ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1995, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, December 2, 1995 TAG: 9512030025
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SERIES: THE FIRST OF TWO PARTS
SOURCE: DIANE STRUZZI STAFF WRITER
AT 10 a.m. on a Friday in October, the problem is a stone's throw from David Clement's back door. He walks from his home on Eighth Street Southwest to his grassy drive. Several yards from his truck, in a nearby alley, he sees it: A prostitute performing oral sex on her customer in a green pickup.
"When I moved here it wasn't that way," Clement says of the neighborhood just west of downtown Roanoke. "It didn't get that way until four or five months ago. You can't believe it, unless you live it."
Prostitutes ply their trade in parked cars; along dark alleyways; and right out on the streets of this working-class neighborhood.
The streets are a motley mix. There's an industrial strip that dead-ends in a cul-de-sac of houses; a main thoroughfare that funnels cars into downtown; a tree-lined lane that leads into a lonely stretch of parked cars.
Just blocks from the City Hall is the crossroads of Western Virginia's sex market. The problem isn't new in this neighborhood between Norfolk and Patterson avenues and 5th and 10th streets. But it is persistent.
Here, long-legged transvestites strut in short-shorts and straggly haired women wearing jeans and sweat shirts pace, their shoulders hunched. BMWs and sleek sportsters cruise the stretch, along with beat-up pickup trucks and rusting four-wheel drives.
The neighborhood had become an eyesore. Residents found used condoms in the alleys and shattered beer and liquor bottles in the gutter. A convoy of cars looped the neighborhood from dusk until dawn, the drivers in search of quick, anonymous sex.
Five months ago, residents and business owners got fed up. They signed a petition and took their problem to police, City Council and the courts. They blamed the social agencies that have food and shelter programs in the area. They cast a disparaging eye on a dance club that attracts hard-core partiers, gays and lesbians. They wanted the prostitutes any place but in their neighborhood.
"In the last three months it's been like an interstate," said Gloria Stinnett outside her Patterson Avenue home in August. ``I've asked the prostitutes real nice, `Please carry your business over to Salem Avenue somewhere. ... Don't be doing it in front of these kids.' Her answer: 'F--- you, bYou don't own these streets.'''
The problem wasn't news to police, who had been targeting prostitutes in the neighborhood over the past several years.
Three months before neighbors complained, undercover officers posed as johns and prostitutes, and in July they made 44 prostitution arrests in the neighborhood. Detectives returned again in September, hitting both buyers and sellers of sex.
More than 90 percent of the city's 157 prostitution arrests so far this year occurred in the neighborhood, police say.
Prostitution is a misdemeanor, punishable by up to 12 months in jail and a $2,500 fine. If convicted, a person must get an HIV test.
Making the arrests is easy; making a difference on the street isn't.
This year, police and prosecutors compiled a list of prior convictions for those arrested from January 1994 through June 1995. They discovered 90 women who had been charged an average of four times each.
Despite the multiple convictions, few had ever seen any significant jail time.
Authorities took that list to court, using it during the sentencing phases of the prostitutes' trials. As a result, repeat offenders faced harsher penalties and many received considerably more jail time than in the past.
Customers who were first-time offenders were fined $500 and given 30-day suspended jail sentences in return for guilty pleas.
The court action dramatically reduced the numbers of prostitutes walking the neighborhood streets. An estimated $30,000 in fines was collected from the customers, according to Assistant Common- wealth's Attorney Dennis Nagel.
"It's better, 95 percent cleaner than it was before," said Bob Zimmerman, a local business owner who threatened to move his electrical supply company from the neighborhood. "We don't have whole groups of them together."
But Zimmerman and others remain cautious. He cites a recent run-in with three prostitutes at Norfolk Avenue and 9th Street. Each bragged about how much money they made - an indication that the problem is far from resolved.
And he directs his anger at city officials, saying they should ride through a part of the city they have forgotten. All City Council cares about, he said, are glitzy, high-profile projects like the pedestrian bridge between the Hotel Roanoke and the City Market.
`This damn game can get dangerous'
For the prostitutes, it's easy money.
Some talk about making hundreds of dollars in a few hours. Most squander it on crack cocaine.
In the 1970s the City Market was Roanoke's red-light district. Cars clogged Campbell Avenue on weekend nights - some to buy, others just to gawk at Roanoke's tawdry side. The Market was a showcase for streetwalkers until city officials decided the area could be turned into a prime tourist attraction.
So for the first time ever, the city put a female undercover officer in the Market to bust johns. The arrests shoved the sex trade across Williamson Road to the working class streets of Southeast Roanoke.
A decade ago, prostitutes watched out for each other on the street. They pulled together when one of their own was murdered in 1987.
