The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Feds Raid ‘Rentboy’ Site

Posted on | August 26, 2015 | 65 Comments

While the hack of the adultery site AshleyMadison-dot-com was making headlines, the FBI was investigating a male escort site:

A criminal complaint was unsealed today in federal court in Brooklyn charging the CEO of Rentboy.com, Jeffrey Hurant, and six Rentboy.com employees with conspiring to violate the Travel Act by promoting prostitution. . . .
As alleged in the complaint, Rentboy.com is a male escort advertising site founded in 1997 which hosts thousands of paid advertisements. While the site has disclaimers stating that the advertisements are for companionship and not sexual services, Rentboy.com is designed primarily for advertising illegal prostitution. The website charges subscribers a minimum monthly fee of $59.95 and up to several hundred dollars to advertise sexual services.. . . Between 2010 and 2015, Rentboy.com had over $10 million in gross proceeds.
“As alleged, Rentboy.com attempted to present a veneer of legality, when in fact this internet brothel made millions of dollars from the promotion of illegal prostitution,” stated Acting United States Attorney Currie. Mr. Currie thanked the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Field Office in New York, and the District Attorney’s Office for New York County for their assistance in the investigation.

The New York Times reports:

The chief executive, Jeffrey Hurant, 50, and six other current or former employees appeared in Federal District Court in Brooklyn on Tuesday afternoon on charges of promoting prostitution. . . .
Charles Hochbaum, the lawyer for Mr. Hurant, said outside court that the case represented a First Amendment issue.
“My client advertises for people who are willing to be escorts, to accompany people for their time and be paid,” he said.
“He’s upset and confused about how this legitimate business could become the subject of a Homeland Security investigation,” he said. The Homeland Security Investigations arm of Immigration and Customs Enforcement was involved in the investigation, apparently because it believed the site promoted prostitution across state and national borders.
“I don’t think we do anything to promote prostitution,” Mr. Hurant said. “I think we do good things for good people, and bring good people together.” . . .
Some of the complaint details “the Hookies,” or the International Escort Awards, which the website holds each year. The site’s marketing banter for the awards described them as “covering all aspects of the oldest profession as presented in the newest media,” according to the complaint.
At the 2015 Hookies, held this year at a West 42nd Street hotel, an undercover agent approached Mr. Hurant, who gave the agent a business card with the email address [email protected] on it and explained that the Hookies were about celebrating sex “so good, you had to tell someone.” . . .
Another of those arrested was Edward Lorenz Estanol, 23, an escort, Hookies award nominee and former social-media coordinator for the site. He charged $300 an hour, or $3,000 for a weekend, the complaint says. On his personal website, he wrote that “escorting is a great way to explore your sexuality and get paid doing it,” the complaint says.
Another is Diana Milagros Mattos, 43, a former saleswoman, who had “a Twitter account in which she identified herself as the ‘escort whisperer’” while she worked at Rentboy.com, the complaint says, and tried to help escorts increase their social-media presence so they would get more clients.

Despite my large “social-media presence,” I haven’t made $10 million blogging since 2010. Maybe I should change my slogan to “Blogs So Good, You Had to Tell Someone.”

 

Comments

65 Responses to “Feds Raid ‘Rentboy’ Site”

  1. Dana
    August 26th, 2015 @ 7:02 am

    I have a very difficult time with the notion that it can be illegal to do something for money that is perfectly legal to do for free, and it is perfectly legal for adults to copulate for free.

  2. AwD
    August 26th, 2015 @ 8:00 am

    Merely consider the fact that it is legal to donate human organs, but illegal to sell them.

    Keeping money out of the “business” of exchanging human bodies is an attempt to prevent certain very obvious evils from occurring as often as they will if such actions are financially remunerative and easy to disguise as legal action: such as dismembering “unwanted” people for their organs, or pimping sex slaves in forced prostitution.

  3. McGehee
    August 26th, 2015 @ 8:02 am

    To put it another way, if it’s illegal to sell one’s own body parts, why should it be legal to rent them out?

  4. Dana
    August 26th, 2015 @ 8:09 am

    I fail to see why it should be illegal to sell human organs.

