look good. I was paying more for drinks than for sex. I didn’t mind looking foolish. Then I asked her if she could meet me in Ohrid the next day.
“My darlink, I cannot do that. Our boss is always with us. Other times I am in the hotel all day long. He lets us buy clothes. I have to spend my money to buy costumes, what I wear.”
Lulu is “paid” 110 Euros per month, four times the average wage in
“I can’t,” I said, “not tonight. I just want to talk. Besides if I pay you, you don’t get the money, do you?”
“No,”
“I don’t want to pay your boss. I cannot do that. You understand.”
“Yes, I understand. You do like me?”
“Yes, I like you. I would invite you to meet me tomorrow in the town.”
“I cannot.” And then as an after thought she said: “You are not gay, are you?”
I laughed. “What do you think?”
“No. No. I don’t think so.”
She kept smiling at me.
When I asked her how she came to
I asked her if she could come to visit me abroad and she said: “Not now.”
I asked her how long she thought she would be in Ohrid. She did not know. Did her parents know where she is? No. If she could do anything she wished what would she do?
Get out of here, she said.
Would she like to return home? “I cannot talk about this,” she said.
She got desperate. “Please come with me to the room and tell me about
‘I will come back tomorrow,” I said and I meant it. I would take her to a room and when we were alone I would get the full details of her story. “I think I will look on you again,” Lulu said.
Friday the Thirteenth
We thought we were smart. Konrad and I devised a good cop/bad cop plan to get Paul to take him to Valesta. Konrad would say he wanted to have two girls. Paul would be impressed. This was to be a secret between them, because I know Konrad’s wife and if I told anyone it might get back to her. We met Paul in the evening at Don Vito’s. I told Paul that I wanted to go back and see Lulu at the Hotel Astor later. I had “fallen” for Lulu. Konrad and Paul left me to go and “shoot pool.” I would wait for them. Two hours later I was standing by a telephone booth near the restaurant. Konrad suddenly appeared. He was walking fast toward me, smiling. His grin was scary. “Dude, we are blown,” he said. “We need to get out of here.”
We said a quick goodbye to Paul acting as if everything was okay. Then Konrad explained what happened as we walked quickly away. Konrad had been in Valesta at the Hotel Joni, a brand new hotel and gas station fronting for a slave brothel. He had paid $200 for two teenage Romanian girls. They both admitted they were not free to leave and one of them said “she wanted to leave, but couldn’t.” He had been discreet in asking if they needed help, but one of them must have talked because about the time they arrived in Ohrid, Paul got a call from his “friend,” a mafia thug in Valesta. Paul didn’t know that Konrad could understand most of what he was saying in Macedonian. Paul slowed the car down to walking pace. They were right in the middle of town now. Konrad heard him say: “She said that? Well, I really don’t know the guy. He is just a client. . . Do you want me to bring him back?” Paul had already stopped the car. Konrad lept out saying he needed to meet me. He also heard Paul saying that yes there was another American and that he was waiting in the beer garden on the square. . .
I took this in as we walked. They knew there were two of us without Paul telling them. They knew a lot, and they knew it very quickly.
My head went cold. We were marked men. We would have to get out of town as soon as we could. However the roads were too dangerous at night to travel under any circumstances, let alone being pursued by the Albanians. We settled in to wait out the night. After the incident with the shouting, a car or cars circled the block almost until morning. Over and over again. . . . but they couldn’t find us. If paranoia were a thing it would have been dancing a jig around us. The minutes stretched into hours. . . The clock crawled like some slow mechanical beast through the hours . . . the next morning with some difficulty, including our taxi being stopped at a police road block and sent back to town, we managed to get to Skopje by way of Bitola, forgoing the shorter route which would have taken us near Valesta and through western Macedonia. Dirty old
Jaded, we went straight to the Irish Pub and had a beer. I called the IOM office and Danilov came to meet us. “So you found what you were looking for,” he said after we told him our story. We went back to the office and filed official reports. We hoped to force a police raid of the places we had visited.
Epilogue: Déja Vu All Over Again
We were sitting in the Kukri bar in Pristina across from the UN headquarters. I was on one side of the table and Swen Lindholm, a pleasant New Yorker, who is a press officer with the OSCE, was on the other. We were drinking beer and discussing Kosovo -- more particularly a couple of brothels in Pristina, the Arizona Café Bar in the Sunny Hill district and the Miami Beach Club near the center, both trafficking operations. However my mind was still on the previous week’s events.
“I think I am going back to Valesta to take photographs of the place,” I suddenly told Swen. “They would never suspect you would be stupid enough to come back.”
“That’s what I’m thinking. . .”
Two days later the taxi halted at a military checkpoint a kilometer outside of Valesta. A heavy machine gun mounted on sandbags commanded the road. The cop was looking through my passport and talking to someone on the phone. He looked serious. Then he came back. He smiled. “No problem,” he said. “They thought I was taking you to the Hotel Joni to see the girls,” the driver said. “I said you were a tourist.”
Soon we drew up across from the hotel. It was as Konrad had described it. I jumped out and clicked off a photo. Then we drove through Valesta slowly while I took photos through the back window, putting the camera down whenever someone looked at the car. In the middle of the town we turned down an ugly side street and immediately there was a beautiful new villa with a big man in the garden watering his flowers carefully. They bloomed like kept women. We drove on and turned left into the main square. There was a café with a couple of guys sitting outside. “Should we stop and have a drink?” I asked.
“No,” said the driver. “That is not a good idea. They don’t like strangers here.”
He was getting visibly more and more nervous now. I snapped off a few more quick photos. Eyes were on us from the doorways of scattered shops and another café to the right. Those eyes were searching. Who were we? No other cars moved on the streets.
“Photos no good,” the driver said.
When we got to the Hotel Joni again I asked the driver to stop and shot some quick photos through the side window. I did not get out this time. Someone was observing us from the gas station.
“I’ve seen enough. Let’s go,” I said.
The driver didn’t need to be asked twice. “There are many more beautiful places than this,” he said. I could tell he thought any place -- perhaps even hell itself -- might be more beautiful. I made my way carefully through the streets of Ohrid, nice streets offering rest and relaxation if you didn’t know what I knew. I felt an overwhelming ambivalence. I knew that fifty percent of the girls who escape end up back in brothels. I knew that a raid last year on Valesta had netted thirty girls. I knew that nineteen of them had skipped their planes in
In my room I snapped the TV on and watched CNN. By almost supernatural coincidence there was a report on the European conference on human trafficking in