From The Press of Atlantic City
“I’m only 17, it’s my first time and I’m scared,” Ashley Boyer told the man who had just paid her for sex.
His answer: “He got dressed, tipped me $50 and told me he would call again.”
It didn’t matter to him that Boyer cried as they had sex. That she didn’t want to be there. That she was months away from high school graduation. Her youth and inexperience was a plus.
She went outside and gave the money to the man who had advertised her on the pages of a local weekly magazine.
“I’m proud of you,” he said.
That first “date” was the beginning of Boyer’s three-year trip into the depths of the sex industry, taking the then-Ocean City High School senior from Ohio to Detroit to the Las Vegas strip. Along the way was “The Monster” who turned her out, abusive pimps who kept her in control and jobs that sometimes left her begging for her life.
Now 29 and the mother of a 6-year-old, she’s proof that sexual trafficking doesn’t end when the victim comes of age or even when she gets out of “the life.”
It’s a daily struggle to keep from going back to what she learned. While her drug use never went beyond recreational marijuana, Boyer likens the quick money to a drug addiction.
Boyer was still “dabbling” as an escort when she met FBI Special Agent Dan Garrabrant in a desperate attempt to save a new victim from “The Monster.”
He heads the Child Exploitation Task Force, whose five-member team takes 30 to 50 children off the streets in Atlantic, Cape May and Cumberland counties every year. That doesn’t include local minors recovered from other parts of the country.
But when the Innocence Lost initiative began in 2004, Garrabrant’s questions about doing work in Atlantic City met with some hesitation.
“I don’t know that it’s really happening there,” his boss said of human trafficking.
“Originally, I was kind of dismissed as this guy looking for a unicorn,” Garrabrant, who is in his late 40s, said during a phone interview as he chauffeured his kids one night.
He’s used to juggling family and the multiple daily calls he gets from law-enforcement agencies seeking his help and victims reaching out.
Some wonder how he can do it with three children, all born after he came here a decade ago.
“I don’t know how you do it if you don’t have kids,” Garrabrant said. “If I don’t protect other people’s kids, who’s going to protect mine?”
He’s far from the stereotype of an FBI agent. He jokes about his small stature and slight belly, and steers away from typical police speak when he talks to potential victims.
Dawne Lomangino-DiMauro, of the Atlantic County Women’s Center, credits Garrabrant with helping change the perception of sex workers.
“They’re collaborating and really identifying them as sexual-assault survivors and victims, which is a big deal,” she said of the task force. “(Sex trafficking is) just another tactic of domestic violence and sexual violence. It’s just another piece of that.”
“This is a whole different kind of police,” Garrabrant tells the woman who came to this Absecon motel for a “date” but wound up in a room with detectives.
It’s one of the undercover operations the task force participates in to assist local departments. They keep their location secret to avoid hurting future investigations.
Talking with a soft, easy banter, he presents himself more as a social worker than a cop.
He never says he’s with the FBI. If this woman goes back and tells her pimp she got questioned by an agent, it could be trouble, even if she promises she told him nothing.
But the 26-year-old woman sitting across from him inside a motel room this night insists she’s never had a pimp.
He lets her know he doesn’t believe it without raising his voice or sounding accusatory.
“I’ve been doing this longer than you,” he tells her.
Flipping through her phone’s contacts, he asks about different names. They’re just friends, she insists. But after she’s gone from the room, he’ll explain that he knows some of them as pimps or drug dealers.
“You’re just in a situation now,” he tells her, keeping his voice friendly and conversational, no matter her reaction. “If there’s something we can do to help you out, we will.”
“There’s people who really need help,” she says. “You should give it to them.”
On this night, there are two teens who may be on the street.
Fliers with their pictures were handed out to the group of officers at the Absecon Police Department, as task force member Detective Paul Vanaman readied them for the night.
One of the girls is a missing 16-year-old who was seen with a potential pimp. The other is a 15-year-old from Hamilton Township who was reportedly advertised on Back Page, a website filled with “men seeking women” type personals that often are really advertisements for paid sex.
An underage victim is their priority, explains Vanaman, of the Department of Human Services. If a victim is found, the operation stops.
“If we recover a minor ... and we focus our efforts on them,” he tells the group.
The child will be brought back to the station for an interview, which will be recorded on video, as it could result in a first-degree human-trafficking case.
“Have you ever been the victim of a crime?” Garrabrant asks a 20-year-old woman caught soliciting during an undercover detail in Egg Harbor Township.
But when he asks whether she’s ever had a bad date, the answer changes.
“Well, describe that to me.”
She goes on to tell of robberies, stabbings, beatings and rapes.
“Do you understand you’re a victim?” he asks.
The woman looks at him with a realization.
It’s something Garrabrant has dealt with countless times.
“They don’t report it because they don’t think law enforcement is really going to care what happens to them,” he explains later.
Garrabrant has worked human trafficking since entering the FBI in 1998. Before that, he was a police officer in New Castle County, Delaware, when since-executed serial killer Steven Brian Pennell was targeting prostitutes.
But his work with victims goes back to college.
While attending the University of Delaware, he worked in a residential treatment center for adolescent sex offenders.
“They were all kids who had been sexually abused, and turned around and abused other kids.”
His job isn’t one envied in the bureau. It’s kind of like a plague, he says, where no one even wants to get near it.
Boyer’s introduction to trafficking came from “The Monster.”
