UK Legal News

Two men and one woman have been jailed for sex trafficking.

The orchestrated a 15-year-old Slovakian girl's passage to the UK and then forced her to sell herself for sex on the streets of Sheffield.

She was rescued from her ordeal when a client called the police believing she was being forced to have sex for money.

Investigations by the UK Border Agencys joint police Immigration Crime Team revealed she may have made the gang £200-300 by working for 12 hours each night. In court it was estimated she had been made to have sex with at least 40 men.

Welcoming the verdict in Operation Reservoir, Regional Director for the UK Border Agency Jeremy Oppenheim said: This was a horrific crime involving the sexual exploitation of a young girl and I am pleased at the tough sentences handed out today which show there is no hiding place for people who break the law.

A jury at Sheffield Crown Court heard how the teenager was snared into a life of prostitution when she ran away from a childrens home in Slovakia after attending her mothers funeral in May 2009. The girl was promised a better life in Sheffield by Roman Dunka and Alzbeta Dunkova. She was given a passport and together with Dunkova travelled to France by coach and then crossed into the UK.

On arriving in Sheffield she was taken to the home of Dunkova and her husband Marcel Dunka which they shared with others. In the coming weeks she was taken out on to the streets of Sheffield at night and forced to have sex for around 20 or 30 a time. During the day she slept and cleaned the familys house. This was the routine for the Slovak teenager until she escaped in mid June this year by pleading for help from a client.

When sentencing the defendants, Judge Roger Keen recommended they be deported on completion of their sentences.

Roman Dunka was sentenced to 17 years for Trafficking into the UK for sexual exploitation. Alzbeta Dunkova was sentenced to 16 years and Marcel Dunka was sentenced to 17 years.

A man who managed brothels has been sentenced to 20 months' imprisonment.

David Greenwood pleaded guilty at Manchester Crown Court to three charges of being concerned in the management of a brothel used for prostitution.

Greenwood was wanted by police after officers carried out a visit in February 2008 at the Belle Air massage parlour in Oldham Road, Manchester city centre.

They discovered a 17-year-old Romanian girl was working as a prostitute. She told officers that she was brought to the UK under the pretence that she was to work as a waitress, but was put to work in the sex trade.

As part of the inquiry, it also became apparent that two other brothels - Cleopatra's Sauna on Whitelegge Street, Bury, and Shangri-La on Ashton Old Road, Openshaw - were also being managed by Greenwood.

Greenwood's business partner, Clive Ashton was arrested at the time and later pleaded guilty at Manchester Crown Court to three charges of being concerned in the management of a brothel used for prostitution and possessing amphetamine. He was jailed for 16 months.

Greenwood had gone to live at his second home in Estepona, Spain, and was arrested in February 2009 after police obtained a European arrest warrant.

Detective Constable Nigel Smith, of Greater Manchester Police's Sexual Crime Unit, said:  Although neither he nor Ashton were responsible for her having been trafficked into the UK, people who run these sorts of enterprises encourage traffickers and perpetuate the misery women are subjected to.

Ashton has already been ordered by the court to pay back £11,000 under the Proceeds of Crime Act and we will be pursuing Greenwood for his ill-gotten gains in relation to his involvement in this illegal enterprise.

Would you mind moving your legs please? OK you're nicked for 'control'

A woman has been found guilty of 'controlling' prostitutes at a Belfast brothel.

Cheng Sook Wong, who is originally from Malaysia, was arrested during a police raid on the property at Tates Avenue in the south of the city in November 2008.

The 58-year-old answered phone calls and directed punters to the house where Asian women worked as prostitutes.

She was given a three month jail sentence but was released because of the amount of time she spent on remand.

During the case, she admitted carrying out all cooking, washing and cleaning duties at the three-storey property, but denied having anything to do with its running or control. She claimed instead to have been employed as a cleaner by a woman identified only as Monica .

Belfast Magistrates Court heard the accused was paid £210 per week and lived in the house rent-free. She told the court how she worked there to pay off debts but had no control over who the women slept with.

Prostitutes from Thailand, Hong Kong and China who were rotated weekly would give her tips of £30-£50 before they left, with cash gifts also received from customers, it was claimed.

But she denied taking any money from punters as soon as they arrived.

I just opened the door. Monica would tell me 'You ask him to turn to the right when he is at the staircase'.

However, a prosecuting lawyer contended that her activities were enough to convict her of controlling prostitution for gain. He said: It could be described as fulfilling the host role downstairs in the premises. That included answering the phone when the upper tiers of management were not present to fulfil that role themselves.

