The Best American Crime Writing (43 page)

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE)—part of the temporary governing body in Kosovo—estimates that around 200,000 women each year are trafficked from Eastern Europe and Central Asia, most of them as prostitutes. The value of their services has been estimated at between $7 and $12 billion. Even before the Kosovo war, human trafficking in Europe—much of it through the Balkans—was worth as much as
$4 billion a year. Bulgaria alone loses 10,000 women a year to the traffickers. Moldova—a country so poor that a quarter of the population has emigrated in search of work—reportedly supplies two-thirds of the prostitutes working in Kosovo. Romania is a distant runner-up, followed by Ukraine, Bulgaria, Albania, and Russia.

Prostitution became a mainstay of the criminal economy within months of NATO intervention in Kosovo. With 43,000 men stationed on military bases, and spending by international reconstruction groups making up 5 to 10 percent of Kosovo’s economy, the problem was bound to arise. There are now as many as a hundred brothels in Kosovo, each employing up to twenty women. Thousands more women are trafficked through Kosovo and on into Western Europe. In southern Macedonia, the town of Velesta has dozens of brothels under the control of a strongman named Leku, who has reportedly paid off the local police and operates in the open with complete impunity. When national authorities tried to crack down on his empire, he threatened to take to the hills and start his own private war. The highway south of the Macedonian town of Tetovo—long a hotbed of Albanian nationalism and organized crime—is lined with brothels as well.

Unable to use local women easily—they aren’t so poor, and their families would come looking for them—men such as Leku have turned to the hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants fleeing the former Soviet Union. Young women who have been promised innocent-sounding jobs in Western Europe, particularly Italy, are typically escorted by Serb or Bulgarian gangsters into Kosovo and Macedonia and then sold to Albanian pimps. By the time they realize what is going on, it is too late. Deprived of their passports, gang-raped, often forced to take drugs, and disoriented by lack of food and sleep, these women find themselves virtual prisoners of whatever brothel they wind up in.

“Once, Leku told a Bulgarian girl to take off her bra when she was dancing,” a Moldovan woman I will call Elena told me. Elena
had managed to escape the Macedonian Mafia after months of brutality and servitude. “She didn’t want to, because she was ashamed, so Leku took a belt from the bartender and started beating her. Then he made her go onstage bruised and bleeding and crying.” Another bar Elena worked at was owned by a man she knew as Ayed. “Ayed put three new girls in a car and made the rounds of his friends—they all took turns raping them. They made the girls do things they’d never done before because they were very young. We all lived in one room and slept on mattresses next to each other. There wasn’t enough room, so we had to sleep on our sides. We only ate once a day, and we had to beg toothpaste and soap from our clients. Ayed had a huge ring on his hand, which was shaped like a lion’s head. One day he started beating us one by one in the face.” According to Elena, if they fell down he kicked them, if they cried he beat them, if they looked at him he beat them, if they didn’t look at him he beat them.

“I learned about good and evil,” she says, “I saw so many evil people.”

After an hour and a half Erol still had not come out, so Valon decided to look for him. He walked into the hotel lobby and heard men talking in the hallway and was spotted by them as he slipped closer. They wanted to know who the hell his friends in the car were. “They’re from the United States,” Valon said. For some reason he added, “One of them is a basketball coach.”

That seemed to satisfy the thugs, who kicked him out and said Erol would be out in a few minutes. Erol emerged ten minutes later, smoking a cigarette and looking shaken. He got into the car and told Valon to get us out of there. “They found the tape recorder,” he said. “They had a lot of questions.” Valon pulled the car into the street, and we drove off through Ferizaj, keeping watch behind us to make sure no one was following. It was three in the
morning, and Ferizaj was completely deserted. Erol said they’d found the tape recorder when they patted him down outside Niki’s room, and five or six of them had gathered around and started yelling, demanding explanations. Erol said that it was just his tape recorder and that he took it everywhere with him.

They confiscated it and then wrote down his name from his passport. They were very angry and kept telling him not to fuck with them. “Listen,” one of the men had finally said. “Go in the room, finish your job for one hour, or you can go, right here and now.”

