This has been an interesting month for Tony Ortega-watchers. From the isolated confines of his homemade blog, what started out as a story of an angry old man furiously scribbling his hateful rhetoric as a hobby has morphed over the years into that of an angry unemployed man, furiously scribbling his hateful rhetoric as substitute for having a career at this point.
This month Tony has treated his readers to some blistering exposés.
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”.
“They love to inflate the numbers by talking about children ‘at risk’ of exploitation.”
That was how Backpage boss Michael Lacey characterized the work of the experts at the Crimes Against Children Research Center on the subject of child sex trafficking. In that statement, Lacey highlights his callous indifference to suffering victims and blinding concern for his own self-interest. If there were any question about Larkin and Lacey’s desire to help authorities put out the fire Backpage started, let this quote serve as a reminder to their true state of mind on the subject.
Backpage was already getting into hot water. A girl in Missouri had sued the site in mid-September of 2009, alleging that she’d been pimped out at the age of 14 and that Backpage had willfully “failed to investigate for fear of what it would learn.” In the official police report she explained that the site’s operators “had a strong suspicion” she was underage. Ultimately, a federal magistrate dismissed her case. The situation was tragic, the judge said, but Backpage was protected under Section 230.
The Communications Decency Act was a law conceived, as the name suggests, to rid the web of vice.
The new act was proposed in 1995 by Senator J. James Exon, a Nebraska Democrat who’d watched with growing alarm as “the worst, most vile, most perverse pornography” spread online. He was particularly concerned about what all this obscenity might do to America’s children.
Although Exon repeatedly described the legislation as “streamlined,” the Department of Justice warned that its indecency provisions were unconstitutionally broad.
Last week we took an insider’s look at two sex peddlers behind the online trafficking empire known as Backpage.
Today we continue our deep dive into the perverse path Backpage blazed without a thought to the host of victims it would leave in its wake to become the undisputed worldwide heavy-weight champion of human sex trafficking.
James Larkin had decided early on in his partnership with Michael Lacey that the fasted way to set their scheme in motion was to concentrate maximum effort on expanding their advertising market, specifically through increasingly risqué sex ads in the site’s personal’s section.
As of this writing both Mike Lacey and Jim Larkin are out on million-dollar bonds, secured by real estate the government eventually hopes to own when it wins its case against Backpage. The bulk of the charges against them fittingly fall under the Travel Act, a law designed by Robert F. Kennedy’s Justice Department to target organized crime. According to the indictment, Lacey, Larkin, and their underlings like Tony Ortega not only turned a blind eye to prostitution and child sexual trafficking but, driven by greed, actively worked to abet it.
In Michael Lacey’s younger and more vulnerable years, his father gave him this advice:
“Whenever someone pokes a finger in your chest, you grab that finger and you break it off at the knuckle.”
Lacey had grown up in the 1950’s as a bright, bookish boy. His father, a sailor turned enforcer for a New York construction union, had little use for his son’s intellectual gifts. If Lacey lost a fight at school, he says, his dad “came home and beat me again.
Even though federal authorities have long since raided and shuttered the world’s largest online prostitution syndicate run by Tony Ortega’s former bosses, new reporting suggests Backpage.com is still a marketplace for prostitution in places like metro Atlanta, according to a Channel 2 Action News investigation earlier this week.
Way back when prostitution first migrated from streets to smart phones, both Craigslist and Backpage were under pressure to stop online adult advertising, this new bombshell report explains.
Schadenfreude is the experience of pleasure, joy, or self-satisfaction that comes from learning of or witnessing the troubles, failures, or humiliation of others.
It’s a complex negative emotion. Rather than feeling sympathy towards someone’s misfortune, schadenfreude evokes joyful feelings that take pleasure from watching harm come to someone. While research suggests his emotion is displayed more in children than adults, some adults also experience schadenfreude, they are just usually better at concealing their expressions.
Recently we reported on the history making case filed against Tony Ortega’s ex-employers earlier this year in which a young girl allegedly suffered multiple rapes through the sex trafficking made possible by James Larkin’s and Michael Lacey’s Backpage platform.
We can now reveal that while that particular case remains groundbreaking, it isn’t the only one filed against Backpage. Across the nation those making claims of victimization at the hands of Backpage (and Tony Ortega’s propaganda on behalf of his employers) and their sex trafficking syndicate are rising up to seek legal retribution.
