Just when you think there are no new depths of depravity to plumb, Backpage proves once more there is no bar to low for it to sink.
In a story that reads like the sort of poorly written fiction one might find on Tony Ortega’s crackpot blog, it was reported over the weekend that a U.S. Border Patrol agent was arrested on an outstanding sex trafficking charge this past Friday.
Last week we first reported to you about a man in Boston who killed his young, elementary school teacher wife, and how the prosecution has been seeking to use his texting with Backpage prostitutes to establish a probable timeline of the murder.
While this isn’t the sort of Backpage story we typically cover on this blog the facts surrounding this case, and the legal precedent they may set, are of keen interest to those of us demanding a full an honest account of the myriad of crimes Backpage played a role in facilitating.
An explosive new murder case brewing in Boston, Massachusetts is shedding new light on the Backpage criminal empire today.
Cellphone records are being used by local and federal authorities as evidence in proceedings against a man from a sleepy suburb of the city who police say killed his young wife, a beloved elementary school teacher, in 2017.
These records show the suspect contacted the sex-peddling site Backpage according to the newly released legal filing.
Since we began covering the insidious history of Backpage we’ve been witness to an unprecedented barrage of lawsuits levied against pimps and those who enabled them.
While we continue to hold out hope that these lawsuits may yet extend further down the corporate chain to include the Backpage bottom-feeders like would-be propagandist Tony Ortega, for the moment it is joy enough seeing so many who participated in this child sex ring syndicate bring brought to justice.
There’s no shortage of bizarre stories surrounding Backpage (and we’re not just talking about the wholly fictional pro-Backpage propaganda Tony Ortega routinely pumped like raw sewage into the town aquifer.)
Today’s story is one of the stranger ones we’ve yet seen out of this ever-expanding Backpage sex syndicate scandal.
This week, sex trafficker Charles White was sentenced to 10 years in prison for trafficking two young women out of his home in Harlem, NY, which he’d dubbed “The White House”.
Recently we helped break the story of an unnamed young woman who was manipulatively coerced by a pimp into selling herself for sex with anonymous strangers on the Internet, filling Backpage’s coffers in the process.
As we’ve previously reported, sex trafficking is a growing problem and thriving business thanks in part to men like Tony Ortega who willingly took to his ad-hoc soapbox to defend the sort of inhuman callousness it takes to look the other way in the face of these crimes.
Another day of Backpage in the headlines, this time the news comes from the nation’s capitol where U.S. Attorney James Kennedy described in press conference today how 51-year-old Valentino Shine Sr. preyed upon and exploited women who were vulnerable and addicted to drugs. Kennedy says Shine used his knowledge as a recovering cocaine addict to target and control the women.
During the conference, Kennedy said:“At the urging of the defendant the victims advertised on backpage.
As rich as Backpage’s founders, Michael Lacey, James Larkin and Carl Ferrer became as a result of their disastrous foray into the world of online child sex-trafficking, the massive generation of cash selling children for sex was hardly limited to the fat cats at the top of the pyramid scheme.
News broke this week of woman going by the moniker “Madame Priscilla Belle” who stands accused of running a multimillion-dollar prostitution ring out of a home she dubbed the “premier Dungeon of Chicago.
Reading through the litany of charges against all those who participated in the Backpage scam – from the kingpins at the top, to the hapless lackeys like Tony Ortega, to the rank and file pimps on the street – the vast majority of the accused have been men.
In the MeToo era this shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. But this week’s news of a new kind of pimp is making headlines.
With all the success we’ve been having with recent developments in the dismantling and subsequent prosecution of the Backpage crime syndicate it can be easy to lose sight of the fact that there is still a long way to go before the kingpins and their willing lapdogs like Tony Ortega are brought to justice.
Yesterday we received word of a setback in the process as Salesforce.com Inc. appears poised to escape a lawsuit brought by 90 women who accused it of facilitating sex-trafficking through its work with the infamous Backpage web portal.
Yesterday we looked at how Tony Ortega was used as a ‘tool’ of the devious individuals behind Backpage. He was what the Soviet propagandists used to call, “a useful idiot”, a political term used to describes a person who, through manipulation, is useful to a cause that is not their own despite not fully realizing the role they play. This makes them “an idiot, an unwitting and useful pawn.
