Lured from Latvia, sex slave tells story BY STEVE WARMBIR FEDERAL COURTS REPORTER
She was 23 and earning good money as a marketing manager in Riga, Latvia, when a stranger, oozing compliments, sidled up to her on the street and made her a tempting offer.
How would an attractive woman like her like to travel to the United States to dance in a bar and make big money--$60,000 in a single year?
No nudity, no sex, no catches.
Just dancing in a bikini.
The woman, who would be known later only as Linda to a federal jury in Chicago, was intrigued. In Latvia, even doctors earn only $30 a month.
Before long, she accepted the stranger's offer, and thus began a journey that turned her into a terrified sex slave, held captive and beaten in homes in suburban Mount Prospect and Lincolnwood, and forced to strip at clubs.
The stranger who lured Linda to the United States, Alex Mishulovich, eventually was convicted of leading a slavery ring and, in February, was sentenced to nine years and three months in prison. The judge called Mishulovich a sociopath. That successful prosecution, led by Assistant U.S. Attorney Terry Kinney, marked one of the first times in the United States that a sex slavery case resulted in a conviction.
Mishulovich used to brag that he had ties to the Chechen mafia, a notorious crime organization that grew up in the economic chaos that followed the fall of the Soviet Union. While it is unlikely he was, in fact, an actual member of the Chechen mafia--he is Jewish, and that crime group is largely restricted to Muslims--it is clear he had an association with the group, court records show.
It is also clear, law enforcement officials say, that Linda's story is not unique. For several years now, Russian and Eastern European organized crime figures have been bringing women to the United States, including Chicago, where they are forced to strip and dance nude and work as prostitutes.
Linda was never physically shackled and chained, so why didn't she simply walk away?
She did try, even before leaving Latvia. And she found it was not so easy.
When, in October 1996, she expressed reservations about going, she saw Mishulovich's dark side for the first time.
"I asked for my passport back, and he said wait a minute, and he suddenly became really rude, and he totally changed," Linda recalled to the jury at trial. "And I was scared. I saw that strange expression on his face, and I thought something is not right here. And I told him that I'm not going to go. I have important work coming up, and I have changed my mind."
Mishulovich, she said, went berserk, yelling and screaming.
"He said that he was going to cut up my pretty face, so no one is ever going to look at me," she said, "and my life was going to change from that point, as well as my family's."
Why didn't she go to the police?
"Being raised and born in Latvia, I have no reason to trust the police over there," she said. "Organized crime is so much more powerful. That's just how it is."
Leaving her parents and brother behind, Linda flew with Mishulovich to Chicago. After arriving at O'Hare Airport, she and several other young foreign women were herded into a Mount Prospect apartment. And it was only then that they learned, much to their horror, that they would be stripping for a living.
At first, the young women were permitted to leave the apartment, but under tight restrictions. They could go for a jog, while a Mishulovich associate watched from a balcony. They could go to a tanning salon, but they had to return to the apartment right away.
If they violated the rules, they were fined hundreds of dollars or beaten.
To teach them how to strip like pros, Mishulovich and his associates ordered the women to watch two movies repeatedly--the 1996 film "Striptease," starring Demi Moore, and the 1995 film "Showgirls," starring Elizabeth Berkley.
Mishulovich obtained fake driver's licenses and Social Security cards for the women, and then he and his associates took them to audition at local clubs. The women danced at the Skybox strip club in Harvey, and the Admiral Theatre and Crazy Horse in Chicago, among others.
Linda initially didn't want to dance topless but wanted to go in her bikini, which cut her earning power.
Mishulovich ordered her to make more money, no matter what she had to do--or else.
"He said he was going to lock me into the basement and make me have sex," she said, "or he was going to kill me and pour acid over me, and no one's ever going to find me."
And he did more than make threats.
"The next day, I went to the club, and the money I made was still not enough," Linda said. "And Alex said something to me, and I said something to him, and he slammed me into the wall, and I passed out."
Another woman at the apartment "dragged me into the bathroom," Linda said. "I was throwing up, and I was unconscious. I guess I had a brain concussion, and I was in bed for about three days. I was not even able to stand up. I was feeling dizzy."
No one called a doctor.
Four days later, Linda returned to the Sky Box--and she danced naked.
"I . . . I didn't want to be slammed in . . . in the wall again," she said.
The women in the apartment, including Linda, began to drink. It was a way to cope.
"I didn't feel good at all," Linda said. "I was constantly drinking before I even could go up on stage and do that."
The women earned good money--sometimes several hundred dollars a night--but often were allowed to keep as little as $20. Back in Latvia, they had agreed with Mishulovich that they would split their earnings evenly, but he had forgotten to tell them about the "expenses," including exorbitant charges for rent and utilities.
The women worried about their own safety, but perhaps that would not have been enough to keep them in psychological bondage. They worried more about what might happen to their families if they defied Mishulovich.
Once, he ripped from Linda's neck a charm that held a picture of her mother. If Linda left, he said, he would have his Chechen mob friends hunt her mother down and kill her.
The women were moved from the Mount Prospect apartment to Mishulovich's Lincolnwood home in early 1997 after a Mishulovich associate was arrested and deported.
There, life for the women was even worse.
After working all night in the strip clubs, they would fall asleep at 6 a.m., only to be awakened four hours later by screaming arguments between Mishulovich and his mother. The women were ordered to scrub the floors and clean the house before going to work.
Mishulovich apparently didn't want his neighbors to know about the women, so they were never allowed outdoors.
One of them, Agita, asked, "Can we just go up and down the block, just to breathe some fresh air, maybe for a jog or anything?"
And then there were Mishulovich's own crude advances. He would paw at the women and masturbate near them.
About a year after being brought to the United States, Linda finally did get her freedom.
A man she met at one of the clubs bought her freedom for $5,000 and a Cartier watch.
Now, Mishulovich said, the man could do whatever he pleased with her. The man could "cut and kill" her, Mishulovich said, according to court testimony, or throw her in the river.
But the man, a manager at a Chicago car dealership, said he wanted only one thing--to release Linda from her nightmare.
Today, Linda is doing far better, authorities said. The Sun-Times is not revealing her full name or whereabouts to protect her privacy.
She is free but still feels the old fears.
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