ORLANDO, Fla. – The Orlando Weekly was served notice on racketeering charges (RICO) last week for including ads for escort agencies. MBI (Metropolitan Bureau of Investigations) agents also arrested three of the papers’ sales managers on charges of aiding and abetting prostitution; claiming that the paper's advertising executives also helped escort services design ads that would hide them from authorities.
In the past, the Weekly has been critical of how law enforcement groups such as the MBI have persecuted adult businesses in the area. Critics say that the arrests are an abuse of process and an attempt to censor the First Amendment rights of a newspaper that has reported critically on the MBI.
“The Orlando Weekly has always been the kind of publication that will dig a little deeper on issues, and go beyond what the mainstream is telling people,” former First Amendment attorney David Wasserman told AVN. “The paper has exposed a lot of illegal activities by the cops, especially dealing with the night clubs here.”
Wasserman said that the MBI pressured the Orlando Yellow Pages in 2005 when authorities discovered ads for escort agencies in the phone book.
“The city has a lot of tourists and this is supposed be a family friendly area, because we have Disneyworld," Wasserman explained. "The phone book eventually stopped running escort ads for a while, and they warned the Weekly to stop running the ads but they refused…they did institute guidelines that took out anything that was sexually explicit, but that wasn’t enough for the MBI.”
At that point, MBI agents launched an extended investigation — included agents posing as madames and prostitutes — dubbed “Operation Weekly Shame.”
Intended to make it easier to prosecute organized crime figures in the 1980’s, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (commonly referred to as RICO Act or RICO) is a United States federal law that provides for extended penalties for criminal acts performed as part of an ongoing criminal organization.
“The prostitution problem has been growing here in recent years because Orlando Weekly is providing space for these kinds of criminal enterprises,” MBI director Bill Lutz told the Orlando Sentinel. “We did send them letters and that worked at the time, but this time, they told us to go pound sand.”
Daniel Aaronson, a longtime Fort Lauderdale criminal defense lawyer and First Amendment specialist, told the Sentinel that the recent arrests were “incredibly repugnant.”
“The papers aren't doing anything illegal. They're taking ads. If an ad uses suggestive language, the stopping of these ads threatens the First Amendment. [If those employees] were asked to change the words of an ad to be part of the solicitation of prostitution, then there are less First Amendment protections.”
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