Teen Streetwalker
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Lucilia's testimony put both Woodolph Romeo (top) and John "Sticky" Fleury behind bars. Photo: Courtesy of the Queens District Attorney's Office
The house in Queens where Lucilia was kept by her pimp. Photo: The City of New York/Courtesy of Property Shark
From left, child prostitutes in Ningxia, China; Tijuana, Mexico; and Poipet, Cambodia. If any of these girls were found working in the United States, they would be sheltered by the federal Trafficking Victims Protection Act. But what about local underage trade? New York State still throws girls in juvenile jail. What makes a 13-year-old Latina from Brooklyn a criminal and a Chinese (or Mexican, or Cambodian) girl a victim? Photo: From left, Mark Leong/Redux; James Whitlow Delano/Redux; Q. Sakamaki/Redux
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The low-slung black car rolled to a stop on Rockaway Boulevard. Another car was already parked there, waiting in the dark. Behind the tinted windows of the first car, Lucilia, a beautiful half–Puerto Rican, half-Dominican girl from Flatbush with long dark hair, pale skin, and wide eyes, sat with the other girls and listened carefully to her instructions. “All you got to do is go up to the car in front of us,” said Romeo, the young black man with heavy-lidded eyes at the wheel. “You charge him whatever you want to charge him, you ask if he’s police or a pimp. He’s gonna give you money, and then you’re gonna just do whatever he wants you to do real quick. It’s just a one-minute thing.” He sent her out.
She went up to the other car. The man inside drove her to one of the big parking lots nearby, close to the Belt Parkway. He paid her $500, had sex with her, and then dropped her off. “Where the money?” Romeo asked her when she climbed back inside his car. “Let me count it.” Lucilia took the cash out of her pocket and watched him flip through the bills. “Can I have my money back?” she asked. “You not getting your money back!” he said. “You making this money for me to take care of you.” And then he explained what he called “the Game,” how he would love her and be her “daddy,” how he would take care of her and buy her whatever she wanted, as long as she brought him money. “Let me tell you,” he said. “I’m a pimp, and you’re a ho.” “What do you mean I’m a ho?” she asked. She knew the word only as an insult, as in, you’re nasty. “No,” he said. “You’re a moneymaking ho.” “Is that good?” she asked. “Yeah,” he told her. “That’s good.” She was 13 years old.
If Lucilia were a 13-year-old Chinese girl smuggled to New York and made to work in a Queens brothel, she would not be seen, in the eyes of the authorities, as a prostitute at all. She would be a sex slave, a victim of human trafficking, and if she had the good fortune to be discovered by the police, she would be given federal protection and shielded by the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000. But she’s not.
In this city, a U.S. citizen like Lucilia is seen by the law as a prostitute. The federal law technically applies, but local law- enforcement follows state law. And according to state law, she is a victim, yes—of statutory rape, since the legal age of consent in New York is 17. But since the rapist paid money for the privilege, she’s also a criminal, subject to arrest, prosecution, and incarceration, no matter how young she is. And the prostitutes are getting younger. The consensus among the police officers, juvenile-rights lawyers, and prosecutors on the front lines is that more and more are entering the life as young as 12 years old. So how do we as a society deal with a girl like Lucilia? The contradiction between the state and federal legislation has created a crisis in policy and law enforcement. Is she a “moneymaking ho,” as her pimp called her, who should be prosecuted as a criminal—or is she just like the girls brought here from China, Colombia, or Belarus, a trafficking victim who should be equally protected under the law?
It would be difficult to pick the one moment that sent Lucilia down her dark and Dickensian path. Her autobiography is, of course, the testimony of an adolescent and thus might be viewed skeptically. But all of the facts as collected and reviewed over the years by child-services caseworkers, police officers, city prosecutors, defense attorneys, and judges have thus far supported her grim account. “I was a very emotional, sad child when I was growing up,” Lucilia says. She spent her first five years in foster homes after she was hurt in a knife fight between her parents. She went to live with her grandmother at the age of 5 and was molested by an uncle at age 10. When her grandmother heard about it, she told Lucilia she was a liar and a whore. After a whipping with a TV wire that left her face sliced so bad it was noticed at school, she went back to live with her mother. “I always wanted to know how a mother’s love feels,” says Lucilia. “I would hear all these kids in school, ‘Oh, my mommy bought me this, I love Mommy.’” She was 12 the first time she saw her mother’s face again.
Her mother bought her tight clothes to wear and put makeup on her, but then started to seem distant and jealous. She had a man living in New Jersey whom she would visit, leaving Lucilia with her 17-year-old half-brother, whom Lucilia also hadn’t seen since she was a baby. According to Lucilia, he started touching her, and when she told him to stop, he said she’d better not tell their mother or he’d just do more. This time she kept the abuse to herself, telling nobody, for fear of being punished. “I was still a virgin when I came to my mother’s house, and he ended up taking my virginity, like forced it out of me,” she says. The rapes and threats escalated, so she ran away from home.
As she walked down the street, wondering where to go, a couple of guys driving by slowed down and asked if she wanted a lift. They took her to an apartment and told her they could give her food and take care of her, but she had to give something in return. “They used to have sex with me, and I used to cry, and they’d be like, ‘Shut up,’” she says. They thought it was entertaining to have a 12-year-old drink and smoke weed with them. She was there for a couple of months, until one day the men found a missing-child flyer with her photo on it. That same day, she was given a cup of liquor that made her feel sick after she drank it. She was delivered back to her mother in an incoherent state and then hospitalized. The doctors found ecstasy and cocaine in her system. No charges were filed.
Lucilia turned 13 and started at a new school that fall. One day, her mother confronted her and said she’d heard that she was “being nasty” with a boy. When Lucilia denied that she had done anything but hug him, her mother punched her in the mouth. The next day, with a split lip, she ran away again, this time to the ice-skating rink in Prospect Park. The cops found her at McDonald’s; when she screamed that she didn’t want to go back to her mother and banged her head on the ground, they took her to the Kings County Hospital psych ward. She was released to a city-run group home in Manhattan, where she says she was threatened with a curling iron by a worker. When she said she wanted to leave, they unlocked the door for her.
She got on the train to Brooklyn, met some guys, and left with them. They took her to a party and then brought her to an apartment, where one of the guys held her down on the bed while she was gang-raped by his friends, one after another, until she was injured and bleeding. The last guy who came in the room did a double take and asked how old she was. He said he wouldn’t let any of the other men hurt her if she wanted to leave with him. He took her to his apartment, washed and cleaned her wounds, and didn’t ask anything of her, but she got the idea that he would be her boyfriend. A week later, however, he told her that he had to go upstate because of a death in his family. He would leave her with his cousin and come right back for her. His cousin’s name was Romeo.
Romeo had five other girls living in his house, a small bungalow facing a park on Guy R. Brewer Boulevard in South Jamaica. He told Lucilia that he would take care of her, but how would she pay him back? He had sex with her, and the next night took her to the “track” on Rockaway Boulevard, where she turned her first trick. Romeo gave her the name Paradise—all the girls had street names—and started telling her all about himself and how his business worked. When she said it was stupid to tell her all that information, he hit her so hard she fell to the floor. Before his cousin came back to pick her up, Romeo told her, “You’re not going nowhere. You stayin’ here with me. I will beat the shit out of you in front of him, and then I will beat him up in front of you.” So when his cousin got there, Lucilia said she would stay wit
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