Amsterdam: bridges and bikes in the red light district.
Walking through Amsterdam’s red light district, we reminisced about the three months we lived at the Krasnapolsky, around the corner. As we wandered, Bob wondered if some of the prostitutes on display behind windows and glass doors actually liked their work. Maybe they felt desired and good about themselves.
I said that that was a totally male fantasy view, and that the women must feel demoralized and dehumanized, having to be intimate with drunken, stinky strangers for pittance, and worse. And on top of that, most of them were slaves to pimps and could barely pay off their “expenses.”
We were both surprised at how great looking some of the girls were. I decided to try to talk to one, a perfect Barbie doll in a white micro-bikini with long blonde hair, freckles, and a friendly smile. When I approached her glass door, she opened it and said sure, we could talk. She invited me in, but I just stayed in the doorway. She was Dutch, 28ish, and spoke perfect and smart English, like most Dutch. She said she did this work because she liked it, and the others who didn’t like it were just stupid. She said there’s always a way out, people to help, safe places to go.
So Bob was right. At least one of these women liked her job.
Amsterdam red light district.
After I left, Barbie stuck her head out of her door to call to a good looking man in a group: “I want you, pretty boy.” The man went to her door and talked for a while, then left. We meandered. A block away, Bob stopped the man and asked (in German) why he didn’t go in. He said she was too expensive. It was 50 euros ($65) to go in, then extra. I imagine that means a 50-euro cover charge, then a menu depending on what you want, which could get expensive. But as I was completely wrong about the woman’s attitude about her job, I’m probably just as wrong about the pricing.
During dinner (Malaysian) Bob wondered if Barbie would allow him to take a picture of me next to her. I didn’t want a picture like that, but finally agreed to do it if she’d allow it. I felt safe in that, thinking that she wouldn’t. After dinner, we went back to her doorway but her curtain was closed. We waited for a while, then I finally went up to the dark-haired girl behind the next glass door of the same house. I asked if the thin blonde was still around or if she’d left. Sure, the other one said, and called “Sabrina, a frau for you!”
A man left through the Barbie doll’s door and the doll herself appeared in her white micro-bikini with a spray bottle of disinfectant in her hand. I beckoned Bob over to make the request for his photo, because I didn’t really want it. He started to introduce himself when she suddenly lit up and said she’s seen him on television. “You’re great!” she said. But no! No photos. She had allowed a woman to film her once from the neck down, but the woman filmed her face and it was shown on ABC. Her American regulars told her about it. Bob asked, isn’t that good for business? No, she said, she has family. She doesn’t want to be filmed.
A pickpocket in Barcelona uses a newspaper to hide his steal. We videotaped with a hidden camera.
Message to Telsta executive pickpocket victim: don’t beat yourself up. It happens to lots of visitors to Barcelona. So many, that events are starting to flee Barcelona for safer cities.
A doctor told us he had just spent six days in Barcelona at a pathology conference. One of his colleagues had her passport stolen and when she went to the embassy, fourteen other conference attendees were there reporting thefts. That’s typical.
Almost a year ago, Yannick Laclau wrote that Barcelona was close to losing the Mobile World Congress, partly because of the high level of street crime in the city. The convention organizers gave Barcelona another shot, and this year’s Congress just ended there. Yeah, there were thefts. No surprise.
A pickpocket at work in Barcelona.
But among the many items stolen by pickpockets was something the entire Windows world was waiting for: the working demo of Windows Mobile 6.5. It was lifted right out of the pocket of the Australian telephone company executive who was testing it. But really, it could have happened to anyone.
Or could it? With its top secret, unreleased, mobile operating system, the one that’s supposed to crush the iPhone with its Windows Marketplace fake AppStore and copycat touch screen, the phone was a hot property. I personally know any number of thieves in Barcelona who would consider it a fun challenge, albeit an easy one, to target a specific item. Presented properly, one could probably hire the unwitting pickpocket to steal the thing, then hand it over over for little more than he guesses is its street price. I’d probably recruit Kharem, or Plaid (about whom I’ve not yet written), or the swift-swiper.
Pickpockets often work in pairs, like these two in Barcelona. The newspaper is a tool, under which they hide their moves, as in the photo above.