    My cousin made a free kidney donation to a stranger, and I’ve been tested as a possible bone marrow donor; a closer match was found, so I didn’t have to donate. Bone marrow is different, in that it regenerates in healthy people, so, other than some pain, it’s an easy donation, but I fail to see why something my cousin did, for free, would have been illegal to do for money.

    Nor do I care if that means that wealthier people will go to the head of the line for transplants; it would also mean that more organs would be available for transplant. Most would be cadaver organs, rather than the live donation of kidneys.

  5. Ilion
    August 26th, 2015 @ 8:26 am

    Most would be cadaver organs …

    Don’t you understand that *even today*, a not insignificant number of “donors” of vital
    organs are not actually dead when they are strip-mined for their organs?

    Why do you think we periodically see
    news accounts of someone “waking up” just as the (ahem) doctors are
    about to “harvest” their organs?
    Are there really that many actual resurrections going on?

    Why do you think “doctors” have taken to anesthetizing
    “corpses” before they strip-mine them for vital organs?
    ========
    AwD has already explained to you *why* certain types of financial transactions involving human bodies are illegal.

  6. Art Deco
    August 26th, 2015 @ 8:35 am

    I cannot see why ICE was involved with this, unless there was some indication that Hurant’s whores included imports who were in violation of immigration law and / or under some sort of coercion. ICE was assembled in 2002 from parts of other agencies. It seems as if the policy of the last two administrations has been to put them to work doing anything but hauling in and deporting people who sneaked across the border or whose visas have expired.

  7. Dianna Deeley
    August 26th, 2015 @ 8:52 am

    The name of the site is “Rentboy”, so I don’t imagine the jury will be bewildered by the charges.

  8. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    August 26th, 2015 @ 8:54 am

    As a matter of public policy (having more organs for those who need them) I am for some form of compensation for organs. It has to be regulated though or you end up with things like those town in India where everyone in the village doesn’t have a kidney.

  9. Dianna Deeley
    August 26th, 2015 @ 8:54 am

    Cross border trafficking? Especially of underage boys?

    That would be my guess.

  10. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    August 26th, 2015 @ 8:54 am

    Nope.

  11. DeadMessenger
    August 26th, 2015 @ 9:11 am

    I think you guessed it, exactly. In essence, it’s the same way with DHS. The don’t exist to protect the citizens from terrorists. They exist to investigate average citizens for supposed terrorism. This is why, if you’re looking for DHS for some reason, pop by your local Sheriff’s office. You’ll find some there. And ICE, too.

  12. Dana
    August 26th, 2015 @ 9:12 am

    I read his explanation, but I don’t find it persuasive; we cannot combitch that the government is passing too many restrictions on our lives, and then advocate restrictions on behavior which do not harm anyone else because we don’t like the behavior.

  13. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    August 26th, 2015 @ 9:25 am

    Wow, prosecuted by the feds? I guess they did not donate enough to the Democrat Party. Lesson learned, lesson learned!

  14. Durasim
    August 26th, 2015 @ 9:27 am

    In other news, there is an Australian actress who played a sadistic warden who molests her prisoners. And it turns out she resorted to some “method acting” for the role. But don’t worry, Australia hardly ever sends female sexual offenders to prison.

    http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory/australian-actress-prisoner-convicted-child-abuse-33195888

  15. RSM: Feds raid “Rentboy” male prostitute site | Constantinople (Not Istanbul)
    August 26th, 2015 @ 9:46 am

    […] From The Other McCain […]

  16. ConstantineX1
    August 26th, 2015 @ 9:47 am

    Hey Robert, here’s your story caption pic for this story: http://www.constantinoplenotistanbul.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/qsjceo.jpg

    Fred Garvin. Male Prostitute (Dan Akroyd from SNL)

  17. Driver8
    August 26th, 2015 @ 10:01 am

    Yeah, but if the Gestapo American Style is behind the investigation I say all parties are completely innocent. The DHS is a bloated, money sucking agency dedicated to state repression. They’ve also “secured” very little in terms of Islamic terrorism. This sounds like a make work project to justify the agencies massive budget, and existence.

  18. RKae
    August 26th, 2015 @ 10:16 am

    Because there is fallout from prostitution. It doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It is a cancer in society – just another thing that destroys families, exploits teenagers, and spreads anti-civilization cynicism.

