A single tear slid down the young mother’s cheek when she recalled her days as a hooker — and the pimp who still owns her heart.
“I think about him all the time,” the ex-prostitute told the Daily News about Vincent George Sr. “I’m lost without him. When he went to jail, I had nobody.”
The unlikely love story is oft-repeated by the working girls employed by father-son pimp team George, 53, and his namesake Vincent Jr., 33. The pair are currently on trial in Manhattan for money laundering and sex trafficking.
But the Daily News found the 31-year-old retired hooker, who once earned $10,000 in a weekend, received no retirement benefits once she left the Georges’ employ.
Money is now tight, work is hard to find and she has three daughters to raise — including one fathered by Vincent Jr.
The News also discovered the Georges likely misled some of the working girls about their living arrangements, leading them to believe their rent checks were actually mortgage payments.
None of it seemed to matter to the women.
Just last week, three self-proclaimed prostitutes offered upbeat stories of their business relationship with the Georges. The hookers commuted to the city from Allentown to work eight-hours shifts.
All testified they willingly sold their bodies for the Georges — and swore the two men took care of them financially and in other ways.
The former prostitute tracked down by The News worked for the pimping pair for eight years, and still gushes about her old bosses.
“I loved (George Sr.) and Junior,” said the former hooker, 31, who did not testify at the trial.
All testified they willingly sold their bodies for the Georges — and swore the two men took care of them financially and in other ways.
The former prostitute tracked down by The News worked for the pimping pair for eight years, and still gushes about her old bosses.
“I loved (George Sr.) and Junior,” said the former hooker, 31, who did not testify at the trial.
They are fighting a sex trafficking charge, the top count that carries a 25-year sentence. They’re also accused of money laundering — a charge with a 15-year maximum jail term.
Prosecutors, for conviction on the most serious counts, must prove the Georges benefited from sex for profit by threatening their workers with physical injury or making the women fear for their safety.
But the anonymous ex-hooker maintained she kept most of her earnings and pulled down as much as $10,000 in a weekend.
These days, money hardly comes so easy. She has had trouble getting work because of her criminal past — two years in prison on retail theft.
She gave up hooking to protect her daughters, and said she would never want them to follow her career path.
“I just don’t want my kids out there,” she said. “They’re my girls and I want better for them.”
Life doesn’t seem much rosier for Danielle Geissler, 31, who spoke in defense of her pimps at trial.
She admitted on the stand that she and George Jr. sometimes “slapped each other around,” but claimed it only happened when her polygamist pimp left her sexually frustrated.
The sleek blonde arrived in Manhattan court last week with a “Pretty Woman” vibe, sporting a conservative beige pantsuit and a stylish coiffure.
The reality was decidedly less glamorous when the News found Geissler at George Jr.’s slightly ramshackle Allentown home Thursday.
Geissler wore a scowl with her black hoodie and jeans, and kept her hair in pigtails. The sex worker stomped back into the house and called police.
Some of the women testified that the Georges set them up in solid, middle-class homes — investments that they would one day own after they paid off the mortgage.
That was about as true as the Georges’ pledges of fidelity.
Desiree Ellis, 24, thought she would one day own the tidy little Allentown home where, according to her testimony, she paid $2,100 a month in rent.
But when the Daily News found the legal owner, he said no such deal existed. Ellis was renting a five-bedroom house and paying rent, said George Sam, a real estate dealer who owns several Allentown homes.
She no longer lives there, but her name was on the lease and she had an option to buy it for $239,000 if she could come up with financing and a down payment within a year, he said.
He was fine with Ellis as a tenant — until he found out she had past arrests.
“She’d have to get financing and stuff. But then I found out all this other bull—-,” said Sam, who owns Samson Real Estate, as well as Sam’s Auto Show on Hanover St. in Allentown.
He said he had met George Jr., but his dealings were mostly with Ellis.
“I don’t know these people personally,” he said. “If they don’t pay, I throw them out. My job is to collect the money, that’s it.”
Dorchen Leidholdt, director of the Center for Battered Women’s Legal Services at Sanctuary for Families in NYC, said in the end the women have little to fall back on.
“There’s only a relatively short period of time in which (women) are marketable commodities — teens and 20s,” Leidholdt said.
After that, the women often have no means of survival and wind up working the streets while battling drug addiction.
“So much for the glamorous profession that pimps falsely tell the women they’re getting into,” she said.
[NYDAilyNews]
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