http://www.dallasobserver.com/2011-0...-up-in-dallas/
The alarm bells reached peak decibel in November, when
Dallas Police Sergeant Louis Felini told the
The Dallas Morning News that between 50,000 and 100,000 prostitutes could descend on the metroplex for the Super Bowl. The call to outrage had sounded.
His estimate was astonishing. At the higher figure, it meant that every man, woman and child holding a ticket would have their own personal hooker, from the vice presidential wing of
FedEx to Little Timmy from
Green Bay.
And if you believed a study commissioned by the
Dallas Women's Foundation, the hordes would include 38,000 underage prostitutes. Doe-eyed beauties from the Heartland would be peddled like
Jell-O shots at the Delta Phi soiree.
Official
Dallas would not be caught flat-footed.
Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott and the
FBI pledged extra manpower to fight "human trafficking." The
Arlington Police Department put up billboards near
Cowboys Stadium. They featured flashing photos of busted johns, warning visitors:
We don't take kindly to perverts like you, son.
Even the Shapiro Law Firm leaped in. Noting that an estimated 40,000 hookers showed up in Dallas for the
NBA All-Star game last year, it wanted to make sure that, should a hedge fund manager find himself ensnared in naked compromise, "our attorneys provide experienced defense for sex crimes, including the solicitation of a prostitute."
The city was gearing up for a massive invasion of skanks and sex fiends. It would be like Normandy, only with way more plastic surgery—the largest single gathering of freaks and pedophiles the world has ever seen. At least outside of a
Vatican staff meeting.
But if Dallas is like any other Super Bowl—or Olympics or
World Cup, for that matter—today's four-alarm panic will tinkle as softly as a servant's bell by next week. All evidence says that America's call girls will be at home, watching the game of TV, just like you and me.
Judging by Super Bowls past, the mass migration of teenage sex slaves is nothing more than myth.
Read between his very terse lines, and you can tell that
Brian McCarthy isn't happy. He's a spokesman for the NFL. Every year he's forced to hear from mopes like yours truly, wondering why his customers are adulterers and child molesters.
The routine is the same in every Super Bowl city. The media beats the drum of impending invasion, warning that anywhere from 15,000 to 100,000 hookers will soon arrive. Politicians lather on their special sauce of manufactured outrage. Cops and prosecutors vow stings and beefed up manpower.
By implication, the NFL's wealthiest and most connected fans—captains of industry and senators from
Utah—will be plotting a week of sexual rampage not seen since the Vikings sailed on
Scotland. And they must be stopped.
"This is urban legend that is pure pulp fiction," the NFL's McCarthy says. "I would refer you to your local law enforcement officials."
So that's what we did. Meet police
Sergeant Tommy Thompson of
Phoenix, which hosted the
2008 Super Bowl. "We may have had certain precincts that were going gangbusters looking for prostitutes, but they were picking up your everyday street prostitutes," Thompson says of his vice cops. "They didn't notice any sort of glitch in the number of prostitution arrests leading up to the Super Bowl."
Conspicuously noted: He doesn't recall a single arrest of an underage girl.
Perhaps Phoenix was an anomaly. So let's go to
Tampa, host of
Super Bowl 2009. Police spokeswoman
Andrea Davis says her department ran special operations on the sex trade. They came up empty. "We didn't see a huge influx in prostitutes coming into Tampa," she says. "The arrests were not a lot higher. They were almost the same."
Now it could be that both departments are incompetent, mistaking tens of thousands of women in fishnet stockings for a very large synchronized swimming team. So let's travel to Europe, where the hooker influx for the World Cup is routinely pegged at 40,000. If anyone's going to break the record for the world's largest orgy, it's the Godless Eurotrash, right?
Germany hosted the 2006 World Cup. U.S congressmen warned the promiscuous Krauts that fleshly opportunism would not be tolerated. So the government spent millions of euros to crush human trafficking. No one could say the Germans were perv enablers.
But apparently 39,995 of the blasphemers had carburetor trouble in
Prague and never showed. The final Cup tally for forced prostitution arrests: 5. German brothels couldn't even report a surge in business. And a further study by the Swedish government ruled "the 40,000 estimate was unfounded and unrealistic."
There don't appear to be solid figures for last summer's
South African Cup, but anecdotal evidence says the sex business was slow.
The only concrete numbers we have: Museums showed record attendance.
This isn't to say that the sex trade isn't alive and well. It is. Nor is it to imply there are no such thing as teen prostitutes. There are. The problem is that most of what we believe remains fixed in a blaxploitation film from 1973, where menacing pimps named Lester beat their weeping charges with diamond-encrusted canes.
Finally... some sanity about the Super Bowl Hooker Myth