Finding her guilty, District Judge Noel Dunlop ruled there was an element of control in her duties. Looking at the sums of money she was getting... it was quite generous for a cleaner, he said: I accept the fact she may be much more down the management scale, but I'm satisfied there was a degree of authority.

Cheng Sook Wong, who had already spent six months in custody, plans to appeal her conviction.

A teenager has fallen fall foul of a new law which bans the possession of 'extreme' pornographic images.

A Lowestoft teenager, Damien Wentworth, was fined after police found a short video on his mobile telephone which contained an extreme image. The newspaper wouldn't reveal the content of the image because of its supposedly pornographic nature.

Lowestoft magistrates court heard that Damien Wentworth's mobile telephone was seized by police in connection with another incident and that the video clip, which had been sent to him several years previously, was found stored on his memory card.

Colette Griffiths, prosecuting, said that when he was interviewed by officers, the 18-year-old said he was aware of the film clip and had kept it on his phone after it was sent to him.

Wentworth pleaded guilty to possessing an extreme pornographic image. His solicitor Richard Mann said: Technically, he is guilty of the offence, but I would say that he didn't even know it was an offence to have this on his phone. I can't blame him for that, as I didn't know that either and nor did the solicitors I have spoken to in court today. It is a law which came into force this year, so it is hardly a surprise that he didn't know.

Mr Mann said that Wentworth had received the image several years ago. He said: He would no doubt say that at the time, everyone was sending these sort of images around…This was just one image on his phone and something which he had not looked at for some time. He was not putting it on the internet or distributing it to anybody.

Wentworth was ordered to pay £175 in fines and costs. Magistrates also ordered the destruction of the image.

Two people have been jailed after threatening an undercover policeman at a clip joint in Soho, central London. Had he been a genuine customer, he would have been another victim of what is a well-established scam.

Video footage captures a man throwing his wallet onto the floor and offering to pay anything to escape.

He shouts: What's the problem? I'll pay whatever it is ... what, £300? I'll pay, I'll pay ... take my wallet. I don't want to be hurt. Leave me!

Unfortunately for those fronting Twilights, this was an undercover policeman armed with a hidden camera and microphone and he had caught them red-handed.

Kingston Crown Court was told that in December last year, a man fled the bar, in Rupert Street, in fear of his safety after being threatened and ordered to pay £300.

Stacey Crossley and Agnieszka Wolowska have since been found guilty of blackmail and false imprisonment.

Crossley was jailed for three years and his co-defendant was locked up for 14 months and recommended for deportation to her native Poland.

They were arrested by uniformed police officers as the scammers chased the undercover officer outside.

The scam involves customers, often foreign tourists, being enticed inside hostess bars with false promises of adult entertainment , Westminster Council explained. The bars, known as clip joints, employ women to stand outside or near their premises and bring the customers in for a small charge, in much the same way as other licensed bars and clubs employ staff to hand out leaflets promoting their offers. Once inside the clip joints, customers are served soft drinks, usually by a pretty young woman. But when the customer goes to leave, they will usually find themselves faced with a charge of several hundred pounds for having been in the woman's company.

If they refuse to pay, the customer may be threatened with violence by bouncers or frog-marched to a cash machine and forced to hand over cash.

Part of the problem in the past was that clip joints exposed a legal loophole. They did not need a licence to operate because they did not serve food or alcohol or provide entertainment. But in September 2007 the London Local Authorities Act reclassified clip joints as sex establishments, meaning they required the relevant licences, closing the loophole.

Councillor Daniel Astaire, Westminster City Council's cabinet member for community safety, said: Today's hearing marks the end of a long battle to close down all known clip joints in Westminster which lured in men under the false premise of adult entertainment, then charged them exorbitant rates for soft drinks in the company of so-called hostesses.

Most people who were ripped off were simply too embarrassed or scared to report the matter to police, and as these venues exploited legal loopholes to operate on the fringes of the law, our powers to close them down were extremely limited.

An illegal immigrant who sold copied porn films in a pub has been jailed.

The man was spotted by police taking a large bag into the Fox Tavern in Gosport, on June 20. The officers followed him in and confronted him but he ran off. He was caught, not far from the pub.

When police checked the bag of 237 DVDs they were found to include 37 pornographic films, three of which were said to be illegal extreme pornography.

Portsmouth Crown Court Judge Ian Pearson said it was a mystery why he had not been deported afterwards. In sentencing the Chinese national to 32 weeks in prison, Judge Pearson said the man would be sent home at the end of his jail term.

The judge ordered the DVDs be destroyed.

