Slave Girl (15 page)

My first real love affair – the first time I had given myself totally to anyone or anything in my 19 years on the planet – was to this chemical outcome of heating baking soda and powder cocaine in a cheap kitchen bowl. Once I had experienced the utter oblivion of crack I became its helpless slave.

How long till the running boy brings my next rock? What do I have to do to get enough guilders to pay for it? Oh, I’d have done anything –
did
do anything just to taste the sweet forgiveness of the fumes flowing through the stem of the crack pipe. I never earned enough, of course. Crack is such a demanding mistress that I could never do enough punters – con them into enough tips – to pay for my habit. But Gregor was perfectly happy to let me have it on tick; perfectly happy to let me run a ‘tab’. Crack made his job so much easier.

He didn’t have to worry about me being lured away by other pimps. Who else would supply me with my crack? He didn’t even need the services of the gangs of Hells Angels who had recently arrived in the Red Light District ‘offering’ their protection services to pimps concerned about their girls running away. Where would I run to when I was so effectively chained to the pipe and the little white rocks of crack?

Of course, Gregor only tolerated my habit – and those of all his other girls – so long as we kept earning. Sometimes the word went out – ‘You need earn more money; too much spend on crack, not enough money from customers.’ Other times he would discourage us from slacking by setting the dogs on us. We’d be back in the room at his place on the edge of the District – the room his girls shared to sleep in. We’d hear him and Pavlov coming down the corridor, hear them growl something at the dogs.

And then the door would open and Gregor would be there with the dogs standing at his heels. Then he’d say something to them in a foreign language and they’d walk slowly over to us girls, snarling and dribbling as if we were live meat and they were going to tear us apart with their teeth. And Gregor would talk to them – slowly and deliberately – and they’d keep coming until they were right in our faces and we could smell their breath and feel its heat on our skin. He’d hold them there – not with a lead or a rope, but just with his voice – and we’d be terrified that he would give them the word, the go-ahead. He never did – or not that I ever witnessed – but the sheer paralysing terror never went away, or lessened. Every time he played that little game with us, the dogs would be just as horrific as the last.

And so we would somehow redouble our efforts at the window, leering at the punters walking up and down, touching ourselves – or each other – obscenely. Anything to get the man in through the door; anything to earn the money and get that next rock and the all-too-brief nothingness it promised.

From time to time – God knows where I found the strength or the willpower – I managed to scribble down a few notes about the daily grind of my existence in the sad little Letts Diary I had brought over to Amsterdam with me. When I had packed it, I imagined noting down all the happy, exciting things I would be doing in this wonderful city. Instead, the entries I made were meagre and embittered – the few despairing words of a young woman being broken on the twin racks of drugs and prostitution.

How many rocks of crack did I smoke? How many joints of strong hash did I suck down deep into my desperate lungs? I have no idea. Hundreds. Thousands, perhaps. But then again, how many punters did I service? How many men handed over their wads of dirty money to use – abuse – my body for their own selfish, temporary relief? God knows. So how much money must I have earned for Gregor?

Looking back, Gregor must have been a millionaire. He had girls working for him all over Amsterdam – standing in the windows 17, 18 hours a day, each handling hundreds of punters a week. And he had his drug businesses on top – both the semi-legitimate hash café and the narcotics he ran all over the city.

I must have been working for him for a couple of months – though, to be honest, since I had no idea of time that has to be just a guess – when Pavlov came into the sleeping room with some tablets. He handed each of us a single tablet and told us to swallow it. Then he stood in front of us and waited to see what would happen.

About 20 minutes later he was still there, still the same shaven-headed thug with a big black gun stuck in his belt. But somehow he seemed less threatening. For the first time I could remember I started feeling ‘up’; even the dogs growling in the corridor outside didn’t seem so frightening. I smiled at the other girls in the room – and they smiled back. Pavlov grunted, turned on his heel and walked out. I heard the key turn in the lock as usual, but even that didn’t seem so bad.

I’d just had my first experience of ecstasy. It turned out that Gregor had started up a new factory churning out E. The tablets were in all shapes and strengths, each with its own distinctive colouring and unique design imprinted on the surface.

Ecstasy was then a relatively new drug – it hadn’t made much of a break-out from the young club scene to the wider international community of people who took drugs ‘recreationally’. The key ingredient, MDMA – or methylenedioxy-N-methylamphetamine to give the full title – is an amphetamine, even though it has a similar effect to psychedelic drugs like LSD. That accounted for the warm ‘up’ feeling we had after taking the pills Pavlov handed to us. I suppose, in those early days, it was difficult for new manufacturers like Gregor to get the exact quantities and mixtures right: too little MDMA and the tablets didn’t give much of a buzz; too much and the effects could be very dangerous. And so he tested out each mixture on us. We were his guinea-pigs, expendable people whom he could use to check out each new batch and make sure the quality was okay.

We never got a choice about taking them; that’s the thing about slaves – no need to ask, just issue instructions. But even if he had, we wouldn’t have refused. We weren’t going to object to any new drug he cared to throw our way – not if it meant more oblivion, a new way to block out the pain of work. We never had a moment’s anxiety about swallowing one pill after another. Not even when we heard Gregor and Pavlov talking about a British girl who had died after taking a single tablet of E – and laughing that it might have been one of theirs.
11

In a city where obscenity and exploitation were the norm, Gregor stood out from the hundreds of other pushers and pimps not just for the scale of his operation, but for its sheer, brazen visibility. He and Pavlov – and all the others working for him – walked around carrying guns. They trafficked women and shipped drugs openly, as if they were untouchable, completely and unassailably above the law.

