By PETE ALFANO
STAR-TELEGRAM STAFF WRITER (Fort Worth, Texas, USA)
He lives at an undisclosed location in Tarrant County.
His mail is delivered to a post office box at a UPS Store in a cookie-cutter strip mall on South Hulen Street.
The 64-year-old is not a fugitive. Well, at least, not in his estimation.
He keeps a low profile, he says, to avoid harassment by women’s groups and human rights organizations.
They say he is a sex tour operator, shepherding men to Southeast Asia for trysts with young, subservient women.
Gunter Frentz has been the proprietor of G.F. Tours for more than 18 years. And for almost a year now, since Hurricane Katrina cast him among thousands of evacuees who sought refuge in Texas, Frentz has been operating from Fort Worth.
Just don’t look for a storefront with a flashy sign beckoning gentleman travelers. Don’t expect an ad in the Sunday Travel section of the Star- Telegram .
Sex tour operators work clandestinely — generally from home — using the Internet to promote their business and solicit customers.
The United Nations and human rights organizations and activists around the world say these tour operators are part of the international business of sex trafficking, often exploiting people who are impoverished and sometimes abducted or sold into slavery.
Under the guise of soaking up the culture and enjoying the night life in exotic locales, sex tour operators entice men to ante up about $3,000 for a 10-day trip to Asian hot spots like Bangkok, Thailand, and cities and resorts in Cambodia and the Philippines. Other operators promote tours to Central and South American port cities in places like Costa Rica and Colombia.
“This is about human dignity and human rights,” says Jessica Neuwirth, a founder and president of Equality Now, a New York-based organization whose mission statement is to “end violence and discrimination against women and girls around the world.”
“It’s the promotion of prostitution, and we think that in some cases, authorities are just giving it a wink and a nod.”
Fort Worth police officer Ed Adcock, who is assigned to the special operations/vice squad, has kept tabs on Frentz since last November.
“He’s definitely on the radar,” Adcock says.
Frentz adamantly denies he is promoting sex tourism.
“I am not calling myself a sex tour operator,” he says. “We don’t provide girls. We do take people to night-life areas.”
But, he adds, “The opportunities do exist to take out a female companion.”
‘Changing tactics’
Frentz says his travel business wasn’t exactly booming in the beginning when he touted the culture, food and historic sights in countries such as Thailand.
“All we got were a couple of old ladies,” he says.
So he focused more on the night life and entertainment in cities such as Bangkok. His Web site offers Pleasure Tours and Marriage Tours and mixes pages of cultural attractions with photos of scantily clad Asian women. None are nude.
But his old Web site — still active a few months ago — offered more.
Are you getting overwhelming, pressure free pleasure and satisfaction night after night? Would you like to be in a city where you can easily get simple, straightforward satisfaction?
How long has it been since you’ve gotten just as much sex as you wanted?
There were also photos of nude women and a Q&A. One of the questions dealt with AIDS in Thailand.
He calls the problem “very serious” and warns prospective customers to avoid brothels where women have almost twice as many clients as the “girls in the clubs that we take you to. . . .”
That version of Frentz’s site was much like sex tour sites such as ClubHombre, Bendricks Tours and Dexterhorn. These Web sites, according to Equality Now, are in effect promoting jet-set prostitution worldwide.
In a conversation with the Star-Telegram Frentz insisted that “We don’t set anyone up with girls.”
Frentz says he books the round-trip flights and other accommodations for G.F. Tours. A tour guide, he says, helps customers navigate unfamiliar surroundings.
He also says that he revamped his Web site and services after Hurricane Katrina put him temporarily out of business.
“Once I started thinking about starting things up again,” Frentz says, “I decided to modify our tour and make it more tamer.”
Adcock isn’t convinced.
“He may be changing tactics, trying to give the impression that he is legitimate,” Adcock says. “But there is continued interest in him.”
Ken Franzblau, the anti-trafficking campaign director for Equality Now, says tour guides often act as middlemen who negotiate the fee for a woman after a customer has picked one out like a new car in the dealer’s showroom.
“You go in a bar, see a woman dancing onstage and pay the house for however many days you want her,” he says. “The tour guide will negotiate the transaction.”
Why would men travel halfway around the world for a date?