    Prostitution is destructive.

    A lot of human trafficking is to feed legal prostitution. Once it’s legalized, they need “product,” and there aren’t enough demoralized, self-destructive women, girls and boys to go around. (Read “Enslaved” on this topic.)

    Profiting from misery leads to more misery.

  19. Prime Director
    August 26th, 2015 @ 10:57 am

    I have a difficult time with the notion that it is illegal to do something for money that is perfectly legal to do for free

    How ’bout voting?

    You can vote for free; should you be able to sell your vote?

  20. Dana
    August 26th, 2015 @ 11:00 am

    It’s absolutely true that prostitution is destructive, but we’ve already found out that something being destructive — homosexuality, for example — can’t be made illegal. To make something illegal, you should have to be able to find a person who has been harmed or who has had his civil rights violated by the action.

    Our host mentioned the now-famously-hacked Ashley Madison website; it was certainly destructive, yet we find that we can’t make a voluntary adultery site illegal.

    Our friends on the left would love your argument, because they use it all the time; they simply say that guns are destructive, a cancer on our society, and that we should ban the ownership of firearms. Once you take the “cancer in society” argument as valid on which to base laws, you are reduced to debating whose vision of what is cancerous in society will be legislated.

  21. Dana
    August 26th, 2015 @ 11:00 am

    Yes.

  22. AwD
    August 26th, 2015 @ 11:06 am

    I don’t care about rich people getting organs faster either. And if the organ in question regrows after donating a piece, then yes, offering incentives to donate doesn’t create a problem. Unfortunately most human organs are not so obliging, which is why I find libertarian arguments like this one utterly unconvincing. They always avoid – just as you did here – addressing serious moral concerns with potential negative outcomes.

    There is an observable corrosive effect that money has on humanity’s ethical principles.

    I have also observed that government regulation of legal activity is incapable of counterbalancing that corrosion, because people who are willing to break the law for money are also quite willing to falsify the paperwork and lie to the regulators about it, even when they’re not actively bribing the watchdogs to look the other way.

    It’s not the depths of evil that certain sociopathic monsters commit that really drives my opinion on this, mind: it’s the banality of evil that convinces millions of people to look the other way while it happens because it doesn’t directly affect themselves. Most people aren’t saints. That’s why we need laws in the first place.

    Additionally, who are you going to trust to make sure institutional abuse of monetized organ harvesting *doesn’t* happen after you’ve set up your society’s rules to legalize incentives for precisely that? When even making organ sale illegal *isn’t enough* to prevent abuses from happening? A legion of government-employed bureaucratic commissars poking their noses into every transplant clinic in the country all on the taxpayer’s dime?

  23. Dana
    August 26th, 2015 @ 11:11 am

    AwD asked:

    who are you going to trust to make sure institutional abuse of monetized organ harvesting *doesn’t* happen after you’ve set up your society’s rules to legalize incentives for precisely that?

    I’m not going to trust anybody to do that, because it’s none of my fornicating business.

    You said it yourself: even with organ sales being illegal, we haven’t been able to stop abuses. Why, then, would you think that keeping organ sales illegal makes a real difference on that?

  24. James G
    August 26th, 2015 @ 11:14 am

    …and then advocate restrictions on behaviors which do not harm anyone else because we don’t like the behavior.

    Dana,

    That right there is the crux of the difference between your view and his: so long as it does not harm anyone other than the one(s) engaged in it, it should be legal. You are okay with people committing self-harm as long as they are not hurting others. Other people (myself included) believe that concern has to be made for those who self-harm as well because: a) they do hurt others by their actions: family, friends, community, society, the families they destroy by enticing others into harmful behavior; and b) often the persons committing the self-harming acts are committing such acts or in such circumstances because of things that diminish their ability to make choices for themselves, to see what is in their own best interest, and often coercion. Those committing self-harming acts are the least of these whom we are supposed to love and love sometimes includes tough-love and setting boundaries for their own good that they are not able to act upon.