Stranger things have happened. Like the time Bob gave some tourist safety talks to police and security groups in an unmentionable Spanish-speaking country. Of course he also demonstrated his pickpocketing skills. At dinner afterward, the chief of presidential security whispered to Bob about a visiting Colombian drug lord known for ordering ruthless murders. He actually asked Bob to pickpocket the gangster! They wanted him to steal his passport. There were 19 at the dinner table that night. It was pretty easy for us to grab our driver and slip away quietly.
If you’ve been to Europe, you’ve no doubt had to walk a wide berth around a sheetful of counterfeit handbags laid out on the street. They cause especially annoying bottlenecks in Venice, where the streets are narrow. And of course they draw crowds, furthering the nuisance. You see the African peddlers, too, grabbing up the four corners of their sheets and darting around corners to hide from police.
Bob and I have often wondered why cities can’t get rid of them; but of course, they could. We wonder why stores like Prada allow counterfeits to be sold right outside their doors. And I’ve always assumed the fakes are cheap copies from China.
Reading Gomorrah has opened my eyes. Here’s how the author, Roberto Saviano, describes the high-fashion factory business in and around Naples, Italy.
Factories are small, with about ten employees, often in cramped, poorly lit quarters. In apartments, the backs of stores, any usable space. Even stairwells and hallways. Factories employ highly skilled workers, as sewing is the specialty of the area.
Big fashion houses announce an auction of jobs to factory owners. Interested invitees show up at the time and place. A fashion house rep describes the job: the exact description of the item to be sewn and the number needed.
No shortage of interested customers.
A factory owner bids on the job by stating a price and the number of days he needs to complete the job. Other owners best the bid, to a certain extent. The winning bid does not win. Instead, all interested (and present) factory owners who’d like to participate under the winning terms, are given, without charge, enough material to complete the job. The factory that completes the job and presents a quality product, is paid. The others are not.
A factory that consistently takes material without ever making the time and quality standards is soon excluded from bidding.
The completed items made by unpaid factories are put on the market. Some get brand names slapped on them, some don’t. Some are sold as authentic, some as counterfeits, some with unknown labels. Some are sold on the streets, some go into local shops, many are exported around the world.
The fashion houses allow this. It’s the way of the industry. It goes for shoes and clothing as well as handbags.
This is all according to Saviano. I’m not finished with the book. Perhaps he’ll reveal a new twist. So far, what he’s described is all Camorra business. On the street, though, the clever Chinese get the credit. Or the blame.
For years, Bob and I have enjoyed shopping in the small boutiques of Naples. We find gorgeous clothes, especially suits, of exceptional fit and quality at ridiculous prices. The labels usually have funny names, like “Alda Mama,” and the shops are gone a year later, but others sprout up in their places. We’ve always been delighted with our purchases in Naples, but had no idea why such fine clothing was sold so cheaply. Now I think I understand why.
I remember when Bob and I first became aware of the extent of Camorra influence in and around Naples. When we innocently asked a shopkeeper about them, he raised a finger and said “Shhh. We don’t talk about the Camorra. We only whisper.”
My previous article about Gomorrah and our snooping among the Camorra crime family in Italy is here.
52-Pickup—Las Vegas police are suddenly, aggressively, picking up prostitutes in the “resort corridor” of the city. Armed with a deck—or a list, anyway—of our “50 most prolific prostitutes,” vice cops nabbed almost half of them in the first two weeks of the initiative.
Meanwhile, Las Vegas promotes sex, women, and “anything goes” in its siren call to visitors.
Meanwhile, the talks go on about legalizing, or at least decriminalizing, prostitution in Vegas, as in 10 out of our 16 counties.
What is Vegas if not one big hypocritical contradiction? Prostitution creates a “bad image for Las Vegas,” says Metro Vice Lt. Karen Hughes. What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas, beckon the ads. Barbara Brents, a sociology professor at UNLV, said it best: “It seems pretty hypocritical to me to have an economy based on sexualizing women and then to come down on the women when police want to make it seem like they’re enforcing the law.”
Aren’t there better things for Las Vegas Metropolitan Police to do? Eastern Europeans have invaded and are having a heyday with fraud and id theft. Home invasions are on the rise, too, and are non-consensual, unlike prostitution.