Two men had picked up Janet St. Clair in Southeast Roanoke, brutally beating and killing her. They tied her naked body to the hood of their car like a deer and dumped it off a bridge in Bedford County.
Authorities found her killers because of an elderly man who looked out for the prostitutes. He had seen St. Clair get into the killers' car and jotted down their license plate number. At the trial, St. Clair's fellow prostitutes came forward and testified on her behalf.
But crack destroyed the bond between the streetwalkers.
At the time of St. Clair's death, the drug had just begun to infiltrate the scene. By the late 1980s, police and prostitutes say, the highly addictive, smokable form of cocaine created a whole new brand of streetwalker - willing to do anything for the next high.
The sex-for-drug market carries high risk for exposure to sexually transmitted diseases like syphilis and AIDS. Drug-addicted prostitutes are less likely to get checked regularly by a doctor or to practice safe sex. On the street, sex without a condom can garner extra money.
"I was on a double date with a man who wanted" to have sex with the other prostitute, a transvestite said recently. "I know he offered her an extra $20 for doing it without a condom. She did it."
For $20 a john can get a quickie. For $20 a prostitute can buy a rock of crack. Scoring a hit is a short walk to Marshall and Day avenues.
With crack, business became ruthless. Prostitutes steered competition to abusive dates. Some ripped off their johns, refusing sex and stealing money, streetwalkers say.
Most of the hookers now work alone. Few would talk with a reporter about their business.
"This damn game can get dangerous," says Karen, a 31-year-old prostitute who asked that her real name not be used. "It ain't all about prostitution."
No longer at home in the neighborhood
A year ago, Janet and Kenneth Barton believed they had found a safe home for their three boys at 9th Street and Patterson Avenue Southwest.
The house was in need of paint. But their first-floor apartment was spacious, with an eat-in kitchen and a front door that opened onto a wraparound porch.
From that vantage point the Bartons had a perfect view of the front yard, the street - and the prostitutes. When the boys walked the dog, they'd see the same woman rolling her shorts up and yanking up her shirt to flash her breasts.
"That's filth to me and I don't want my children brought up around it," Janet Barton says. "It's the worst thing a neighborhood could tolerate."
After a summer of watching women loiter at the corner, the family left for Southeast Roanoke.
Before she left, Barton gathered 60 signatures on a petition that demanded city officials stop the prostitution in their neighborhood. Residents had become so frustrated that they threatened to take action on their own. Some did.
Shannon Taylor, an 18-year-old who used to live at Patterson Avenue and 8th Street, heard a prostitute make a degrading comment about his father one afternoon.
"I told her to shut her damn mouth," he said. "I grabbed her by the throat and slung her against the wall. Probably been one more person no one would have had to worry about."
Residents agreed that police are doing all they can. But they say confronting the problem successfully takes long-term commitment - and not just from the police.
Mayor David Bowers said the city has refurbished the area. Tax dollars rebuilt the Fifth Street Bridge and Jefferson High School was renovated to create the Jefferson Center, a space for the community and local government organizations.
The city's response to the situation in the neighborhood was swift and aggressive, Bowers said.
"The patrol increased, which is exactly what the neighborhood wanted," he said.
And what of the neighborhood's future?
Many suggest moving the homeless shelters from the neighborhood or investing in the area to attract businesses.
Some, like Zimmerman, envision the area as an industrial park generating extra tax dollars for the city. He has already begun buying vacant houses in the neighborhood.
Others who have seen the same faces on the street time and again have resigned themselves to the activity.
"It's picking up again and eventually it'll get back to the way it was," said a resident who did not want her name published. "I don't feel like we should let [prostitutes] run us out. I feel they would like nothing better."
TOMORROW: Combating sex on the streets is a never-ending battle.
Go along with a vice officer and listen to prostitutes and their customers explain why they cruise the strip.
LENGTH: Long : 189 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: MIKE HEFFNER/Staff. 1. A time exposure of theby CNBintersection of Eighth Street and Rorer Avenue illustrates the heavy
traffic at night. 2. Patterson Avenue resident Gloria Stinnett
noticed that prostitution around her home picked up quite a bit over
the summer. She's lived in the area for 14 years. 3. In the
alley behind David Clement's house, between Eighth and Ninth
Streets, a used
condom lies on the ground as a reminder of the prostitution that has
plagued
the neighborhood recently. 4. Bob Zimmerman owns Roan0oke Electric
Zuppy on 10th Street. Zimmerman, shown here at the corner of Ninth
Street and Salem Avenue, has tried to press authorities to clean up
prostitution in the neighborhood. color. Graphics: Map by staff.
color.