City Fakes Arrests
The city's continuing war on porn shops has claimed gay and bisexual men as victims as nearly 50 of them have been arrested on questionable prostitution charges in seven Manhattan porn shops over the past four years.
And in lawsuits brought against six of those businesses, the city has cited those prostitution arrests as the primary justification for trying to shut those shops down.
"It seems as though there is a pattern of arresting innocent men in an effort to try and close these places down," said Robert Pinter, a 52-year-old massage therapist who was among 12 men arrested this year in Blue Door Video on First Avenue in the East Village. "It's extremely troubling that the police have so little regard for the gay citizens of New York that they use them as pawns to try and close these porn shops down."
The city sued Blue Door in June after ten men were arrested for prostitution there. The business paid a $2,500 fine and installed video cameras to monitor the premises. Since then, Pinter and a 42-year-old man were arrested, and the city is now seeking to close the shop. Pinter denies that he engaged in prostitution and forcefully disputed the account of a policeman involved in his arrest.
The 42-year-old man is contesting his case while the rest pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct and received small fines and minor sentences. Those arrest records will eventually be sealed, which suggests they had not been arrested before. For most defendants, such deals are the quickest and easiest way to make the cases end.
Also this year, police arrested four men at BH Connections at 557 Eighth Avenue, two men at the DVD & Video Center at 218 West 35th Street, and six men at Gotham City at 687 Eighth Avenue. All the men were charged with prostitution.
The city sued these three Midtown West businesses. In an agreement with the city, the DVD & Video Center was closed in July while the other two remain open. The men were not named in those suits, so Gay City News was unable to determine the disposition of these 12 cases.
In October, one man was arrested outside the Rainbow Store at 207 Eighth Avenue in Chelsea after allegedly agreeing, inside the store, to have sex for $60 with an undercover officer from the Manhattan South vice squad who made some of the arrests in Blue Door. That man pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct. Rainbow Store has not been sued by the city.
In 2007, Video, Video, Video at 488 Eighth Avenue at West 34th Street paid a $35,000 fine and closed, in a deal with the city after police arrested 21 men there for prostitution and four for marijuana sales between 2004 and 2007. That building, once a Bickford's cafeteria, was purchased in 2007 by Vornado Realty Trust, a major real estate company, for $12.3 million.
Prior to a 2005 temporary closing of Blue Store at 206 Eighth Avenue in Chelsea, police made two prostitution arrests of gay men, one in 2004 and one in 2005.
These are only the arrests and lawsuits that Gay City News identified. There may be others, though it appears that this type of police activity is restricted to Manhattan. Criminal complaints for 2008 show no prostitution arrests of men in porn shops in Brooklyn and the Bronx. As Gay City News went to press, the Queens district attorney was still reviewing its records.
Only 36 of the men were identified in the lawsuits, and not all of their arrest records were included in those cases, but the records raise questions about the legitimacy of these arrests and whether police were truthful in their descriptions of what took place in these businesses.
Eight of the 12 men arrested in Blue Door were between 42 and 54. Four were from out of state.
It is possible that Blue Door hosts prostitutes who are mostly middle-aged and have managed to avoid getting busted, but that seems statistically unlikely.
Equally unlikely is that a 54-year-old hustler from California or a 20-year-old one from Virginia would incur the time and expense of traveling to New York City to sell their bodies when they could do so in their home states.
Most implausible is the notion that a 37-year-old from Europe and his 44-year-old partner would obtain a US visa, travel to New York City, and check into the Astor on the Park Hotel so they could earn $20 each for having anal sex with a stranger in a Lower East Side porn shop.
What explains these scenarios is Pinter's arrest. He was approached by a younger man who was aggressive and charming in getting Pinter to agree to what he thought was consensual sex outside of the store. It was only as the two were leaving Blue Door that the undercover cop said to Pinter, "Oh, I want to pay you $50 to suck your dick."
Pinter said nothing in response and was arrested outside the store, as were all the men. It appears police targeted older men, who might be more likely to respond to a younger man. The cops could not know where these men lived until after they were busted; some of the arrests were of men from out of state.
"A lot of what's known suggests that this was a massive violation of the civil rights of those arrested who were charged falsely," said William K. Dobbs, an attorney and gay civil libertarian. "The circumstances surrounding these arrests don't add up to what the police claim."