We saw how this same basic set up was essential to make the Backpage sex-trafficking business model work — from the executive board at the top to the rank and file pimps on the street.
Having read enough of the first-hand, personal stories of underage girls who were “groomed”, often over substantial periods of time, we here at the blog have gained something of an understanding of the dark seductive power used by pimps to lure their victims into service.
We have commented in the past how this process resembles Backpage itself, making its army of pimps and sex traffickers dependent over time on the platform, by virtue of its ease of use and its flagrant willingness to turn a blind eye to the exploitation of vulnerable women and children.
“If you’re innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?”
The above quote could equally apply to the criminals behind the prostitution syndicate know as Backpage.
Last year when the ‘very much for-profit’ advertising website Backpage shuttered its adult ads section, it left in its way bewildered escorts, sex workers, and clients. Among those who were not quite as shocked by the dramatic turn of events which led to the federal authorities raiding and closing down the infamous child sex trafficking site were those of us who had long been watching from the sidelines waiting for the hammer of justice to fall upon the men responsible for selling children to creeps on the internet for sex.
Recently we reported to you the strange turn of events which lead to both the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security joining the fight against Backpage, almost a year after the monstrous syndicate was seized and shuttered by federal authorities.
New information out today suggests that both the DOJ and DHS are casting a wide net and implicating many foreign-based sites trying to exploit the same loopholes in American law that Tony Ortega’s pals who ran Backpage once did.
What a rocky year it has been for Tony Ortega and his sex trafficking pals over at Backpage. In some respects it’s almost difficult to fathom that a year has passed since the CEO of classified ads website Backpage.com, Carl Ferrer, pleaded guilty to federal charges and the site was permanently shut down.
In the meantime, we’ve seen how scores of pimps and accomplices have been taken down and served stiff prison sentences.
According to experts, it’s important to understand the differences between prostitution, which is voluntary, and sex trafficking, which can trap victims — often vulnerable, underage girls — with involuntary sex work.
We’ve seen an awful lot of examples over the past few months of exactly how the proprietors of Backpage (together with its small army of sock puppets like Tony Ortega) helped maintain a platform explicitly designed to make profit off both prostitution and sex trafficking, caring very little about the nuanced difference in legality.
Following on a story we first reported to our readers earlier, more details have emerged about the particularly shady Backpage-inspired crime involving a pimp in Wichita, Kansas who recruited a 15 year old girl to scout other potential underage girls for sex trafficking.
It seems the story, like the sordid tale of Backpage itself, gets creepier and more disturbing the deeper one examines it.
We originally reported that the unnamed minor’s phone was used by Wichita police to expose bigger fish higher up the chain of pimps.
Another lowlife pimp, this one known as “Cadillac Black”, was sentenced to 15 years in federal prison for trafficking two underage girls this week. It will come as no surprise to our regular readers to discover “Cadillac Black” used Backpage.com to advertise the young girls as prostitutes.
Christopher Hamlett, 26, also known as “Cadillac Black,” was found guilty of multiple counts of sex trafficking a minor, using a facility of interstate commerce to promote commercial sex and production of child pornography, following a trial in which the two underage victims and two adults testified that Hamlett was their “pimp,” records show.
The Internet has long been a marketplace for the sex trade, one where the now mercifully defunct website, Backpage was justly demonized as a hotbed for illegal activity, including child sex trafficking.
We’ve seen time and again how Tony Ortega and his pals defended Backpage, at times even picking very public fights bemoaning that their “constitutional rights” to sell women weren’t being respected.
We’ve also looked at the new crop of human trafficking sights which were seemingly inspired by Tony Ortega’s vile rhetoric surrounding the selling of children for sex for profit.
Tony Ortega and Karen De La Carriere
With the death of the mysterious sex trafficker Jeffery Epstein so much in the news this past week, one seemingly minor question continues to confound news sources. Who was financing Epstein’s lifestyle? With no job to speak of, no sources of income, no vast inheritance from a long-forgotten aunt, many in the media are asking, “where did the money come from?”
We talk about sex traffickers here on the blog quite a bit, and we couldn’t help noticing some interesting parallels between the notoriously reclusive Epstein and Tony Ortega.