Offsite: Dangerous Animals

Based on article from theregister.co.uk by John Ozimek

A man from Newcastle, was sentenced on 11 September to seven and a half years for drugs offenses – and a further six months in respect of a series of illegal images found on his PC.

This is another "porn-plus" case: in looking for evidence of one crime (drugs), the police uncovered evidence of another (possession of extreme porn). It is also another case where charges have been brought in respect of material depicting bestiality: in court, police stated that they had found 33 illegal obscene images of animal and human intercourse.

Update: Extreme Add Ons

2nd October 2009. See article from thesun.co.uk

An Army major has been jailed for two years for having child porn. He pleaded guilty to nine sample charges at a court martial in Colchester, Essex. He also admitted four of possessing indecent photographs of children, two of possessing extreme pornographic images and three of distributing the pictures.

Two men who ran a mail order business selling hundreds of thousands of pornographic DVDs have been jailed for 15 months each.

The DVDs were found at the office of Tehsin Panju and Hitendra Patel.

Prosecutors estimated that a quarter of the films were supposedly obscene but the pair's defence team said it was less than 1%.

Panju and Patel, 47 admitted conspiracy to publish obscene material. Panju also admitted three counts of 'money laundering'. [nothing to do with organised crime, just spending ill-gotten gains]

Southwark Crown Court heard that Panju and Patel set up the firm Direct Media in 2002 to process orders for £8 DVDs sent to a post office box.

Police required five lorries to remove all the DVDs from their headquarters in Shepherds Bush, west London, in July last year. They also recovered copying equipment, a client database containing thousands of names and cash worth £41,000 in the raid.

Prosecuting, Natasha Tahta said: This is to date the largest seizure of pornographic material the Met's Obscene Publications Squad has ever dealt with.

Sentencing, Judge Peter Fingret said it was not possible to determine the true proportion of seized DVDs that were obscene and therefore illegal: However, the scale of the operation, even on the basis of a small percentage, would necessarily involve a large number of obscene DVDs .

A man accused of possessing more than 4,000 unclassified porn films [presumably with intent to supply] has had all charges against him dropped after a government blunder.

David Jessett, was due to go on trial at Lewes Crown Court, but the 'legal loophole' that the 1984 Video Recordings Act was never actually enacted meant the case collapsed.

The ruling has left Brighton and Hove City Council with a legal bill for thousands of pounds plus days of wasted man hours spent investigating the case.

The man had denied six offences of possessing unclassified films after a police raid on his home in Brighton. Officers allegedly seized DVDs and equipment that was capable of making 15 copies of films at a time during the raid on July last year.

Since 2001 Brighton & Hove City Council has prosecuted ten people for offences under the act. Sentences have varied from unpaid work to fines and in three cases the offenders were sentenced to prison terms of up to 2 months.

Christine Henderson, prosecuting for the council, told the court the local authority had only found out about the mistake just over a week ago. She said that when the government had rectified the loop-hole the the council may consider a new prosecution against Jessett. [Surely the law can't be retroactive, that is against all sorts of human rights laws].

Jessett's defence costs will be met by the public purse.

A Bulgarian sex trafficker and restaurant owner has been jailed for smuggling three Bulgarian women into the UK and forcing them to work as prostitutes in Tottenham, in North London.

Bulgarian national Plamen Hristov was handed a 66-month sentence at Wood Green Crown Court after a jury found him guilty of three counts of controlling prostitution for financial gain and three counts of trafficking for sexual exploitation.

Crown prosecutor Khalid Sheikh said: When they (the women) arrived, they were told they would actually be working as prostitutes and that if they did not, their families in Bulgaria would be harmed. This threat to their families, the manner displayed towards them by the defendant and the threats to expose what they were doing, made the women extremely vulnerable and was enough to keep them under his control for a number of months.

The three women, all Bulgarian, eventually went to the police in March this year.

Stefan Mocanu, was jailed for six years for trafficking and forcing Romanian Carmen Constantin to work in Brighton brothels.

The former welder from Romania was working in Brighton when he met his victim in an internet chatroom. He promising her a new life and flew her to Britain in April last year.

She was taken to a house in Brighton, and then to a brothel in Coombe Terrace where men paid for her services.

Miss Constantin said: He told me we would get married and I would be cleaning for old people. I believed him. The moment I arrived here his behaviour was totally different. I had to have sex with men for money. I scowled and pulled faces at them when I was made to line up with the other girls so that the men would not choose me. I wanted to go back to Romania but he said he would kill my family.

Mocanu was found guilty at Hove Crown Court yesterday of three charges of trafficking and controlling a prostitute for gain.

Judge Hayward said that the authorities should consider deporting him when he is released from prison.

