Getting Screwed (15 page)

Julie threw some cash on the table and pulled on her parka. “Let's see what's going on,” she said and hurried out of the restaurant, Patrina right behind her. (Jerry had left the restaurant before she started calling; he said he was going to buy a
CD
and would meet them at the office.) They turned down 49th Street, and the Mexican guy who owned Spoiled Brats, a tiny shop that sold stuffed animals, poked his head out the door and said casually, “There's a party going on up the street. You might want to go back.” Julie could see dozens of men clustered outside the entrance to the two buildings where her apartments were.

“If we turn around now, they'll notice,” Patrina whispered. “Put your hood up and keep walking.” So Julie threw her hood over her head and continued walking as if she owned the street, as if what was going down at 336 and 326 49th Street was no concern of hers. As they passed by, she could see the
FBI
and New York Police Department logos splashed across the back of the men's jackets, and she was sure they could hear her heart thundering in her chest. But none of them even glanced her way. She and Patrina kept walking until they reached the end of the block, and then they turned the corner. Julie collapsed against a wall, breathing heavily. It looked as though the Feds and New York's finest had teamed up to raid her business. They had, no doubt, already busted into the 46th Street office and her home on Long Island, maybe even the brothel on 35th Street.

As Julie was later to discover, the New York police had not forgotten the time she had asked their help in getting the two Russian sex workers away from traffickers. Indeed, when news of the raid on Julie's brothels hit the local papers, there was speculation from police sources that she was involved with trafficking Russian virgins. The
Daily News
reported that “authorities are investigating possible links to kidnapping and human smuggling in which children were brought to Julie for the
specific purpose of taking their virginity. . . . A source familiar with the case said the girls were of Russian descent.”
³²

Julie Moya was never charged with trafficking, but that didn't stop the media circus. That afternoon, all she could think about was that the moment she had long dreaded had finally, irrevocably, arrived. After calling Jerry and warning him off, Julie threw her cell phone away (she knew the
FBI
could track her by its
GPS
), grabbed a cab to her bank, where she withdrew $10,000 in cash, and bought a prepaid phone. She then hid out for a few days, meeting with her lawyer and sending her mother to collect clothing and other items, whatever was left after the raid on her Long Island home. She also parceled out some of her beloved pets to friends and relatives. Her older son, Tommy, took the two aging pit bulls she had rescued from animal shelters. Julie's younger brother took Gucci, her yellow-naped Amazon parrot, and she gave the two African grey parrots to a friend of hers who had a big aviary on Long Island and sold exotic birds. There was nothing she could do about Earl Grey, who was recovering from surgery, except to hope that the vet would take care of the old tomcat.

On January 31, four days after the raid, Julie Moya walked into the 7th Precinct on the Lower East Side, her lawyer by her side, to give herself up. As she later wrote on her blog, “It was a terrible time and it only got worse. . . .”

From Bad Laws to Bad Cops and Violence against Women

L
ike Julie Moya, Elle St. Claire remembers the months before 9/11 as the calm before the storm — but for very different reasons. By the summer of 2001, Elle was living openly in Worcester, Massachusetts, as a transgender single parent, raising two sons and making a name for herself in the local community. She volunteered with a parenting group at the school her sons attended and was active in a local antipoverty organization known as the Worcester Community Connections Coalition. The Worcester County District Attorney's Office had asked her to serve on an antigay bullying committee it had set up. A few folks had even suggested that she run for a position on the Worcester City Council. While some knew that she worked in the adult entertainment industry, modeling and doing films, she didn't advertise the fact that she was an escort.

Better yet, Elle was in love. She had recently become engaged to Carmen Rudy, a young woman who, like herself, was single and raising two children. Carmen carried an outsized zest for life within her deceptively petite 5'2" frame. One of nine children born to a French Canadian mother and a Puerto Rican father, she was an attractive woman with billowy black hair — “the wild child” of the family, according to her older sister, Jackie Rudy. “Carmen was a force of nature; she was the one who would try new things out,” says Jackie, who lives with her five children on the second floor of a dilapidated three-story row house in Worcester. “When she was a teenager, she started hanging out with the wrong friends, and they introduced her to heroin.”

Carmen married young (at age seventeen) but became addicted to heroin after losing her brother and best friend in separate car accidents. In time, the addiction destroyed her marriage and resulted in temporary loss of custody of her son and daughter to the state. But by the time she met Elle, in the spring of 2000, Carmen, then twenty-seven, had kicked her habit and regained custody of her children.

