Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Getting out of ‘the game’

WEEKEND EDITION Dec. 6 - 7, 2003

Seventeen-year-old Gia always ordered Shirley Temples with extra cherries at Strip hotel bars on the nights she worked. You have to have your mind clear when you steal from men who think you're going to have sex with them for money, she said.

She met her first customer at a Caesars Palace bar. The "trick" was a drunken tourist and looked about 35.

"He asked if I wanted to come up to his room to see his coin collection," Gia said.

In his 15th-floor room, he paid her $1,000 up front, she says. She suggested that he take a shower, then slipped out of his room with his wallet. It contained $600. She also stole his watch.

"My heart was about to jump right out of my chest," Gia said. She ran down several flights of stairs in high heels before catching the elevator the rest of the way down. "I was just trying to calm myself down. I was so scared."

She paused and smiled as she recalled that she had a cabbie drive her across the street to the Bellagio.

Gia says she stole about $20,000 last summer from men who picked her up for sex. After getting arrested twice, she was directed to Children of the Night, a nonprofit organization that runs a home in the Los Angeles suburb of Van Nuys, Calif., for child prostitutes who want out of "the game."

Children of the Night provides a protected place to live, food, clothing, counseling and schooling to child prostitutes from all over the country.

The shelter, a converted post office situated between an auto-body shop and a barbershop, has room for 24 children. The rooms resemble those in college dormitories. Most have a couple of beds in each room. Sometimes the youngest children staying at the home are put in private rooms. Every room has a its own bathroom.

Employees and volunteers for the organization sometimes walk the streets of the greater Los Angeles area handing out brochures to try to spread the word that help is available for child prostitutes. They have a website and advertise in other cities. Youth from throughout the nation contact the home through its 24-hour toll-free hotline.

Others, including many from Las Vegas, find out about the operaiton when they are given the option of coming to the home after being arrested. Children of the Night is not punitive; it's used as a form of rehabilitation in addition to court-ordered punishment.

Children can stay at the home for as long as they need to. One Las Vegas girl lived there for four years.

Sociologist and attorney Lois Lee founded Children of the Night in 1979. Since then, the home has taken in more than 10,000 children ages 11 to 17, and follow-up studies indicate 80 percent of those children have not returned to prostitution, Lee said.

Over the past six years, 97 girls arrested in Las Vegas spent time at the home, Lee said.

Officers from Metro Police's Stop Turning Out Child Prostitutes program, nicknamed STOP, "call us all the time to check on the success of the kids ... They're doing a wonderful job. They have a very aggressive effort," Lee said.

On Dec. 3, there were 17 children living at the shelter, and six, including Gia, were from Las Vegas.

Into the business

Gia got into the lifestyle through Jessica, a friend from school. Gia liked the idea of easy money, but she knew that Jessica's pimp beat her.

Gia says she figured she could work without a pimp. And if she could get away with stealing the tricks' money without actually having sex, so much the better.

"The girls here don't believe me," she said while sitting in her room, decorated with Tupac Shakur pictures, at Children of the Night. "They're like, 'Yeah, right, you had a pimp.' But I'm smart because I didn't have a pimp. I chose to do it on my own."

Gia has long dark hair and is beautiful even without makeup. Dressed in a sweatsuit, she looks like a high school athlete. She laughs easily and she's believable when she says she's a good girl who just got caught up in something bad during her summer vacation between her junior and senior years of high school.

She moved to Las Vegas from Utah two years ago. Her mother sent her to live here with Gia's 30-year-old sister after the teenager got arrested while riding in a stolen car with a friend. Her mother thought Las Vegas would be a good place for Gia to start over. She was wrong.

Gia didn't want to come to Las Vegas, she said. She heard a lot of bad things about the city, "about drugs and crazy people and murderers." But she didn't know Las Vegas was called Sin City until she started seeing that moniker on key chains in gift shops.

She soon learned the reasons for the city's nickname.

"My mom left me in Vegas, and here I was stuck in this bad environment and I got caught up in it," she said. "I got stuck in this hole."

Her living situation was tenuous. Gia and her sister didn't get along, and her sister kicked Gia out in June. The timing was bad -- Gia had just quit her job at a pizza parlor because she wasn't getting paid during her training period.

Without a job or place to live, she moved into her new friend Jessica's Budget Suite hotel room. Jessica had told Gia she was topless dancer, but Gia soon found out the truth. Jessica's boyfriend, "Special K," was actually her pimp.