In the Las Vegas Review Journal’s Sunday cover story this past weekend, Hughes said “it’s time to stop the revolving door of prostitution-related arrests, especially when those arrests involve ‘trick rolls.'” Well of course, arrest thieves! Whether it’s a pickpocket, or a prostitute who empties her sleeping client’s wallet, book ’em.
Hughes goes on to say they “want to minimize opportunities for prostitutes to be aggressive with the tourists and with men who aren’t interested in that.” Aggressive sales tactics are annoying, I agree. I particularly detest the loud recorded radio-style ads blasted through hotel speakers onto the Strip. I’m not fond of the hundreds (it seems) of Mexican men and women (they are all Mexican, and they all wear earphones) who shove escort ads at passers-by, whether they’re interested or not. They create an awful lot of litter, too. And I’m especially irked by the saleskids in the malls who accost passers-by with questions meant to engage, meant to stop a person to create an opportunity for a sales pitch.
Oh, and it’s okay to aggressively solicit porn stars on huge, well-lit billboards.
I haven’t done a survey, but I bet a large proportion of our visitors enjoy temporarily flirting with the naughtiness Vegas cooked up. They can be momentary voyeurs, or daring participants, wannabes, or shrinking lurkers, aghast but rapt. We know one thing: trying to appeal to the family crowd didn’t work, and isn’t what Vegas wants.
Why not legalize prostitution? No one need buy the product unless it’s wanted. Legalize brothels, and no one need see the product unless they want it. It would end trick-rolls. It would be safe for the working girl and safe for the customer. Our mayor, who won’t publicly “advocate it,” says a Little Amsterdam red-light district in Vegas would generate hundreds of millions of dollars for the city.
Otherwise, I’ve got an idea for the pimps. Leave the girls at home. Keep them off the streets, where they’ll just be arrested. Put them in front of a web cam, and show your iPod or iPhone to potential clients. Call her on your cellphone and introduce her to the john. Let them speak. Let her stay safe (and warm, or cool), while you do the soliciting. Just until prostitution is legalized.
There’s no question that Las Vegas attracts an upside-down bell curve of residents, no matter what scale one uses for measurement. We have a lot of gamblers, drunks, deadbeats, quick-buck-artists (or wannabes), fraudsters, greedsters, and lowlifes. We have transients, dreamers, and losers. We have a high ratio of service personnel to professionals, making our population quite unlike other cities. Not too many intellectuals choose to live in Las Vegas.
So I wasn’t surprised to see a billboard showing a naked hunk (strategically held box in hand), offering $500 to “show us your package.” Another billboard shows a sexy-chick, not unlike the “gentlemen’s club” billboards all over town, but its headline is “Co-Stars Needed. Earn $500 tonight.” Another says “Get Tugged. Get $1000. The Las Vegas Review Journal published a lengthy article about this public pitch for future porn stars, complete with video.
Such a Vegas story. No wonder most people don’t want to raise their families here. Children grow up with billboards and taxi ads showing suggestive near-nudity, Cirque du Soleil is the dominant cultural activity, and the phonebook has color pages of “entertainers.”
I’ve known my fair share of people in alt jobs here in Vegas. I used to have a friend in the 900-number business. On a tour of his phone-sex factory floor, he explained that he liked to hire the handicapped, the overweight, and the ugly. He was no altruistic hero; he simply found that these employees made him more money in the phone-sex business. After all, he told us, most of the men calling in wanted compassion more than passion, and empathy above eroticism. To maximize minutes on the line, the callers had to feel heard and understood.
This fascinating, off-the-charts man, this friend we long-ago lost touch with, had let me read a book he’d written. I don’t recall its title, or know if it was ever published. The book was an argument against marriage and a lesson in how to find, and write a “modular contract” for, a mistress. His experience had taught him, he told us, that a man is better off defining his expectations and paying a woman to fulfill them, than living locked in blind hope of compatibility and paying after the fact in support and settlement. His modular contract was meant to be renegotiated once or twice a year to both parties’ satisfaction, pay adjusted.
