The fact that so many of the working girls are from abroad, and especially from poorer countries, is because they can earn more in London in six months they could in ten years back in their own countries. A girl working for a big London escort agency can easily earn £200,000 in a year.

Most decide to work for a set period of time, a few years at most, and save their money to set up their own business back in their own country. Some of the foreign ones end up marrying clients. Most do not see it as a long-term career. The ones that do stay on the game for many years are the ones with drug problems or with a pimp, as both drugs and pimps prevent them from saving their earnings.

Prostitution is already legal in the UK. A woman who accepts money for sex is not breaking the law. As explained in the book, it is the offering sex for money - soliciting - or offering money for sex - importuning - that breaks the law. The act itself is legal. The law allows for a prostitute to work from a flat, but not more than one. Though she is allowed a maid who can answer phones and show callers in and out. More than one working girl in a flat means it is classed as a brothel and is therefore illegal.

Providing the girl isn’t being coerced, and she’s not underage, and providing that everything that takes place is consensual, then I personally don’t see that there is a problem. Even the police seem to accept this. A girl working on her own from a flat is never hassled. Vice are more interested in organised prostitution, girls who are being abused, and illegal immigrants, as well as getting prostitutes off the streets.

In my opinion the business should be totally legalised and regulated. Escort agencies could be sold licences, their girls would be taxed and have to have weekly/monthly medicals, and VAT would be charged. (A lot of prostitutes are already registered for tax as they know they will have more problems with the tax authorities than with the police).

I also don’t see why working visas couldn’t be issued to girls from overseas who wanted to work as prostitutes in the UK. That way they could also be regulated, taxed, and medically checked. At the moment the foreign girls are working illegally and so tend to avoid health checks, or talking to the police if they are robbed or abused. Regulation would also solve that. Regulation would offer protection to both parties, to the girls and to the customers. Just my opinion! Anyway, my research was an eye-opener, both to the horrors of the ethnic cleaning in the Balkans, and to the mechanics of internet prostitution, and I certainly think I produced a memorable thriller!

REVIEWS

Daily Mirror - ‘Atmospheric suspense set in Sarajevo’s killing fields.’

BRUTAL TALE OF THE EVIL TRADE IN PEOPLE ;MORE MONEY IS SPENT ON PROSTITUTION THAN GOING TO THE CINEMA. STEPHEN LEATHER TELLS ANNE SIMPSON OF THE CHILLING RISE OF SEX TRAFFIC FROM THE BALKANS

February 4, 2003

Anne Simpson

There is an icy moment in Stephen Leather's latest thriller when his hero, Jack Solomon, asserts a creed of calloused sensibility. "You won't go far wrong," he says, "if you believe people are basically evil." On almost every level Leather's book, The Eyewitness is pertinent, exploring the contamination which seeps into innocent lives when ripped open by violent social upheaval.

At its core is the hideous gangsterism of people-trafficking, with its inter -linked rackets of money-laundering and high and low-grade prostitution. Solomon, a former London detective, is working in the Balkans with an agency dedicated to identifying the war-dead. His particular mission is to trace the only remaining witness to a massacre by Serbs, in which 21 members of a single Albanian family "simply vanished". He tracks the survivor to London where liberty for this 19-year-old girl now means selling herself for sex, and its ruthless, powerful web of danger.

It is a grim, suspenseful tale and we, the readers, know from almost daily news stories that Leather's plot is disturbingly close to fact. Recently 10 prostitutes from Kosovo, Moldova, Poland, and Thailand were detained by Strathclyde Police in simultaneous raids on Glasgow premises, but almost weekly police break up call-girl networks operating throughout Britain, from plush Mayfair addresses to sauna parlours in Manchester and Scotland. Research into the vile big business practices of gangster overlords led Leather himself into all sorts of bandit territory, from the shattered remnants of Yugoslavia to the clubs of south-east Asia. But does an author so focused on the potency of wickedness for fictional purposes come to share Solomon's bleak view of humanity? There is a long intake of breath before Leather replies with an emphatic no, and then he adds: "But terrible, terrible things do happen in our world and quite often it is fundamentally good people who are the perpetrators."

This observation contains an even sharper chill than Solomon's, so at what point does Leather think decent people step over the line into barbarity? In Sarajevo he spent time with the International Commission on Missing Persons which, in this, his fourteenth, novel, becomes the International War Dead Commission. "That's the question everyone must ask themselves. Bosnia -Herzegovina is at most a three-hour flight from London.