    Addressing the extension to selling organs, others here have already mentioned the tendency for the poor (especially in third-world places) to be exploited for such purposes. I’ll go further and point out that it is wrong to use people as exploitable resources because of their inherent dignity. A human is not a horse and to treat a man as a horse is to do damage to his dignity. Slavery is wrong not just because of the practical evils committed but because to “own” another human is to violate his inherent dignity. To scrap out baby parts is evil not just because PP is doing it and they are evil but also because a baby is not a cow, she is higher than a cow and should not be treated as such.

    James G

  25. Prime Director
    August 26th, 2015 @ 11:32 am

    Individuals who are in involved with prostitution and/or other third-party-effect-laden practices/decisions like neglecting your kids (including not getting them vaccinated or educated) or being chronically unhygienic and/or disruptive in public, exhibit distain for the welfare of others. If there is potential for the negative externalities of an act having serious network effects, a coersive i.e. legal/political approach may be warranted.

  26. James G
    August 26th, 2015 @ 11:34 am

    Dana,

    To make something illegal, you should have to be able to find a person who has been harmed or who has had his civil rights violated by the action.

    Define “harm” and then we will have a basis to argue further. You used homosexuality as an example of something “destructive” that can’t be made illegal (though how that occurred could be a point of dispute) so how harmful is something before it becomes legally “harm” to be made illegal?

    Once you take the “cancer in society” argument as valid on which to base laws, you are reduced to debating whose vision of what is cancerous in society will be legislated.

    I disagree with the premise. To say that the other side is wrong when they use an argument so therefor we are wrong to use the same argument does not follow if we are using different premises or first principles. An argument made on faulty premises is wrong because of the faulty premise not because the argument constructed on it is per se wrong. The left is wrong in their premise on guns; saying a “cancer on society” argument is thus always wrong just does not follow.

    James G

  27. AwD
    August 26th, 2015 @ 11:38 am

    Oh, now that one’s too easy. Making murder illegal didn’t stop murder from happening, so why should anyone care about it if it doesn’t happen to someone they know? It’s none of their business anyway!

    Dana, I think that we operate by such divergent axioms that neither of us is going to be able to convince the other. I’m not going to write a research paper for you on how making certain things legal increases certain types of criminal behavior and then projecting that pattern to legal organ sale and playing a “what if” game to explain in greater detail why I think that criminal exploitation of the system would increase after legalization. I might as well ask you to prove to me that making organ sales legal *won’t* cause an increase in ethical corruption in the medical profession, after you’ve indicated that you are utterly uninterested in addressing that aspect of the issue in the first place! But I do thank you for your time.

  28. Ilion
    August 26th, 2015 @ 11:49 am

    When I was a kid, back in the mid-70s, and the US supreme Court decriminalized pornography — because, hey! it’s not hurting anyone … and, besides, “nice”, “respectable”, middle-class suburban men wanted easier access to it — it didn’t take long before there was a porno shop almost next door (*) to my decidedly non-suburban home.

    And, of course, it wasn’t long before just walking home from school I was propositioned. But, I guess that was OK, since we poor people didn’t really count.

    And, mind you, I was a boy.

    So, all those “nice”, “respectable”, middle-class suburban men got their easy access to porno, with no affect to their own daughters and sons. Or so they thought; for now days it comes into your house on prime time television.

    ====
    There is no such thing as a “victimless crime”. And there is no act that doesn’t affect someone else’s life, for good or for ill.

  29. Art Deco
    August 26th, 2015 @ 11:50 am

    DHS cannot have a uniform purpose other than general law enforcement. DHS was formed in 2002 from an assemblage of existing agencies. The only new agency was TSA, which performs functions which were formerly undertaken by local airport authorities. I think they added an intelligence clearinghouse, or some such, but that’s it.

    The odd thing about DHS is that Congress incorporates what amounts to a federal police department but then leaves a mess of agencies out for obscure reasons (perhaps because congressman x wanted agency y in the bailiwick of his committee). I can see select departments and agencies (the military, the diplomatic corps, Congress, and the civilian intelligence services) having their domestic in-house security services and I think I can see the point of not including agencies which have service functions as well as enforcement functions (e.g. the National Park Service or the Coast Guard), but I cannot see the point of divvying up federal policing between two departments (neither one impressive), jumbling policing with civil defense in one department, jumbling policing with prosecution and legal counsel in another department, and scattering small police services in several other departments.