Franzblau says these men generally are social misfits. But Frentz says many are fed up with the attitude of American women.
Some of their complaints are listed on a page on his Web site called “American Women.” In an earlier version, the headline said, “American Monster Women.”
Though he toned the headline down, he says many clients view U.S. women as materialistic and pushy.
“I hear men say that . . . the conversation is steered to work and what they do for a living . . . what kind of car they drive,” Frentz says. “A lot of men also are old-school. They don’t want . . . a 50-50 relationship.”
Still others, he says, are bitter because of a divorce.
“But the thing that amazes me is that while I thought I would get a high percentage of losers and weirdos, that hasn’t been the case,” he says. “They are professionals and seem like decent human beings.”
Franzblau says he has had several conversations with Frentz, posing as a potential customer and using an alias. He also asked for references and received testimonials from some of Frentz’s clients, one man bragging that he slept with 18 women in 10 days.
Sex tours don’t necessarily involve consenting adults. Some attract pedophiles.
The FBI conducted two stings in Florida, using phony sex tour Web sites to lure men who wanted to have sex with minors.
According to a 2005 Miami Herald report, one such operation netted 11 men who had signed up with a fake Web site called Costa Rican Taboo Vacations.
Among those convicted was a Hollywood, Fla., police officer.
In Thailand, “Research conducted by the Office of the National Commission on Women’s Affairs in 2000 indicates that between 22,500 and 40,000 girls under the age of 18 are engaged in commercial sex work,” according to the Tourism Authority of Thailand Web site.
“Poverty is the principal reason why children in rural communities in Thailand are driven into the sex trade,” it says.
Though prostitution is illegal in Thailand and pedophiles can face severe penalties, enforcement is undermined by bribes and kickbacks.
Frentz says he does not promote or sanction sex with children, calling it “evil.” When he talks to a prospective customer who sounds him out about hooking up with minors, he warns that he might notify police.
Frentz says that plenty of women of legal age are drawn to work in the nightclubs, out of desperation.
An official with the Justice Department in Washington, D.C., says the sex business is booming in Bangkok.
“There are so many people offering sex for sale, Westerners who pay to go there are preyed on. You can’t walk 15, 20 feet without multiple young ladies offering to come home with you for $20 to $25 per night,” says the official, who prefers not to use his name, citing agency policy.
He describes the neighborhood where eight or nine brothels are clustered as “like a mall.”
According to the Tourism Authority of Thailand, “Many young women without appropriate skills end up working for bars, massage parlors and brothels. Some girls are even sold into prostitution by parents and relatives.”
Keeping a low profile
Frentz says he keeps a low profile because he doesn’t want Equality Now harassing the airlines or his other vendors or picketing at the airport.
He even lists his post office box — not his residence — as his address on his Texas driver’s license, which, according to the Department of Public Safety, is against state law.
He also played cat and mouse during one telephone conversation before confirming that Gunter Frentz is his real name.
Frentz is reluctant to talk about his past, the information coming like drops from a leaky faucet.
He was born in Berlin in 1942. His father, he says, was a colonel in the German air force but had a desk job.
When World War II ended, his mother brought Frentz, who was 3, to the U.S., where they settled in Morristown, N.J. He says he returned to Germany for a few years before settling permanently in the U.S. when he was 15.
He began his professional career as an underwriter for an insurance firm on Wall Street but says he didn’t like the stress that comes with playing with other people’s money.
In the 1960s, he says, he was a civil rights worker for the Congress of Racial Equality, which, like Frentz’s current critics, champions human rights.
Frentz is evasive about some of his other jobs, saying he eventually moved to Miami, where he lived for 27 years, and even drove a taxi for a time. He made enough money in one venture to travel the world and fell in love with Thailand.
And that is what inspired him to start G.F. Tours.
When he became bored living in Miami, he moved to New Orleans, a city that seemed full of possibilities. But after Hurricane Katrina left him homeless, he packed what remained of his belongings and drove to North Texas, where a friend and customer in Bridgeport offered him shelter.
Frentz decided to make North Texas his home and found his own place.
He says that his tours have changed lives and that some customers found their future wives.
But Frentz has a daughter in her mid-30s (his wife died of cancer more than 20 years ago), and he says she is not ecstatic about his line of work. And no, he says, anticipating the question, he wouldn’t want her to be one of those “dancers” his clients seek out.
