In what is believed to be the biggest operation of its kind in Canada, police from Toronto and three outlying suburbs last night swooped in on hundreds of body-rub and massage parlours looking for children and illegal immigrants forced into the sex trade.
And they rescued at least two teenagers, one 16 and one 17, who were working in one of the establishments, and late last night had sealed off a York Region hotel room and arrested a man they allege was pimping the young women.
Called Project Home for Christmas, the joint forces effort was spearheaded by Toronto's child-exploitation unit, but also involved officers from York, Durham and Peel Regions, federal immigration and Royal Canadian Mounted Police and local bylaw enforcement officials -- with child-protection agencies put on standby and interpreters at the ready. "This is not an exercise in enforcement," Detective Sergeant Paul Gillespie, head of the child exploitation unit, told hundreds of officers at a briefing yesterday, "and it's certainly not a morality issue.
"Consenting adults can do with consenting adults what they like," he said. "This is about women, and sometimes children, being exploited, being threatened, or having to work off a debt by performing sex.
"I firmly believe there is a sex-slave industry in Canada," Det. Sgt. Gillespie said.
Of last night's operation, he said, "we got a couple of kids who were scared to death out of that environment. Is it a success, or not a success? If that was your kid, would you have wanted this initiative?" Working in teams, detectives launched a co-ordinated strike against an estimated 350 establishments in the Greater Toronto Area, most of which bill themselves as "holistic" health centres purporting to offer only reflexology, aromatherapy and like services.
Bylaw enforcement officers also handed out at least 100 tickets, but with such an enormous operation, final numbers won't be available until today. The holistic houses, often located in dingy, third-floor walkups, have mushroomed since the late 1970s, when in the wake of a public uproar over the murder of a 12-year-old shoeshine boy named Emanuel Jaques above a Yonge Street massage parlour in Toronto, a moratorium was placed on new bodyrub licences.
Such licences are grandfathered, with Toronto having only 26.
But where an operator wanting to set up a bodyrub would have to buy an existing operation for $6,000, a municipal licence to run a holistic centre costs only $147, with a $100 annual renewal fee.
Toronto Detective Reuben Stroble, the operational head of last night's project, said that young women, often underage, are tricked or lured into the prostitution racket just days after arriving in Toronto.
Many are runaways, he said, citing a recent case of two 16-year-olds from Barrie, north of the city, who came "for a party", promptly ran out of money and were within the week forced to "prostitute themselves all over the place -- on the Net and in escort agencies."
The holistic centres allow pimps to get the young girls off the street, where they can be more easily spotted by police and youth workers, and into less visible locations.
Several of the teams were accompanied, at the invitation of the Toronto force, by reporters.
The Globe and Mail had a writer and a photographer out with Team 9, comprising four undercover officers from the 14 Division vice squad, an immigration officer, an RCMP officer and Joe Magalhaes, a Toronto licensing inspector.
And, just as Det. Sgt. Gillespie had predicted at the briefing, the team found a classic example of an "illegal" detectives believe is effectively an indentured sex worker, a 32-year-old Vietnamese woman working at an unlicensed holistic house on Spadina Avenue in the city's downtown Chinatown.
Det. Sgt. Gillespie had warned officers they likely would encounter women -- particularly among those who have been smuggled into the country under the ruse of a legitimate job and then forced into sex to pay back their fares here -- who are too frightened to co-operate. "Remember," he said, "as bad as it might be for them here, it might be a lot better than from where they came." He urged the teams to work "in as soft a way as possible when you enter these places. If they [the women]want to be there, that's fine. We're here today because we don't believe they all want to be there."
Team 9, headed by Detective Howie Page, dispatched Detective Constable Anthony Castellucci to make sure there were no rear exits from the building, and Detective Constable Rob Stolf to case out the shop, the third on the team's hit-list of six in the downtown core. The other team members then entered under Mr. Magalhaes's authority.
Within "two seconds" of arriving, the woman offered Det. Constable Stolf "full sex" for $100, and pointed to a gloomy back room fitted out with a small cot covered with dirty towels. From the inside, above the door, the ledge had been fitted out with two makeshift handles.
As police began gently questioning the woman, whose command of English was confined to simple description of the services she offered, two male customers, from Cambridge, Ont., a city about 90 minutes from Toronto, wandered in.
At first, they claimed to be in search of haircuts -- even the nearly bald fellow -- but once officers checked to make sure they were no outstanding warrants against them, and the men realized they weren't in trouble, they relaxed and began grinning.
When they left, one of them joked, "Thank you. Come again."
The immigration officer, meantime, working with a Vietnamese interpreter by phone, ascertained that the woman was in Canada illegally. Detective Constable Bryn Taylor also used the interpreter, and discovered that the woman was instructed, if she got too busy to handle the traffic, to refer customers to a Bathurst Street address just blocks away.
The address is known to the vice squad, Det. Page said, as "a fuck-house. It's just straight sex, no pretence."
The woman claimed to be married, but didn't know her supposed husband's age, and was given a notice to appear before an immigration adjudicator. Det. Page questioned her at some length, and satisfied himself she was frightened, had been smuggled in, and that it appeared she had not been paid since arriving in the country two years ago. "We'll do some follow-up on this one," he said.
Generally, the holistic centres charge between $30 and $90 for a treatment, but once the customer is in one of the typically garish, overheated rooms and naked on the table, the attendant will offer various "extras" -- $20 for a topless massage; $40 for touching or "hand release"; and upwards of $100 for oral sex and intercourse. Some shops also offer what are called "nude slides," where both customer and attendant are nude, with the woman on the bottom, and "nude reverse slides", where the attendant is on top of the customer.
The shops where Team 9 did its "investigative walk-throughs" consisted, with one exception, of a rabbit warren of small rooms, some with bars attached to the ceiling.