Over the years of our friendship, we met a series of his mistresses. I particularly remember “Miss Kitty” and “Peaches.” Our friend advertised for his women in the jobs sections of newspaper classifieds. High pay, odd work hours, no skills or experience necessary. And no baggage. He wanted women who’d hit bottom, had no place to go. No kids. No family. He interviewed the applicants with brutal honesty. His demands included renaming the woman, choosing her clothing (sleazy—which he bought for her), and her undivided attention to him during her working hours. During the years that we knew him, and now, after hearing an update from a mutual friend, I don’t think that he found any more happiness than ordinary married folks (divorced or not).
I used to live in a townhouse in Las Vegas, where my next door neighbor was a prostitute. Uh… entertainer. When she went out she’d turn on her answering machine, but she must not have realized how loud it’s volume was. We heard all her messages. “Hey baby, I’m coming into town tonight…” etc. I wouldn’t say we were friends, but enough that she gave me a key to go in and feed her cat when she went away for a few weeks. One time, her brother, a stranger to me, showed up at my door, begging for cash. I gave him $20, out of fear. A few months later, when my neighbor was out of town again, she called me and asked me to go in and see what was missing. She’d just been tipped off that her brother had burglarized her house. He had.
I have other interesting Vegas friends with odd jobs. One runs a porn site. One started AmericanLowlife.com, a swingers social networking site. If you live in Vegas, you meet these sorts. I like odd people.
I made 105 takeoffs and landings during the calendar year. I stayed 162 nights in beds not my own or on planes. A record low for the past few years; probably for the past 15 years, except for 1996 and 1997, when we had a couple of very long-term gigs (and almost grew roots).
This is good, and by design. Although Bob and I still love travel, I’ve felt the urge to indulge my homebodiness more: to enjoy our home, cook, entertain, and get things done that can’t be done on the road. So we’ve made more trips: more domestic, fewer international. That means fewer flight segments per trip and fewer hours in the air. It’s still a lot, though.
2007 had 115 take-offs and landings and 176 nights away from home.
2006 had 117 flights and 184 hotel nights.
199 hotel nights in 2005; 222 in 2004.
I’m not counting any prior years, but I think they were higher still.
I wonder if Bob and I should have bodyguards, like Roberto Saviano does. We, like Saviano, write about and expose the Camorra, Naples’ infamous mafia. The Camorra is not a crime family to fool with. If they don’t like you, they just kill you. Even if they do like you, because you’re just a tourist with money to spend (or have stolen), you might step in front of a flying bullet. These things happen in Naples.
Robert Saviano wrote the book Gomorrah, about the Camorra, in 2007. It’s been made into a film, which opens in the U.S. this week. Since publishing his book, Saviano has been housebound, despite living with a security detail. “I have not been able to go for a walk, go to a bookstore, to the cinema, to the theatre. Or even just grocery shopping,” he told The Wall Street Journal.
Quartieri Spagnoli
As thiefhunters, Bob and I have been mixing with the criminal element in Naples since 1993. I don’t remember how much we knew about the Camorra in the beginning of our research there. We knew a little, for sure, but not how ruthless they are, not how deep their tentacles reach. We should have been more scared. I mean, on our very first visit we got mugged. That experience left a lasting legacy with me: I still get a chill every time I hear motor-scooter buzzing behind me.
My scientifically-unfounded assumption is that pickpockets in Naples are low-level Camorra members. They steal right in front of police officers, who are also in on the game. About young gang members, a local says “they steal for money,” and “they shoot like it’s a video game.” In Naples, everyone’s part of the system. If higher-ups get word that we’re in town, will they be intrigued and want to talk? Might they show up at our door and threaten us? Will our rooms be broken into and equipment stolen? Will we be mugged again? A bone or two broken, just so we get the message? Am I a hysteric with a rich imagination? The truth is, Naples is dangerous. Not too dangerous for the ordinary visitor, but what about one who goes snooping about in mafia business? One who wants to expose the city’s dirty little secrets?
Port and commercial district of Naples
The Camorra
In Naples, everything is connected to the syndicate. Even if you’re not part of it, you pay up. In Rome, we met the owner of a men’s clothing store who told us how her Naples shop was destroyed and how they were extorted and threatened there until they closed up shop and fled to Rome. She cried as she told us this.
Shopkeepers in Naples pay about €1,000 ($1,300) a month as “protection;” supermarket managers pay about €3,000 a month. A report by the Italian retailers’ association Confesercenti, published last week, said organized crime had become Italy’s biggest industry.