Now, he says, he would like to refocus his travel business on marriage tours. But he says Equality Now and other “feminists” have made that more difficult as well.
They supported the International Marriage Broker Act of 2006, which imposed new rules on purchasing mail-order brides.
Tighter screening and full disclosure are now part of the process. A man looking for a wife must reveal more personal information, including previous marriages, and criminal records, including instances of domestic abuse or rape.
Prosecution efforts
Sex tour operators might be only a small part of human trafficking, but efforts to prosecute them have been increasing.
U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, introduced a bill last year that would have specifically prohibited sex tourism. The legislation did not pass.
In an e-mail, Cornyn said sex tourism operates “in the shadow of our society.”
“This is an industry that is based essentially on modern-day slavery and our government, at all levels, must take aggressive action to address it,” he wrote.
Some states are taking action. The New York attorney general has filed criminal and civil actions against Big Apple Oriental Tours and its owners, alleging that the tour promotes prostitution in violation of the state penal law.
Big Apple Oriental Tours is not currently operating.
Hawaii has outlawed the activities of sex tour operators and has specifically prohibited sex tourism. The law makes it a felony “to offer to sell travel services for the purpose of engaging in prostitution” and carries a prison term of up to five years.
“I think [sex tourism] is part of the whole trafficking issue,” says Hawaii state Rep. Marilyn Lee, a sponsor of the law. “The exploitation of women, and many times, children, is all related. The situation worldwide is scary.”
In Texas, a spokesman for Attorney General Greg Abbott said his office will not initiate action against a sex tour operator unless a complaint is filed by a local jurisdiction.
Adcock, of the Fort Worth police, says Fort Worth and Dallas have formed a North Texas Anti-Trafficking Task Force and expect to receive grants from the Justice Department, just like Houston, El Paso and Austin. Adcock says municipalities are going through a learning process about trafficking and are developing a closer working relationship with federal authorities.
Sex trafficking is just part of the problem, he says.
“It’s a civil rights violation,” Adcock says. “It’s not human trafficking; it’s slavery.”
Equality Now says the federal government should do more to enforce provisions of the Mann Act, which makes it a crime to knowingly transport an individual to another state or country “with the intent that such individual engage in prostitution, or in any sexual activity for which any person can be charged with a criminal offense.”
The Justice Department official says that while sex tour operators “may come close to violating the statute,” the department’s focus is on child prostitution and enslavement.
Prosecuting sex tour operators is difficult as well, given the scope of the business and the cooperation needed from other countries.
According to the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2005, the U.S. government estimates that 600,000 to 800,000 individuals are transported across international borders each year, either for forced labor or commercial sex exploitation.
It is estimated that 80 percent of the modern-day slavery involves women and girls.
Violence is also an issue.
One well-known case involved Lorelei Loseo, a 26-year-old who emigrated from the Philippines to the U.S. after she met Craig Staskewicz in her homeland in 2002. Franzblau says Staskewicz was a frequent sex tour traveler.
Loseo, a dancer in the Players Sports Club in New Jersey, was stabbed to death by Staskewicz at their apartment in January 2003 after a domestic dispute. He committed suicide while incarcerated.
Defending his business
Frentz says that what some view as the sex tourism business is getting a disproportionate amount of attention from activists.
Organizations like Equality Now, he says, should focus on bigger fish.
“The biggest sex tour operator is probably the U.S. Navy,” Frentz says, referring to the shore-leave escapades of sailors in foreign ports.
“I am attacked for sending 20 people over there [Thailand], and the Navy is dropping off 7,000 [sailors] in one shot.”
Frentz says there are fewer than 10 tour operators in the U.S., a number that is all but impossible to verify because of their surreptitious nature. Franzblau says that there may be 25 or more and that business is flourishing.
Frentz claims his business isn’t going well. His most recent tour group in May, he says, consisted of two men.
The next, scheduled for September, had two bookings as of Friday, he says.
He blames Equality Now for his economic slump.
Frentz says he probably would have closed up shop by now, if not for the group.
But, he defiantly says, “I won’t go out under fire.
“One person’s morals should not be forced on another, as long as no harm is being done.”
Time will tell if the state of Texas disagrees with him.
Staff writer Alex Branch contributed to this report.
