413047-Underground-Commercial-Sex-Economy

We’ve gotten complaints on them [topless bars], there was one club here, a nice one, they
had Russians there … and every time that we’d go up there looking we couldn’t see what
they were talking about … it could have been that we just couldn’t get in, none of us were
Russian. (Dallas Law Enforcement Official)
Law enforcement also described how Russian groups operating the topless bars were much more
organized than the Asian groups operating massage parlors and harder to infiltrate.
Escort Services
Dallas law enforcement also described “high-end” or “high-dollar” escort services comprising the UCSE.
These escort services were described as the hardest to infiltrate given the secrecy, access control, and
amount of money needed to pose as a potential client. Given these challenges, as well as the belief that sex
trafficking is not occurring, local law enforcement does not investigate these services:
Respondent: I would think that the high dollar ones, I don’t think that they are actually
getting pimped. They might have a Madam who they give a percentage, but that’s about it.
And that’s something that we don’t, you can look on several different websites, not
obviously the ones that we go to, but they’re talking about four or five hundred dollars an
hour or $4,500 to spend the night, or something like that.
Interviewer: And are there a lot of those escort services out there
Respondent: We’re starting to get a lot. You’ve got to have, first of all you’ve got to have
a profile, you’ve got to have recommendations from other girls. You’ve got to have
passwords. They have a very intricate way of infiltrating those. It’s at the point where you
only get one shot and then one thing can burn so it’s not worth our time.
Interviewer: And is that mostly domestic women who are involved in that
Respondent: Yeah, the FBI has laws, it’s pretty neat, but it’s something that was out of
our league big time.
Interviewer: Just because it was too difficult to get in
Respondent: Oh the money, you had to be legitimately rich. And there was one where
we had found, where she was checking and she was going to call your work. She wanted to
know where you worked and she would look up the number herself and ask for you. So
it’s not, “Where do you work Give me the number.” It was, “Where do you work Give
me the name. ” She was going to call your work and ask for you. Some guys were paying
ten grand just to hang out with her, he didn’t even want anything to do with her, I mean
sexual. Just a nice companion for the weekend. (Dallas Law Enforcement Officials)
In addition to these challenges and the belief that there is no sex trafficking associated with escort
services, another reason local law enforcement does not investigate this venue is because it is not believed
to be as connected to other types of Part I offenses. As one official explained, trafficking cases are often
connected to other crime types and may even be classified as other crime types:
There is so much crime at the Part I offense that impact us as a city that are related to
trafficking, whether it be kids or adults, but it’s not reported that way because when you
have a guy who is in the hotel room with the car getting burglarized, the burglar is going
to come out in the Part I offense but it’s not going be attached to the prostitution. … Say
an officer goes out there, but everyone knows that he was engaging in prostitution when
the robbery happened, the burglary happened, all of those things happened but it’s going
to go into the different categories or whether it be an adult or a child or with … young
kids, when we get ‘em in, we may put the pimp in jail, the girl’s been trained not to talk
about the trafficking case meaning you can’t make the trafficking case, but they forgot to
train her on sexual assault. So you pop him on the sexual assault, it will go down as a Part
I sexual assault but it will never be reported as a trafficking case. (Dallas Law
Enforcement Official)
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