The 21 arrests at Video, Video, Video do not strain credibility as much as those in Blue Door, but they also have problems.
Of those arrested for prostitution, seven pleaded guilty to that charge, five pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct, one defendant did not appear for his court date and a warrant was issued for his arrest, and the remaining eight cases are sealed, which suggests those eight pleaded guilty to a lesser charge or those cases were dismissed.
In their four years of undercover arrests at Video, Video, Video, just one-third of the prostitution arrests resulted in prostitution convictions. Two-thirds of the men there were innocent of that charge.
A 49-year-old former Video, Video, Video employee was arrested for promoting prostitution in 2005. He pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct.
Pinter is working with the New York City Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project (AVP) to organize a community forum on the arrests, and AVP issued a statement.
"[AVP] is concerned about the recent arrests of men for alleged prostitution at adult video shops," the statement read. "In particular, we are concerned about the number of arrests and the locations that suggests a pattern of targeting gay men."
On December 1, Gay City News emailed questions to the police press office, the Manhattan district attorney, which prosecuted these cases, and the city's Law Department, which brought the lawsuits against the porn shops. "Regardless of age or involvement of out-of-towners, the fact remains that the locations had become notorious for solicitation of sex acts, with complaints from the public resulting in police attention," Paul J. Browne, the police department's spokesman, wrote in an email. "All investigations were supervised by a Sergeant or above. All of the locations were visited after the NYPD received complaints from the public."
By December 3, the district attorney did forward some documents related to the criminal cases to the paper, but did not otherwise respond, and the Law Department did not respond at all.
More than two dozen men have been arrested over the last several days on investigation of lewd conduct, indecent exposure and public indecency during a five-day sting to catch people having sex in the park, according to Pierce County, Washington sheriff's officials.
Sheriff's spokesman Ed Troyer told the Tacoma News Tribune that the sting was set-up after a number of families complained about the illicit activity occurring at all hours on trails in the county's Spanaway Lake Park.
Troyer said the men arrested were mostly people who responded to Internet posts seeking casual and anonymous sexual encounters in the woods at the park on Gus G. Bresemann Road South.
The arrested men ranged in age from young adults to age 76 and were from Pierce, King and Thurston counties. Troyer reportedly told the Tribune those arrested included registered sex offenders and one man who is HIV-positive.
He said investigators also found three mattresses, pornography and other sexual paraphernalia in the woods at the park.
Troyer said sheriff's deputies will continue to patrol the park with diligence and more arrests may follow.
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Ten teenagers from the Florida Keys were charged Wednesday with making child pornography after detectives confiscated a videotape of a 16-year-old runaway girl having sex with a 19-year-old man as another man is ''directing,'' according to the Monroe County Sheriff's Office.
All violent crimes are reprehensible. But the damage done by hate crimes cannot be measured solely in terms of physical injury or dollars and cents. Hate crimes rend the fabric of our society and fragment communities because they target a whole group and not just the individual victim. Hate crimes are committed to cause fear to a whole community. A violent hate crime is intended to “send a message” that an individual and “their kind” will not be tolerated, many times leaving the victim and others in their group feeling isolated, vulnerable and unprotected. 
According to the Federal Bureau of Investigations, the term "hate crime" didn't enter the national vocabulary until the 1980s, when Skinheads and other groups committed a continual series of bias-based crimes. Hangings, lynching, vandalism and cross burning have been a method of intimidation and bias in the U.S. for some time. However, the FBI didn't begin investigating what we now call hate crimes until their first Ku Klux Klan case in 1924.
Bias Motivated Violent Crime Affects an Entire Community
The hate crimes provision was not included in the final version of the DoD bill. The provision fell victim to House opponents of hate crimes legislation as well as unrelated concerns regarding Iraq-related provisions of the bill. The hate crimes veto threat issued by the White House and organized opposition by House Republican Leadership cost significant numbers of votes on the right. Iraq-related provisions that many progressive Democrats opposed cost votes on the left. Moderate Democrats, many of whom voted for the hate crimes bill in May, did not want to test the President’s veto threat and risk a delay in increased pay for military personnel. All of these factors resulted in insufficient votes to secure passage of the bill with the hate crimes provision.