His mail is delivered to a post office box at a UPS Store in a cookie-cutter strip mall on South Hulen Street.
The 64-year-old is not a fugitive. Well, at least, not in his estimation.
He keeps a low profile, he says, to avoid harassment by women’s groups and human rights organizations.
They say he is a sex tour operator, shepherding men to Southeast Asia for trysts with young, subservient women.
Gunter Frentz has been the proprietor of G.F. Tours for more than 18 years. And for almost a year now, since Hurricane Katrina cast him among thousands of evacuees who sought refuge in Texas, Frentz has been operating from Fort Worth.
Just don’t look for a storefront with a flashy sign beckoning gentleman travelers. Don’t expect an ad in the Sunday Travel section of the Star- Telegram .
Sex tour operators work clandestinely — generally from home — using the Internet to promote their business and solicit customers.
The United Nations and human rights organizations and activists around the world say these tour operators are part of the international business of sex trafficking, often exploiting people who are impoverished and sometimes abducted or sold into slavery.
Under the guise of soaking up the culture and enjoying the night life in exotic locales, sex tour operators entice men to ante up about $3,000 for a 10-day trip to Asian hot spots like Bangkok, Thailand, and cities and resorts in Cambodia and the Philippines. Other operators promote tours to Central and South American port cities in places like Costa Rica and Colombia.
“This is about human dignity and human rights,” says Jessica Neuwirth, a founder and president of Equality Now, a New York-based organization whose mission statement is to “end violence and discrimination against women and girls around the world.”
“It’s the promotion of prostitution, and we think that in some cases, authorities are just giving it a wink and a nod.”
Fort Worth police officer Ed Adcock, who is assigned to the special operations/vice squad, has kept tabs on Frentz since last November.
“He’s definitely on the radar,” Adcock says.
Frentz adamantly denies he is promoting sex tourism.
“I am not calling myself a sex tour operator,” he says. “We don’t provide girls. We do take people to night-life areas.”
But, he adds, “The opportunities do exist to take out a female companion.”
‘Changing tactics’
Frentz says his travel business wasn’t exactly booming in the beginning when he touted the culture, food and historic sights in countries such as Thailand.
“All we got were a couple of old ladies,” he says.
So he focused more on the night life and entertainment in cities such as Bangkok. His Web site offers Pleasure Tours and Marriage Tours and mixes pages of cultural attractions with photos of scantily clad Asian women. None are nude.
But his old Web site — still active a few months ago — offered more.
Are you getting overwhelming, pressure free pleasure and satisfaction night after night? Would you like to be in a city where you can easily get simple, straightforward satisfaction?
How long has it been since you’ve gotten just as much sex as you wanted?
There were also photos of nude women and a Q&A. One of the questions dealt with AIDS in Thailand.
He calls the problem “very serious” and warns prospective customers to avoid brothels where women have almost twice as many clients as the “girls in the clubs that we take you to. . . .”
That version of Frentz’s site was much like sex tour sites such as ClubHombre, Bendricks Tours and Dexterhorn. These Web sites, according to Equality Now, are in effect promoting jet-set prostitution worldwide.
In a conversation with the Star-Telegram Frentz insisted that “We don’t set anyone up with girls.”
Frentz says he books the round-trip flights and other accommodations for G.F. Tours. A tour guide, he says, helps customers navigate unfamiliar surroundings.
He also says that he revamped his Web site and services after Hurricane Katrina put him temporarily out of business.
“Once I started thinking about starting things up again,” Frentz says, “I decided to modify our tour and make it more tamer.”
Adcock isn’t convinced.
“He may be changing tactics, trying to give the impression that he is legitimate,” Adcock says. “But there is continued interest in him.”
Ken Franzblau, the anti-trafficking campaign director for Equality Now, says tour guides often act as middlemen who negotiate the fee for a woman after a customer has picked one out like a new car in the dealer’s showroom.
“You go in a bar, see a woman dancing onstage and pay the house for however many days you want her,” he says. “The tour guide will negotiate the transaction.”
Why would men travel halfway around the world for a date?
Franzblau says these men generally are social misfits. But Frentz says many are fed up with the attitude of American women.
Some of their complaints are listed on a page on his Web site called “American Women.” In an earlier version, the headline said, “American Monster Women.”
