Sunday Boston herald, pg 1
Craigslist or Craigslust? Hookers prowl family Web site
By O’Ryan Johnson/ Exclusive
Sunday, February 26, 2006
Scores of Boston-area hookers are using a major Internet site popular with soccer moms, apartment seekers and job hunters to post hundreds of daily pornographic ads for unbridled sex romps that can be set up within minutes.
A two-week Herald investigation of free “erotic services” ads on the craigslist.org Web site uncovered prostitutes shacked up in hotels, operating from Spartan apartments rented by pimps or willing to meet for “car dates” in parking lots. Fees ranged from $50 to $250.
“Craigslist has made it much easier for women to engage in this sort of business,” said Boston police Detective Sgt. Jimmy Fong, who monitors the site, one of the 35 busiest Web addresses on the planet. “The (working girls) now have the power to select who they want using modern technology.”
Eight women advertising sex on craigslist in the past two weeks were contacted by the Herald by phone or e-mail. Meetings were arranged in 15 to 30 minutes.
Three women used Hub hotels and one sought to park at the South Bay Plaza lot. They seemed to have varying levels of experience in the sex trade. When told upon meeting that the caller was a reporter, all but one of the women refused to be interviewed.
In East Boston, where a crackdown on prostitution has shut five bordellos, a trio of “young, sexy, and willing” women posted contact information on craigslist, offering Johns “the massage of a lifetime.” At a Meridian Street location, a slight woman in her 30s with a pockmarked face and dark hair answered the door to a dingy, barren apartment, smiled and identified herself as Reann.
Told she was speaking to a reporter, she consulted with her colleagues. An hour later a man drove up and whisked the three away in a 1991 Mercury Grand Marquis.
“Rick,” who posted a “review” of this brothel on craigslist, described his encounter in an e-mail to the Herald.
“She appeared to be under strict guidelines for time, yet she lost track of time,” he wrote. “She mentioned that she gave the money to ‘someone’ who paid for everything that she needed.”
Despite the deluge of pornographic images and explicit descriptions of fee-for-sex services offered in Boston and at 190 sites in all 50 states and 35 countries served by craigslist, the company’s CEO, Jim Buckmaster, insists “prostitution is strictly prohibited” on the site.
“When it comes to legal escort and ‘sensual massage’ services, craigslist respects First Amendment rights as well as the privacy rights of consenting adults,” he wrote in an e-mail to the Herald.
“And as far as any ‘moral judgment’ is concerned,” Buckmaster said, “we do not impose our own, but rather leave this to the greater wisdom of the craigslist community, who are empowered through our flagging system” to help police the site.
Gabriel Atchison, program director at the Women’s Center in Cambridge, called on craigslist users, who routinely praise the site as a feel-good place to trade furniture or recipes and hunt for jobs or housing in new cities, to urge the company to ban the practice.
“I see it as another form of exploitation,” she said. “People are adults, they can do what they want, but it shouldn’t be so easily accessible as it is over craigslist.”
Buckmaster defends the site - founded by Craig Newmark, a legendary San Francisco Internet pioneer - asserting that it is almost impossible to tell which ads are stepping over the line.
“(A)ny knowledgeable law enforcement officer will tell you it is difficult if not impossible to know for certain whether a given escort or sensual massage ad could be a front for illegal activities,” he said.
But Fong, a veteran vice detective, doesn’t buy the explanation. “I think they just say that as a way to cover themselves,” he said.
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