    After making this sausage, they put Tom Ridge in charge of it. Michelle Malkin and others have been making the case for 10 years that the seminal institutional culture of DHS was bad. And who might you blame for that???

  30. Art Deco
    August 26th, 2015 @ 11:53 am

    The DHS is not an agency, but a federation of agencies which existed prior to its formation. The Secret Service, FEMA, Customs and Border Protection (derived from the old Customs Service and Immigration Service), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (derived from the same two agencies), the Coast Guard, &c. are all DHS constituents. They had discrete missions before DHS existed.

  31. Art Deco
    August 26th, 2015 @ 11:57 am

    The salient decisions re pornography were earlier than that, around about 1965.

    Skin magazines were sold openly as early as 1952 and pornographic films shown publicly as early as 1966. The judiciary’s acts were less salient than prosecutorial discrection. Anti-obscenity laws were still on the books in New York in 1989. District Attorneys simply refused to prosecute anyone for violating them. Cincinnatti was one one of the few loci which continued to do so.

  32. kilo6
    August 26th, 2015 @ 12:05 pm

    I’m surprised I didn’t find words such as “courageous” in the NYT piece. Isn’t the homosexual the heir to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s? Shouldn’t these fine examples of the homosexual lifestyle be lionized just like the Stonewall Riots ?(I’m pretty sure there was some sodomite prostitution going on there as well)

  33. Finrod Felagund
    August 26th, 2015 @ 12:13 pm

    The number of cases of murder that are also victimless crimes are so few as to be negligible.

  34. Daniel Freeman
    August 26th, 2015 @ 12:23 pm

    I have a very difficult time with the notion that it can be illegal to do something for money that is perfectly legal to do for free, and it is perfectly legal for adults to copulate for free.

    You get more of what you incentivize. No one will pay you to drink beer (more’s the pity), but they will pay you for other self-harming actions, such as promiscuity and getting your organs cut out.

    Or, to look at the same principle the way economists do, demand creates its own supply. If you want something, then you can refrain from spending your money until someone takes your offer.

    Adding prosecution risk to exploitative transactions reduces the effective demand, freeing up that money to be spent on other things, thereby incentivizing the supply of those other things instead.

  35. RKae
    August 26th, 2015 @ 12:29 pm

    “Cancer in society” is not the reason to make the law. It is the reason to start the debate.

    Laws against public obscenity are not draconian, nor are they un-Constitutional or anti-liberty.

    The reason to make a law against it is the one I pointed out: it increases human trafficking while trying to supply the “product.”

  36. Prime Director
    August 26th, 2015 @ 12:39 pm

    So you support a round-a-bout way of vote buying/selling; just nothing forthright. Got it.

    Heh, I remember witnessing the tribal council elections for an unnamed homeless Nor Cal tribe during the casino boom back around 2005: some guys (not my relation), each with a stack of Walmart gift cards, were handing out payment to select voters as they exited the polling place. Later on, big suprise, the folks buying votes ended up stealing hundred$ of thou$sand$ from the tribe.

    Anyone who attempts to buy the judgement of your conscience prolly has a yawning chasm where his conscience should be.

  37. Driver8
    August 26th, 2015 @ 12:58 pm

    They also have their own seperate mission to “fight terrorism”(which seems to mean surveilling, and investigating people that oppose federal authority)with their own programs, funding, etc. while coordinating all of those child agencies in the same mission, and enabled by the Patriot Act. They even have their hooks in local law enforcement who receive grants to to purchase military surplus. If you want to point your finger as to who is responsible for the new militarized police it’s DHS. And are we really supposed to believe arming local police with military hardware is supposed to help fight “terrorism”? It’s to scare, and repress the public, and to terrorize organized protest movements.

  38. Driver8
    August 26th, 2015 @ 1:01 pm

    Prohibition never works. It only exacerbates the problem. See alcohol, and drugs for obvious examples of this. And in prostitution women are far more likely to suffer harm if the act is deemed illegal.

  39. Art Deco
    August 26th, 2015 @ 1:04 pm

    The ‘rentboy’ site makes the reality of male homosexuality in practice too explicit. They’re planning on boiling the frog in the kettle a little while longer.

