That was back in 2004, when the biggest little whorehouse in Florida had its Backpage on the front page of the Miami New Times website; and Broward New Times too for that matter.
It was a golden era full of pioneer hoes walking a virtual Biscayne Boulevard of sloppy head lines, teaser pics, body text, and call-to-action contact numbers for dollar-dollar bills y'all.
Local moms financed suburban homes on the backs of Hialeah hotel bed springs. Strippers went to college. Ladies of the night got their teeth fixed. And we support them. Sexual freedom is a South Florida community standard.
Unfortunately, criminal networks operating at scale across state and international lines were pouring millions of illbegotten advertising dollars into Backpage, and generating triple-xxx-ponential dirty bucks for backroom schmucks to do more dirty deeds with.
From one dashboard, they were able to run sophisticated multi-state trafficking under the guise of low-level independent work.
That’s how a chain of little alt-weekly classified sections in popular metro markets became the most active public database and content management system for adult escorts online in the first place. Backed by Salesforce "customer relationship management" with a custom engineered back end, no less.
Miami.Backpage.com from the old days is still available via Wayback. The site was chock full of steamy day spas, mature Colombianas, fat butt Brazilians, European double d blondes, probably pretty much anything you could think of.
So if you were one of the ladies or fellas or whatevers featured in those old stuck together backpages, you may be party to a piece of the $215 million dollars the embattled Backpage company was ordered to pay up after federal seizure of its assets.
How it ended up for its owners was this:
Michael Lacey was sentenced to Federal Prison. Jim Larkin pressed backspace on his own lifeline. One of their closest associates informed against them. Everything the feds could find, they took. Something was rotten for old time's sake. Consider the news.
From 2004 through most of 2012, the Miami New Times and Broward New Times were physically, legally, and financially married to Backpage.
Throughout that time, their editorial management teams followed the company line and towed it as well.
But as they continually pursued lurid tales of sex, lies, and corruption for the New Times, their executive level leadership and local level management promoted false journalistic precepts while fattening their larders off of the global criminal sex trafficking business effectively underwriting their newspapers.
They went toe to toe with the truth of their own compromise, but that’s the last thing they’d investigate.
Jim Mullin, Chuck Strouse, Tim Elfrink, Deirdra Funcheon were all editors or managing editors at some point throughout the available years for claimants to the action (2004 - 2012), necessarily describing their local level management of the official company response to the long arm of the law that was always on their tail. The editors were employed by both Village Voice Media, and the Voice Media Group that their newspapers were sold to.
Turns out editorial hypocrisy was their proverbial adverbial; at the deadline, said the headline, their words couldn't modify their actions.
I worked for both newspapers as a freelance writer, photographer, and visual producer and my biggest video ever so far is still Girl Gets Butt Hole Tattoo, which is just what it sounds like. I also worked for the company that owned and produced Bang Bus.
All I’m saying is just because Backpage was good for some people, don't forget it was horrendous for others.
For more information on the $215 Million Backpage Class Action claims process, see:
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