"The people there are not all that different from us yet they marched men, women, and children out of villages and took them into forests, mowed them down with machine-guns, buried them, then dug up the bodies again to mix them up in different mass graves elsewhere to make identification harder." We may wonder about the sort of people who would do that, muses Leather. "We may agonise over whether we would be capable of such appalling hate. I would like to think that I would be among those who would stand their ground and say, 'This mustn't happen'. But that doesn't always seem to be the case when the group mentality takes over. People together will carry out the most tremendous atrocities while, as individuals, they might never commit a crime. That's the very scary thing."

In a dozen or so years he has gained a sizeable international reputation as a thriller writer whose fast, unvarnished prose is a natural spin-off from his time in journalism when he worked for publications including The Herald, the Times, Daily Mail, and the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong. From his latest investigative sources he possesses some astonishing data, the starkest information being that in the UK more money is now spent on prostitution than on cinema-going. In financial terms that's £770 million on prostitution as opposed to £400 million on taking in a movie.

"There are girls queuing up right across central and eastern Europe to come here because they can make big money quickly. For them prostitution is a career choice, a means to financing a better life back home but something they wouldn't necessarily pursue in their own countries for reasons of shame." Most foreign girls, he says, are brought into Britain on false papers by people -traffickers, after probably telling their families they were planning to stay here as language students or waitresses. "The traffickers call themselves agencies, and the girls are contracted to them. But one student, two years into a law degree in Poland, told me that she went to the British Embassy for a six -month visa, having already signed up with a language school in London."

Within a day of arriving she had a flat near the Edgware Road and was working as a call girl. She had estimated that during her stay she would earn enough financial security to see her through the rest of her degree. By contrast, the British prostitutes whom Leather interviewed seemed blighted with self -loathing, their work usually a frantic means of funding drug addiction.

Leather's field work for The Eyewitness also took in the turf wars erupting now in Britain, battles which have convinced him that the rise in gun violence is often linked to foreign mobsters who, in the guise of political refugees, do manage to steal through our inept and cumbersome bureaucracy. "Once here, vast numbers of mafia types from the former eastern bloc and Russia re-activate their criminal contacts and start making colossal money from escort agencies and drugs."

As a result, trafficking in human beings is now a more profitable growth industry than actually dealing in drugs. "The penalties for smuggling in people are much less than for drug trading. A person desperate to reach Britain might pay $ 10,000, and the trafficker might bring in up to 20 people at a time, with very little risk of him getting caught. And if he is caught, the maximum penalty will be five years, with most offenders getting out in 18 months. For the drug trafficker it could be five, 10, or 20 years."

Back in Thailand, recently, Leather was standing before that reconstructed bridge of infamy over the River Kwai when a Japanese sight-seer, one among thousands, asked him politely if he would mind stepping aside slightly so that the man could assemble his eight companions for a photograph. Leather obliged and the group duly beamed into the camera, no trace of awareness on their faces that this very location had once been poisoned by brutality.

Yet the visual evidence is still there in hundreds of graves on the river bank, those row upon row of headstones dedicated mainly to the British and Dutch soldiers who perished at the hands of the Japanese while beaten into building the Kwai's original railway bridge during the Second World War. "Two hours out from Bangkok, and you can join a passenger boat which carries you past temples and caves, all good stuff for souvenir pictures. And nobody seems to notice the war graves or exclaim, 'Oh, God, how horrific'. What happened 60 years ago appears to have been forgotten."

The carelessness of memory is a reminder of how easily history gets ploughed over to become lost in something else - in this case a teeming extension of Thailand's happy, snappy tourist industry. But then, as Stephen Leather reflects, who can truly blame any of us just now for setting our sights on the least harrowing aspects of our imperilled world?
Copyright 2003 Scottish Media Newspapers Limited
The Herald (Glasgow)

As assignments go, it was a tough one. Researching his latest book, Stephen Leather had to sleep with scores of women. The Dublin-based former journalist has now written a riveting thriller about the lucrative international industry of human trafficking and Internet prostitution. Brendan O'Connor met him.

NO ONE could accuse Eyewitness, Stephen Leather's latest thriller, of being badly researched. Indeed, for seven or eight months last year Leather was, to use the old expression, buried up to his b*****ks in research for this story of human trafficking and Internet prostitution.

