The organisation of accommodation may reflect the level of organisa-tion of the criminal operaorganisa-tion as a whole. The Swedish survey shows that housing the women becomes more carefully planned and organ-ised as the level of organisation in a trafficking network goes up.
Several difficulties may arise when organising accommodation.
First, renting is seen in many cases to require a great deal of organi-sation and planning. For that reason, evidence of renting apartments is found mainly in the medium-scale or large-scale Internet-based or-ganisations or networks. It is mainly the organiser or facilitator who sub-leases the apartments. Sometimes they get help from friends or acquaintances. There is also evidence in the Swedish survey that or-ganisers use both private landlords as well as housing agencies. In one case, they used a black-market agent to find apartments.
In one case, both the organisers and women working for them used
“mailbox addresses,” where they only were registered at the Swedish Migration Board as asylum seekers. They lived somewhere else but paid a certain sum every month to the provider of the mailbox ad-dress. In addition, a woman previously suspected of being a madam and human smuggler was letting her apartment illegally to one of the organisers, where one of the facilitating organisers lived with the women.
Difficulties in finding apartments
According to one informant convicted of aggravated procuring in the Swedish survey, the main difficulty today when establishing a procur-ing business is to find an apartment. In particular, he found it difficult to explain to the landlord the purpose for which the apartment was to
be used. According to him, it was even more difficult for non-Swedish persons than for Swedes:
One of the guys I was in custody with, he had problems. He was from Estonia, and when he wanted to rent a flat, he had to have a Finnish guy help him. But they had four, five flats.
In several of the analysed cases the apartments are used as brothels where several women both live and receive sex buyers. This kind of arrangement may also cause problems. According to the informant convicted of aggravated procuring, the clients in particular can cause a lot of problem:
But, it is not the girls who cause noise, it’s often the clients, who are drunk or something. (…) if a sex buyer came and was drunk, then they [the girls working there] didn’t open the door. Or if two clients were there at the same time. I mean they couldn’t take an unlimited number of people. At the same time.
The informant admitted in the interview that he had been involved in such a brothel. In that case, the building caretaker, who was also a client, told him that the neighbours had been complaining. The in-formant knew of another brothel, run by a friend of his, having the same problems.
Case description: Estonian trafficking network
In the most highly organised cases in the Swedish survey, involv-ing the Estonian traffickinvolv-ing network, women lived and sold sex in many apartments. In the last case, 15 addresses were used where women both lived and worked, including two hotels. In most cas-es, the women had stayed only briefly in Sweden and lived only in one apartment at a time, but in cases where they have moved to another apartment, it had to be done to get more clients. Some of the women complained that the sex buyers did not want to go to certain areas, which was the reason for the shortage of clients.
All the apartments were sub-leased. Sometimes the organisers used housing agencies and a black-market estate agent was also used.
This man stated in the police interrogation that he had helped peo-ple of different nationalities, of whom many were criminals, to get sub-let apartments. He also said in the police interrogation that he knew of other estate agents who did the same thing. For a fee of SEK 1,000 he acted as the intermediary between the person letting the apartment or landlord and the sub-let tenant. In this case, the sub-let tenants had several times disappeared after the sub-lease expired. Sometimes the lessors have returned to find the apartment in shambles and have had to change the locks. The organisers or
facilitators, or sometimes the women working for them, had rented the apartments. In the second case, the main trafficker at least dis-cussed allowing the women to rent, which would be a precaution-ary measure if they were caught. Many of those who rented apart-ments to the network were private persons acting in good faith.
Precautionary measures
Precautionary measures are taken to avoid problems such as com-plaining neighbours. One example is found in several cases where organisers move frequently. Even in one case where the women only lived in the flat, they had to move due to risks of getting too much attention from neighbours. In another case, the women lived in the apartment sub-leased by the main organiser only for a couple of weeks or a month. Sometimes they moved with very short notice if the main organiser thought the police were after them. Another precautionary measure found in another case was that the organisers forbade the women to receive clients in the apartments they lived in to avoid at-tention from the neighbours.