Though he toned the headline down, he says many clients view U.S. women as materialistic and pushy.
“I hear men say that . . . the conversation is steered to work and what they do for a living . . . what kind of car they drive,” Frentz says. “A lot of men also are old-school. They don’t want . . . a 50-50 relationship.”
Still others, he says, are bitter because of a divorce.
“But the thing that amazes me is that while I thought I would get a high percentage of losers and weirdos, that hasn’t been the case,” he says. “They are professionals and seem like decent human beings.”
Franzblau says he has had several conversations with Frentz, posing as a potential customer and using an alias. He also asked for references and received testimonials from some of Frentz’s clients, one man bragging that he slept with 18 women in 10 days.
Sex tours don’t necessarily involve consenting adults. Some attract pedophiles.
The FBI conducted two stings in Florida, using phony sex tour Web sites to lure men who wanted to have sex with minors.
According to a 2005 Miami Herald report, one such operation netted 11 men who had signed up with a fake Web site called Costa Rican Taboo Vacations.
Among those convicted was a Hollywood, Fla., police officer.
In Thailand, “Research conducted by the Office of the National Commission on Women’s Affairs in 2000 indicates that between 22,500 and 40,000 girls under the age of 18 are engaged in commercial sex work,” according to the Tourism Authority of Thailand Web site.
“Poverty is the principal reason why children in rural communities in Thailand are driven into the sex trade,” it says.
Though prostitution is illegal in Thailand and pedophiles can face severe penalties, enforcement is undermined by bribes and kickbacks.
Frentz says he does not promote or sanction sex with children, calling it “evil.” When he talks to a prospective customer who sounds him out about hooking up with minors, he warns that he might notify police.
Frentz says that plenty of women of legal age are drawn to work in the nightclubs, out of desperation.
An official with the Justice Department in Washington, D.C., says the sex business is booming in Bangkok.
“There are so many people offering sex for sale, Westerners who pay to go there are preyed on. You can’t walk 15, 20 feet without multiple young ladies offering to come home with you for $20 to $25 per night,” says the official, who prefers not to use his name, citing agency policy.
He describes the neighborhood where eight or nine brothels are clustered as “like a mall.”
According to the Tourism Authority of Thailand, “Many young women without appropriate skills end up working for bars, massage parlors and brothels. Some girls are even sold into prostitution by parents and relatives.”
Keeping a low profile
Frentz says he keeps a low profile because he doesn’t want Equality Now harassing the airlines or his other vendors or picketing at the airport.
He even lists his post office box — not his residence — as his address on his Texas driver’s license, which, according to the Department of Public Safety, is against state law.
He also played cat and mouse during one telephone conversation before confirming that Gunter Frentz is his real name.
Frentz is reluctant to talk about his past, the information coming like drops from a leaky faucet.
He was born in Berlin in 1942. His father, he says, was a colonel in the German air force but had a desk job.
When World War II ended, his mother brought Frentz, who was 3, to the U.S., where they settled in Morristown, N.J. He says he returned to Germany for a few years before settling permanently in the U.S. when he was 15.
He began his professional career as an underwriter for an insurance firm on Wall Street but says he didn’t like the stress that comes with playing with other people’s money.
In the 1960s, he says, he was a civil rights worker for the Congress of Racial Equality, which, like Frentz’s current critics, champions human rights.
Frentz is evasive about some of his other jobs, saying he eventually moved to Miami, where he lived for 27 years, and even drove a taxi for a time. He made enough money in one venture to travel the world and fell in love with Thailand.
And that is what inspired him to start G.F. Tours.
When he became bored living in Miami, he moved to New Orleans, a city that seemed full of possibilities. But after Hurricane Katrina left him homeless, he packed what remained of his belongings and drove to North Texas, where a friend and customer in Bridgeport offered him shelter.
Frentz decided to make North Texas his home and found his own place.
He says that his tours have changed lives and that some customers found their future wives.
But Frentz has a daughter in her mid-30s (his wife died of cancer more than 20 years ago), and he says she is not ecstatic about his line of work. And no, he says, anticipating the question, he wouldn’t want her to be one of those “dancers” his clients seek out.
Now, he says, he would like to refocus his travel business on marriage tours. But he says Equality Now and other “feminists” have made that more difficult as well.
