Baltimore police said they recently closed a "well-organized house of prostitution" in Upper Fells Point and a related residence in Butchers Hill, a community of well-kept rowhouses and close-knit residents. City prosecutors say it is apparently a case of human trafficking, involving Mexican women who arrived in Durham, N.C., and were transported to Baltimore to work as prostitutes.
The rare city-level case, which moved this week to Baltimore Circuit Court, exposes a flourishing underground world of human sex trafficking that is often overlooked in a city with daily exposure to more conspicuous crimes such as robbery and gun violence, said Assistant State's Attorney Joyce Lombardi.
"This kind of thing is hidden so well in the fabric of a neighborhood," said Lombardi, who helped form the Maryland Human Trafficking Task Force last year. "The ringleaders are smart. They pick up and move to a new house when they're detected, so they are extremely hard to catch."
Sterling Clifford, a police spokesman, said that while "the vast majority of our prostitution issues, like many other issues, are local and drug-related," police have found other prostitution set-ups similar to the one in East Baltimore.
This police investigation culminated last month in a raid on a two-story Formstone rowhouse on South Collington Avenue and the arrests of the suspected pimp, Carlos Silot, 39, and two suspected prostitutes, Reina Lopez, 35, and Virginia Martinez, 31. The women said they are sisters and listed a Durham apartment as their address. Silot's address, on East Lombard Street, also was associated with the sex ring, said authorities, who believe the prostitutes lived there while in Baltimore.
Court documents say the women in the prostitution ring were paid $15 per customer - Lopez and Martinez had 19 apiece on the day of the arrests - worked seven days in a row and then were returned to Durham and exchanged for new sex workers.
Customers were charged $30, court documents say, and the Collington location was advertised on fliers distributed to Hispanic men in the Patterson Park area.
The charges, prostitution and pandering, are misdemeanors. Silot, Lopez and Martinez posted small bails late last month and are scheduled for a court hearing in November. None of them could be found yesterday. Authorities said they were unsure of their immigration status.
