Portland prostitution: "Snitches die, you know"

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Portland prostitution: "Snitches die, you know"

Postby sam » Mon Dec 08, 2008 8:47 am

Atrocious title, decent article.

Young workers in the oldest profession
Clark County girls make up a third of the underage sex workers in Portland


Saturday, December 6
BY ISOLDE RAFTERY
http://www.columbian .com/article/20081207/NEWS02/712079963

Sarah was 16 and addicted to crack cocaine when she heard there was easy money to make in the parking lot of a fast food restaurant off Fourth Plain Boulevard.

“I went there to pick up guys,” Sarah, 22, said. “They would buy me what I wanted as long as I had sex with them.”

After working for a year in Vancouver, Sarah ventured to Portland. Willowy, her greasy blond hair pulled tight into a bun, she looks exhausted.

“I got here on Sandy and 82nd, and this guy, D.C., asked me if I wanted to get high,” she said one morning last summer, sitting on a curb in northeast Portland. “Then he told me I owed him money and to go get money.”

Sarah was trapped. She’d fallen prey to a pimp’s come-on and become one of the 20 to 30 juveniles Portland police say work the streets at any given time. Like more than a third of those girls, she is from Vancouver. And like many of them, she remains beyond the reach of police efforts to separate her from her pimp. It’s been six years, and Sarah is still on the streets.

“The girls out there are being forced to do it,” says Portland Vice Det. Meghan Burkeen. “We consider them the victim, try to get them away from their pimp, and hopefully we can prosecute the pimp.”

In Portland, child prostitution has come to light because neighborhood groups have lashed out against prostitutes and pimps for littering their sidewalks with condoms and needles.

In Clark County, only former U.S. Congresswoman Linda Smith has tackled the issue, and on her own terms.

Smith’s organization, Shared Hope International, has examined sex trafficking abroad and recently turned its lens on the Vancouver and Portland region. This fall, the group staked out a large truck stop on the Oregon-Washington border and found that a young prostitute is an easy buy.

How police deal with young prostitutes depends on where they’re from. In Portland, young workers from Vancouver are rarely identified as prostitutes and usually sent back to Washington state on runaway warrants. Therein lies the problem: They may work just 15 minutes from home, but they’re operating in another state with different laws, different social services and even another FBI jurisdiction. And because there are few supports in Clark County, girls fall through already gaping cracks when they return home.

A mother’s story

Law enforcement officials say sex-trafficking is hard to stop because pimps keep moving the girls. They drive them across state lines to sex hubs from Seattle to Salem to San Diego to isolate them from their families and duck a law enforcement system bound to strictly divided jurisdictions.

And so, mothers are often on their own to find their missing daughters and report whatever information they find to police.

That’s the case for Dori Westerman, who, on a recent rainy Thursday night, drove from her tidy Beaverton, Ore., home to an apartment in Portland, where her 16-year-old daughter was living with her pimp.

The pimp works her daughter, Cherise, as other pimps have, walking her up and down Portland’s 82nd Avenue track, through Vancouver hotels and up to Seattle.

Westerman knew that getting her daughter’s latest address was risky. Police might spook her pimp and cause them to leave the state. If they split, Westerman would be back at square one, checking Cherise’s MySpace page to see if she had logged on.

She lost the gamble. Police knocked at the apartment door early the next Saturday morning, and Cherise’s pimp said she wasn’t home and that he’d bring her to the precinct later. By 5 p.m., they were gone.

Tears roll down Westerman’s perfectly made-up face when she recounts stories her daughter has shared: “She’s been beaten and thrown out of a moving car naked. She has been brutally raped and beaten by three men in a Motel 6 in Arizona. She was found in an alley left for dead, hog-tied with something in her mouth.”

After these terrifying episodes, Cherise — a baby-faced, half-black, half-white teenager with Clark County family — called Mom, begging for help. Cherise is identified here by her middle name to protect her identity.

