published January 11, 2003

Ruling hurts Web sex case

Owners of the bigdoggie.net site and four female ''escorts'' linked to it are off the hook.

By CHRISTOPHER GOFFARD, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published January 11, 2003

TAMPA -- Crippling a much-hyped case that took the Hillsborough Sheriff's Office two years to build, a judge on Friday threw out charges against the owners of a Web site accused of promoting prostitution.

Hillsborough Circuit Judge Debra Behnke said the statewide prosecutor's office failed to meet the legal deadline to bring Charles S. Kelly and Steve Lipson to trial on felony charges of conspiracy to commit racketeering in the bigdoggie.net case.

The judge also threw out racketeering charges against four female "escorts" linked to the Web site.

The delays that doomed those cases stemmed largely from the state's effort to conceal the identities of six witnesses, some of them married, well-known figures in Tampa Bay business and political communities who used the Web site.

While eight defendants still face charges ranging from racketeering to prostitution, Friday's ruling left the state's two biggest targets, Kelly of Hunter's Green, and Lipson of Boca Raton, off the hook.

The ruling also scuttled the case against Darcy Piotrowski, whom prosecutors call a ringleader in a prostitution operation linked to the site.

"We will file an appeal, and hopefully the appeal will go our way," said Assistant Statewide Prosecutor Christopher Brown.

Under the law, felony defendants have a right to trial within 175 days of their arrest. The cases that were dismissed Friday involved defendants who were arrested last June.

The cases were scheduled to go to trial in December, but Judge Behnke postponed them on the grounds that prosecutors had not fully complied with her order to reveal evidence to the defense.

The identity of the confidential informers was the sticking point. In seeking to keep their names secret, prosecutors said some had received threats.

One of the informers was Monte Belote, 43, a candidate for Tampa City Council who dropped out of the race when his involvement with bigdoggie.net was revealed.

Defense attorney Luke Lirot said the blame for the case's unraveling lay with the Hillsborough Sheriff's Office.

"I think law enforcement created this obstacle for the statewide prosecutor's office," Lirot said. "I think law enforcement promised informants confidentiality that they didn't have the ability to carry out."

Lirot said the Web site, where male clients called "hobbyists" traded stories of their adventures with hired escorts, dealt in constitutionally protected speech. Even if the contact between clients and escorts is illegal, he said, talking about it is not.

"It would be like saying, 'I smoked 5 pounds of killer Colombian weed,' " Lirot said. "It's illegal to possess it, but what you say is protected speech."

Darcy Piotrowski, an escort against whom charges were dropped, said she provided a much-needed service to lonely men but did not sell sex.

"An escort sells time for money," said Piotrowski, 38. "Do you know how many lonely guys there are in the world? Guys that are divorced, widowed, single, who want companionship with a beautiful woman?"

Piotrowski said she charged $1,000 to $1,500 to accompany a man for an evening.

Men greet her with flowers and candies, she said, and show her elegant evenings.

"I've been to the David Copperfield show," she said. "I've been to the Dali Museum for their annual dinner twice. I'm not a prostitute. I have never had sex for money. I go out with gentlemen. I am wined and dined."

Ed Suarez, her defense lawyer, said authorities seemed to target female escorts while giving male clients a free pass, even attempting to conceal their names.

Pointing to the Sheriff's Office announcement last summer of arrests in the case, Suarez said, "If you're going to have a press conference and stand on your high horse, you don't cover up for these guys."

With the exception of the Web site owners, "How come not a single man was prosecuted?" Suarez asked. "It was a sexist decision."

Defense attorney J. Kevin Hayslett, who represented one of the escorts cleared Friday, said authorities were guilty of catastrophic bungling.

"In a case of this magnitude, you better have your ducks in a row before you make an arrest," he said. The Sheriff's Office, which dubbed its two-year investigation Operation Flea Collar, declined to comment on the ruling.

-- Times researcher John Martin contributed to this report. Christopher Goffard can be reached at (813) 226-3337 or goffard@sptimes.com .

updated 7:52 a.m. ET, Fri., Jan. 20, 2006

A consumer guide to prostitutes is a click away

In explicit detail, Web sites ‘review’ services of professional escorts

Big Doggie continues to operate more than three years after the arrests of its founders, whose cases were thrown out when police could not persuade witnesses to come forward.

By Alex Johnson

Reporter

MSNBC

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

• Profile

Angelica is a shade over 5½ feet tall. She is in her late 20s, and she has straight brown hair down to the middle of her back. She has an athletic body with surgically sculpted breasts. She sports a few tattoos but no pubic hair, and her belly button is pierced.

For the right price — which she pegs at $350 an hour, to start — Angelica will have sex with you. She will perform unprotected oral sex, and she will usually agree to anal intercourse. She will, if you have the money, bring a second lady with her, and they will have sex with each other for your enjoyment. Or, if you wish, she will set up an S&M scene.

We know all this about Angelica because she is a professional escort, and you can read what her customers say about her on Web sites where men who purchase such services gather to review and rate thousands of working ladies like her.