A man walked free from court after becoming one of the first people in the country to be prosecuted under new laws that ban the possession of extreme pornographic images.

St Helens Magistrates' Court heard how the obscene photographs - depicting women and a number of animals - came to light after the 20-year-old was snitched up by computer repairers.

An engineer spotted the pictures [are they instructed to do a scan of images?] and suspecting them to be unlawful reported it to his line manager, who in turn snitched to the police.

The 14 images were claimed to be grossly offensive and disgusting .

District Judge Ian Lomax said the offender had “low social skills”, and believed he had merely viewed the images out of curiosity.

Judge Lomax, who had been shown the images involved in the prosecution, explained: This is new legislation and my inclination is for it to go before crown court. However no fee was paid, there was no file sharing and no processing. The images were obscene and curiosity seems to be the driving force behind you. Your computer skills are good and you stay home a lot. Computers are a substitute for socialising and social skills. But nothing will be gained by sending you into custody, because you wouldn't survive because you would be vulnerable. Support and assistance is needed.

He was given an 18-month supervision order and 24 hours at an attendance centre, where his offending behaviour will be addressed. He must also pay costs of £65, which will be deducted from his benefits.

Judge Lomax said he would not have to sign the Sex Offenders Register, concluding: Hopefully supervision will make you realise that it is possible that by looking at such images, whether it is out of curiosity, can result in a criminal conviction.

According to sources within law enforcement, there have been two or three prosecutions on their patch under the new Dangerous Pictures legislation. In each case, the crime targeted is that of Chinese men fogging very obviously pirated DVDs. There will be several copies of the latest blockbuster releases with very bad covers, and some pornography, always including some bestiality DVDs.

According to our source, prosecutions always tended to be under counterfeiting and trademark laws. A charge under the Obscene Publications Act (OPA) has also been possible. However, the police have now taken to adding a charge under extreme porn legislation for the bestiality DVDs. This pattern has happened at least twice and probably more.

If true, this suggests critics were right to challenge claims that it was no more than the Obscene Publications Act for the internet age. In the cases described, it would have been open to the police and prosecuting authorities to charge individuals under the Obscene Publications Act.

If there was, as has been argued, no difference between obscenity as defined in the extreme porn law and the OPA version of obscenity, then the OPA would be the more appropriate legislation to apply. The material in question was obscene: those caught by the police would have been guilty of seeking to distribute it, not mere possession. It looks as though the new law is more easily used than the old.

A woman who ran a brothel in the city centre has had a total of £622 confiscated.

Sunicha Jittawee pleaded guilty to keeping a brothel for prostitution in St Albans. She received a six-month prison sentence, suspended for 24 months. The sentencing judge also recommended Jittawee for deportation.

A formal confiscation order was made for the amount seized after the police raid on the property. Proceeds of crime investigations could uncover no further profit from the defendant's illicit activities.

Three members of a Hungarian family have been jailed for trafficking women to the UK for sexual exploitation, by an Inner London Crown Court judge.

Istvan Kalocsai and his son Istvan were jailed for six-and-a-half and five years respectively for sex trafficking offences. Istvan's wife Istvanne got three years for controlling prostitution.

Police said they had exploited another human being in the most horrible way.

The family were arrested after a young Hungarian woman was found cowering in the toilets of London City Airport, the court had heard. They tricked her into leaving her village home and forced her into prostitution with threats and beatings.

She originally came from a remote village in Hungary and was told she could have an all-expenses paid trip to Britain, where she would then work legitimately to pay back the cost of her trip.

A woman has been ordered to pay back £9,000 after she profited from her part in an online prostitution business.

Lisa Bowry was told to pay the sum under the proceeds of crime act at Guildford Crown Court.

At an earlier hearing the woman was handed a curfew and community order and told to pay £600 costs after admitting eight counts of controlling prostitution for gain and possessing criminal property.

The court heard that while working for escort agency Valentines of London between April 4 and July 12, 2007, she answered phone calls from punters, organising appointments for prostitutes and their clients.

She earned around £100 a shift working as a receptionist, and a further £10 for each booking she made, the judge was told.

Comment: Vindictive Legal Nastiness

30th April 2009, thanks to Alan

This is another piece of vindictive legal nastiness. Law about "controlling" prostitutes is being interpreted to include routine tasks such as those undertaken by a receptionist, and the police are clearly targetting such women with the hope of trousering their modest earnings, since they get some of the confiscated dosh.

Comment: Controlled for Authoritarian Gain

2nd May 2009, thanks to Alan

There was a similar case reported in the Express & Star a few weeks ago.