They supported the International Marriage Broker Act of 2006, which imposed new rules on purchasing mail-order brides.
Tighter screening and full disclosure are now part of the process. A man looking for a wife must reveal more personal information, including previous marriages, and criminal records, including instances of domestic abuse or rape.
Prosecution efforts
Sex tour operators might be only a small part of human trafficking, but efforts to prosecute them have been increasing.
U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, introduced a bill last year that would have specifically prohibited sex tourism. The legislation did not pass.
In an e-mail, Cornyn said sex tourism operates “in the shadow of our society.”
“This is an industry that is based essentially on modern-day slavery and our government, at all levels, must take aggressive action to address it,” he wrote.
Some states are taking action. The New York attorney general has filed criminal and civil actions against Big Apple Oriental Tours and its owners, alleging that the tour promotes prostitution in violation of the state penal law.
Big Apple Oriental Tours is not currently operating.
Hawaii has outlawed the activities of sex tour operators and has specifically prohibited sex tourism. The law makes it a felony “to offer to sell travel services for the purpose of engaging in prostitution” and carries a prison term of up to five years.
“I think [sex tourism] is part of the whole trafficking issue,” says Hawaii state Rep. Marilyn Lee, a sponsor of the law. “The exploitation of women, and many times, children, is all related. The situation worldwide is scary.”
In Texas, a spokesman for Attorney General Greg Abbott said his office will not initiate action against a sex tour operator unless a complaint is filed by a local jurisdiction.
Adcock, of the Fort Worth police, says Fort Worth and Dallas have formed a North Texas Anti-Trafficking Task Force and expect to receive grants from the Justice Department, just like Houston, El Paso and Austin. Adcock says municipalities are going through a learning process about trafficking and are developing a closer working relationship with federal authorities.
Sex trafficking is just part of the problem, he says.
“It’s a civil rights violation,” Adcock says. “It’s not human trafficking; it’s slavery.”
Equality Now says the federal government should do more to enforce provisions of the Mann Act, which makes it a crime to knowingly transport an individual to another state or country “with the intent that such individual engage in prostitution, or in any sexual activity for which any person can be charged with a criminal offense.”
The Justice Department official says that while sex tour operators “may come close to violating the statute,” the department’s focus is on child prostitution and enslavement.
Prosecuting sex tour operators is difficult as well, given the scope of the business and the cooperation needed from other countries.
According to the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2005, the U.S. government estimates that 600,000 to 800,000 individuals are transported across international borders each year, either for forced labor or commercial sex exploitation.
It is estimated that 80 percent of the modern-day slavery involves women and girls.
Violence is also an issue.
One well-known case involved Lorelei Loseo, a 26-year-old who emigrated from the Philippines to the U.S. after she met Craig Staskewicz in her homeland in 2002. Franzblau says Staskewicz was a frequent sex tour traveler.
Loseo, a dancer in the Players Sports Club in New Jersey, was stabbed to death by Staskewicz at their apartment in January 2003 after a domestic dispute. He committed suicide while incarcerated.
Defending his business
Frentz says that what some view as the sex tourism business is getting a disproportionate amount of attention from activists.
Organizations like Equality Now, he says, should focus on bigger fish.
“The biggest sex tour operator is probably the U.S. Navy,” Frentz says, referring to the shore-leave escapades of sailors in foreign ports.
“I am attacked for sending 20 people over there [Thailand], and the Navy is dropping off 7,000 [sailors] in one shot.”
Frentz says there are fewer than 10 tour operators in the U.S., a number that is all but impossible to verify because of their surreptitious nature. Franzblau says that there may be 25 or more and that business is flourishing.
Frentz claims his business isn’t going well. His most recent tour group in May, he says, consisted of two men.
The next, scheduled for September, had two bookings as of Friday, he says.
He blames Equality Now for his economic slump.
Frentz says he probably would have closed up shop by now, if not for the group.
But, he defiantly says, “I won’t go out under fire.
“One person’s morals should not be forced on another, as long as no harm is being done.”
Time will tell if the state of Texas disagrees with him.
Staff writer Alex Branch contributed to this report.
1 comment:
Try whistle blower act with FBI or jurisdiction law enforcement if it works.
Good cause and reason to protect innocents why not?
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