On the other hand, finding rental apartments to house the women may be preferable to finding other housing, such as hotel accommo-dation. According to the informant convicted of procuring, this kind of housing brings stability and does not require as much other plan-ning, which is needed for example when driving the women to and from sex buyers. In another case, they solved the dilemma by using a rendezvous near the women’s homes where sex buyers could pick up the women.
The Finnish survey found several legal actors involved in housing, such as hotel and apartment owners. In some cases, they may gain from the profits made by renting to criminals. In one case, the hotel owner denied that he was aware of the large-scale operations taking place on his premises in Kotka (the place functioned as a brothel), but he was found guilty because he had profited from renting the hotel.
Similarly, the owner of a holiday camp where a procuring operation had been ongoing for several years denied that he knew, but was still found guilty by the court. In both cases the procurement businesses were common knowledge in the area.
Similar to the Swedish survey, there are records in the Finnish sur-vey that housing agencies have been used in some cases. The agen-cies are usually aware that their apartments are used for prostitution, because they charge higher rents (double) for prostitutes. They may also exclude the apartments rented to prostitutes from the formal ac-counts.
Spontaneous arrangements
In the smaller and more unplanned trafficking cases analysed in the Swedish survey, arrangements for housing the women are more spon-taneous than in the medium-scale to large-scale organisations. In small-scale organised activities the women often live with organisers, who often board with friends and family members in their homes. In the majority of these cases, one of the organisers resided in Sweden.
One informant from the police provided an example from a small-scale case of the spontaneity of housing organisation and who might organise it:
Yes, it seems to be the contact living in Sweden. Often they [the women] live together with someone, with one of the procur-ers. They have lived at hotels, then they lived together, well they shared a small cheap hotel room, sneaked into the room at night so all four slept in one room meant for one or two people, so the others sneaked in there too…
In one case, the suspected traffickers rented land on which to park caravans. The landowner may be seen as a facilitator, although he denied knowing anything about the activities in the police interroga-tions.
In cases where women have been lodged with family or other ac-quaintances, it appears in several cases that the person providing lodging was unaware of the business activities. In some cases, the young girls were introduced as the organisers’ girlfriends, and the per-son lodging them did not notice the selling going on. But in one case it did become clear. The acquaintance who was providing lodging to the traffickers, a couple, and two women, eventually understood and threw them out. He said in the police interrogation:
Later, I noticed that they maybe were prostitutes. I thought it was strange when they were at my place. They were out all night and stayed home during the day. And that was why I threw them out, when I realised what they were doing.
In the small-scale trafficking networks the organisers and women also live in cheap hotels and youth hostels, and in some cases there is evi-dence that they move from place to place more often. In medium-scale to large-medium-scale organisations they also use hotels as accommoda-tion, although the survey shows that the organisers choose this option mainly when establishing business activities or when they are between apartments, since in many cases it is clear that it requires a great deal of planning and sometimes may be rather difficult for the organisers to fill the gaps between two rental agreements.
In the presumably more well-organised city tour procuring
opera-tion the women stay at mid-range or even classier hotels, where they both receive clients and stay briefly, for a couple of days, before mov-ing on to another city. The hotels are usually booked in advance from the source countries.
According to the informant convicted of procuring, it was less risky to use hotels to receive clients than it was for instance to organise the business in an apartment brothel, because it is easier for the police to monitor activities in an apartment brothel. Even though, he added, it may be more time-consuming because the organiser or facilitator has to drive the women to the hotel and then wait somewhere for the transaction to end.
In an apartment they [the police] can sit outside, like they did with us. They sat in a car outside and watched. That means it must be an advantage for the procurers to go to hotels.
In summary, it is apparent that the organisation of housing follows the organisation as a whole. The small-scale organised sex businesses are more spontaneous when arranging lodging and move frequently. The organisers and women often stay together in friends or acquaintances’
houses or at cheap hotels or hostels. The medium-scale to large-scale organisers think more about risks and plan accordingly when looking for accommodation. They rent apartments to a higher extent, and use the existing housing market, which implies a convergence of the legal and illegal spheres. However, they also seem to act spontaneously at times, for instance by choosing to stay at hotels when no other hous-ing is available. There are also parallels found in how they organise housing for the women and plan other logistics, such as transports to and from clients.