Removing a girl from her pimp isn’t easy because he controls her emotionally, says retired Portland vice detective Daryl Dick. When he worked in the 1980s and 1990s, Dick said, Vancouver girls made up a large part of his caseload.

The detective would build trust with a girl by describing to her how a pimp works, how he chats up girls at malls and outside high schools to identify those most vulnerable to his charms. For weeks, the pimp courts the girl, buys her clothes and jewelry, and tells her that she’s beautiful.

A pimp might have one or two other girls and make them compete for his affections, then show favor to whoever brings in the most money. Though some pimps keep a “stable” of girls, sticking to a smaller group allows him to maintain tighter control.

“Once she hears these kinds of things — boom — she’s listening (to us),” Dick said. “We don’t know the details, but we know how it works.”

‘Snitches die, you know’


Those closest to Cherise try to understand why she’s fallen prey to pimps. Westerman says when her daughter was 7, she was traumatized by her father’s murder. Others say she was always wild. Cherise is pretty, articulate, a good writer — how could this happen to her?

Det. Dick says this could happen to anyone’s daughter.

“I can cite case after case of girls coming from average families, and once the pimp was able to intervene, the family didn’t matter anymore,” Dick said. “I know of officers’ daughters who got into it, a federal prosecutor’s daughter, a DA’s daughter, a politician’s daughter.”

Cherise was a rebellious 15-year-old when she met her first pimp, Deandre Green, at Lloyd Center in Portland. Green was a 25-year-old Bloods gang member from Aloha, Ore.

He sweet-talked her to a nondescript, two-story motel and told her the rules: This is business, don’t be out of pocket, respect your pimp and give me all your money.

According to court documents, when Cherise said she had second thoughts, Green said, “I know where you live and where your family lives. I will kill you and your family if you say anything to anybody. You’re mine now.”

They lived in motels and his mother’s home before moving to California. Eventually, Cherise called home, setting in motion a police raid of the Los Angeles hotel room where she and Green were staying.

In July, Green pleaded guilty to transportation for illegal sexual activity. He was sentenced to 70 months in prison and three years of supervised release.

Though Green was in prison, Westerman was still scared for her daughter, who was being threatened by old friends and strangers. On a Portland MAX train one day, a girl she didn’t know walked up to her and said, “Snitches die, you know.”

That day, Cherise ran away again.

“She made the comment that if she’s out there doing this, living that way, people won’t think that she’s the snitch, the one that told on Deandre,” Westerman said.

Portland Police vice squad Sgt. Doug Justus says there aren’t services for young prostitutes who give up their pimps.

As it is, the police bureau has a three-member vice squad, compared with a 10-officer unit in the 1970s and 1980s.

Justus once spent two days trying to place a 14-year-old he found in a home raid. A children’s home agreed to take her for a night, but only if Justus promised to pick her up the next morning.

He says that as juvenile prostitution cases pile up, his supervisors tell him to triage the load.

“But how do you pick and choose which 12- or 13-year-old?” Justus asked. “How do you tell the mom that we’re not going to do your case?”

The Multnomah County Juvenile Justice Center rarely holds girls, either, because prostitution is a misdemeanor. In the past year, juvenile prosecutors filed prostitution charges against 13 minors, including one from Vancouver and two from the Seattle area. Two more were charged with compelling prostitution, or pimping. Clark County has filed just four prostitution charges against juveniles in eight years.

Justus, who lives in Vancouver, says he doesn’t understand why dealing drugs or stealing cars is treated as more important than dealing or stealing children. After a rash of stolen car years back, Portland dedicated a unit to car theft.

“We have little girls raped and beaten, and they won’t give us more bodies,” he said. “How does that correlate?”

Checking in

Sarah, the young prostitute from Vancouver, was beaten so badly by her pimp, D.C., that she needed facial reconstructive surgery. He was sentenced to prison for abusing her, and she, barely recovered, returned to the track in northeast Portland.

She was recently pulled over by police who found a crack pipe behind the front passenger seat. She told officers she was driving two men she’d just met, but they believe that one of the two is her pimp.