The Confesercenti report estimated that organised crime groups take in 30 billion [euros] a year from the protection racket alone, a phenomenon that affects 160,000 businesses or 20% of all shops in Italy.
The extortion plague is particularly prevalent in the south. In the Sicilian towns of Palermo and Catania 80% of shops pay protection money. The figure slips to 70% across the water in Reggio Calabria and to 50% in Naples, although in some of the rundown suburbs of that city absolutely everyone pays.
Quartieri Spagnoli would be one of those rundown suburbs.
Another form of thievery in Naples is Rolex theft. It happens to any non-mafia member who dares to flash the easily identifiable status symbol in the city. Bob and I have spoken to countless victims, including Napolitanos (but mostly visitors). We’ve been to the home of the Rolex thieves, quivering at the doorstep as their pit bulls growled, too scared to film even with hidden cameras. Greetings, Camorra. We’re the Arnos!
Two thieves on scooters corner Bob in Quartieri Spagnoli
Closely related to Rolex theft, and possibly everything else going on in Naples, is the drug business. I remember a police officer we often met with in Barcelona ten years ago. He was Italian, and specialized in recognizing mafia bosses who’d had plastic surgery to change their appearance. He was intrigued with our work, and facilitated one of our important interviews with gypsy pickpockets in Barcelona. At the time, Bob and I didn’t understand why an Italian police officer with his knowledge-base would be working in Spain.
Now we read that a Camorra godfather and his henchman were captured in Madrid two weeks ago. “Neapolitan organised crime has created logistical bases in several major Spanish cities,” a Naples military police official said. They’re partnering with Colombian cartels in the cocaine business, stationed in Spain, Europe’s main welcome mat for drugs. Saviano, the author, says that “Spain is considered by many mafiosi as the best place to hide without interrupting their activities.” Seems that they were doing more than just hiding. Spain is wisening up though, having arrested many suspected Camorra members in the past few months, including a Camorra boss in Barcelona.
When police searched the hideouts of three arrested Comorra members near Naples a few months ago, they “found Carabinieri outfits and other disguises.” This first makes me think of “pseudo cops,” those who commit crimes while pretending to be police; then I think real cops, members of both the mafia and the police; and then I think dead cops. Of course there are endless uses for a police uniform if you’re a criminal.
Funiculi, funiculaaaaah….
How is it all related? We’re not mafia experts; I’d hate for us to step on the wrong toes, ask the wrong question, or peek around the wrong corner. Frankly, research in Naples scares me. When it goes well, it’s extremely exciting. If it goes wrong, how wrong can it go?Â
Why is crime in Naples allowed to flourish? I used to wonder this. I used to be amazed that it went on and on. If Bob and I could see it, surely the police and politicians could see it, too. Now, of course, I realize that it’s an integral part of the economics and politics of the city. It’s not meant to go away. Hopefully the terrible violence of the past few years is a temporary symptom. But the theft, the graft, the drugs, extortion, money-laundering, palm-greasing, conning and scamming—they’re all art forms. They’re tradition. The way of life. It’s unique among modern countries. Something you might expect to find in the third world, or in the old days. An anachronism.
Naples has much to brag about. Just look at all the types of thievery: The pickpocket. The pacco man (bait-and-switch). The Rolex snatcher. The scippatori (thieves who snatch from the back of a speeding scooter). The borseggio (bag snatcher). All against a rich backdrop of warmth and welcome, including the thieves who invite us for lunch or coffee (and insist on paying) (after they try to steal our wallet). They all have heart, soul, pride, shamelessness, and bravado. Luciano, whom we’ve known since 1998, raised his kids on pickpocketing, and now has five or six grandchildren. Salvatore, the star of our Playboy shoot, is quick to show pictures of his babies.
Charming but dangerous
Danger is a big part of Naples. Worry. Concern. Fear. Contrasted with the pleasures: the ambiance of the place, the charm, the incredible food, the picturesque beauty of the old city, the gravel-voiced men in the coffee bars, not to mention the great coffee, lemon granita on the street, multiple weekend wedding couples out for photo sessions within sight of all the thieves I’ve mentioned.
