Word: sexed
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Beginning last year, the city has intensified its pursuit of financial investigations into the neighborhood's sex and drug businesses. The officials' best tool is an anti-money-laundering law that obliges all business owners in Amsterdam's red-light district to disclose their financial records when they apply for permits and licenses; anyone suspected of criminal activity can have their application suspended or refused, whether or not the charges have been proved. The strategy has sent a chill through De Wallen, where long-time building owners - some nearing retirement age - have little stomach for long legal wrangles...
...same. Many prostitutes (some of them men) still show off their bodies in about 400 display windows, wearing sliver-sized underwear and heavy makeup. But other traders of more immediate use to locals, like food stores, have largely vanished from these streets and been replaced by a profusion of sex shows, erotica stores, pornography cinemas and at least 150 brothels. Amsterdam's sex industry is worth tens of millions of euros per year, officials say. From this year onward, those funds are theoretically taxable, but Asscher admits that while prostitutes' income taxes could bring the city millions in revenues...
That slow-footedness gave criminals time to wrap their tentacles around the district, as the city's first high-profile sex-trafficking trial showed this summer. Two German-Turkish brothers, Saban and Hasan Baran, were charged with running a large-scale prostitution operation, assaulting prostitutes and forcing some of them to undergo breast-enlargement operations; they were convicted and sentenced to prison terms in July. Yet despite that victory, law-enforcement officials believe many other criminals are escaping prosecution. "Girls just will not go to the police, in case these men threaten their families at home," says a police officer...
...City Hall, Asscher says prostitution and the use of soft drugs will still be widely tolerated under the new plan, but that criminals will not be. The neighborhood could boom once the sex industry is "substantially diminished," he says. "Real estate investors realize this is a beautiful part of the capital that has great potential...
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...