Used to be you could order a hooker off the internet easier than a cheeseburger.
That was back in 2004, when the biggest little whorehouse in Florida had its Backpage button 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 pioneering internet escorts working a virtual Biscayne Boulevard of headlines, attached pics, body text, and phone numbers for call-to-action dollars.
Plenty of independent moms in Kendall financed their homes on the backs of Hialeah hotel bed springs, and hey, it’s all good. We support them. Sexual freedom for sale is a South Florida community standard.
Unfortunately, large scale criminal networks operating across state and national lines were paying millions of advertising dollars into Backpage, and generating dirty bucks for backroom schmucks to do more dirty deeds with.
That’s how a little alt-weekly classifieds section became the most active live database and content management system for adult escorts online in the first place. Backed by Salesforce technology with custom engineered coding, no less.
The Miami Backpage from the old days is still available via Wayback. It was chock full of day spas, Colombian hotel in-calls, fat butt Brazilian drive to you’s, European double d blondes, advertised infinitum. And if you were one of the ladies or fellas or whatevers featured in those ads, you may be party to a piece of the $215 million bucks 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 directly connected to Backpage.
Throughout that time, their editorial management teams followed the company line and towed it as well.
Somehow they were 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, necessarily describing their local level management of the official company response. They were employed by both Village Voice Media, and the Voice Media Group that their newspapers were sold to.
I worked for both papers 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: