The Brothel Empire and the Ex-Detective, Always One Step Ahead of the Law
A former vice detective is at the center of one of the New York Police Department’s worst scandals in recent years. Here is his story, as uncovered by a team of Times reporters.
By Michael Wilson, Ashley Southall, Alan Feuer, Al Baker and Ali Winston
.
The retired police detective, Ludwig Paz, 51, is accused of running a syndicate of prostitution and gambling that spanned Brooklyn and Queens and brought in millions of dollars.
The complaints from neighbors about prostitution flourishing behind the Brooklyn apartment’s thin walls had been flowing into the vice squad for months. Men, arriving at all hours, were asked at the door which nationality of women they preferred: “Brazil? Peru?”
Police officers swooped in one day in September 2017, slamming through the door with a battering ram, but they left empty-handed. The brothel on the border of Gowanus and Park Slope had quietly closed down before the raid, just as had happened with several other brothels around the borough, gone dark right before the police showed up.
The brothel empire was always one step ahead of the law.
Last week, prosecutors disclosed why: They said the brothels were run by a retired police detective who had been repeatedly tipped off about planned raids by officers on the force, revealing one of the worst corruption scandals to hit the New York Police Department in years.
The retired detective, Ludwig Paz, 51, was arrested and accused of running a broad and complex syndicate of prostitution and gambling that spanned Brooklyn and Queens and brought in millions of dollars. Three sergeants, two detectives and two officers were also charged. Two other officers were stripped of their guns and shields and placed on administrative duty. Dozens of civilians were arrested, and more are being sought.
Police corruption in New York City has long revealed its share of notorious characters — the rookies working as muscle for drug dealers, the veteran investigators in the pockets of Mafia bosses, the shakedowns and favors and kickbacks.
But Mr. Paz, as portrayed by prosecutors, represents an unusual breed: a vice detective who kept a clean record until he retired, only to pivot hard and use his law-enforcement background to become the very strain of crime lord that he once was supposed to stamp out.
His years wearing a badge in Brooklyn, the police said, would prove to be on-the-job training for a second career as a purveyor of prostitutes and protector of pimps.
“Because of his familiarity with the tools of the trade and vice — and how to investigate these kind of enterprises — he kind of became expert,” said a law enforcement official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the case. “He figured, wow, he can make a lot of money.”
City officials were quick to claim credit for smashing the brothel-and-gambling ring, saying that the arrests offered evidence that the Police Department could police itself. Still, Mr. Paz’s apparent success at evading detection for years underscores the enduring power of the “blue wall of silence,” whereby officers stay quiet about the misdeeds of their colleagues.
Department officials defended their anticorruption programs, but acknowledged that the Paz case was prompting them to examine whether they need to put new ones in place.
Mr. Paz is in protective custody in jail, and his lawyer declined to be interviewed for this article. But his rise and fall was pieced together by reporters for The New York Times who conducted dozens of interviews with current and former law enforcement personnel, Mr. Paz’s family members and others. The reporters also visited locations of brothels and gambling parlors across the city.
The interviews and court records portrayed a crime boss who relied upon seven police officers he had met over his years on the job to be his crew — his legmen, his doormen, his bagmen.
Most important, they were Mr. Paz’s inside men, tipping him off to raids and betraying one of the most sacred trusts in law enforcement: the identities of undercover officers. Wiretaps revealed Mr. Paz’s contacts with the officers on the force who were later arrested and accused of being his accomplices. The contents of the wiretaps were recounted to The Times by senior law enforcement officials.
The syndicate thrived because of its secret weapons — all seven of them — and yet it was done in from within.
In the end, the “blue wall” finally cracked. The whistle-blower was a fellow officer who called the Internal Affairs Bureau with a tip.
“These guys were pretty blatant.”
The women’s pictures appeared on Backpage.com and other sites notorious in the sex trafficking world. Selfies, grinning and topless. “I’m a fun, flirty, sexy & bubbly girl who just wants to hang out and have some fun,” one ad read.
She listed her location: an apartment on Fourth Avenue near 11th Street in Brooklyn, on the border between Gowanus and Park Slope.
This was how Mr. Paz attracted customers for his syndicate, the police said. New ones arrived looking for the women advertised on their phones, only to be met by a bizarre requirement.
They were ordered to drop their pants and submit to a fondling before engaging with prostitutes. The screening was Mr. Paz’s idea, the police said, a clever way to weed out undercover officers. From his time on the vice squad, Mr. Paz knew that undercover police officers are barred from exposing themselves in interactions with prostitutes.
After submitting to the screening, and the vast majority did, the customer paid, was handed a playing card as a receipt and proceeded to the next room to select a prostitute, the police said.