Carmen and Elle had recently moved their blended household into Elle's cramped two-bedroom apartment on Eastern Avenue, and Elle was working hard to expand her film business so that they could afford to move into a larger place — either that or find Carmen and her children some subsidized housing nearby. “Our kids weren't getting along well and I wanted to get them separated,” Elle recalls. “My apartment was a very small area and there was lots of clutter.”

In September 2001, Elle attended a meeting of the Worcester Community Connections Coalition and noticed that a top official with the city's Department of Social Services (
DSS
) was there. She decided to ask the woman about the possibility of subsidized housing for her fiancée. The bureaucrat's response filled Elle with foreboding. “When I mentioned Carmen's name, she smirked and said [Carmen] wouldn't be needing any housing,” Elle recalls. When asked why, the
DSS
official told Elle that Carmen was going to lose custody of her children. Elle was shocked. “For what?” she asked. “I know she's had issues in the past, but she's doing great now. She's clean and going to a methadone clinic, and she's in counseling.” The woman responded, “Oh, she has a long history.” She paused and then said, “Trust me, you're going to lose your kids too.”

The
DSS
official was right. In January 2002, state officials accompanied by police picked up Carmen's ten- and twelve-year-old children at Belmont Elementary School and took them into state custody. Carmen and Elle began fighting to get them back, but three months later, while Elle was on a business trip to Los Angeles, trying to find investors for her film production business, her own two sons, then nine and eleven, were taken away the same way.
DSS
officials levied a string of accusations against Elle — all of them unsubstantiated and later dropped. During the protracted battle over custody, Elle's sons were bounced back and forth
between their maternal and paternal grandparents and a series of foster homes. After a five-year battle, the state dropped all charges against Elle and opened the path for her to regain custody. But by then, the boys had embarked on new lives and chose to stay with their grandparents.

Elle's sons are now grown and have a close relationship with her, especially the older son, T.J., who moved back in with Elle for a time when he was eighteen. (When I met T.J. in 2010, he said he had no problems with Elle's transgender identity or her sex work, although he still refers to her as his father. “I think my dad is a wonderful parent. He's nice and easy to talk to. I can go to him about problems. If I need help with school, he helps me,” T.J. said. “My dad is there for me.”)

To this day, Elle believes the state's action against her and Carmen was motivated by politics and gender. “I was becoming a strong political figure in Worcester, and I believe that was the reason I was targeted,” she says.

For Carmen, the loss of her children proved devastating. As both Elle and Jackie Rudy recall, Carmen slipped back into using drugs, and by August of 2002, Elle had had enough. She has a rare blood platelet disorder that causes her blood to clot and that, if left untreated, can be deadly. After being diagnosed with the condition while hospitalized the previous October, Elle had been prescribed medication to thin her blood, which she initially self-injected using hypodermic needles.

“I caught [Carmen] stealing my shots, emptying them out, and selling them to drug addicts as needles so she could raise money on the sly to get drugs herself,” Elle says. “I didn't need the meds anymore; I was keeping them on hand and taking pills. The thing is that every hypothermic needle is marked and tagged, so that's how I discovered my needles were ending up on the street.”

Elle confronted Carmen and ended up throwing her out. “I had tried everything I could to get her clean again, but nothing was working,” she says. “It broke my heart, but I had to do it.” Carmen went to live with friends, but Elle says they were in touch almost every day. Then in late September 2002, Carmen Rudy suddenly disappeared. She was twenty-nine years old. Elle knew immediately that something was wrong.

“She disappeared on a Monday, and she was supposed to give me a call that day. She didn't, and I called the house where she was staying with roommates and they said she would call me when she got back,” Elle says. “Tuesday was the first day I had visitation with my children after they had been removed, and she was supposed to meet up with me in downtown Worcester and be with me and my kids. She never showed up. We had a court date on Wednesday [on the custody issue], and she never showed. I knew without a shadow of a doubt that something had happened to her.”

The next day, Elle went to the police station to report Carmen as a missing person, but the police refused to take her statement or allow her to file a report. They told her that only relatives could file a missing person report. So Elle called Jackie Rudy, who had remained close to Carmen. According to Jackie, Elle drove her to the police station, where she filed a missing person report. Jackie too sensed something was wrong. Carmen, she says, never went four days without talking to her. “I gave the police a picture of Carmen, but they didn't question me about her disappearance,” Rudy says. “They didn't question anyone. They didn't care.”

