Two members of Romanian Gheorghe O.'s gang arrested this week The challenged escort websites are now off the air. Clients of the ladies received a text message from the police.

THIS WEEK, the National Criminal Investigation Department flattened two websites with photos of naked ladies. Several arrests and searches followed. So what? However, the investigation involves much more than that. For a year the police delved into the hidden world of pay sex using far-reaching methods. Famous hotels along highways became the hidden domain of rock-hard criminals and their Eastern European sex slaves. Clients included: employees and businessmen, on the road for the boss. Numerous difficult moments when it came out that the investigators were observing them. And this week they also received a text message.

AMSTERDAM - This was not what the Romanian had expected. After a knock at the given room number, the door was opened not by a man in underpants, but by a young, pretty woman. Caroline's identification made everything clear. Police!

The day of the big operation, the detective smiled. "That bewilderment on her face... In the room the colleagues and the interpreter were waiting. What have you come to do? Nothing, some said. Others didn't beat around the bush, or reacted in a routine manner. Those had dealt with the police before."

Being ordered around by a police undercover; it's unpleasant for pimps, when trafficking turns out not to be trafficking. Especially when ladies from the "stock" tell them they are working under duress. Many times more unpleasant was it for the men who were observed at the hotels last year. In few families will the confrontation the husband had with the police have been discussed at length.

Team leader at the National Criminal Investigation Department Pel Timmer, talks about it matter-of-factly: "Paid sex is 150 euros. Of that, 75 euros is for the woman herself, who in turn has to pay 25 euros to the snatcher. The rest is for the pimp. But he also keeps the money for the woman, she only gets it after months."

The team leader should know. For months, all phone orders were listened to and noted. Then an observation team sprang into action, following the women and their drivers. As soon as the Eastern European women entered the hotels, they were followed unnoticed by a detective.

Then there was a neat wait at the hotel rooms. Painful things became as soon as the men left the room or hotel. They were then immediately accosted by detectives. "Good afternoon sir, police. What have you been doing inside?" said Timmer.

"We asked them if they had had paid sex. We also wanted to know if they had noticed things about these women." Denial was of little use. The ladies' orders were captured on a phone tap, as were customers' mobile numbers.

Photos

"We showed them pictures from the websites. You had picked this lady, right? Do you know that she works illegally as a prostitute? After taking down all their details, the gentlemen were allowed to go."

The world of escorts, net stockings, hotel rooms. It was hidden from the police for years. Led by prosecutor Warner ten Kate of the national prosecutor's office, the first major nationwide investigation into the structures behind it began in January 2010.

When prostitution was legalized, the sex industry sounded the alarm that illegal prostitutes would disappear into "the back rooms. But where were those back rooms?

That women not infrequently work under duress had already been revealed by other investigations, such as into the infamous pimp Saban Baran.

At the National Criminal Investigation Department, a group of ten investigators and detective experts, including Caroline and team chief Pel Timmer, bent over the question of where the illegal prostitutes were now working. Caroline: "We first looked at advertisements in newspapers and on the Internet. Gradually it became clear that there were roughly two ways of working. We wanted to visualize all the steps of that."

It is Tuesday evening, the day of a second major police action. At six in the morning, detectives and members of arrest teams were briefed in an office building in Amsterdam Zuid oost. In the presence of Ten Kate, the script was gone over. Several addresses will be raided. Police and justice want to make big hits in a few hours.

Arrests and house searches must be made, but specialists must also secure important servers at an Amsterdam computer company. There, two sites must be taken over; zuzana.com and pleasure-escort.nl . There is also a long list of customers' cell phone numbers. This was created by tapping all traffic on two escort sites for months, as well as the phone lines.

Ten Kate: "The goal is to work in an unorthodox way and to achieve as much effect as possible in a smart way." Later that morning, he will give the green light to an action that will have raised questions in many a household. He will have a text message sent to over 1,300 customers, and again in the afternoon: This number had contact with zuzana.com. This site supposedly offers victims of human trafficking.

In Lisse the suspect Marco H. is arrested, the administrator of the supply site for paid sex Zuzana, an online booking catalog with many large breasts and girls photoshopped into sex bombs. Raids followed in The Hague's Ypenburg neighborhood and Amsterdam's IJburg residential area. Main suspect is Dutchman Alex van de B., who founded the site. However, the criminal, who still has to serve four years in France, appears to have flown ... He is arrested two days later.