  40. Delaney Coffer
    August 26th, 2015 @ 1:04 pm

    That is a stupid cliche. Prohibition always works which is why we have laws to begin with. All laws are one prohibition or another.

  41. Dana
    August 26th, 2015 @ 1:09 pm

    And therefore, from your argument, we must, as a society:

    1 – Provide universal health care, because the decisions of those not to have insurance harms themselves, and we know better than that;
    2 – Repeal the Second Amendment, because people might harm themselves, as well as being a danger to others, and we know better than they do;
    3 – Well, Hell, I’m too busy at work to continue, but there are a million examples of why we, as a society, must protect the people from harming themselves and others.

    If your position is that we simply must restrict people’s behavior, for their own good, then we are simply debating with the left which behavior to restrict.

  42. Art Deco
    August 26th, 2015 @ 1:15 pm

    You’re paying too much attention to sensationalized newspaper reporting.

    Grants to local law enforcement by DHS are somewhat north of $2 bn. The % of local police budgets that accounts for is in the low-single digits.

  43. concern00
    August 26th, 2015 @ 2:26 pm

    Yes they need to push to whole love angle, as this has just as much to do with love as other items on the homosexual agenda.

  44. Prime Director
    August 26th, 2015 @ 3:50 pm

    demand creates it’s own supply

    And/or vice versa. Isn’t each an expression of the other, under the right constraints?:

    The prevailing view among economists, on the other hand, has long been that purchasing power grows out of production. The great producing countries are the great consuming countries. The twentieth-century world consumes vastly more than the eighteenth-century world because it produces vastly more. Supply of wheat gives rise to demand for automobiles, silks, shoes, cotton goods, and other things that the wheat producer wants. Supply of shoes gives rise to demand for wheat, for silks, for automobiles, and for other things that the shoe producer wants. Supply and demand in the aggregate are thus not merely equal, but they are identical, since every commodity may be looked upon either as supply of its own kind or as demand for other things. But this doctrine is subject to the great qualification that the proportions must be right; that there must be equilibrium.

    Effective demand is what you have to trade i.e. a supply of something.

    My two cents: the key to reigning in keynesianism is a recontextualization of demand side dynamics and a resuscitation of Say’s Law.

  45. Son of Liberty
    August 26th, 2015 @ 4:56 pm

    It does not have to make sense to those who want to rule our lives. It just has to be unusual or unpopular enough to rationalize as a threat to the public good.

    I understand that prostitution is not exactly the brightest business, but this is an example of the left getting between consenting adults (what they claim not to do), and DHS should be worrying more about ISIS than some prostitution joint or Americans who want a return to constitutionalism.

  46. Son of Liberty
    August 26th, 2015 @ 4:59 pm

    Because there is fallout from prostitution. It doesn’t happen in a
    vacuum. It is a cancer in society – just another thing that destroys
    families, exploits teenagers, and spreads anti-civilization cynicism.

    Can be stopped with parents teaching kids personal responsibility. No need for statism.

    A lot of human trafficking is to feed legal prostitution. Once it’s
    legalized, they need “product,” and there aren’t enough demoralized,
    self-destructive women, girls and boys to go around. (Read “Enslaved” on
    this topic.)

    Can be minimized with better border security, but neither democrat or republican cares about that anymore.

  47. Son of Liberty
    August 26th, 2015 @ 5:05 pm

    The progressives often find reasons to regulate the sex lives of others. At their most moderate it is because they think they are protecting women. At its most extreme, they seek to suppress personal love and happiness to fill the void with solidarity (collectivism, mob mentality, etc).

    There are areas where a major segment of the left and a fringe minority right find a common interest, and sex-as-a-ruinator-of-public-good (abliet for differing reasons) is one of them.

    Live and let live is not popular with statists of any type.

  48. Son of Liberty
    August 26th, 2015 @ 5:11 pm

    That argument can be said for all the government not just DHS

  49. Daniel Freeman
    August 26th, 2015 @ 5:35 pm

    It is possible that I got the usual line backwards, but I do think it goes both ways.

  50. Daniel Freeman
    August 26th, 2015 @ 5:46 pm

    Hmm. I guess this tells us that they want to lower the age of consent first, before legalizing prostitution. Clever strategy.