Frustrated with the police's seeming indifference to Carmen's fate, Elle embarked on her own search for her. She knocked on doors, went to shelters and hospitals around the city, and talked to people who knew Carmen. That's when she learned that her former fiancée had been on the stroll — to earn money to feed her drug habit. Elle even put up flyers asking people to contact her if they had seen Carmen before September 25, 2002, the day she disappeared.

“I tracked her to her last movements, right when she got into a vehicle,” Elle recalls. “That's when my trail went cold.”

IT'S THE WEEK BEFORE
Thanksgiving, and we're sitting at Elle's dining room table, which is dressed up with a green and red Christmas tablecloth and matching napkins. Elle is wearing a snug-fitting gray-flannel
shirt and jeans. She's carefully made up with lipstick and eye makeup that accentuates her gray-green eyes. She sips beer from a tall Coors can and seems lost in her memories. In the weeks after Carmen went missing, she says, “I was so angry and filled with rage, I blocked out a lot.”

In September 2003, a year after her disappearance, Carmen Rudy's skeletal remains were found buried in the woods behind a private boys' school in Marlboro, Massachusetts, about twenty miles northeast of Worcester. Five days later, the remains of another young woman, Betzaida Montalvo, also twenty-nine, were found a hundred yards from Carmen Rudy's grave. A reporter for the
Metro News,
which covers Marlboro and surrounding towns, interviewed John Kelly, a forensic specialist, who speculated that a serial killer might be at work. As Kelly noted, both Rudy and Montalvo fit a specific profile: they were young, single Hispanic mothers who had taken to selling sex on the streets of Worcester to feed drug habits. Despite the press coverage, however, police were reluctant to acknowledge the existence of a serial killer. In 2004, the bodies of two more young women from Worcester were discovered, one of which had been taken across the border and dumped in a trash can in York, Maine. That brought the
FBI
into the case, and local law enforcement finally said the S-word.

“You have to understand, if the police come out and utter these words, ‘serial killer,' here comes the press, and when the press comes in, there is pressure to solve the case,” says Kelly, a forensic social worker and the president of System to Apprehend Lethal Killers, or
STALK
, a nonprofit New Jersey–based organization that profiles suspected serial killers. “A lot of law enforcement agencies aren't interested in having that kind of pressure put on them.”

Kelly and others say that many police agencies in the United States simply don't put a lot of resources into solving the murders of sex workers. “The way a lot of local law enforcement [officials] look at it, [the women] are living a high-risk lifestyle. They're out there doing drugs and selling themselves, so [violence] is all part of that game,” Kelly says. “There's a double standard here. If four hookers are found dead down
the street, they are not going to get the same attention as a lily-white housewife who has disappeared in suburbia. If that happens, [the police] are going to have helicopters up and dogs beating the bushes.”

Sex workers have long been viewed as disposable not only by law enforcement but also by society as a whole, which often turns its back on prostitutes, particularly streetwalkers. Such official indifference may explain why prostitutes are more likely to be killed than any other set of women ever studied, according to a 2006 report published in the
Journal of Forensic Sciences.
The researchers found that sex workers were killed primarily by clients. Equally chilling, these researchers found that serial killers accounted for up to 35 percent of all prostitute homicides.
¹

A 2004 study, which tracked homicides from 1981 to 1990 and was published in the
American Journal of Epidemiology,
found that, on average, 124 sex workers were murdered each year in the United States.
²
This study concluded that the homicide rate for prostitutes in the United States is fifty-one times higher than that for the next most dangerous occupation — working in a liquor store.
³

Conservative groups argue that prostitution itself is what causes this level of violence, but research shows that the profession is not inherently violent. A number of studies show that indoor sex workers are much less likely than streetwalkers to be targets of violence. Indeed, a 2007 British study of 135 indoor prostitutes found that 78 percent of them
never
experienced violence.
⁴
When a Canadian researcher surveyed thirty-nine indoor sex workers who had never worked the street, she found that the majority of women (63 percent) had not experienced any violence while working in the sex industry.
⁵
Similarly, in a study of 772 sex workers in New Zealand, conducted after prostitution was decriminalized in that country in 2003, the risk of violence was not perceived to be an issue among indoor sex workers, “as most had never experienced violence.”
⁶

Most serial killers do not target women in general; they focus on street prostitutes. Gary Ridgway, for example, was the notorious Green River killer, who admitted to killing forty-eight women (most of them streetwalkers) in Washington State and may have killed dozens more. In his statement of guilt in 2003, he said, “I picked prostitutes as victims
because they were easy to pick up without being noticed. I knew they would not be reported missing right away and might never be reported missing. I picked prostitutes because I thought I could kill as many of them as I wanted without getting caught.”