He tried to persuade Gia to work for him, telling her he'd be her sugar daddy and get her money and cars. But Gia saw that Jessica's pimp left bruises on Jessica. Gia also didn't want to have sex with random men. But she wanted money.

"I thought (prostitution) was the only way I could support myself," Gia said.

So, armed with a fake driver's license that would allow her into casinos, she hung out at bars and led the men on, then stole from them. She had sex with some of them when she couldn't make a clean getaway. One got angry and raped her when he caught her sneaking out of his room.

Gia was arrested in June after Jessica's mother told police what the girls were up to. Vice officers went to their room, and both girls, frightened, admitted that they were prostitutes.

Police questioned Gia for a long time about who her pimp was, but she didn't have one, she said. She eventually told them Special K was her pimp so they'd stop asking her.

She spent 10 days in the Clark County Juvenile Detention Center, then was placed on house arrest for a month. The day her month was up, she went to a mall and ran into a woman she knew who worked as a prostitute. The woman offered to let Gia move in with her.

That night, she and the woman went to the Strip to work. They split up and agreed to meet at a nearby McDonald's at 6:30 a.m. Gia never made it. After a few hours, she had run into an undercover cop at the MGM Grand Hotel.

"He said he was looking for some company, but I had a feeling that something wasn't right," Gia said. But she wasn't sure, and she didn't want to miss a chance to make some money. She told him her rate was $1,500.

"He got me really good," she said. "He said, 'This isn't your morning, sweetheart,' " and arrested her.

Looking back on her experience, she admits what she did wasn't smart, but she said at least she didn't get involved with a pimp.

Lee doesn't buy that part of Gia's story: Child prostitutes who work on their own are extremely rare.

"I bet she had a pimp and she just doesn't want to get him in trouble," Lee said.

A typical 13-year-old

Unlike other girls at Children of the Night who seem older than their years, 13-year-old Heather looks and acts like the child she is.

Her skin is like porcelain, and a mane of wavy brown hair frames her baby face. She skips through the halls at Children of the Night, where she's been for a month and a half, kicking off her blue flip flops and giggling.

For months when she should have been going to school dances and developing crushes on boys, she worked on Fremont Street, selling her body to make money for clothes and shoes that her mother couldn't afford to buy her.

Her home life was tumultuous. Her mother's boyfriend was physically abusive and Heather said she escaped by "partying" -- hanging out, drinking alcohol and using methamphetamine with older friends.

In January a man who lived in the apartment next door approached her about being a prostitute. He told her she could make a lot of money and buy anything she wanted.

Heather was too naive to be afraid. She knew little about the dangers of prostitution, she said, and it wasn't until she came to Children of the Night that she learned the risks she had taken.

"My pimps never informed me that prostitutes get killed," she said. "If I had known that then, it would've made me stop. The only thing I worried about was getting a (sexually transmitted disease)."

Heather's first foray into prostitution wasn't profitable, she said. After two nights on Fremont Street, she hadn't gotten any business, so her first pimp gave up on her, she says. A few months later, she met another sweet-talking pimp and began working downtown again.

Every few nights, she'd be on the streets. Her mother didn't know what she was doing when she went out, she said. Heather made excuses as to why she was out late, once even telling her mother the reason she was out all night was because she had been raped. Her mother suspected Heather was using drugs, but never imagined she was working as a prostitute, Heather said.

One memorable "trick" pulled up to her in "a really expensive red car." He was a dentist, she said, and took her to his dental office where they took Ecstasy and had sex, she said.

The material possessions Heather wanted so badly were still out of her reach, though. All the money she made went to her pimp, "Cash." She estimated she turned about 20 tricks in the few months she worked the streets, but only got to keep a few dollars.

Early one morning about two months ago, a man pulled up to her and asked her to get into his car. He said it was his day off and was looking for some fun, but he had a cup of coffee and a newspaper. She wondered why he was up so early on his day off.

She soon had her answer. He pulled out his police badge and arrested her.

"I was going to run out the door," Heather said. "I was so scared."

But the arrest turned out to be a blessing. She was given the opportunity to come to Children of the Night, where she's getting counseling and taking classes at the on-site school. Her favorite subject is algebra. Most importantly, she said, her relationship with her mother has flourished.

Heather's goal is to finish high school, graduate from college and, like Gia, she dreams of becoming a Metro vice cop. She wants to help women and girls turn their lives around, just as the officer who took her into custody did for her.

