Inside the Teen-Hooker Factory
On the last night of her life as a normal small-town teenager, Sara Slattery bounced through the front doors of the Cheap Skate roller rink, passed the gift stand that sold colored laces and glow sticks, and settled down with her friends by the arcade mall. When you’re a sixth-grader hanging out in Coon Rapids, Minnesota, there’s not much else doing on a winter night in late February. Poke your nose out the front doors of the joint, and there’s nothing but ice, an ashen expanse of gray earth, dirty snow and boredom. Sara laced up her pink-and-white skates, ate a pretzel and hit the oval as the DJ cranked the music up a notch. After a few hours at the rink, everyone headed across town for an older friend’s birthday party. That’s where the blue-eyed, thirteen-year-old Sara met her pimp-to-be.
Theresa Krueger introduced herself as Nikki. She was pretty and cool. She got high. She was twenty and had money to burn. She listened when Sara talked about her dad’s drinking and her nervousness at school. Come on a road trip, Nikki suggested. “It kind of sounded like fun,” Sara says. “It was so cold.” The next day, Sara and her two friends were in Krueger’s Cadillac, Texas-bound. Three or four days later – she’s not sure anymore – Sara became a prostitute.
It’s difficult to understand how such a thing happens. The way Sara and other former prostitutes tell it, one day a pimp is your best friend, the next your master. One day you’re shopping and having fun, the next you’re in a situation you can’t get out of. Krueger told the girls there was no money to get home. They knew no one in Piano, Texas, and had nowhere to go. You need to help pay your way, she said. Don’t worry – it’s easy.
Sara went first. She followed an older prostitute everyone knew as Twerk to a hotel room. Twerk told her what to do. Her first trick, Sara remembers, looked just like her dad. “I was kind of scared, I didn’t look at him,” she says. “He paid a G to have sex with me.” Dozens, then hundreds followed. So did a cocaine habit and regular beatings at the hands of her pimp. Once, after spending too much time in a trick’s room, Sara and another girl were stripped, soaked with cold water and whipped with black leather belts from Wal-Mart. In between Johns, the girls would nap in their room, where they shared a single futon. “We never had time to sleep ’cause we were up 24/7 with calls,” Sara says. “I kept doing drugs so I didn’t have to face myself. After a while I knew what to do, so it was like a cakewalk. It really didn’t bother me.”
The way she tells it now, eighteen months later, it’s like she’s talking about someone else. Sitting in the living room of her parents’ home in a quiet suburb of Minneapolis, Sara talks in a steady monotone, her voice barely registering above a whisper. Her story seems more like a journey through a deranged kid’s imagination than anything that actually happened. You’d be tempted to shrug it all off, one gruesome anecdote at a time, were it not for the cop sitting next to her, confirming every last word. Her mother, Donna, spent so many days looking for her daughter that she lost her job at a local hospital. “We didn’t know if she was dead or alive,” Donna says.
Exact numbers of juvenile prostitutes are impossible to come by, but in the past two years, authorities say, the number of Minnesota girls like Sara getting pulled into “the life” has been steadily growing. “There’s just so many of them,” says Special Agent Ann Quinn-Robinson, a juvenile-prostitution detective with the state’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. “It’s a lot more than ten times the number of girls out there as there used to be a few years ago.” In 2000, according to the FBI, more kids were arrested for prostitution in Minnesota than in Massachusetts, Maryland and Michigan combined. Pimps in Las Vegas call Minnesota “the factory.” Of every ten hookers the cops pick up in Sin City, at least one is from Minnesota. “They think of us as an assembly line down there,” says a Minneapolis judge.
State officials realized they had a problem five years ago, when cops stumbled across a prostitution ring so deeply embedded in the foundations of daily life, it was likened to a colony of termites. The Evans clan, a three-generation family of pimps – grandfather, father, sons, nephews – recruited stables of girls from across Minnesota and shipped them to pimp houses in two dozen states. It was the largest juvenile-prostitution ring ever prosecuted by the feds. More than fifty juvenile victims testified, and seventeen family members were convicted. It is hardly hyperbole to say that the case sent shock waves of outrage through a state groomed on its Garrison Keillor-made image. One pregnant fifteen-year-old was beaten so badly she miscarried; another girl committed suicide to escape the clan. Evans family members, meanwhile, drove around town in Cadillacs with tailpipes dipped in gold.