A silver BMW pulled alongside two young women late Friday night, its male driver looking for “something to get into.”
The women, waiting along Cleveland Avenue in southwest Atlanta, appear to be part of the city’s illegal sex trade.
“You gonna ride back through, and I ain’t gonna be out here,” one of the women told him.
“I’ll stay if we can do a three-way,” the driver said.
“You already know what’s gonna happen,” the woman replied.
But he didn’t.
As soon as he offered a price for sex -- $40 -- an Atlanta police patrol car rushed up, and four “Red Dog” tactical police officers jumped out to arrest him.
The man was cuffed and put into the back of the squad car and another officer drove his vehicle away to be impounded.
The women, one dressed in short shorts and a white camisole, the other in a dark one-piece mini-dress with a plunging neck line, are undercover Atlanta police vice officers. And the “john” they had just nailed was going to jail, a victim of his own desires.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution was allowed to ride along with police late Friday night and early Saturday morning for an exclusive look at the Atlanta vice squad's efforts to tamp down prostitution in the city.
Deputy Chief Calvin Moss told the AJC that these stings are set up periodically when residents complain about street walkers.
“[Prostitution] sends a message to the community that disorder is tolerated here,” said Moss, who heads the criminal investigation division. “I strongly feel that the citizens should never stand for disorder taking place in their neighborhood.”
So, the vice unit periodically teams up with about a dozen “Red Dog” officers and members of Zone 3’s plain-clothes field investigative team to take down both johns and prostitutes in the Cleveland Avenue-Metropolitan Parkway area, or anywhere else prostitution is a problem.
Undercover cops posed as prostitutes and johns made 10 arrests -- five men and five women -- during an eight-hour shift shortened by lightning and thunderstorms.
That adds to the 418 prostitution-related arrests police say they’d already made in 2010.
“I’ll be here all night,” one of the undercover female officers, who asked not to be identified, told a potential john shortly after the sting began.
“I gotta go drop my kids off,” the john said to her, his voice transmitted through the wireless microphone she was wearing to a radio receiver in an unmarked police vehicle.
Inside that vehicle, Officer Jared Watkins directed the show within clear view of the cops dressed as prostitutes.
Watkins, a six-year Atlanta police officer in his second year with the vice squad, listened to the chatter and directed the three women, a team of plain-clothes officers placed nearby on foot to protect them, and the “Red Dog” take-down teams.
Setting a price is the first step towards jail.
“Any time [suspects] offer or agree to have sex … any type of sex act for money or anything of value,” Watkins said. “Once it’s at that point, the arrest team’s notified and it’s basically on the undercovers to make the case.”
Friday night, undercover johns were able to pick up five women soliciting sexual favors for money on the east end of Cleveland Avenue.
Most of those arrests were made early in the evening, soon after the rain and lightning subsided, police said.
Just after 11 p.m., the team of women lured their first arrest.
“I got a room just over here,” the undercover officer told a potential john, pointing to a nearby motel.
“How much ... 30?” he responded.
“OK, just meet me over there,” she said.
The man pulled out of the parking lot and drove to a gas station a block away, where he was met by a take-down team and arrested.
Not 10 minutes later, the BWM-driver looking for the threesome, pulled into the parking lot.
Soon after, a man in a blue Mercury SUV actually stops in the middle of the street and turns on his parking lights while negotiating a tryst with one of the undercover officers.
"I only have $40," the john says, triggering his eventual arrest.
Moss insists that paying for sex is not a victimless crime.
“The ladies or the men who are out there offering their services … put themselves at risk,” Moss said. “They, in some cases, are involved in other criminal activity where a potential john, for instance, will get robbed or get set up.
“In those areas where that’s tolerated, it breeds more of the same.”
Police have found varying layers of the sex trade during their stings, said Maj. Chris Leighty, commander of APD’s special enforcement section that includes SWAT, “Red Dogs” and vice.
“The last detail we ran, we actually picked up a pimp who was actually doing human trafficking,” Leighty said.
He noted the toll prostitution can take on families.
“One of the johns we picked up had left his 4-year-old daughter alone in a hotel room on Fulton Industrial Boulevard,” Leighty said, referring to a previous sting.
Lt. Tony Crawford, who leads Atlanta’s vice squad, said that’s not unusual, although Saturday morning, the five johns arrested didn’t appear to be philanderers or wayward parents.
“A lot of times we see car seats in the back of their vehicles,” Crawford said. “But not tonight. And no wedding bands, either.”
Watkins said much of the vice squad’s motivation is to see the women who actually do sell their bodies to find a way out of the sex trade.
“Probably everybody in the unit would rather them get help and get out of here,” he said.
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