Word: brothel
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...Aviv gangster Ya'acov Alperon liked his violence up close and personal. He relied on his boxer's swift, sledgehammer fists and the blade of a knife to terrorize Tel Aviv's shopkeepers, brothel owners and drug dealers into paying protection money. But in the end, what finally got Alperon was that most impersonal of assassin's weapons: the car bomb...
...deal brokered by city officials last October, one of the district's biggest brothel owners, "Fat" Charlie Geerts, sold 18 buildings alongside one of Amsterdam's most picturesque canals to the semipublic property company NV Stadsgoed for $37 million. Officials immediately closed down the buildings' 51 brothel windows, and installed in 16 of them young fashion designers, who pay a token monthly rent of $220. That's just one small piece of a much more ambitious cleanup initiative. A wall map in City Hall shows a block-by-block plan that aims to halve the size of the red-light...
...presence of these networks is hardly new to long-term residents. For years they have warned officials and police that the owners of the narrow 17th century canalside buildings were charging hugely inflated rents to the sole group of tenants willing to pay them: brothel managers. Buildings were bought and sold within weeks at steep profits, leading officials to conclude that millions of euros were being pumped through the area with little oversight - a perfect environment for large-scale money laundering. Police also say that more and more prostitutes now work for pimps, in violation of Dutch laws that require...
Behind the brothel doors, the plan has sparked unease about the future. Slim Gharbi, 43, who runs a brothel company called La Vie en Rose, believes city officials have exaggerated the area's criminality and placed its entire sex industry under suspicion. "I make so much money I would be crazy to do anything illegal," he says, sitting at a computer in which he stores personal files on dozens of prostitutes - including the necessary proof that they are over 21 and allowed to work in the European Union. Gharbi can earn thousands of euros a day by renting...
...women's madrassa took over a nearby children's library to protest the destruction of an illegal mosque that had been built on government property. Tensions escalated when seminary students embarked on a vigilante campaign in the capital, forcing music and video shops to close down and kidnapping suspected brothel workers. For several months the government refused to crack down on the students, for fear that any action against them would ignite the wrath of religious conservatives...