In each case, he worked with groups of women delivered to him from the Eastern Bloc, the investigators discovered. "First they worked for a week in Amsterdam. Then the group went on a trip," Timmer said. "Then they worked in Paris for a week, to continue on to Rome again. The women were introduced as former porn actresses and photo models. As the group left, another group of women arrived, working in the hotels for another week."

It is a preliminary climax after a year of digging and delving into the escort industry, searching for the secret "back rooms.

Chief of Police Ruud Bik, the top boss of the KLPD and the National Criminal Investigation Department, already announced the action in veiled terms on January 4. He expressed great concern that forced prostitution by Eastern European women had shifted to "large hotel chains."

Backroom

The backroom deals turned out to be less hindsight than predicted. In recent years, prostitution has simply taken place under the eyes of anyone who occasionally stops at a hotel along the highway. The customer is not a penniless man in long coat, but often a neatly dressed employee who takes an hour off on the road.

Caroline: "The two variants, mainly have to do with how the women are offered. In the first, women are 'ordered' and taken to hotels by appointment, where the customer has booked a room. Another way is that young women are actually accommodated themselves in hotel rooms or apartments. Clients are then sent to those locations on a schedule that allows women to complete as many clients as possible in a day."

The first police action attracted less attention than Tuesday's, but was no less important. That one focused on a gang of Romanians back in October. The team found out that Romanian Gheorghe O. from the town of Botesani repeatedly assembled loads of young women. Team leader Timmer: "It is a poor area, where young women can just earn 200 euros a month. Gheorghe O. kept telling them that they got that much with him already in one evening. Some knew what to do, others thought they were going to work in the hospitality industry."

Prosecutor Ten Kate: "If the economic situation is abused in such a way, we also see those women as victims of human trafficking."

Gheorghe O. worked with a flawless system. Using his BMW X6, he had a group of women brought to the Netherlands each time, where they were accommodated in hotels and later apartments. Timmer: "He presumably supplied women to the Netherlands and other countries in this way for years."

During observations, the gang members were captured on camera. So was their contact with the women. "Harrowing scenes," he says. "The women's earned money is kept by the pimps. Everything they need, such as food, drinks, condoms, towels, clothes and lingerie, is taken from their wages. Hardly anything is left over. We even saw one woman one summer day ask her pimp for money for an ice cream..."

The unpredictable travel behavior of the gang members, initially made it difficult to plan an action. But by early October, a trap could be set. Ten Kate: "One of the gang members got married, in front of the whole group in Botesani." It was to be a three-day wedding, according to tradition lavished with slivovice (plum gin).

Timmer: "This was a crucial moment. They were all together. On the third morning of the wedding, on Oct. 10, the entire group was lifted from their beds by a Romanian arrest team." Gheorghe O. and seven other gang members now await trial in their home country for human trafficking.

Then the final steps were taken to a Dutch perpetrator group, which was supplied with women in a similar way. They were marketed on the sites zuzana.com and pleasure-escort.nl. According to Timmer, the police now have statements not only from victims of human trafficking, who were used as sex slaves, but also from prostitutes.

In love

"Customers we interviewed provided a wealth of information. One man even made very detailed statements. He had fallen in love with a prostitute, so he knew everything about her. About how she had ended up in the Netherlands and was working there under duress." Also after the text message bomb among clients, dozens of men and some women reported this week.

"Some of the customers said they did not know the woman was a victim of criminals," Timmer said. "They had not asked for identification or a license. They were prioritizing their hormones." More arrests followed this week. The two owners of a series of sex sites, including pleasure-escort.nl, which provided ladies in hotels, were also handcuffed. Dutch entrepreneurs Arne S. and Stefan B. were also charged with cooperating in human trafficking.

"Incomprehensible," said their lawyer Mr. Serge Weening in a comment. "These are decent businessmen! One of them even studied literature. Precisely they don't want to know anything at all about forced prostitution. They form the largest escort business in our country. Their arrest is a big misunderstanding."

Team leader Pel Timmer says that there must be large sums of money, but that all payments are cash. "No large sums have been found anywhere. So it is drained every day. Even a year's investigation did not provide a complete picture. These criminals don't own anything on paper. Everything is veiled. We have more questions; above these people are undoubtedly criminals again ... We are now tackling it from the bottom up. In doing so, we are also affecting them."