ORLANDO, Fla. – For years, the back pages of the Orlando Weekly were filled with ads for naughty nurses, sultry coeds and girls with come-hither names like “Rush” and “Roxie.”
But the saucy escort-service advertising came to a halt this fall.
Vice squad officers arrested three of the paper’s advertising sales reps in a sting operation and secured an extraordinary racketeering indictment against the Weekly, accusing it of knowingly profiting from prostitution.
The free alternative paper is calling the arrests an assault on the First Amendment – an argument that might not fly in court, given that investigators say they videotaped Weekly employees selling ad space to undercover officers who openly claimed to be prostitutes.
“We couldn’t believe how easy it was to say, ‘We’re a prostitute. I want to put out an ad,’ ” said Paul Zambouros, commander of the vice and organized crime section at the Metropolitan Bureau of Investigation, a task force made up of Orlando-area police and sheriff’s departments. “That has to stop.”
Escort-service ads are common in the nation’s alternative newspapers and bring in big money. But Richard Karpel, executive director of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, said he has heard of only one other similar case, and it involved only one employee and no charges against the newspaper.
“There’s hundreds of ads every week, and it’s not a place of newspapers to vet all their ads,” Karpel said.
“I think the responsibility of the newspaper is to make sure that they’re not advertising anything that’s explicitly illegal.”
The Weekly has decried the arrests as retaliation for running stories critical of the MBI. The paper has extensively chronicled allegations that during investigations of strip-club prostitution and drug sales, MBI officers groped dancers, mishandled evidence and spent a lot of time in nightspots with little results.
The MBI denied the bust had anything to do with the Weekly’s stories. Zambouros said the agency couldn’t ignore the newspaper because MBI officers kept arresting prostitutes who advertised there.
“Believe me, we’ve got a lot of other things we want to do,” Zambouros said. But “they forced our hand.”
The employees were arrested Oct. 19 and charged with aiding and abetting prostitution and profiting from it. The charges could bring as much as five years behind bars. The employees and their lawyer would not comment on the case.
As for the charges that the Weekly operated as a third-party pimp, the paper could be fined $15,000, and it would be up to a judge to decide whether anyone representing the publication goes to jail, according to the MBI.
The MBI spent two years investigating the paper, accumulating hours of audio and video surveillance. Investigators said the Weekly sold ad space to undercover agents posing as prostitutes, even though the officers made it clear they were selling sex.
The ad reps even tried to help the “prostitutes” by passing on a tip the MBI planted about a fictitious sex sting, authorities said.
Publisher Rick Schreiber said in a statement: “These charges are outrageous and we are confident they will be dismissed in due course. The arrests are a blatant attempt to infringe upon the First Amendment rights of this newspaper and its advertisers.”