In a Brothel Atop Street 63
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After he was in Thailand for a while, he flew to Cambodia to renew his visa and took the time to visit a brothel outside Phnom Penh known for having young girls. There he met Nee, the older daughter, who was then 13. Mark liked Nee a lot, maybe he even loved her, and he asked her if she wanted to get out of there and go with him. She said yes, for sure, and so he bought her out of the brothel for $1,500 and paid her mother $1,000. And then he married her and bought a big house and let 10 members of her family move in.
He put Nee and Auk in school. He taught their little nieces and nephews how to ride bicycles. He took them to the beach on weekends. He loved it.
“You know, it’s funny,” he says. “It was like I went through this Lolita syndrome. I was in la-la land for two years. Maxed out all my credit cards. Or, part of it, do you ever do something just because you can do it and you think it’s the wildest thing and you want to do it? I mean to buy someone out of a brothel was so wild, something you read about in the National Geographic in the Sudan or something.”
The thing he didn’t do, however, was give the girls’ mother enough money to pay off all her debts, which at 20 percent a month interest grew very quickly, and the mother, with her daughters out of the business, had no way of covering it. Mark claims she convinced Nee to divorce Mark and go work in the higher-paying Taiwanese brothels, which she did. Then, according to Mark, the mother tried to steal the home away from him while he was out of town. Then she filed charges against him for the crime of debauchery—sleeping with a child under the age of 14—and that cost him a lot of time and worry and $2,000 to pay off the judge. Still, he doesn’t hate the mother.
“She’s a fucking bitch, excuse my French, she causes all sorts of problems. She’s an evil, evil woman, but I kind of like her a little bit. Even after she took me to court, cost me thousands of dollars, almost sent me to prison for years, when I saw her I gave her a kiss. Like I said, a flaw in my character.”
Mark openly admits to all of this. He speaks as if he has no guilt or shame about having had sex with a minor, because in his mind he was doing nothing but trying to help her and her family. And he loved her, maybe, he’s not sure. Plus, he says he feels okay about talking because he’s been given immunity from prosecution by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in return for helping them obtain evidence for the conviction of another American pedophile with a much worse record.
I meet the Homeland Security officer Mark is working with. He comes over to Lisa’s office for a chat, and I ask him why the Department of Homeland Security is in Southeast Asia tracking down pedophiles.
He says, “Because they are terrorists.”
“Terrorists?” I ask, somewhat dumbfounded.
“Domestic terrorists,” he says with some hesitation.
“Domestic terrorists? I’ve never heard the term.” And that is the end of the interview. He leaves in a huff.
Is this off the subject?
ACCORDING TO THE United Nations, human trafficking includes “the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of persons, by means of threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person....” It goes on and on, passing through a difficult section about the selling of people for use as sexual slaves and ending with “the removal of organs.”
Off the record, people within the U.S. State Department in Cambodia will tell you they don’t know what human trafficking is or how it happens. And yet their job is to get rid of it. They say they have more anti-trafficking money than they know what to do with, that there aren’t enough aid workers in the country to give the money to, and consequently much of the money is being given to faith-based initiatives. They call this cronyism, like it’s an infectious disease.