Erol screwed up his nerve and went into the room. There was one bed and a window with a narrow balcony and a shower but no toilet. Niki was sitting on the bed, and she started to undress when he walked in. “You don’t have to do that—I’m not here for that,” he said. “I just want to talk to you.”

She’d probably had stranger requests before—they all must have. He asked her where she was from and how she’d gotten here, and she became very serious and told her story. This is what Erol could remember of it on the drive back to Priština:

Niki was from Moldova; her father was dead, and she had lived with her mother. She’d been promised a good job by a recruiter in Moldova who was actually in league with the Mafia, and she wound up trafficked to Banja Luka. Banja Luka was hell on earth, she said. Every customer was drunk and many were violent—one even grabbed her belly-button ring and ripped it right out. A month ago she had been trafficked to Ferizaj, where she wound up at Europe 2000. She sought refuge in the Apaci. Tonight her previous “owner”—Beqiri—had come looking for her at the Apaci and said he was going to kill her if he didn’t get back her purchase price. She didn’t have the money, and neither did the owner of the Apaci. That was the argument we had witnessed. She was the girl they’d been arguing over.

“I like life very much. I’m too young to die,” Niki had told Erol. “I’m just eighteen years old.”

Erol asked her if she was free to go home to Moldova if she wanted. She said that she was, but then admitted that she didn’t actually have her passport. (In all likelihood, Beqiri did.) She wasn’t even sure that any of the $150 Erol had paid for her would wind up in her pocket, so he gave her all the money he had on him, a 10 deutsche mark note (about $5). On it he wrote, “For Niki, the most beautiful girl.” She gave him a cigarette lighter in return. His last question was whether she ever had feelings for the guys she was with, or were they all the same?

“Of course sometimes I have feelings,” she said. “I’m human.”

Erol told her he was sorry and said goodbye and walked out of the room.

The next day we went to the police station in Gnjilane to report what we’d seen. Not only was there plenty of evidence of trafficking and prostitution in Niki’s case, but there was reason to believe her life was in danger. The deputy police chief in Gnjilane was an American named Bill Greer, who quickly organized a group of Kosovar police to raid the Apaci. (U.N. police officers are training local Albanians—many of them taken from the ranks of the disarmed Kosovo Liberation Army—and Serbs in basic police procedure.) The newly trained cops crowded into Greer’s office and strapped on their guns and flak jackets while he explained through a translator: “We’re going to get a young lady who’s been threatened with being exterminated. She ran away from one pimp to the Apaci, and he came after her and demanded [$2,000] or she’d be killed.”

The owner of the Apaci, Sevdush Veseli, was well-known to the authorities. He’d already been detained for trafficking a young Romanian woman, but when it came time to make a statement to the judge, she was too frightened to repeat what she’d said earlier to the police, so they had to let him go. Veseli was a former member of the KLA who wasn’t known to be particularly violent, but Greer
wasn’t taking any chances. He sent half a dozen local police, backed up by a couple of U.N. officers, and they picked up reinforcements at the Ferizaj police station before bursting through the door at the Apaci. All they found was an old guy mopping the floor.

If Veseli hadn’t been tipped off before, he certainly knew something was up now. Our little escapade the night before couldn’t have escaped his notice, and he must have figured out that Niki had been the object of today’s raid. Between the police and Beqiri, she was causing him more problems than she could possibly be worth. That meant that, one way or another, he would probably try to get her off his hands. That afternoon Ali Osman, a Turkish police officer who headed the Trafficking and Prostitution Investigation Unit in Gnjilane, sent word to Veseli that he was to appear at the police station the following morning with all of his dancers.

Technically the Apaci was just a strip joint on the outskirts of Ferizaj. And technically the police could round up the employees anytime they wanted to check their visas and work papers. At nine the next morning, Teun and I showed up at the police station to watch the interrogation of a dozen or so women employed by Sevdush Veseli at the Apaci.