A mother’s relief

As for Cherise, her room hasn’t changed since August, the last time she lived with her mom. The magenta walls match the sheets, and there’s a large framed photo of her father on the armoire. Deandre Green’s scrunched red kerchief is on the floor. On her unmade bed is a novel called “Seduction.”

But Westerman no longer cries when she stands in her daughter’s room. That’s because last week, she found Cherise.

She had checked her daughter’s My-Space page, expecting to see the tragic photos Cherise posts of herself: Never smiling, posing in a skimpy red bikini, staring at the camera with stoned eyes.

But she noticed something different this time. Cherise had a new name, which Westerman suspected meant she had a new pimp.

She scoured online dating services sites and spotted her daughter. She didn’t hesitate to call police, even if it meant taking a chance that’s failed her again and again. But this time, the gamble paid off.

Today, Cherise is at a mental health facility in Portland, looking forward to charting a new life.
"Your orgasm can no longer dictate my oppression"

Trisha Baptie
sam
chaotic good
 
Posts: 4391
Joined: Thu Dec 30, 2004 12:54 am

Re: Portland prostitution: kids raped & threatened by pimps

Postby sam » Mon Dec 08, 2008 8:50 am

Young girls forced to learn and obey brutal rules of the street
Failure to do so could lead to bloody beatings at the hands of their pimps


Sunday, December 7
BY ISOLDE RAFTERY
http://www.columbian .com/article/20081208/NEWS02/712089955

Rule No. 1: Never talk back to your pimp.

It was 1989, and Angie was a tall, sassy 12-year-old on the run from her alcoholic mother. She was tired of their fights, tired of the abuse, so she made her way to downtown Portland where punk and grunge reigned and where the seasoned kids called her greenie. She stayed close to a punk kid named Gutter Boy and his girlfriend, and they panhandled for change and cigarettes and slept in the woods by the freeway.

But then she met Rickie and her imperfect world fell apart.

Rickie had a baby face, had barely started shaving, and Angie’s friends told her that he’d been checking her out. They never talked, just sneaked glances at the soup kitchen and across what they called Paranoid Park, until one day Rickie invited her to a party.

She remembers following him to a whitewashed motel on the outskirts of the city, where he introduced her to Earl and his girls, Shannon and Sonja.

Earl was a quietly imposing man who wore a leather jacket and steel-toed snakeskin boots. Sonja, his main girl, was a New Yorker whose body had been tattooed with her former pimp’s name. Shannon was a sweet-tempered blonde.

Angie remembers smoking their pot, drinking their booze and getting very high. Earl sat back, watching her, and then gestured to Shannon and Sonja. “Do you know what these girls do?” he asked.

Angie’s brain was foggy and her limbs felt like molasses. She looked to Rickie for explanation, but the boy’s soft features turned hard.

“Just shut your mouth,” he said.

Then Earl stood up and said to her what every pimp tells a fresh girl: “You’re not going anywhere until I’ve explained the rules.”

Now, nearly 20 years later, Angie says she couldn’t have left.

“He was three times the size of me,” she said. “There was no way, no way that I was leaving.”

The next day, Angie turned her first trick and vomited on the man’s lap.

Rule No. 2: Turn tricks and turn in your money.

Angela Corll is a grown woman now, a Clark College student who hopes to be a social worker for street youth or foster kids. She lives on a quiet street in Battle Ground with her husband, whom she calls her soul mate, and their two cats and three dogs.

Though she avoids “the track” — that stretch of Portland sidewalk where she was forced to sell herself from the ages of 12 to 15 — her curiosity occasionally takes her to a less tangible track, the erotic services section of the free online site, Craigslist.org. There, she sees pictures of girls who claim to be 18 and who sell sex for “80 kisses” or “80 hugs.”

From Angie’s cozy living room, online sex trafficking looks different from when she was young — girls wear skimpier clothes, and transactions occur online — but vice officers say nothing has changed and that pimping minors is as old as the oldest profession.

