413047-Underground-Commercial-Sex-Economy

So after a few weeks of a girl staying with us, we come and get a disk done. If the girl
wanted to leave us, she would have to pay us $300 dollars, and we had every picture on
the disk. It would be the same photographer, and when we first went there he offered for
me and another girl to be on the centerfold. He sent us to one guy, and they had the
make-up but we just had to bring the outfits, so we kept sending the girls to them. Every
year we did new photos, so the guy [the client] wasn’t seeing the same thing. (A8)
Respondents also reported costs associated with posting advertisements to websites, phonebooks, or print
newspapers. According to respondents, phonebook advertisements were the most costly. Local newspaper
advertisements were less expensive, but did not have the same sustained exposure as phonebooks, and
required more frequent posting. Online advertisements were even less expensive than print
advertisements, but respondents posted multiple times a day. One respondent explained, “That’s where a
lot of money went to: posting. Each girl would post at least five times a day [on Backpage]. I think it was
$5–10 per post … Craigslist was the best one to post. It was the same: $5 or $10” (G8). The frequency with
which online advertisements were posted drove up costs.
Some respondents also reported equipment costs to allow for advertisement posting. Twenty-seven
percent of respondents considered computer and Internet costs as business expenses. One respondent
explained, “I had a laptop; that cost about $2,000. I had a camera, a Canon that was expensive, to post
pictures of the girls” (A3).
Hotels and Motels
Forty-four percent of respondents reported spending money on renting hotel rooms or maintaining
spaces for customer appointments. The cost of hotel rooms varied significantly across respondents: One
respondent reported renting a hotel room for a month for $1,000 while other respondents spent over
$1,000 on hotel rooms per week. Respondents would sometimes purchase hotel rooms for an extended
period of time to receive discounted rates: “I’d talk to the clerk, sometimes buy a room for a week or
month to get the right discount” (G15). Other respondents had employees share rooms to save money on
rental costs.
Cell Phones and Plans
Forty percent of respondents reported business-related charges for cell phones and plans. Many
respondents chose to use prepaid phones, which allowed pimps to regulate the number of minutes
available and the money invested into each phone. Prepaid phones could also be thrown away and
replaced, and thus could not be as easily traced by law enforcement. Other respondents used monthly
plans for their employees or simply used employees’ personal phones for business transactions. The type
of phone and plan varied by respondent, but several pimps stated that the longer an employee worked for
him or her, the greater the likelihood that she would be placed on a phone plan.
Legal Fees
Pimps reported expenditures on bond payments or lawyer fees resulting from employees’ arrests or
respondents’ own cases relating to pimping. Twenty-nine percent of respondents reported some amount
of legal expenditures. One pimp reported that he kept an attorney on retainer to address all legal matters
that arose as a result of his business. He explained, “I would give him $2,500 for me to cop out for
something. If I go to trial, it’s $10,000. If I have a good day—I would say [to the lawyer,] ‘Come pick up
$500, man’” (D4). Pimps also reported covering the cost of bail when their employees were arrested and
booked. One respondent explained, “There was a couple times that girls got arrested, and we did go post
their bond ” (A8). Paying employee bond was a way to keep employees from leaving; it demonstrated a
commitment to invest in an employee. One respondent explained, “There was a particular girl I had, she
knew I would pay her bond, because I know a girl could leave any day” (G3).
Prosecution on pimping or sex trafficking charges was itself an unexpected business expense for many
respondents. While some respondents were represented in court by a public defender, others retained
private lawyers to defend their cases. Pimps reported spending from $1,000 to $720,000 on legal fees
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