She was a senior at Ocean City High School when the man she describes as “about 300 pounds and disgusting” told her he had a friend who was a music producer. They even met with her family.
Then one day, he said he was taking her to the studio, but instead took her to a room with four women. She says he told her about how he knew everything about her family and could hurt them. One of the women who worked for him even showed her the bruises on her back that he put there.
He wasn’t a “real pimp,” Boyer says. She found that out when he tried to put her out on Pacific Avenue.
“That’s when Pacific was really, really, like, big,” she says. “(Pimps) told him that he couldn’t be out there, and if he ever did put me down, they would take me from him.”
While today’s girls usually show up on Back Page, print was the method a dozen years ago.
Boyer’s first date at Absecon’s Red Carpet Inn came through an advertisement in Atlantic City Weekly, she recalls.
But “The Monster” didn’t know how to really make money, so she was dropped off with a real pimp.
Boyer calls the short man with the ponytail and long leather coat “The Abuser.” He recruited girls in Ohio, Garrabrant says. And, when he was finally arrested, that’s where the charges were filed.
It’s also where Boyer learned “the game”: Working bars, then moving on to Detroit. She would later get a slight reprieve with “the Nice Guy,” a pimp she says saved her in Las Vegas and was the closest thing to a real relationship she had. While there, she also was fully in “the life.”
She would get another pimp, eventually. One well-known on the strip. His abuse included a brutal beating that ended with him urinating on her.
Multiple arrests in California and the threat of strict jail time had him send her to Hawaii, where she would finally call her mother and reveal everything.
“I’m a ho, I have a pimp and my feet hurt,” Boyer said. “I want to go home.”
Then, “The Monster” re-entered her life, when a girl he had access to called Boyer.
“She said he’d been raping her since she was 8,” she recalls the then-12-year-old saying.
Boyer went searching for help, and found Garrabrant.
But the girl wasn’t ready to come forward. And “The Monster” is still out there, somewhere. And Boyer knows he’s still doing what he did before.
He reached out to her several times on social media. Finally, she wrote him a letter telling him how he had ruined her life, how she doesn’t think he should be walking the Earth. She hasn’t heard from him since.
Still, she’s careful. She doesn’t want to risk identifying the victim who reached out. She also doesn’t want to put herself in danger.
“You do the wrong thing or say the wrong thing, you could be dealt with,” she says.
Many are surprised to find prostitution isn’t used to feed drug addiction, Garrabrant says. Instead, the drug addiction comes after, to cope with the life of sex for money.
“Not a lot of people realize heroin is a coping skill,” Lomangino-DiMauro says.
While there are no studies on it, she likens the victims to those of domestic violence, who take an average of seven incidents before they try to get out.
“A lot of times, they’re not at a point in their lives where they want help,” Garrabrant says.
Even those who are don’t always take the offer right away.
Boyer says she was sent to one place where she wanted to help but they wanted her to go into counseling to work through her experiences. She doesn’t need that, she says. Her focus is on others.
“It’s happening right now,” Boyer says. “Someone’s at a bus stop because she ran away from home because she was unhappy, and someone pulls up and takes her. It’s just that easy. And once you’re gone, you’re gone.”
The tears fill Boyer’s eyes. She apologizes for the emotion, but her face never breaks. Years of covering up her vulnerability are apparent.
She says she barely remembers anything from school. But in her years in “the game,” she learned to survive and to read people, and that education, she believes, gives her a unique value in helping other girls.
The tattoo on Boyer’s right shoulder doesn’t recognize a lost loved one. Instead, it marks the death of her former life.
“I basically killed myself, my alter ego,” she says.
“I was never Ashley,” she says. “I was always like my ho name. I was that person. That’s who I was.”
But remnants of Talaysia remain. A past that stole her youth and the dreams she may have had to finish high school and go to college also taught her a different way to make money and have nice things.
Boyer has left legitimate jobs, where a person without a high school diploma makes about $200 a week. She used to be able to make $1,000 a week, or even in a night. Her head still works that way, she says. But she can’t go back to that life. So she goes on without work.
“It’s like being in prison all your life, and you’re trying to figure out how to live in civilization,” she says. “That game makes you feel like a crackhead. You want that fix. You want that $1,000-a-week fix. Your brain is still in that, ‘It’s OK, the money will come.’
“Then, every day you look in the mirror and say, ‘I’m better than this.’”
Finding the victim is really where the case starts, Garrabrant says. Then it’s finding the person putting them out.
“A 15-year-old isn’t paying for an ad on Back Page,” says Sgt. Bill Adamson, a task force member with the Atlantic County Prosecutor’s Office.
While adult sex workers may refuse help, they will call when they see or hear about a young girl being pimped.
Boyer says she could have been helped.
“But because I was a prostitute, I was treated like I deserved everything I was getting,” she says. “The tricks don’t help you, the pimps beat and brainwash you, and the cops just want to throw you in jail instead of offering help or counseling.”
Years of building relationships with the victims he’s met give him a unique perspective. One trusted by women like Boyer, who have learned to tell when someone’s sincere or trying to use them.
“I stalk him a little bit,” she jokes of calls she’s made.
Garrabrant is used to it. He often gets calls from unrecognizable numbers. The story on the other end is always one he remembers. It could be a woman finally ready for help, or a former victim updating him on her life.
Not all can be saved. Garrabrant recently learned a young man whom they had rescued committed suicide.
“It can be incredibly frustrating,” he says. “You’ve got to get back up and keep going because there’s a lot more kids out there that need help.”