"Oh my gosh, oh my gosh," she said, leaning forward in her chair. "I really want to go back and thank him."

She added one other hope: "I really want to see (Cash) put away. It was really wrong for him to put me out on the streets."

3 pimps in 2 years

Linda spotted the man who would be her first customer sitting at a bar at the MGM Grand.

He was in his mid-30s and looked wealthy, sporting rings and a diamond watch.

Wearing clothes she thought a prostitute should wear -- a short black skirt, halter top and heels, her hair and nails done -- she nervously approached him.

Before long, they were in a room her pimp had booked.

She told the man she was 21, but she was a 13-year-old runaway. She made $1,000 that night.

Two nights later, Linda and a friend stripped for the man and his buddies and had sex with them. She can't remember how much money she made, but it was a lot, she said.

Back at the apartment she shared with her pimp, she ecstatically showed him the money, throwing the bills all over the bed.

"He said 'Baby, you don't have to work for a couple nights now,' " Linda recalls. "Making money was a high I couldn't come down from."

Two more pimps, three arrests and two years later, Linda, now 15, lives at Children of the Night. She has been there since June.

Linda is tall and pretty and wears a warm-up jacket and light blue pajama bottoms. She tells her story matter-of-factly. When she speaks, her tongue piercing is visible.

She has lived in Las Vegas most of her life. When she was 11, her mother's boyfriend moved into their home and started molesting her, she said.

When an attractive, charismatic, dark-skinned man with braids approached her on the Strip one night and told her she was pretty, she saw him as a ticket out of her troubled home.

Linda moved into his one-bedroom apartment. He "wined and dined" her and told her he loved her, she said. They were boyfriend and girlfriend, she thought, and when he suggested she get a job to help out with expenses, she agreed.

"He said he knew about a quick and easy way to get paid," she said. "He said I could sit at a bar and make $1,000 by just talking to a guy."

Linda soon found out she'd have to do more than that. Her pimp persuaded her have sex for cash and she agreed. Instead of "giving it away," it just made sense to charge for sex, she said.

She says she knew nothing about prostitution at the time. She didn't know that her pimp would make her hand over all the money she earned.

"He said I would be out turning tricks, and I said, 'What's a trick? What's the definition of that word?' " Linda said.

Her pimp told her what to do (find customers at Strip hotels), what to say (nothing overt about prostitution), how to act (coy and flirty), what to wear (sexy clothes), how much to charge ($800 to $1,000.)

Every five tricks, Linda would change her clothes and do her hair a different way to throw off vice cops and casino security guards.

She was arrested two or three months after she started. After some persuading by Metro vice officers, she gave the name of her pimp and testified against him in court.

After a stay in the juvenile detention center, she was placed on probation and moved back in with her mother. Her mother's boyfriend started molesting her again, and she kept running away and coming back home.

Pimp No. 2 entered her life a few months after her arrest. He lived in her apartment complex. He was "really sweet," and he asked her if she wanted to party. He arranged for her and two other girls to meet two men in a hotel room. The girls started stripping.

"They said, 'Wait, keep your clothes on,' " Linda said. "They were undercover cops. I felt like jumping out the window!"

"I really saw it as a sign that God was looking out for me," she added. "I shouldn't have been there doing what I was doing ... My mom was very upset."

Linda moved back in with her mother and enrolled in eighth grade at an alternative school, but, as before, her mother's boyfriend molested her, and she ran away again.

When she was 15, she met her third pimp, a 20-year-old man who lived near the children she baby-sat.

"He said I could make more money selling dope," Linda said. She decided to take him up on his job offer and began selling crack for him.

When a few hundred dollars came up missing, he accused Linda and another girl of stealing from him. He put them in a shower stall, held a gun to their heads and threatened to kill them if they didn't give him his money.

Linda said she didn't take the money and she's sure no money was actually missing. It was a ploy to get her to work for him as a prostitute.

A few days after working for him, she got into an undercover Metro cop's car. Linda and her pimp were both arrested. She was relieved, she said.

"By then I was like, 'I'm getting arrested for prostitution again,' " she said. "Three strikes."

Linda is scheduled to return to Las Vegas this month. She admitted she's nervous about it, afraid she'll run into her former pimps.

But she expects her home life to be smoother. Her mother dumped the boyfriend and her father is back in her life. Her priority is school. She said she has no reason to run away now.

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