The Times January 26, 2007

*800 held in crackdown on Rome's sex-slave gangsters*

Richard Owen in Rome

Nearly 800 people, said to be part of a network that smuggled women into
Italy and forced them to work as prostitutes, have been arrested in a
crackdown on the country’s sex-slave trade.

The arrests are a response to the growing outcry over increasingly
visible street prostitution, with many roads and lay-bys on the
outskirts of cities lined at all hours with scantily clad prostitutes
from Eastern Europe and Africa. According to police, there are 70,000
prostitutes in Italy, 90 per cent of them foreigners.

The phenomenon has given rise to a debate in Parliament and the press
over whether to reintroduce brothels, abolished in the 1950s.

In co-ordinated raids in 17 regions, police arrested 780 people and
opened inquiries into more than 1,000. Almost all are non-Italians.

Gilberto Caldarozzi, the officer in charge of the crackdown, praised 45
prostitutes who had courageously defied their captors by going to the
police. All have been given residence permits and round-the-clock
protection.

Mr Caldarozzi said that the women were often lured to Italy with
promises of work. Some were bought from poor families for as little as
€200 (£130). The women earned an average €5,000 a month, he said, but
handed it all to their kidnappers, who kept them captive in sordid
conditions and beat and raped them.

According to one estimate, a fifth of all foreign prostitutes are minors.

A 16-year-old Romanian girl, named as Maria, told reporters yesterday
that she had been sold by her parents and taken to Ladispoli, on the
coast north of Rome, where she was “treated like an animal”. Her captors
had taken away her passport and mobile phone and put her to work at once
on the Via Aurelia, the coast road. She said that she had tried to run
away, but had been recaptured and beaten up. She eventually escaped and
went to the police.

Police said that there was no overall organisation or “Mr Big”. Instead,
groups of pimps formed alliances, in the style of the Mafia, working an
agreed turf. Mr Calderozzi said that the Mafia was not directly involved
in foreign prostitution but tolerated it.