HS Home 29.10.2002 - Organised prostitution leagues amicably divide Finland into zones

By Ari Lahdenmäki

A decade ago prostitution in Finland underwent a change which was as dramatic as the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the late 1980s Finland's few prostitutes were mostly full-blooded Finns in business for themselves; pimps were rarely involved.

The collapse of the Soviet Union brought the criminal element which had operated prostitution rings in the tourist hotels of St. Petersburg and Tallinn onto the Finnish market. The gangs forced nearly all Finnish prostitutes to either join them, or give up their business. The gangsters read the newspaper advertisements of the Finnish girls, called them and went to meet them. Those who refused to heed their threats were beaten.

It was easy for the Russians

and the Estonians to extend their operations to Finland, says Jari Leskinen of the National Bureau of Investigation - Finland's central criminal police.

"Their brutal methods were foreign to the Finns. There has never been a tradition of organised crime in this country."

These criminal elements brought Finland an unprecedented boom in the commercial sex trade. A sex-oriented restaurant, Pikku Pietari, opened. Later organised prostitution - complete with pimps - spread first to Southern Finland and later to the whole country.

Leskinen says that there are about ten

professional prostitution rings in Finland, which are run from Estonia or Russia. The groups divided Finland into their separate territories. For instance, the Helsinki region is the Estonians' turf, while Turku belongs to the Russians.

"The division has been made by mutual agreement", Leskinen says.

The number of prostitutes in Finland varies a great deal. Usually a few thousand foreign prostitutes visit Finland each year.

The Russian and Estonian professional criminals use the services of Finnish pimps, who arrange housing and transport for the women. "The Finns are very important in arranging practical matters", Leskinen says.

In recent years the Estonian gangs have branched out, moving into Southern and Central Sweden. Russian gangs led from Murmansk control much of the prostitution in the north of Sweden and Norway.

The violent crimes unit

of the Helsinki police have succeeded in crushing four large organised prostitution gangs in the Helsinki metropolitan area.

The police got wind of one of these in its investigation of a serious case of blackmail. A phone tap revealed that the victims were prostitutes and the Estonians were their pimps.

The top figures of the gangs live in Estonia, and police have not managed to pin any crimes on them. The Finnish police have been trying to persuade the Estonian authorities to arrest them.

"We believe that the suspects are at the highest levels of Estonian organised crime", says Kari Tolvanen, head of the violent crimes unit of the Helsinki Criminal Police.

Tens of millions of euros

in money earned from prostitution flow from Finland to Estonia. Truck drivers often help transport the cash.

The league that was recently uncovered in the Helsinki region gives an indication of how profitable the business is.

Three men served as the pimps for six or seven women. There was considerable demand for their services: in a single month the women served about a thousand customers. The operation yielded EUR 50,000, of which the prostitutes themselves got EUR 16,800. After rents and other expenses, the league was able to keep another EUR 16,800 for itself.

Tolvanen expects that the groups

that were broken up will soon find successors from across the Gulf of Finland, and he hopes that planned legislative changes will make it easier to catch the pimps.

Under the proposal, procurement - like many other crimes - would be divided into three categories: petty, ordinary, and serious. Tolvanen feels that the maximum sentences could be made significantly higher than the present three years of imprisonment.

"Currently procurement brings in profits that are on a par with drug dealing, but the punishments are similar to those of traffic violations", Tolvanen says.

In July Helsinki District Court handed down two-year prison sentences to two Estonian men. The leader of the group who lives in Estonia has not been brought before a court. The organisation got EUR 430,000 in profits from their illegal activities.

Police would also like to be able to listen to the telephone conversations of suspected pimps; under present Finnish law, procurement is not a crime that is considered serious enough to merit a wiretap.

"Wiretaps would be the best way to investigate crimes of procurement, as the women are dispatched by telephone", Tolvanen says.

Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 27.10.2002