The women were seated in a small room, smoking and looking annoyed. Teun and I walked in, glanced around, and told Osman that Niki was not among them. That was no surprise. We went into Osman’s office; the next step was to question the women individually, where we could speak freely without the other girls or their bosses listening in. Not only might they know what happened to Niki, but some of them might want out. Those were the ones who could provide testimony of trafficking and prostitution at the Apaci, which was what Osman needed to put Veseli behind bars.

Since undercover investigations were not allowed at this time under the U.N. mandate, convicting someone like Veseli usually
depends on testimony from the prostitutes. It’s a delicate game, though. First there are plenty of prostitutes who—no matter how desperate their lives—have decided that anything is better than what they escaped from back home. Their pimp may be a violent alcoholic, but maybe their husband or father was, too, and at least here they have the possibility of making a little money. “You’re fighting against the most appalling economic conditions,” says Alison Jolly of the OSCE in Priština. “And one of the worst myths is that these women want to become prostitutes. I mean in a sense, yes, but how much of a choice is it when the alternative is to stand in a breadline trying to feed your child? You’re a paid slave, but you’re still a slave. I personally consider it a very clever ruse by the pimps to pay the women something. This is a recent development. These guys are very smart, and a little intimidation goes a long way.”

Even for the ones who are desperate to escape, though, making the leap into police custody is risky. To begin with, the pimps have convinced their prostitutes that the police will simply throw them in jail for prostitution or visa violations—which was true until U.N. regulations were recently established that overrode the Yugoslav Criminal Code. Furthermore, the women know that—since they were recruited back home—the Mafia network extends into the smallest villages of their home country. When a pimp promises to harm a prostitute or her family, it is not an idle threat.

The first woman they brought into Osman’s office was a short, dark-haired Moldovan who pretended barely to understand Serbian. She said she had come by taxi through Romania into Serbia, then across the internal border into Kosovo. She claimed she was just a stripper, not a prostitute, and made about $50 a month at the Apaci. “Tell her we are here to help her,” Osman said to the translator. “She has no problem with the police.” She said nothing, so Osman sent her out.

The next woman was Romanian, dressed in tight black pants, a purple spandex halter, and the same high-heeled white sandals as the previous girl. When she also claimed to be just a dancer, Osman told her that her owner had sold his girls to customers, had threatened them, had beaten them. She feigned surprise and said that her owner was very nice. “One day everything will change, you will see,” Osman told her. He was playing tough cop, but I could see concern softening his eyes. Maybe he had a teenage daughter back home. “And when it does, I may not be able to do anything.”

Finally a tall blond came in. I recognized her as the one who had sat with the American officer at the Apaci. She said that her name was Kristina and that she was from a small village in Moldova. She was wearing the same tight vinyl pants as the second woman but had different sandals and a lot less makeup. In the light of day she looked rougher, a more hardened version of her dance-floor self. I could see what she would look like as an old woman. She sat smirking with her legs spread and her feet cocked provocatively back on her high heels. She was smart and confident and said she spoke five languages well—all the countries she’d worked in. She said that she had come here by taxi from Moldova, and that her trip was paid for by a friend back home named Oleg. She had stayed in a house in Serbia for a while and then crossed the internal border into Kosovo two weeks ago.

“I heard about those houses with women waiting there,” Osman said. “People come from Kosovo to pick you out.” He pretended to be a buyer: “You, you, and you!”

“I don’t know anything about it,” Kristina said.

“I am sure you were trafficked. You were sold.”

“No.”

“Someone paid for you. Someone paid money for you.”

“Nyet.”

“Da.”

“Nyet.”

“Da
. You have no trouble with the police. Our job is to arrest the pimps, not you.”

“I am telling you the truth, sir.”

Before he let her go, Osman allowed me to ask her some questions. I described Niki and asked if she knew her. Kristina furrowed her brow in a parody of concentration and finally shook her head.

“Do you remember sitting at a table with an American officer at the back of the room two nights ago?”

“Yes.”

“Do you remember four men at a table sitting close to the stage?”

“No.”