A 15-minute session cost $40, a full hour, $160 or more. The sessions played out in seedy little plywood stalls within the apartment on Fourth Avenue. Other brothels across Brooklyn and Queens were in bedrooms lit by a bulb behind a red lampshade, with a dirty mattress on the floor and a bottle of Febreze air freshener within arm’s reach.
The syndicate operated at least seven of these brothels, along with “pop-up” rooms advertised on Backpage. (Law enforcement officials shut down Backpage earlier this year.)
Men outside wore jackets marked “Security.” Cameras watched from above.
In Brooklyn, this boom in brothels like the one on Fourth Avenue was playing out alongside the gentrification of what was once the borough’s less-desirable edge, hard by a polluted canal. Now there was a Whole Foods a short walk away, and modern condos across the street advertised a full-time doorman and residents lounge.
New residents were arriving in the neighborhood and, like the old-timers, they were dismayed at what was happening in the building.
“These guys were pretty blatant,” said a worker at a nearby business who asked to remain anonymous. “You’d see a half dozen guys coming and going at the same time — I always wondered why it was so obvious.”
A former tenant at the Gowanus building said she started reporting the sex operation to the police in January 2017, after she noticed lots of men visiting and talk of a massage table. She said nothing happened.
At one point, a detective from the vice squad told her that the sex trade was impossible to stamp out, she said, and suggested she move.
The police finally came with the battering ram in September 2017. Nothing there.
Similar scenes were happening elsewhere.
Sven Britt, a musician who lived in a building on Foster Avenue in Ditmas Park, said he first noticed a brothel there in September 2015. It advertised “hot Latinas” and “tight security and total discretion.”
He said he repeatedly called the police through August 2017 to report the brothel, and visited the nearby 70th Precinct in person to report the issue.
Again, nothing.
“They never got in touch,” Mr. Britt said.
It seemed whoever was running the operation was untouchable.
Policing vice and learning the system
Before he was Defendant Paz standing in handcuffs in a courtroom and before he was Detective Paz or Officer Paz, he was just another hopeful young man telling his father what he wanted to do with his life. He wanted to be a cop.
His father, Luis Paz, had misgivings. The family had moved to Sunset Park, Brooklyn, from Ecuador when Ludwig was 8. To save money for his Catholic education, his parents gave him water instead of juice at breakfast.
“I expected him to become a lawyer,” his father said.
But Ludwig Paz took the police test anyway and was sworn in as Officer Paz in October 1990 in a ceremony in Madison Square Garden. His father still felt disappointment, but that was nudged aside by pride.
“It was a good job — to protect the people, to be part of the good side, not the bad side,” Luis Paz said in an interview.
As a patrolman, Officer Paz was assigned to the 84th Precinct, covering the brownstones and cobblestones of Brooklyn Heights and Vinegar Hill.
They called him “Pana,” slang for partner. One officer who was actually his partner, Officer Giancarlo Raspanti, was perhaps the first of the seven he would work beside. More than two decades later, Officer Raspanti would end up in handcuffs with Mr. Paz.
By 2002, Detective Paz was on the Brooklyn Vice Squad, where he learned the inner workings of street crime at its most sordid. To get inside required going undercover, entering the realm of pimps and prostitution and speaking their language.
By all accounts, Detective Paz was a quick study.
Along the way, he met several other officers whose names, in the far-off year of 2018, would appear beside his own in a sweeping indictment detailing corruption and prostitution.
Among them: Giovanny Rojas-Acosta, Carlos Cruz, Cliff Nieves and, most notably for his actions as described by the police, Rene Samaniego, who would tell pimps when undercover officers were planning to visit a brothel and describe what they looked like.
Detective Paz was married, and he and his wife, Sonia, and their young son, Ludwig Raphael, lived in the same small building, above an auto-parts shop, as Detective Paz’s parents. He and Mrs. Paz went to comedy clubs in Manhattan. Detective Paz took his son to the arcade and for hikes in state parks.
“Growing up with him, he was my hero, because in my eyes, police officers were the ones who did the right thing,” his son, now 28, said in an interview.
Mr. Paz and Arelis Peralta were both arrested last week.
A new love, but then bankruptcy.
But by the mid-2000s, Detective Paz’s family life began to crumble. He had met another woman, apparently through his work on the vice squad.
Law enforcement officials said the woman, Arelis Peralta, was inside a brothel that the vice squad raided, though they did not say why she was there. Detective Paz let her slip out the back door when the police arrived, the officials said.
