A heck of a story about an unusual family business coming out of the hills and mountains of Tennessee. Read more at The Tennessean.com…

Police: Family business was teen prostitution
By Kate Howard

A 45-year-old woman and her two children have been indicted on state and local charges of employing minors in their prostitution business.

Charges were filed against the woman, who formerly lived in Nashville, for sexual servitude and promoting prostitution. Police interviewed a 16-year-old girl who was contacted by the woman on Aug. 3 and came to a Motel 6 in Murfreesboro. The girl told police she worked as a prostitute, and the woman kept about $40 for each sex act she performed.

Read the whole story at KnoxNews.com…

Police: Prostitution sting nets 11 arrests

Eleven alleged prostitutes were arrested in a weekend sting operation in North and East Knoxville, authorities said.

Undercover officers on Saturday were deployed around Magnolia Avenue and Central Street, according to Knoxville Police Department Lt. Dusty Lane.

Police arrested 11 female suspects on prostitution charges, 10 of whom had been arrested on the same charge at least once before, Lane said.

A fairly detailed look at a police bust appears in The Daily Times…

Four women charged in Alcoa prostitution sting tied to Craigslist
By Jessica Stith

“It’s the oldest profession in the world.”

One of four women charged in a prostitution sting explained her profession to the “john” (customer) minutes before her arrest on Thursday night during a joint law enforcement operation.

The woman (who advertised herself as “Nicole”) also let him in on a little secret of the trade: If you ask someone three times if they are a police officer, they must be honest the third time and admit if they are with law enforcement.

Wrong.

The john listened with interest. He denied being an officer three times and even asked the woman three times if she was an officer. She lay comfortably and confidently on a hotel room bed — but not for long.

“POLICE!”

Officers came barreling through the room’s front door and the door to the adjoining room.

Officers set up appointments with four women with ads posted on craigslist.org — a classified ad Web site — for the sting. The bust was held at an Alcoa hotel and was a joint operation between Alcoa Police Department, Blount County Sheriff’s Office and Maryville Police Department. All four women were ultimately arrested, and a Daily Times reporter observed the six-hour operation through a surveillance device.

Read the whole story at WKRN.com…

Police say Green Hills massage service also involved sex acts

A Green Hills woman is charged with promoting prostitution after detectives learned a massage service she advertised also involved sex acts.

The 61-year-old woman was arrested Tuesday evening after an uncover police operative made an appointment through her “Holistic Massage-Complete Stress Relief!” service.

Once at her home, the operative learned that she charged $70 per hour for a massage, but would also request an additional $100 to perform a sex act.

Records found in the home showed that she had a number of clients.

Read the whole story at The Chattanoogan…

11 Arrested In Prostitution Sting

The Chattanooga Police Department’s Special Investigations Unit and patrol officers conducted a vice street prostitution sting in the East Lake and Highland Park areas Thursday that resulted in 11 arrests.

During the operation undercover officers were used to pose as “johns” to drive the area and be solicited for sex for money from suspected street prostitutes.

Those arrested face various charges including aggravated prostitution, prostitution within 1 ½ miles of a school, possession of marijuana, obstructing a roadway, disorderly conduct and public intoxication.

Read the whole story at WATE.com…

Knox County massage parlor busted for prostitution
By JILL MCNEAL

Knox County deputies busted a massage parlor they say was a front for prostitution. Hollywood Spa is in West Knox County.

Complaints from neighbors started the investigation.

After two arrests, the owner of the building, who’s cooperating with the investigation, says Hollywood Spa’s lease is up.

An undercover officer says one female employee offered to perform a sex act for a price during his massage. Investigators also took her boss to jail.

Getting to this point took several weeks of investigation. Officers found reviews of the spa’s erotic offerings on the Internet and did surveillance. They also sent in two other undercover officers who got massages, but nothing else.

“The first two weren’t able to get any illegal acts, which is not unusual. And then the third one got the indication of an illegal act,” says Sheriff’s Office Attorney Carleton Bryant.

The woman who refused to give anything extra was allowed to leave.

“One of the young ladies in there may have been legitimate and didn’t engage in illegal activity,” Bryant says.

Read the interesting analysis at KnoxNews…

Hooked up: Web, cell phones make prostitution easier to commit, harder to police
By J.J. Stambaugh

The world’s oldest profession is now also one of the most technologically savvy. Gadgets like pagers and cell phones as well as the Web have made it easier than ever to buy and sell sex, police say.

“They reinvented the wheel with the Internet,” said Investigator Jim Marcum of the Knoxville Police Department’s Organized Crime Unit. Marcum has been investigating prostitution, drugs and gangs since the late 1980s.

“It’s made our job a lot more difficult. … There’s so many of them and so few of us. What are the odds?” Marcum said.

Prostitutes can be lumped into two types that rarely cross paths: streetwalkers, who tend to solicit business from public sidewalks, and escorts or call girls, who operate in a more discrete manner that’s meant to draw as little police attention as possible to themselves or their customers.

The former type of prostitution hasn’t changed much over the past few decades, but high-end hooking bears little resemblance to the norm of even a generation ago.

Until the late 1980s, upscale prostitutes often worked in brothels, but the invention first of pagers and then cell phones meant there was no longer any need to set up shop in a particular location, Marcum said. The Internet eventually made it cheaper and easier than ever for women to go into business – often by themselves. Call girls now use the Web to arrange meeting places, usually hotels.

In a series of Internet searches, The News Sentinel found approximately 100 local women advertising as escorts on Web sites at rates ranging from $100 to $500 an hour. Those searches didn’t include Craigslist, which has become notorious for its “erotic services” category over the past two years and has generated approximately 45 busts by KPD over the past 18 months.

