A couple who made £40,000 in just six months running a brothel from a flat have been jailed for their part in an international sex-trafficking and prostitution racket.
Fabiana De Souza, 42, and her husband Gareth Derby, 53 were found guilty of transporting sex workers to the UK from Europe and South America.
The pair treated the women like “commodities” and were caught after a major police operation to protect sex workers, a court heard.
Police said sexual exploitation of seven vulnerable women amounted to modern day slavery.
De Souza, who provided dominatrix and discipline services to punters in the posh spa town of Harrogate, North Yorkshire, was said to be the ringleader of the 'large-scale commercial operation'.
The court heard that she and Derby, who earned around £50,000 a year as an engineer and machine specialist, flew in prostitutes from Brazil and Portugal. They paid for flights and met them at airports, before whisking them off to sex dens where men paid for 'massages' and 'full services'.
The prostitutes were put at a 'significant financial disadvantage' and forced to lie to police to avoid detection, the court heard.
De Souza and Derby, who ran the mega-money business from their home in Norfolk, were arrested in August 2018 and charged with controlling prostitution for financial gain and human trafficking. They each denied the charges, but a jury found them guilty on both counts following a two-week trial in December.
They were jailed for five years each when they appeared at Leeds Crown Court for sentencing on Monday.
Prosecutor Nicholas Lumley QC said De Souza rented a two-bed flat in Harrogate so it could be used for sex, which would be advertised on the internet.
He said: “As soon as the (prostitutes) arrived here, they would be installed in the flat in Harrogate or elsewhere, always with the purpose of being available for sex.”
De Souza and Derby would pay for sex adverts within hours of picking the women up from the airport and “setting them up” at the flat or a converted garage at their home in Norfolk.
They took the bookings and “made the arrangements (with the clients)” who would pay various amounts - from £80 for half an hour to more than £1,000 for an overnight stay.
Following her arrest, De Souza told police she had rented the flat in Harrogate for more than £700 a month and let rooms to people including “friends" from her homeland of Portugal. Derby said only that he had an “inkling that Fabia worked at the Harrogate flat as a dominatrix”.
But in a text sent to a friend in January 2018, Derby boasted of being a “smuggler of women”, the court heard. Police trawled through their bank accounts and found they'd spent “thousands on air fares” and more than £2,000 on adverts alone.
They tracked the couple’s movements and an undercover officer posed as a client to make appointments for the brothel in Harrogate.
Defending De Souza, Michael Fullerton, said she had a very deprived background and had worked in the sex trade from a very young age. She had worked in Brazil and then Portugal, at one point as a stripper, before arriving in the UK.
Judge Guy Kearl QC, the Recorder of Leeds, told the couple: “You were not only partners in marriage, but partners in business (as well).
"This was a properly organised, contrived, criminal business. This was a joint enterprise between the both of you (and) you are each equally culpable.
"You treated these women like commodities to increase your finances.”
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