There is a great deal more — very explicit and very detailed — about Angelica and what she does in her profile on The Erotic Review, the largest of the escort-rating Web sites. In its aim and practice, it essentially is a consumer guide for prostitutes and johns.

“I know from an escort’s point of view the review boards really, really help a lot, because everyone always asks, ‘Well, do you have reviews?’” said Billie, an escort in a Midwestern state whose name, like those of all other escorts cited in this report, has been changed. “If they’re bad, that’s not good, but when they’re good ones, it really helps an escort get established when she’s just starting out.”

Not all escorts sell sex. Some sell sensual massages or even actual, non-sexual dinner companionship. But law enforcement officials estimate that 90 percent to 95 percent of the escorts listed on the Web sites are selling sex. And there is very little the police can do about it, even when it is openly discussed on sites like The Erotic Review.

Pursuing ‘the hobby’

Many men make a lifestyle out of patronizing escorts. They call it “the hobby,” not prostitution, and they are “hobbyists,” not johns. They consider themselves connoisseurs of fine women, and they are eager to learn from their fellow hobbyists who will provide exactly what they want.

What they want is generally very clear: They want a centerfold model who will hang adoringly on their every word in public, then perform any sex act in any position with professional skill in private. The combination — a romantic dinner date followed by uninhibited sex — is called the “girlfriend experience,” or GFE. Of Angelica, a reviewer wrote, “The term GFE should be based on what she is.”

Before review sites came along, hobbyists had no way to protect themselves, said David R. Elms, president of The Erotic Review, which began in 1999 and claims that it gets 350,000 unique visitors a day.

“I’m a hobbyist, and I was getting ripped off,” Elms said. “There was no way to hold people accountable for their actions.

“There had to be a way to get this information out,” he said. “If a guy got ripped off or he received good service, then he could tell somebody. We treat it as something equivalent to going out on a hot date and telling a hundred thousand of your closest friends.”

Officially, review sites insist that it is just the hot date that men are paying for — in other words, companionship and conversation, not sex. Whatever happens beyond that “is purely a matter of personal choice and personal preference between two or more consenting adults,” says a disclaimer on Big Doggie, another nationwide escort review site. The Erotic Review goes further: “You can give it away for free, but you can’t sell it.”

But interviews with working escorts across the country and with review-site operators, activists for prostitutes’ rights and law enforcement officials bear out what is evident in the reviews themselves: Sex is the “it” being sold.

“‘Escorts’ — right,” said Master Sgt. Bruce C. Woodbury, head of the Vice/Morals Unit of the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office in Tampa, Fla., which mounted an ultimately unsuccessful sting operation against Big Doggie in 2002. “Nudge, nudge, wink, wink.”

For escorts, a complicated relationship

Professional escorts have a love-hate relationship with The Erotic Review and Big Doggie, where, for a monthly or quarterly fee, men can find out exactly what a woman’s customers think of her.

The sites represent the ultimate commodification of women, who are impersonally rated by anonymous men in much the same way they would judge a sports car or a racehorse. Some find it demeaning, but most acknowledge that it’s a fast, easy way to build a reliable client base.

“It’s a double-edged sword,” said Helen, a $350-an-hour escort in a Western state, who said she was in the business to make enough money to go to graduate school so she could teach.

“Yes, it does give you exposure that you may not otherwise get,” she said. But at the same time, an escort can find her livelihood held hostage to the whims of a customer who doesn’t get exactly what he wants, at the price he wants to pay.

“This lady spoke to a client she considered a friend, and she was apparently very upset because the guy had threatened to post a bad review,” Helen said. “I’ve personally never had it happen, but I know it has happened.”

The sites serve another purpose, too: They make prostitution a little safer, because women can challenge unfair or inaccurate reviews in forums on the sites and they can lodge complaints with site administrators.

Much more than streetwalkers or prostitutes who are controlled by pimps, a professional escort has a significant element of control, because she can screen potential clients, who already know how pricey her services are — top-dollar escorts in New York have been known to command $2,000 an hour.

That control is elevated when a client comes to her through a review site. Reviewers earn credibility by the accuracy of their reviews, so over time, an escort can essentially rate the men who are rating her.

Robyn Few, a former prostitute who lobbies to decriminalize prostitution as executive director of the Sex Workers Outreach Project in San Francisco, said that on a personal level, “I hate it” that women are “being reviewed and rated like some subhuman.”

But she added: “The Erotic Review and Big Doggie took some of the danger out of it. When providers have a bad client, they write about it. ... It’s one way to out the bad guys.”

Billie, who said she got at least 90 percent of her business through The Erotic Review and a similar local review site, said: “I haven’t had a bad experience at all. The people that I have seen, or whatever, they have all been professionals — really upper-class people.”

Cleaning up prostitution

If nothing else, Few and many escorts say, the success of The Erotic Review and Big Doggie demonstrate that prostitution can be a respectable business. For the first time, the women are not victims, they say — they are not walking the streets, and they are relatively protected, and they run their own business affairs.

Now it is the customer who must solicit the prostitute, not the other way around, as it has always been through history. From the safety and relative anonymity of their living rooms, highly rated independent escorts like Billie and Helen can pick and choose from hundreds of potential clients.