Bob and I became intimately involved with the Camorra the moment we stepped among the pickpockets of Napoli. As I’ve hinted above, and as the linked articles state, the mob is everywhere and touches everything. The Camorra was aware of us from the moment we hit the streets, at some level or other. How high up our presence is known, who knows? How long it will be tolerated, who knows? But if the mob bosses don’t want us sniffing around anymore, we’ll find out. We plunge ahead, but we acknowledge that we’re in real mafia-country, investigating family business. We might pretend ignorance, but we can’t ignore the danger. When you work on mob turf, you cannot ignore the mob.
When was the last time you were delighted by a public bus? This one, in Mykonos, did it for me. The driver had turned his domain into a garden with a dozen potted plants and three vases of flowers.
Among the basil, peppers, and marigolds, passengers planted feet with delicate precision while boarding. And if a leg should brush against the herbs, their fragrance, released, would waft throughout the bus. Throughout the front of the bus, at least.
Bus driver in a bus garden.
The bus driver smiled permission when I gestured with my camera, and beamed when I included him in the frame. He obviously liked decoration; he was decked out in quite a bit of jewelry, adorned with every accessory a self-respecting Greek man of his age could get away with.
A few days ago, a foreigner arrived at Mexico City’s international airport and exchanged money there. What he didn’t know was that he was being observed by lookouts. When he left the airport, his car was followed by two others. He was forced off the road and approached by gunmen, who simply shot him in the head when he resisted their demand for the cash.
By now everyone knows that Mexico has become a risky destination, thanks to drug gangs and their brutal operations. Police officers have been steadily targeted by the gangs, and are being killed from the top ranks to the bottom in scary numbers I can’t quote.
Last year, the director of the federal police division monitoring trafficking and contraband was killed, along with his bodyguard. So were other top police officials, including the head of Mexico City’s anti-kidnapping unit, and the director of national police operations against drug traffickers.
Little girls in Mexico playing with bottle caps.
All of Mexico is dangerous now, from the capital city to the most popular resort towns. Acapulco (the city in which Bob and I met), is now called a “violent Mexican resort.”
Tourists to Mexico are in the middle of it all. They are perceived to have cash: either on them, accessible by ATM, or available as ransom.
Mexican police say that the drug gangs now post lookouts at the airport money-exchange booths. The lookouts phone their colleagues outside the airport, who rob the visitors as they leave.
If an ATM must be used, it should be accessed only during the business day at large protected facilities (preferably inside commercial establishments, rather than at glass-enclosed, highly visible ATMs on streets).
About Mexico City specifically, the State Department suggests:
Arriving travelers who need to obtain pesos at the airport should use the exchange counters or ATMs in the arrival/departure gate area, where access is restricted, rather than changing money after passing through Customs, where they can be observed by criminals.
It’s easy and common for criminal gangs to recruit low-level airport employees as conspirators. I wouldn’t feel much safer in the “secure” arrival/departure gate areas.
Mexican citizens have long been the targets of express kidnapping and carjacking, along with the usual burglaries and robberies. Tourists have had to be alert to pickpockets, drink-druggers, taxi-robberies, and psuedo-cops.
Seeking answers, or shared experiences: On a first class cross-country flight last weekend, the trackpad of Bob’s MacBook Air refused to work. His cursor moved erratically or not at all, or opened contextual menus unasked. He turned off his wifi antenna and made sure bluetooth was off. He restarted. He checked his trackpad prefs. No help.
What worked was raising the laptop 24 or so inches into the air. There, the trackpad worked normally. It also functioned well about a foot below laplevel. Meanwhile, the trackpad on my four-year-old PowerBook was fine in any position, including in Bob’s dead zone.
We were on a Boing 737, row 4, Bob in the aisle seat, if that matters. There was a/c power in the seats, and we were plugged in. We’ve used laptops on airplanes for decades, with and without power, in all cabin classes. This MacBook Air has worked flawlessly on about 30 previous flights.
On the return trip two days later, we had aisle and window seats in row 1 on another B737. Same issue. Bob’s troublesome area ranged from laplevel to tray-table height, with a bad buffer of a foot or so above and below. Again, he was on the aisle.
The Air’s cursor moved normally while on my lap in the window seat, and my machine worked fine in all of Bob’s territory. We did not get up and change seats in order to complete experimentation—perhaps the cause was a combination of Bob’s body on the aisle.