One of the questions I get asked most frequently is why didn’t the police stop them? Why, given the fact that they made little or no attempt to disguise their criminal operation, weren’t they arrested and brought to justice?

Take a guess.

There are two different types of police in Holland: the
regiokorpsen
, or regional forces and the KLPD –
Korps landelijke politiediensten
– the country’s national police service.

The KLPD is a bit like the FBI in America, concentrating its efforts on major national and international crime and – most important of all – intelligence gathering. Day-to-day routine policing is left up to the
regiokorpsen
, which cover towns and cities all over the country. There are 25 individual
regiokorps
, each led by a force chief, who conducts the daily management of the police throughout his district. His overall force is divided into a number of local police teams called
basiseenheden
– ‘basic units’.

Decisions about law enforcement policy throughout the district – deciding which issues are a priority and therefore get the most attention and effort – are made by a separate outside committee. This includes a representative of the police, the chief local prosecutor and the mayor of the largest municipality in the district.

What all that means in practice is that the policing of somewhere like de Rosse Buurt is partly under the political control of the people who run the city. And since Amsterdam itself had no real interest in cleaning up the Red Light District, neither did its local police teams.

Not much has changed either. In summer 2000 Amsterdam police published a glossy guide about how to have ‘fun’ safely in the Red Light District. ‘Cocaine, heroin, LSD, ecstasy, etc. are strictly forbidden,’ the guide notes. It goes on to explain that a ‘small amount of marijuana for personal use can legally be consumed in a coffee shop’, adding helpfully, ‘When you feel sick after smoking, or eating space cake, drink lots of water with sugar.’

Its instructions about prostitutes are very plainly centred on the interests of ‘the consumer’: ‘If you visit one of the women, we would like to remind you they are not always women.’ Although it does manage to suggest decorum – ‘Don’t shout or use bad language towards these women’ – it originally contained unabashed guidance on getting the best out of a visit to a prostitute trapped in her glass cage: ‘Make a clear deal at the door and don’t be too drunk to get things done. Time is money for the ladies.’
12
(The guide’s author was a serving police officer who had worked the streets of the District for 12 years. His photograph – which adorns the cover – shows a grinning policeman in full uniform, sitting on a police motorbike. Next to him is the advertising hoarding for ‘the Museum of Eroticism’.)

Not much chance of vigorous law enforcement there. But then again, in 1995 any police officer on a mission to enforce the letter of the law inside the District would almost certainly have come up against pretty stiff opposition from many of his own colleagues – because the laws of economics that made vice such an attractive proposition for the city council also filtered down on to the streets.

Cops – or at least basic street patrol cops – are rarely paid a huge amount. Gregor could afford to supplement their wages every month … in return, of course, for a blind eye being turned whenever he needed it. I’m not saying every policeman who worked the 18 streets in De Wallen and Singelgebied was on the take, but some most certainly were – and they didn’t just take their ‘wages’ in cash.

Reuben’s murder had caused ripples on the streets. It wasn’t the fact that he’d been killed – people died or disappeared all the time in the District. It was the fact that his head had been completely severed and deliberately left a few metres away from the rest of his body. It was intended as a warning to all the other ‘Loverboys’ – but the sheer brazenness of the act was also bound to attract attention from outside.

There had been rumours, passed about by the running boys and amongst the girls in the windows, that a special police squad from outside the Red Light District had been assembled and instructed to investigate the organised crime gangs that ran it. Some of the pimps – Gregor included – got rattled enough to run their own basic ‘counter-spy’ operations. From time to time they would send in a new face from their gangs to come and talk to us girls, pretending to be from the rumoured ‘Special Force’, to see whether any of us were prepared to give evidence against our masters. We generally spotted these
agents provocateurs
, as they were known to us – and wouldn’t have said anything even if we hadn’t – but it was a measure of how uneasy the crime bosses had become.

That’s what I say when people ask how Gregor got away with it for so long. And it’s also my reply when I’m asked, ‘Why didn’t you go to the police?’ Then, for good measure, I tell them about the rape.

Gregor’s drug café was not far from one of the local police stations. We all knew that some of the cops there were on his payroll, but with the pressure building and suspicion rife, I suppose they decided to add their own little incentive to stay silent.

It was around seven o’clock, dark and damp and miserable as only a winter night in the Red Light District knows how to be. It was a quiet sort of evening – plenty of passers-by, but few enough punters ready and willing to open their wallets. That meant trouble when Gregor picked us up. Trouble, and not enough drugs to feed our habits and ease our pain. So my bloodshot eyes must have lit up when I saw the group coming towards my window.

There were seven men, all walking purposefully; not rushing but not dawdling. They looked as if they might want business. Sue enough, they came to my window and wanted to come in – all together.

It’s a rule in the District: one at a time, never more than one at a time. Quite often I would get small groups of two or three guys – generally young, stupid and drunk – wanting to come in and watch while one of them bought his fuck. Mostly it was safety in numbers for the one with the money to spend – too scared to go in alone. Pathetic, really.

Sometimes couples wanted to come in together – whether for a quick thrill to spice up their sex lives or because they both fancied a bit of flesh for hire, I never found out. It was a basic rule of self-preservation: one at a time. But the seven men who marched up to my window weren’t interested in taking turns; nor in watching – or paying, come to that. They pushed the glass door open and flipped open their police IDs.