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.
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.
“What’s there to panic about?”
The above quote, taken from one of Tony Ortega’s many shameless defenses of the Backpage child sex-ring syndicate, tells us so much about Ortega’s mindset in the midst of the scandal that would ultimately bring down the criminal enterprise employing him.
In someways it’s almost understandable that a deeply obsessed individual like Tony Ortega would sell himself to the cash-rich “Pimp Industrial Complex”. Our readers will recall he was at the time barely hanging on to his job at the failing alt weekly newspaper The Village Voice.
Back when Tony Ortega, infamous Backpage defender of pimps, prostitution, and philandering, was exposed carrying on multiple affairs while married to different women, people were rightly disgusted by his behavior.
When it came to light he was ‘sexting’ (chatting explicitly online) with a close family friend we began to see he was no ordinary creep.
That Tony Ortega is a toxic individual who infects just about anything he touches no longer comes as a shock to most readers.
Backpage.com Bosses
We have spoken openly and frankly here on the blog about how Michael Lacey and James Larkin piggybacked off their then-failing newspaper Village Voice to launch an international sex trafficking syndicate with a global reach. They succeeded in their efforts far beyond what they’d imagined and today we are all the worse for it.
They knew, if exposed, Backpage would be nothing short of a nightmarish PR disaster. But it wasn’t until their hired philandering Editor-in-Chief, Tony Ortega, weaseled into the picture that a ‘pro-active’ game plan came into focus.
With the advent of the Internet, we now live in an age where so much of life is happening online. By the time the study of online sex trafficking began in a serious scholarly back in 2011, we were already seeing websites like Craigslist and, worst of them all, Backpage emerging as behemoths in online sex trade.
Although some of the ads on those sites were for what we might call “at-will” sex workers, researchers understood early that sex traffickers were flooding these platforms to advertise their (often under-age) victims against their will.
Tony Ortega and Leah Remini
If you ask Tony Ortega about child sex-trafficking in America, he’s likely to give you the same set of repeated lies he’s given so many media outlets before.
Consider this whopper Ortega offered up in a propaganda piece he wrote in defense of Backpage shortly before authorities stepped in to pull the plug on the entire criminal organization: “Underage prostitution… exists at a level that is nothing like what is being trumpeted [by] activists who want to put us out of business.
More than a year after his arrest on unrelated drug charges following a traffic stop by police man in Amarillo, TX was charged with human trafficking and has been sentenced to ten years in prison.
In March of 2018, Jirehn Lamarr Curtis Jr., 22, was stopped for a routine traffic violation. Though detained for an infraction of the driving laws, it was ‘traffic’ of a different sort which would ultimately lead to this Backpage pimp being put away for better than a decade.
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) is cracking down on the multi-billion dollar business of human trafficking in the U.S. The very same line of work Tony Ortega so proudly, if tone-deafly, defended as an ‘honest exchange between consenting people’. That characterization, like so much that comes out of the mouth of Tony Ortega, was a big fat lie.
Just two months ago, 1,700 people were arrested nationwide for committing child sex and exploitation crimes as part of a nationwide DOJ initiative called, “Operation Broken Heart”, the AP news service reports.
Terry Johnson III
For the briefest of moments Tony Ortega had the attention of the nation. It came in the midst of a flurry of allegations that his employers at Backpage knowingly turned a blind eye to the epidemic of child sex trafficking that was taking place on the online platform built for unscrupulous pimps to sell marginalized women for sex.
Tony Ortega used this spotlight, not to decry the injustice of coerced prostitution of the vulnerable but to attack the growing number justifiably outraged men, women, institutions and authorities who dared to call Backpage what it was — the largest illegal sex ring the world had ever seen, trading the lives of young women and underage girls to make a fast buck.