This time the "controller" was a Polish girl of 19 (at the time of the case coming to court). She was working as a tart herself and handling the bookings ("controlling"), maybe as the best English speaker in the "brothel" (three tarts working together).

Since the supposed "offences" took place prior to Sep 07, she may even have been under 18 at the time - and thus a victim - depending on just when her birthday fell.

Her lawyer mentioned that her activities would have been legal in Poland. Forty years of Stalinism, followed by rather conservative Roman Catholicism, and the Poles show more common sense than we do.

I also wonder why her lawyer didn't simply advise the girl to go home. Poland wouldn't extradite someone for doing something which isn't a crime there.

A policewoman admitted working as a high-class call girl when she appeared before a judge.

PC Victoria Thorne was among a number of women working for the Notorious Girls escort agency, appearing on its website in provocative poses and using the name Kelly.

The officer admitted misconduct in a public office when she appeared at Newcastle Crown Court and was remanded in custody.

The case was adjourned for the preparation of a pre-sentence report but her barrister John Elvidge made no application for her bail to be extended.

Judge John Evans adjourned the case and told her: You have pleaded guilty to this matter for which you will be given appropriate credit in due course. In the meantime you must remain in custody.

Thorne appeared in court alongside six others, all charged with offences relating to prostitution. They are charged with conspiracy to manage brothels for prostitution and conspiracy to control prostitutes for gain.

Thorne will be sentenced later.

Belinda Weston managed a p4p business venture in Worcester and shared the profits with prostitute Wendy Bristow.

But nutters complained to police and the ground floor flat was put under surveillance. A raid by officers on May 29 last year discovered two customers on the premises.

Weston pleaded guilty to controlling prostitution for gain between December 2007 and May last year. She and Bristow both denied a second charge of keeping a brothel and were given not guilty verdicts.

Judge Alistair McCreath discharged Bristow and fined Weston £500 with £500 costs. Weston must disclose her assets by April 3 for confiscation of her profits at a hearing the following month.

The judge said: It is completely unacceptable to set up what was, effectively, a brothel in a respectable, residential neighbourhood. The people who lived there were distressed by all the traffic it caused [up to 10 customers a day!] . It was painfully obvious why these men were going there.

But the judge accepted it was a shared business venture in which no one had been exploited.

The brothel charge could not be sustained because in law, a brothel has to have two prostitutes working on the premises.

Update: Robbed by the authorities

4th November 2011. See  article from  worcesternews.co.uk

A woamn who ran a brothel in Worcester has been forced to pay back more than £ 16,000 she earned through the business.

Belinda Weston was convicted at Worcester Crown Court in March 2009 of keeping a brothel used for prostitution. As well as a £ 500 fine and costs of £ 500, Weston was ordered to disclose her assets for confiscation under the Proceeds of Crime Act. She was ordered to pay back £ 14,396.48 and just under £ 2,000 in interest to Her Majesty's Court Service (HMCS).

Chris Battin, financial investigator at the West Mercia Police Economic Crime Unit, gloated: This represents a very satisfactory conclusion to the case as not only were the original offences detected and her activities stopped, but her criminal benefit was paid into the public purse.

Because there were no direct victims who suffered losses as a result of her activities, the money paid back will be split between the Treasury, West Mercia Police, HMCS and the Crown Prosecution.

Running a brothel at a bungalow in a Devon village has landed the unfortunate manager behind bars.

A court heard that after the brothel in Newton Poppleford, near Sidmouth, was raided, Peter Colicott got involved in managing another one in Gloucestershire which also offered Far Eastern girls for sex.

Colicott was jailed for harsh sentence of 15 months after he admitted keeping a small brothel at Newton Poppleford and assisting in the management of a brothel in Cheltenham.

Colicott had an Oriental partner — a Thai woman who is now back in her home country — and the two of them operated the business together until police raided it after an undercover operation in early 2007.

Officers rang the advertised number inquiring about the services on offer and were told it would be ฃ60 for half an hour and ฃ100 for an hour, Bremridge said. A full hour included everything, the caller was told. The premises were then raided.

Two girls were at the address at the time — one was Colicott's partner, and the other was a Thai girl. She told police she had come to the UK to work as a prostitute of her own free will, having worked in a massage parlour in Bangkok.

Giles Nelson, for Colicott, said the bungalow in Newton Poppleford was so remote — half a mile from the nearest property — that the brothel operation caused no offence to anyone. The girls working there were all doing so of their own free will: I hesitate to use the expression but it was a very small cottage industry

Judge William Hart told Colicott: Brothel keeping in Newton Poppleford is unlikely to be a particularly widespread evil — but it is a widespread evil in this country.