In fact, the postings suggest the Internet may have pushed more sex trafficking into suburban areas such as Clark County, where police don’t have the staff to monitor online operations based out of hotels or homes.

Rule No. 3: Never talk to another pimp.


Angie was 13 when Earl sold her for $100.

She hadn’t wanted to get sold. But as she walked into a food mart, a handsome 25-year-old pulled into the parking lot.

“Hey sweetheart,” she recalls him saying to her. “You’re with Earl. I am so much better than him.”

Angie barely looked up.

“Whatever,” she said.

When she returned to the motel, Earl sat her on the bed and told her she now belonged to a man named Kevin Mitchell.

“I don’t have a choice,” Angie remembers Earl saying. “It’s the rule of the street, the rule of the game.”

For days, Mitchell forced her to sleep in a closet. He brought friends over to rape her until she promised not to talk back. He beat her and rarely fed her.

When he put her back on the streets, a newly broken teenager, she ran into a familiar face — Portland Police Bureau Detective Daryl Dick, a gentle man who would pester her for months to testify against Mitchell.

Dick was an unorthodox detective. He and his wife, Anita, invited young prostitutes to live with them and helped them get on their feet. Now retired for a decade, he is still admired by colleagues for pursuing tough cases and bullying prosecutors into taking them. From years of observing sex trafficking, he came to understand the narrative of the trade and how pimps terrorize girls into submission.

“The control is to the extent that she needs permission to do anything, like looking out the window,” Dick said recently from his home in Welches, Ore. “She goes out on the track and he comes by every so often to pick up trap, the money. She may be on what they call automatic — the pimp doesn’t have to be there, because he has the control.”

Rule No. 4: Never try to leave.

One night, after Mitchell threatened to kill her, Angie decided she wanted out. When he fell asleep in their motel room, she quietly got dressed and took the $1,500 wad next to his gun on the dresser.

“Then I ran over to McDonald’s, and I begged the shift manager to call me a cab,” Angie recalled. “The cab driver took his time getting back into the cab, and I saw Kevin coming toward the McDonald’s. I threw some 20s at the guy, I said, ‘Right, let’s go. That guy there, he’s going to kill me.’”

She got away, but months later, Mitchell caught up with her in a grocery store parking lot and beat her bloody.

It was then that Angie decided to go one step further and testify against him. In 1992, Mitchell was charged with compelling prostitution and rape in the third degree. He served 11 months in jail.

When Dick encouraged her to give up Earl, she refused. To this day, Angie won’t speak ill of her first pimp. He never raped or beat her and he always fed her well, she says.

Rule No. 5, Angie’s rule: Shed the shame.

One day at Cafe Omega, a gritty spot that catered to Portland’s all-hours crowd in the 1980s and 1990s, Angie told a friend her story, unaware that a woman was listening intently at a table nearby.

The woman later approached Angie and said she was a former prostitute herself, and invited Angie to move in with her family. Angie agreed and stayed with the woman’s family for a month before running away again.

“They were really religious, and I had a requirement to go to their church and share my life story,” Angie said. “It was, ‘Here is the girl we rescued. She used to be a prostitute.’ But I didn’t want everyone in the world knowing that I was a prostitute.”

She returned to the streets, selling herself in Seattle and Tacoma. As she approached her 16th birthday, though, she was exhausted.

When a social worker she knew reached out, Angie responded. She moved in with new foster parents who pushed her to graduate from high school and get a job.

Today her life is better, but it’s not perfect. She wrestles with bipolar disorder and the demons of her past.

To those who listen, she tells her story, starting with the pimp who stole her and then sold her for $100. She tells of the tenacious and warm-hearted detective who brought her a stuffed bear during a trial. She describes the tricks, the track and the tattoos on Sonja’s body. Those are imprints in her memory, building blocks to her present.

Isolde Raftery: 360-735-4546 or isolde.raftery@columbian.com.
"Your orgasm can no longer dictate my oppression"

Trisha Baptie
sam
chaotic good
 
Posts: 4391
Joined: Thu Dec 30, 2004 12:54 am


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