The Sex Business

Gangsters and criminals do get involved in the sex business in Spain. Dave had come up against them both as would-be partners and as adversaries in the past. Neither encounters had been long-lived and he and Saskia and their businesses were still standing without being involved in any illegal activity at all.

People trafficking is the issue always in the news with regard to the sex business but, other than at the very lowest end of the market, it really was not a major issue. And at the highest end of the business, working with the highest class escorts Malaga can supply, Dave and Saskia never really encountered it. Certainly the major criminal gangs did not take it seriously as an earner. There was a lot more money to be made moving a illegal immigrant and keeping them as a slave making counterfeit clothes and bags than there was keeping them as a sex slave.

In fact, the only reason the Camorra, Ndrangheta, or Mafia shipped girls across the Mediterranean or Adriatic was so that, as Misha Glenny explains in his book McMafia, so that they can throw them out of the boats filled with smuggled cigarettes so that the Coastguard chasing them stop and rescue the girls rather than pursuing them.

The sole exception to this is the Romanians, where the “Romeo Pimps” convince young girls that they are working as prostitutes just for a short time so that they and their “boyfriend” can go off and have a great life together with the wealth they have accumulated. Unfortunately, the “boyfriend” all too often moves onto the next victim and so on. But while some of these Romeos pay “tribute” to the Romanian gangs, most of them are just solo scum, working the vile scam on their own.

Dave had become an expert on identifying the Romanian girls who were being pimped in this way and making sure that their businesses never worked with them. And occasionally he had been known to encourage the offending and offensive Romeos to seek another line of work. In a different part of the world. Immediately.