" The only way to get the girls to talk to you is to be a customer," he says, only slightly sheepishly. "If you turned up with a notebook and said you wanted to talk about this and that, you'd be lied to. The only time they'll really talk to you is in the afterglow. You've proved by sleeping with them that you're not a cop and they wouldn't expect a journalist to do that kind of thing so they trust you totally after you've done it with them."
Those who didn't trust him were the girls who thought he might be a spy from their own or another agency. Apparently, many of the bigger London escort agencies send out a form of mystery shopper to their girls. The spies sample the wares and then report back. The issue is not so much quality control as to ensure that the girls are offering every possible extra they can, including, "I have a friend who can join us". Given that Leather admits he had problems keeping up, so to speak, with one girl at a time, we can assume he didn't get any friends to join in.
" I saw about 40 girls in all," he says, "and about halfway through this I started to have trouble maintaining my interest." Leather's excuse for seeing so many girls was that it was difficult to weed out the real Eastern Europeans. "Ideally," he says, "I wanted to talk to Serbian or Bosnian girls and they were very hard to find because they wouldn't advertise on their websites that they're Eastern European. Most of them claim to be Italian to keep the immigration people away."
So Leather had to pick girls he suspected might really be Eastern European and then go and try them out. "If you found one who admitted to being Eastern European, that was interesting for me, but in the meantime I had to go and see lots of so-called Italians and find out if they could actually speak any Italian. Obviously many of them actually were Italian so they weren't really any good to me." But in order to win the girls' trust and find out if they really were Italian, he of course had to sleep with them.
" So halfway through the research I got some Viagra. And by the way, they really do work. If you've never tried it, you really should," he says. "You have to beat it down with a shower head."

