Prostitution

Police arrested 15 people in South Baltimore late Friday and early yesterday, continuing a neighborhood sweep of prostitution which 15 were arrested last weekend.Police said the arrests of 11 women and four men underscored efforts to respond to community complaints of prostitution from residents in the Brooklyn, Curtis Bay and Pratt and Monroe Street areas."It was to the point where residents said they were going to the store and being approached by men and woman for sex," said Col. Ronald Daniel, chief of the city's criminal investigation division.

HAVANA -- It's early evening on the Malecon, Havana's beautiful seaside boulevard. The young miniskirted girls are out in the moist pink-blue air, tugging at the male tourists, flirting, offering to spend the night with men old enough to be their grandfathers in exchange for a six-pack of Coke, entry to a discotheque and $6.Lisa, a pretty, 13-year-old bleached blond, personifies this city's return to the decadence that Fidel Castro's revolution was supposed...

For all you complaining about the less-than-stellar season six premiere, feast your eyes on the scintillating second episode. “The Collaborators” delves into themes of desire, putting on a good face for show and the sin rooted deep in Don's history: prostitution. The death and suicide images are still there, but toned down a bit from last week's one-and-a-half deaths. That's always a plus. Don runs into the good -- but not good enough for his wife -- doctor in the elevator before slipping away to sleep with said wife.

Baltimore City Councilman Tim Murphy has drafted an anti-prostitution bill that tries to bring a new realism to an old problem.Unstated in, though underlying, the bill are the beliefs that:* Little can be done to wipe out prostitution.* Trying to do so by arresting more suspects or increasing the punishment will simply burden an already over-burdened criminal justice system.* Shifting prostitution away from residential neighborhoods is about as much as we can hope for.Yet even a bill as modest as this one demonstrates the problems of trying to satisfy outraged public opinion with new laws.

Baltimore police, responding to complaints from several community groups, swept through the Monroe and Pratt street corridors over the weekend and arrested 22 women on prostitution charges.Starting Saturday evening and continuing into early Sunday, undercover detectives fanned out over the Pratt-Monroe community and the streets west and south of Carroll Park, targeting what one police commander said were more than 150 prostitutes who work in the area."It's a tremendous problem," said Col. Ronald L. Daniel, chief of the Criminal Investigation Bureau, adding that most of the illicit activity is connected to a proliferation of crack cocaine sold on the street corners.

The newspaper ad for massages promised a "quiet, discreet setting" with plenty of privacy. And, to hear police tell it, the occupants of the house on rural Calvary Road in Creswell apparently delivered that -- and more.But most of those who live near the couple arrested on prostitution charges said they were unaware of anything unusual going on at the house in the serene, wooded community.Robert Dean Burchett, 49, and Julie Gaye Burchett, 40, were charged Tuesday with running a prostitution operation in their home, where police said they secretly videotaped clients having sex with Mrs. Burchett.

The defense attorney for a former University of Maryland, Baltimore County assistant professor accused of working as a prostitute out of her Ellicott City home has asked that her Feb. 5 trial in Howard County Circuit Court be postponed, according to prosecutors. Brandy M. Britton, 41, of the 10200 block of Shirley Meadows Court faces four counts of prostitution, each of which carries a maximum penalty of one year in prison and a $500 fine. Defense attorney Christopher Flohr requested the postponment because of a personal conflict.

Complaints about a large group of aggressive prostitutes on a stretch of North Calvert Street prompted a police sweep netting 18 arrests by early yesterday -- most of them males wearing women's clothing, authorities said. Sgt. Craig Gentile, the Central District vice squad commander, said the department had received complaints in the past two weeks from more than a dozen people -- including several transvestites who live in the neighborhood -- about loud, often vulgar, skimpily dressed people soliciting motorists and pedestrians along a four-block stretch of Calvert from Read to Preston streets.

For three consecutive nights last week, two female undercover officers worked the corner of Ritchie Highway and First Avenue, chatting with men who drove up to them. When the men asked for sex, the women suggested they pull around the corner, right into the arms of waiting detectives.From Wednesday through Friday, county police arrested 17 men, ranging in age from 21 to 54.They hailed from Anne Arundel, Howard, Baltimore, Kent and Prince George's counties. One is a carpenter in Crownsville, and another is a master electrician.

Love is a many-squalored thing.That's the thrust of "The Good Woman of Bangkok," a strange and poignant film opening today at the Charles. The movie also played last spring at the Baltimore Film Festival.This is one of those unvarnished, almost pathetic movies of personal documentation in which the true subject is the filmmaker himself as he comes to grips with his own obsessions. Dennis O'Rourke, an Australian documentarian who acquired a world reputation on the strength of an earlier work, "Cannibal Tours," woke up one day to find his professional life a shambles and his private life a catastrophe.