Money, homes, cars, ski vacations — with perks like these, who wouldn’t want to be a hooker, a defense lawyer in a bizarre Manhattan sex trafficking case said in closing arguments today.
“I’m trying to find a job myself that pays me $10,000 a week,” defense lawyer Howard Greenberg said as summations began in the trial of admitted father and son pimps Vincent George, Sr. and Jr., arguing that there is no proof that their pampered staff of five hookers were forced to do anything.
“One wonders in this economy if a girl can make up to $10,000 a week … why more women don’t do it, I don’t know,” he said.
The father and son pimps’ operation was based in Allentown, Pa., and their five employees each were given a house in town to live in and cars for their commute to Manhattan, where they’d hand out “masseuse” cards to randy male tourists, defense lawyers argued in morning-long summations.
Prosecutors are due to give their spin on the six-year investigation this afternoon.
“The girls wanted for nothing,” Greenberg, who reps George Sr., told Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Ruth Pickholz, who will render a verdict in the non-jury trial.
“There was maternity leave — can you imagine that?” he said, referring to one of Jr.’s prostitutes, who’d taken the stand last month to say that Jr. gave her four years off as she raised their little girl.
“In short, the benefits package was great.”
Sure, the pimps were recorded in phone calls making violent threats to the women, but, “If those threats had been real… there would have been medical records stacked a mile high,” said Junior’s lawyer, David Epstein.
Three of the hookers took the stand last month to protest that they were Jr.’s employees and “sister-wives” by choice.
Prosecutors had called a “trauma bonding” expert to the stand last month to testify that hookers often say they have a choice, and even believe they have a choice, when they are actually involuntarily imprisoned by physical and emotional coercion.
That’s an unfair win-win for the prosecution, Epstein said.
“If they say they’re victims, they’re victims. If they say they’re not, then they’re still victims,” he said.
The judge has yet to say when she will render a verdict.