Unfortunately, Leather got all the side-effects too. "The way it works is that it raises your blood pressure, so I got a line around my neck, above which I was red as a beetroot. My nose would swell up and I couldn't breathe through it, my ears would go bright red and, because it can swell your brain a bit as well, I'd get a piercing headache like a migraine. It also gave me very bad wind, so within 20 minutes of taking it I'd be burping and farting. So there you are, arriving into a pretty 24-year-old from Belarussia, with a red face, burping and farting. I had to stop taking it."
However, the research has definitely paid off. Eyewitness is one of the better thrillers I've read for a while and is jam-packed full of interesting little sidelines about the sex trade and the trafficking of human beings from Eastern Europe. Leather, a former journalist, has a comprehensive take on the whole industry that is both realistic and darkly funny.
The story of Eyewitness begins, as does the story of much European prostitution, in Bosnia. The war in Bosnia, together with the Internet, has revolutionised the vice trade in Western Europe. "The whole Balkans conflict has opened up the sex industry in a huge way," says Leather quite cheerfully, "because when the killing and the ethnic cleansing was going on, the rest of Europe began, quite rightfully, to take in refugees. But of course organised crime saw that as a golden opportunity so the Russian mafia moved in, the local Bosnian mafia moved in, and of course there were the Albanians."
The Albanian mafia now controls 80 per cent of the vice trade in London's Soho and its tentacles spread as far as Glasgow.
" What they were doing," says Leather, "was manufacturing and procuring passports. Lost passports are a big thing over there. You get someone who is Bosnian who says he's lost his passport and he's issued with another one and, bang, you've got two and that becomes four and so on. And then people with no intention of travelling anywhere will apply for a passport and sell it on to traffickers as well."
In effect, Bosnia became a clearing house for Eastern and Central Europeans who wanted to get into the EU. Bosnian border controls are fairly lax and so they flooded there from all over Eastern Europe to get their passports and come to the EU. "Gangsters, hookers and drug dealers from all over that part of the world come there and it became just a staging post for them to get into Europe," says Leather, "and if they get caught coming into Europe, they immediately claim asylum on the basis of their false Bosnian passport."
Leather claims that most of the Eastern European girls working in the vice trade in London and Dublin were probably prostitutes in their own country before they came here. The difference is that while they might have started out working for one or two dollars a day in the Ukraine, they will end up making two to three hundred pounds sterling an hour if they can get to London. The only problem they have is getting the $10,000 they need to pay a trafficker to get them papers and passage to Europe. Some of the girls will have managed to save it up, while many others will sign a contract with the trafficker agreeing to work off the money in the vice trade here. By this method they may end up paying back anything up to $30,000 "You shop around for the best deal," Leather says before resorting to the normal 50-50 arrangement with their pimp.
Another huge scam is the language-student route into Europe. This is particularly popular with Thai girls. When Leather isn't living in Dublin, he spends half his year in Thailand and this is where he first began researching the book. In Thailand, the going rate to get to Britain is about $7,000. Most of the girls come in as tourists or language students and many of them will be accompanied by what are known as jockeys. These are British backpackers living in Thailand who for £500 or so will fly into London with the girls. They walk through customs with them, saying, "This is my girlfriend, here are her papers, she's staying here with me for six months," and then the jockey will stay in London a few days before flying back. The jockey system is all very civilised, with the jockeys meeting their mounts in a hotel beforehand to get to know them. But, in case you're wondering, yes, they are called jockeys because they ride the girls to England.
Interestingly, though some of the girls in Eyewitness are de facto slaves, Leather believes that most of the girls involved in the vice trade are reasonably in control of their lives.
" I never met anyone who would admit to being beaten or coerced. Though obviously, when the police catch these girls with a fake passport or without a visa, as a way of getting better treatment the girls will immediately claim they were forced into prostitution."
Leather reckons there's no real point in forcing girls to work in the sex trade when there are thousands of Eastern European girls queuing up to do it willingly. "You don't need the aggravation. You just go to Belarussia and say you run a massage parlour in Dublin and you'll get 20 girls who want to come straight away. Although while they're not literally forced into it, they have probably little choice in that they're doing it because there are no prospects in their own countries."
As against the very lucrative prospects in the UK and Ireland. Pretty young girls at the high end of the escort market can earn up to a quarter of a million pounds a year in London. This is usually more than they would earn in a lifetime in their own countries. Leather says that many of the girls he met did actually just work as prostitutes for six months or a year.
" People think that these girls are stupid or uneducated but many of them aren't. I met one girl from Warsaw who had done two years of a law degree at home but who had run out of money and couldn't get a job in Poland. She came to London for six months and earned 80 or 90 grand and now she's finishing up her degree and she's going to be a solicitor in Poland. Some of the Asians come over for a year or two and then go home and set themselves up with a house and a business."
You could almost begin to imagine that prostitution is nothing but a very lucrative gap-year programme.
But Leather admits that not all the girls escape unscathed, even if some of them manage to maintain themselves behind the mask of prostitution and keep a professional distance from what they do, getting out of the business relatively intact and fairly rich. "I met two Russian girls in St John's Wood who were working for a lap-dancing club and an escort agency," he says. "They were both single parents with young kids back in Russia. They'd come over on language student visas and, while they were very nice and very friendly, there was a limit to how far you could go in talking to them because they were clearly keeping themselves at a distance from the whole thing. They seemed to be managing it quite successfully, and presumably they went with plenty of money back to their old lives."
Others are clearly very damaged by the whole experience. "I met a paediatric nurse from Thailand who had only been in London for about three months and she was obviously very hurt by the job. You could actually see the damage it was doing to her," says Leather.
For his own part, Leather wasn't damaged by his experience. He has just had the results of his second Aids test in the last six months, and he is healthy, and for the time being he is back in the calmer confines of his flat off Grafton Street. Leather says he is one of only about two dozen residents of the area and it's getting more difficult all the time.
" It was fine when the opening hours were sensible, but now that kicking-out time seems to be about three in the morning and the trucks start delivering at about six, there's a window of about three hours where you get some sleep." Triple glazing, earplugs and heavy curtains apparently help too.
Originally from Britain, Leather spends much of the winter in Thailand but Ireland is obviously more convenient for his publishers in London and for the British television industry where he isn't averse to making a quick buck, writing episodes for everything from London's Burning to Murder in Mind. Though it would be fair to say that TV is not his first love.
" Writing books you have much more control but television is a much more collaborative process. Sometimes you hand in a script and they hate it and you ask why, and they'll say something like, 'Tone, we don't like the tone,' and you're fired. You have to learn not to take it personally. In TV and film, writers are much more disposable. They're much more gentlemanly in the book world. If they don't like something they'll sit down and help you with it. You'd never deliver a book and have an editor say, 'We don't like this, you're fired and we'll get someone else to do it."'
When his ego is bruised by TV, Leather will often go home and take solace in looking at the bookshelf which holds the 14 thrillers he's written. He also consoles himself with the money. He gets up to stg£25,000 for an episode of something like Murder in Mind and he reckons he can knock one out in three weeks.
He's was married once but has been divorced for over 15 years now and hasn't really met anyone new. "I lead quite a nomadic lifestyle," he says. "If I'm going to research a book I'll be travelling around and then I'll be writing it, so I'm quite happy this way."
While he says he has few inclinations to return to his prostitute habit he admits wryly that he still cruises the Internet now and again, "and if I saw someone who looked interesting, well, you never know".

'Eyewitness' by Stephen Leather, Hodder & Stoughton, 16.60 euros, is out now
Brendan O'Connor