Prosecutor paints bleak picture of life at Casablanca
GREAT BAY – The public prosecutor painted a bleak picture yesterday of what it is like to work in a brothel like Casablanca. The girls have to pay $60 per day for a small room that they share with a second girl.
“Casablanca received almost $2,000 per month per girl,” the prosecutor said. “That is almost $4,000 for a shared small room. For that money you get on this island a royal villa with four bedrooms, four bathrooms and a swimming pool.”
Attorney Ritch Kock, who handled the fiscal part of the trial for the Casablanca suspects, noted that the girls run a financial risk as if they were entrepreneurs. “If they are sick and they cannot work they do not earn anything, but the costs continue,” he said, indicating that the girls have to pay for their room whether they work or not.
This is one part of the reason why the girls build up debts instead of making money.
Other expenditures are for internet ($25 per week). That is more than $100 per month,” the prosecutor pointed out. If half of the fifty girls took internet, Casablanca would rake in another $2,500 while the cheapest internet connection is just $63.”
The club also takes $5 from the $50 a client pays for sex for condoms. McQuincy R. has denied this: the $5 is for room service, he told the court. Asked what this means he told investigators: “You get a key and a condom.”
Based on the prostitution policy, brothels are not allowed to charge their prostitutes for condoms.
The brothel used a ticket system to keep the prostitutes in a dependent position, the prosecution says. When a girl went to her room with a client, the client paid the company and the girl would get a ticket that represented the amount. Once a week, they could redeem these tickets for cash, but more often than not they got no money at all, because their earnings were balanced with their outstanding debt.
Victims of the Casablanca practices have told investigators also that they were subject to a fine-system. Coming back to the brothel after 6 p.m., not wearing high heels, staying longer than twenty minutes with a client – all these situations warranted a $50 fine; a fight with other girls resulted in a $500 fine, one woman told investigators.
The prosecutor said that the club took away ID-cards from the girls and that they only got them back once they had paid off their debt.
The girls had to work seven days a week, also if they were ill or had their period. Not working carried a fine of $500.
The prosecutor calculated that the girls have $530 fixed costs per week, or almost $2,300 per month, fines excluded. To pay off a starting debt of $3,500 the girls would have to have sex with 78 men.
The price for twenty minutes of sex is $45. “If a girl manages to have sex with five clients per day, she needs almost a whole month to cover her costs,” the prosecutor said.
The prosecutor presented several examples of the economic results the girls realized. Some of them worked three months and went home with nothing, others left with a debt anywhere from $2,000 to $3,000, while a few others managed to scrape together $1,000 to $2,000 after four months of work.
The prosecutor furthermore charged that the club treated the girls as commodities and that a client who fell in love had the option to buy the girl. Several men bought girls free for amounts of $2,500 to $2,800; buying a girl outright cost $5,000; “McQuincy would then tell the authorities that the girl had run away,” the prosecutor said.