“I pretty much have regular clients now,” said Billie, whose ratings are consistently 8 to 10 (out of 10) for both appearance and “performance.” These are men whom she has screened and whom she trusts, and she thinks that’s why “I’ve never been cheated or anything.”

In the future, the balance of power will shift more and more to women who approach prostitution as a profession and can take advantage of advances in technology, said Few, the sex workers advocate.

“We are not going to stop prostitution. We are not going to stop it,” she said. “It is not going to be abolished. It is not going away. And the Internet has connected us around the world.”

Said Helen, the escort from the West: “Technology increases exponentially. So who knows what’s going to be out there in 10 years?”

© 2008 MSNBC Interactive

updated 7:50 a.m. ET, Fri., Jan. 20, 2006

BigDoggie Story

MSNBC

Master Sgt. Bruce C. Woodbury, head of the vice unit of the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office in Tampa, Fla., would like to be the biggest threat to escort review Web sites, but he acknowledges that he isn’t. Nor is he likely to be any time soon.

The Hillsborough vice unit pioneered the technique of registering with escort sites and posting bogus profiles when it launched Operation Flea Collar in 2002, targeting Big Doggie, which is in its back yard. Vice officers started their own fake Web page in order to join Big Doggie, and they almost immediately were flooded with solicitations for dates.

Eventually, authorities in Hillsborough and in Orange County, who joined the investigation later, brought more than 50 felony racketeering, procurement and obstruction charges against Charles S. Kelly of Tampa, the 300-pound “Big Dog” for whom the site is named; his business partner, Steven E. Lipson of Boca Raton; and 11 others. Police said in charging documents that they were raking in $30,000 to $80,000 a month from facilitating prostitution.

The postings on Big Doggie are protected speech; what the police must produce is proof of actual illegal conduct. That means they need witnesses in open court. But when authorities could not persuade their six star witnesses to give up the confidentiality they had been promised, a judge dismissed the cases against Kelly and Lipson.

“There’s not much motivation on their part” to be witnesses, Woodbury said of men caught up in prostitution investigations. “Frequently, they’re married men, professionals, and they don’t want anyone, including their wives or business associates, to know. They’re very reluctant to testify in open court.”

Big Doggie remains in business, but it’s not very likely that the Hillsborough vice unit will try again to shut it down, Woodbury said, because of the significant strain on manpower and other resources such a sting demands.

“As technology changes and as computer programs become available to the general public that can check driver’s licenses and tag numbers and phone numbers for a nominal fee, it’s very difficult for us to stay ahead of that curve,” he said. “If a bad guy is technically astute and computer-knowledgable, it makes great difficulty for us.”

Multiple suspicions

Notwithstanding Woodbury’s reassurances, escorts themselves presume that rating sites, especially The Erotic Review, are crawling with cops.

“It’s almost like a flare for law enforcement, like: ‘Hey, check me out. Bust me. Or try to bust me,’” said Helen, an escort in the West. “They’ve really concentrated a lot of their effort on Internet directory sites like Big Doggie, Erotic Review, Craig’s List. They kind of go down the list and try to see who they can get.”

Web sites provide a consumer guide to prostitution

“Is it dangerous? Yes,” said Robyn Few, executive director of the Sex Workers Outreach Project in San Francisco. “Every police officer has access just like you do.”

In postings on rival Web sites, both The Erotic Review and Big Doggie are widely criticized by escorts and their clients for not alerting their users to the identities of police officers posing as customers.

“DO NOT POST ANY PRIVATE REVIEWS ON THIS BOARD!” says a warning about Big Doggie on the Sexwork Cyber Resource Center, which is based in Phoenix. “It is well known that vice cops read it for leads to sting and entrap even if nothing illegal is being done.”

Executives at Big Doggie did not reply to requests for an interview, but David R. Elms, president of The Erotic Review, said he was aware that police occasionally registered as fake customers on his site.

Elms maintained that it didn’t happen nearly as often as escorts and their customers believed, adding that law enforcement had asked for information about the site’s members only once. The company’s attorneys “worked it out,” he said, providing no further details.

Elms said he had no choice but to keep quiet even when he learned of active stings on his site: “We can’t impede an investigation. It’s a felony.”

In any event, The Erotic Review’s user forums and other channels for feedback mean the site effectively polices itself, he said, so vice officers (in addition to menacing or unreliable clients) are quickly found out. “The community tends to get the word out faster than we ever could,” he said.

© 2008 MSNBC Interactive

The TBD bust may not seem like much now but at the time it was going down it sent shockwaves over every internet hobby forum.  I was in Houston for many years before coming to Charleston and was involved with ASPD.net (which began in the Houston hobby community) as a moderator and administrator when this first went down.  Prior to the TBD bust I think we all felt like we were untouchable because we were in the shadows of the internet.  This showed everyone (or should have shown them at least) that the internet is not the cloak of secrecy we all thought it was and one still has to be very careful.

Scenarios like this are exactly why I think it's a good thing that only members can post here now.