The detective and Ms. Peralta began a romance. His wife had moved to Puerto Rico and was waiting for him to join her and their son. Instead, he asked for a divorce. By November 2006, he had moved to a single-family house in Ozone Park, Queens, with Ms. Peralta.
Ms. Peralta, who was arrested last week along with Mr. Paz, did not respond to requests for comment.
Back then, Detective Paz, perhaps thinking back to the cramped building above the auto parts store, did what a lot of Americans did. He borrowed too much.
And, like a lot of others in 2008, he was swept into the financial crisis, failing to make monthly payments on his subprime mortgage loans and filing for bankruptcy.
Detective Paz owed more than $690,000 on subprime mortgages, according to court records. That same year, he earned $120,000 on his police salary, with overtime.
On a later wiretap, the law enforcement official said, he was heard telling an associate that he started working in prostitution in 2008 — not as an arresting officer, but as a player.
He retired in 2010. “Twenty and out,” officers call it, the club of retirees who leave as soon as their pension kicks in at 20 years.
Image
Prosecutors said Detective Rene Samaniego told pimps when undercover officers were planning to visit a brothel and described what they looked like.CreditUli Seit for The New York Times
“Expect visitors today”
The calls came for Mr. Paz at all hours.
Mostly, it was Detective Samaniego from the vice squad. Mr. Paz would listen, hang up and call one of his brothels, said a law enforcement official who has listened to wiretap recordings of the conversations.
“‘My friend has said that you are to expect visitors today’,” Mr. Paz would tell the brothel, the official said. “And then they knew what to do. They shut the place down.”
Other calls were more specific. Mr. Paz never sounded panicked. Always relaxed.
“Hey, the U.C. is walking up the block,” Mr. Paz said, according to prosecutors, using the abbreviation for undercover officer.
“An Asian,” he said, “with a beard.”
In hindsight, it would seem reckless for a retired detective to speak so openly on the telephone.
“If we believe what he said, that he was doing this since 2008, he’d been doing it for 10 years now and nothing happened to him,” the law enforcement official said. “So why not speak freely on the phone?”
The officers working with Mr. Paz helped in many ways, the police said.
Some watched the door at the brothels, collecting cash. They arrested his competitors. When Mr. Paz’s workers were arrested in unforeseen raids, officers looked up the arrest records to glean information to protect the operation.
The fear of an arrested employee “flipping” and informing on the operation was constant.
According to prosecutors, an apartment in this building, center, in Park Slope, Brooklyn, was used as a brothel.CreditDave Sanders for The New York Times
Operation Zap
Wednesday, Sept. 12: This time, there were no warnings.
The police waited until 1 p.m., when the brothels were open for business, and struck three of them quickly, arresting everyone they found. At one location, officers even handcuffed a 72-year-old superintendent who, after convincing them he had nothing to do with any crimes, was released.
The raids were the culmination of an investigation that started with a 2015 telephone tip to the Internal Affairs Bureau. It came from a police officer.
Three years later, the tipster, still unnamed, would be praised by Commissioner James P. O’Neill at a news conference as “a cop who recognized that the behavior and actions of even one of our members reflects on every single member of this police department.”
Thousands of hours of surveillance and recordings of calls had been collected. The investigation took so long because of its secrecy, the police said. Policing the police without tipping off the officers brings its challenges.
Still, a police spokesman, Phillip Walzak, said the department was investigating whether there were instances when the crimes described in the case could have been detected sooner.
“Thus far those efforts have not identified such an instance,” Mr. Walzak said. Internal Affairs routinely conducts integrity tests in search of corruption, he said. “Those tests are more frequent and much improved from years past,” he said.
Mr. Paz and Ms. Peralta were the first to be arrested, handcuffed at Kennedy International Airport, where they were waiting to board a flight to Las Vegas for a vacation. Their luggage left without them.
A search of their home uncovered $20,000 in cash, the police said.
Mr. Paz and the arrested officers all entered pleas of not guilty last week. Officials said they did not anticipate more officers being arrested unless new information surfaces.
New York Police Sgt. Cliff Nieves, second from left, is one of three sergeants, two detectives and two officers charged in the prostitution and gambling ring.CreditUli Seit for The New York Times
By the time top police brass gathered in 1 Police Plaza to announce the arrests last week, the case had been assigned a code name: Operation Zap, because it was the name of the former vice detective accused of running the syndicate, spelled backward.
But investigators on the case had already chosen a different code name, one that spoke to the nature of the crimes said to have been masterminded by the former vice detective named Ludwig Paz.
They called it: Protection Detail.
Annie Correal, Zoe Greenberg and Nate Schweber contributed reporting. Doris Burke contributed research.
0 comments:
Publicar un comentario