Also, more than 30 local escort services advertise openly in the phone book or on the Internet.

Those figures, however, may be misleading because many services can be traced back to a small group of providers who pay for multiple ads using different business names, Marcum said.

More tales from the front, from KnoxNews…

Lifestyle only way to pay bills, single mom says
By J.J. Stambaugh

“Kelly,” a 22-year-old call girl from Knoxville, doesn’t mince words when it comes to explaining how she feels about her job.

“I needed to make money quickly,” says Kelly, who has worked as a hooker on and off for the past year and only agrees to be interviewed on the condition that she be identified by one of her working aliases. “I need to make money to take care of my son, at least $100 a day.”

She continues: “I’m not comfortable with what I do. I’m ashamed. I’m embarrassed. My family doesn’t know. I know this is morally wrong.”

While Kelly says she wants to do something else for a living, she feels she has no choice. She’s been struggling as a single mother, and has been unable to make enough money in the current job climate to even make the transition from a motel home to a more permanent residence.

Unlike many escorts who have moved onto the Internet as “independents,” Kelly is on call every day for an escort service. Her boss arranges dates and takes $50 of the $150 per hour she charges per client. She also follows the various instructions that he gives to her to avoid being picked up by the police, who conduct occasional vice stings at area motels.

“It’s not talked about on the phone, that it’s about sex,” she says. “When you’re there, make them get undressed first, don’t let the money get put in your hand, don’t talk about it. A cop cannot get undressed. That’s the biggest rule.”

Kelly doesn’t entirely trust the advice, even though she’s thus far avoided building a criminal record. She’s heard too many stories of other call girls getting busted despite following the rules of the trade. “I’ve heard that you can get arrested just by talking to a date on the phone, that they can call that soliciting,” she says.

When asked about her clients, Kelly says they fit pretty much the same profile: “Most of them are lonely. They want someone to make them feel good.”

She says it’s very rare to meet a client who’s under 40 years old. The vast majority are married men with jobs that allow them to afford her services. “They have problems with their wives, they don’t see their wives, they’re traveling a lot, they have kids and their wives won’t sleep with them,” she says.

Read the whole article at Knoxnews…

Prostitution a means to an end for college student
By J.J. Stambaugh

The 19-year-old Roane State Community College student shows up for an interview at Panera Bread on Cumberland Avenue looking like countless other college kids: red hair in braids, a small piercing in one nostril, a “PEACE” button on her coat.

Mary Jayne sips her coffee and explains that she’s a sophomore in the process of earning a degree in alternative and complementary medicine.

Unlike many of her peers, however, she’s already found a part-time career that earns her an hourly rate comparable to that charged by the highest-paid attorneys, accountants and physicians.

Mary Jayne is a professional escort – she provides her services at the rate of $350 an hour – and an occasional adult film actress. Mary Jayne is the name she goes by in films and as an escort, and she agrees to be interviewed only on the condition that she not have to reveal her real name.

Although sex with customers isn’t technically what Mary Jayne is paid for, it’s the norm. She usually meets with clients in hotel rooms – the precise location may vary – and engages in the type of activity that, if she’s unlucky, could earn her a trip to jail and a misdemeanor criminal record.

“I always had a strong feeling about prostitution, I thought it should be legalized, so it was natural to start doing it,” Mary Jayne says. “It’s not what most people think.”

To her, being a call girl is a dream job: high wages, little risk and a flexible schedule that provides her with a degree of freedom that few women achieve. Most of her family doesn’t know what she does, she says, and she’s told only a select group of friends about her profession.

While the thought of running afoul of the law is certainly a concern, she says she has yet to be caught and has faith in the screening process that she and three co-workers use.

“We’re very selective with our screening and everything like that. I feel safe at all times,” she says. “But there are always concerns with that. But to me, it’s a victimless crime, between two consenting adults. … I don’t see the point in a law that’s not protecting anyone.”

Mary Jayne also says that she’s far from being an atypical escort. “Your typical idea of a sex worker is that they’re desperate, or hooked on drugs, but that’s not it,” she says. “A lot of girls provide for their families, or are going to school … Many of them have middle-class backgrounds, they could get 9-to-5 jobs, but that’s not what they want.”

Read the whole story at KnoxNews…

Arrests, citations have little effect on prostitution problem

Some streetwalkers may be arrested dozens of times during the course of their careers, but they rarely spend more than a few hours or days behind bars at a time, court records show.

In fact, they are often issued a citation in lieu of arrest, and some even make bond in time to be arrested again the next day.

“It’s just the price of doing business,” said Kevin Teeters, a prosecutor with the Knox County District Attorney General’s Office. “It just doesn’t mean anything to them.”

Under Tennessee law, buying or selling sex is a Class B misdemeanor punishable by a maximum of six months behind bars with no mandatory fine, Teeters said. If it takes place near a church or school, it becomes a Class A misdemeanor that carries 11 months and 29 days in jail with a seven-day minimum sentence and a $1,000 fine.

Most cases, however, are pleaded to a lesser offense and unsupervised probation in lieu of jail, Teeters said.

Over the past five years, at least 782 people have been arrested or cited for more than 1,700 prostitution-related charges that have passed through Knox County General Sessions Court, according to court records.

Many offenders get charged only once or twice before dropping off the system’s radar. Others become permanent fixtures in local courtrooms, records show.

Knoxville’s 11 most cited or arrested prostitutes – with at least 10 tickets or arrests since 2004 – have racked up 459 criminal charges over their lifetimes.