LAS VEGAS, Nev. -- Somewhere out there, a dark night is about to get darker. Beautiful girls are willing to do just about anything you wish. It's a world of drug-fueled violence and a search for sex in all the wrong places.
But it begins with girls working hard to make a pimp happy, literally by hook or by crook. The desire of the flesh now comes with an unexpected price. "We have carjackings, we have shootings, we have stabbings," said Metro Vice Lt. Karen Hughes.
Natalie used to live this life. Her mother was a prostitute and her grandmother before her. But it was the pimp who pushed Natalie to roll her tricks. "I would know that I'm going to go home and I'm not going to get beat up that night because if I make my pimp happy, everything goes smooth," she said.
Pimps have a quota for the girls - say $1,000 a night. Because of the bad economy, johns aren't paying as much as they used to. So girls either turn more tricks with a smaller pool of clients or they turn to trick rolls to meet that quota.
Every girl had a different technique. "Seeing women knock men out with Visine, and then realizing, ‘Wow, I can get his Rolex. I don't have to have sex with this guy,'" said Lobert.
Lobert is out of the life now and helping other girls get out too. The johns are easy to roll, she says. Already loose from too many drinks, they are just as careless about what they leave unprotected -- chips, jewelry, "money in paper bags. We're talking thousands of dollars," said Lobert.
Then, it's a quick call to the pimp. "He'd come up with a gun and put it to the guy's head and the guy would say, ‘Here, take whatever you want,' because he'd be scared for his life," said Natalie.
Then there are the drugs that knock a man out cold, like Ambien, diazepam, or GHB. An undercover Metro Vice Officer says girls load up the guy's drink in a club. "You take a sip of it, you wake up 10 hours later, you don't even know what happened," he said.
Natalie said a partner took out a whole group of guys. "She did that and knocked everybody in the room out. And I'm standing there and going like, ‘Whoa, what is this?' And she said, ‘Go through their pockets, girl!' And I'm like, ‘Okay,'" she said.
Other times it's a grope and grab. A girl grinds away on a guy in a club, lets her hands wander, then she walks off with a wallet and a hotel key. Lobert says the guys don't come forward because the shame of being taken is too much. "They don't want to be on the news as a guy, a trick, a john that got rolled for $100,000," she said.
It's dark times in this bright city. "Ninety-percent of them don't have sex with you anymore, they just rip you off," said an undercover officer.
The cost of desire higher than ever before. After a huge spike last year, trick rolls are actually down significantly this year. Metro's Vice Squad has been busy the first seven months of the year, but not enough, they say.
They want the rolled johns to come forward. Prostitution is a misdemeanor and police can't arrest you unless they actually saw the solicitation go down. They want victims to speak up, ID these girls and keep the city just that much safer.
